Prologue

The story unfolds in the province of Burgundy during the eighteenth century. The hero,  Edmond Rétif, was born in 1692 in the village of Nitry to Pierre Rétif, a tyrant of a father, and Anne Simon, a saintly mother and devoted, if beleaguered, wife.

The Provinces in France in the Eighteenth-Century

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For a peasant of this era, Edmond had a rather uncommon education. After learning his lessons in the village school,   he was apprenticed at the age of 14 to his attorney uncle in the town of Noyers and there learned the rudiments of  legal clerking.

Noyers

"The Village School" (La Vie de Mon Père)

"Be good, my children,
for the approach of death will terrify the bad man."