“A Dog Day”, by Xavier Patier, Cerf, 200 p., €20, digital €15.
We would like to believe that nothing changes. Well, no more than the seasons, which pass but always return. Except that in succeeding each other, they carry the years away. And the world, in the end, is no longer the same at all. Four-lane roads cross the forests, housing developments nibble away at the countryside. No more fathers and sons, no more inheritances. The land is divided. Rural life is relegated to the museum. Popular traditions and old agricultural tools. So, hunting and its crews… Yet another practice from another age that many are surprised has not completely disappeared.
Xavier Patier’s new novel is set in Corrèze, in the north of the Uzerche region. Daguet is the old huntsman of the Fénayes estate (from the “Fénayes rally” if we’re talking about hunting with hounds), the one who looks after the pack of hounds. He grew up in the castle, the son of the sharecropper, descended from generations of loyal servants. When Solange, his boss, took over from her parents, the house had long since ceased to be in the best of circumstances. The servants gradually left. Only Daguet remained, who has to do everything. He is now almost 70 years old. The same age as Solange. He has been in love with her since he was a young man. Secretly.
A dog day is a battered drama. A story of melancholy and bizarre happiness, a tragedy too, which takes place on a Tuesday in December, from 8 in the morning until very late at night. Solange, angry, has cancelled the hunt. It is too cold, it is snowing. Daguet senses that she has other reasons. He will soon learn them, after three crew members who had not been warned in time arrive. This is bad news that he refuses to believe. So, with the help of wine, abandoning his prudence, his reserve, he embarks with his companions on a hunt for a large stag which will end, grotesquely, against the fence of a motorway service station. A last hunt where the death knell that is sounded is that of an era. And of many illusions.
Xavier Patier, a Corrézien, has led a career as a senior civil servant while writing around thirty novels, collections of short stories and essays. He plays the role of a weigher of souls without taking himself seriously. In The Silence of the Termites (La Table Ronde, 2009), he was bringing down an entire civilization. It wasn’t a great loss, by the way. With A dog dayhe makes the disenchanted observation that time slowly erases worlds that we hold dear. But, deep down, nothing prevents us from thinking that it could last.
