Search Results

“... Jean-Marie Déguignet was born near Quimper, in Brittany, in 1834, the fifth of ten children born to an illiterate tenant farmer. A succession of bad harvests drove the family off the land into the town and at six, Jean-Marie was sent out to beg. He survived fevers, the potato famine of 1845, and a near-fatal accident which happened when he was ‘no taller than a riding-boot ...”

“... or an idleness attuned to ‘the rhythm of life’. The life-story of a Breton peasant called Jean-Marie Déguignet, who ‘wrote his memoirs because he had never read about anyone like himself’, involves hunger, fire, war and a blow to the head from a horse’s hoof.* But where even a perceptive traveller like the English farmer Arthur Young would ...”