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Provincial entertainment – De Regnier Henri

Provincial Entertainment, published in 1925 is a rather astonishing novel, mixing several genres and with a surprising ending. It is very well written, in a little old-fashioned, elegant, rather rude French.
The protagonist is a Parisian from a good family who, the death of his parents, will touch a fairly significant legacy. But 40 years old, he will have wasted everything; without making any real follies but leading a good lifestyle.
So he will go to the provinces, to the small town of P, where he will be welcomed by a paternal aunt, a widow without children and who had welcomed him on vacation with his parents until the age of fourteen. (Here I admire the sense of family, welcoming a 40-year-old bent and offering him bed and breakfast without changing anything).
This aunt is a personality in the small and hard town of P, she prores, we listen to her, she receives the local personalities and goes to mass every day. Our protagonist is not at all tender with her, and she doesn’t seem to like him much but leaves him alone.
The author gives us a difying catalog of this small provincial society, they observe them with an entomological acuity and judge them; he seems to neglect that he, for these provincials confused in their customs, he incarnates the futile and the debauchery.
This small town of P is judged without mercy by our Parisian.
Something surprised me in the novel, it is the representation of Argentines. We are in 1925 and the writer must have been struck by these Argentinian engamines, extremely rich, ostentatious, not always having recommendable frequentations.
Over time a real neurosis will develop in this Parisian relegated to total inactivity, a depression one would say today. Maybe even psychosis? Because the unthinkable will happen in this small town of P: a murder, the murder of Mr de Bligneul, the visitor of the aunt he hated the most.
We will give the case of this murder a brave magistrate who will have all the penalties in the world to come to the end of this story. For the reader, the matter is not straightforward and it may well be that nothing is as it appears. In any case, I saw two very distinct possibilities and that was for me one of the charms of this novel.

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