The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village

Pierre-Jakez Helias's grandfather was so poor that he could not afford a horse. Still, he said, he would always have a horse in his stable-the Horse of Pride. Le Cheval d'Orgueil (The Horse of Pride) is an epic, an epic of peasant life in Brittany during the first half of this century. It is also an ethnographic description of a culture that has all but disappeared. It is an intimate social history of the Third Republic. It is a case study in the quarrel over ethnicity. It is an account of a childhood. Above all, it is a gripping tale. Pierre-Jakez not only absorbed the lore of the three people who brought him up; he learned from them the art of storytelling, and he has spent his adult life talking about his native pays bigouden, the area of Pont 1'Abbe, southwest of Quimper. Helias writes to arouse not pity but respect for the Breton peasant culture he knew. He vaunts the will of his people to accept their condition humaine and, thanks to the Cheval d'Orgueil, to lead a dignified existence. His sabotier grandfather told him: Whenever you hear a cry for help and there's no one anywhere around, it's your own unhappiness that's howling inside you. Or else it's the World Bitch, which has just jumped on somebody you know. Whenever that happened to me, I grabbed hold of my spade and started turning up the ground as if I were about to kill.