David Bosc

La Claire Fontaine

«The water of the Loue, dawn blue, has the swell of oil. Father’s potbellied house soaks in it all the way along, a hard crust put to soak for the geese or coquecigrues.»

Swiss Literature Prizes 2014

David Bosc’s «La Claire Fontaine» is a novel about a painter, Gustave Courbet. It is also a book about Lake Léman captured by the eye of a painter. And it is the story of an exile. Sought by the authorities for having taken part in the Paris Commune, Courbet leaves Ornans for Switzerland in 1873. This novel spanning Courbet’s last years pulses with a foolhardy «revolutionary» fervour which completely takes over the painter. David Bosc has invented a pictorial language that seems to have been borrowed from the artist. Generous, crisp and funny, it paints the picture of a painter in Switzerland in bold, bright, humorous strokes.
(Jury selection of the Swiss Literature Prize, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

The French painter Gustave Courbet spent the last four years of his life in exile on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He was wanted by the police for the demolition of Napoleon’s Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune – of which he was a member – in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In July 1873, Courbet left his home town of Ornans, along with two of his assistants, and set off on a donkey for exile in Switzerland. He sojourned in the Jura countryside along the way, bathed in cool rivers whenever he could, and eventually, after spending some time in Geneva, made his new home in a studio in La Tour-de-Peilz. Once there, he captured the majesty of Lake Geneva on canvas, in all its colours and moods; exhibited his latest paintings; made love with Juliette, his Piedmontese housekeeper; sang in the village choir; cursed the police, who were pursuing and harrassing him; and drank himself into an exhausted death at the age of 58. «The Clear Fountain» is a semi-biographical novel, interspersed with original source material from letters and legal and police documents; with brilliant word pictures and a powerfully eloquent musicality. It portrays the final excessive stages of the Realist painter’s life, famous for his scandalizing erotic tableau «The Origin of the World» (1866). The novel stands as an artistic and literary defence of the life of a «self-governing man» – «l’homme qui se gouverne lui-même».

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Clear Fountain

Verdier, Lagrasse 2013

ISBN: 978-2-86432-726-4