SOURCE: Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. “Double Trouble.” New York Review of Books 30, no. 12 (22 December 1983): 12, 14.

In the following review, Ladurie summarizes the narrative of The Return of Martin Guerre, praising Davis for an unbiased reconstruction of Guerre's story.

The biographies of peasants and especially the autobiographies of country people are a longstanding problem. We owe to the habits of Protestant introspection the fascinating life history of the Swiss mountain dweller, Thomas Platter, written in the sixteenth century; for the seventeenth century, as far as I know, nothing of the kind exists, at least in French. During the eighteenth century, Jansenism (as an almost Calvinist exercise of self-examination) provided us with the memoirs of the expeasant Restif de la Bretonne. The picaresque tradition produced the recollections of Jamerey-Duval, an obscure vagabond who tramped for many years through the regions of Champagne, Burgundy, and Lorraine. The culture disseminated by the Napoleonic...