Books In Brief

THIS collection of essays most interestingly challenges Machiavelli’s devilish reputation for preferring vice to virtue, bad to good, and impiety to piety. Machiavelli’s true view, according to Professor Mansfield, is even more radical: Assaulting and appropriating the classical and Christian traditions, Machiavelli redefined morality, teaching that evil deeds do not oppose but are a necessary part of virtue. Pauline, the young wife of the elderly Marquis de Théus, from whom she has become separated by the outbreak of the plague. Angelo gallantly postpones his return to Italy to act as Pauline’s bodyguard as she searches for her husband through manifold perils. This has been aptly described as an equestrian road movie; it is also a magnificent swashbuckler, an ultraromantic but adult love story, and a brilliantly psychological, Stendhalian evocation of character in action.

There is Giono’s love of the land captured with controlled lushness by the inspired camera of Thierry Arbogast (who also shot Ma Saison Préférée), and the growing love between the boyishly idealistic Angelo and the unhappily married but faithful Pauline. There are the depredations of the epidemic, and the meanness it brings out in some, nobility in others. There is intense passion without so much as one conventional kiss. There is the poetry of Giono’s language, superbly translated to the screen by the gifted scenarists, who include the director himself. Quite a bit of it survives even in the subtitles.

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THIS collection of essays most interestingly challenges Machiavelli’s devilish reputation for preferring vice to virtue, bad to good, and impiety to piety. Machiavelli’s true view, according to Professor Mansfield, is even more radical: Assaulting and appropriating the classical and Christian traditions, Machiavelli redefined morality, teaching that evil deeds do not oppose but are a necessary part of virtue. Pauline, the young wife of the elderly Marquis de Théus, from whom she has become separated by the outbreak of the plague. Angelo gallantly postpones his return to Italy to act as Pauline’s bodyguard as she searches for her husband through manifold perils. This has been aptly described as an equestrian road movie; it is also a magnificent swashbuckler, an ultraromantic but adult love story, and a brilliantly psychological, Stendhalian evocation of character in action.

There is Giono’s love of the land captured with controlled lushness by the inspired camera of Thierry Arbogast (who also shot Ma Saison Préférée), and the growing love between the boyishly idealistic Angelo and the unhappily married but faithful Pauline. There are the depredations of the epidemic, and the meanness it brings out in some, nobility in others. There is intense passion without so much as one conventional kiss. There is the poetry of Giono’s language, superbly translated to the screen by the gifted scenarists, who include the director himself. Quite a bit of it survives even in the subtitles.