To the Manure Born

David Coward

• Memoirs of a Breton Peasant by Jean-Marie Déguignet, translated by Linda Asher
  Seven Stories, 432 pp, £17.99, November 2004, ISBN 1 58322 616 8

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’. A kick from a horse left him with a dent in his left temple, which he believed made him ‘different’. To it he attributed his quick intelligence and a spirit of independence which was to prove a mixed blessing. He asked questions and took nothing on trust, but his siblings were happier, he thought, for they existed on a ‘physical and animal’ level and wanted nothing better than to live in luxury and die in a state of grace, ‘so as to go upstairs and keep on living even more luxuriously’. Jean-Marie spent 15 years as a soldier, 14 as a farmer, six as a shopkeeper and finally 16 as a pauper. He died alone in 1905 in a Quimper slum.