Farinet ou la fausse monnaie

Farinet ou la fausse monnaie is a Roman from Paulsen.

Farinet was a famous counterfeiter, king of escapes and Robin Hood who lived between the Val d'Aoste, Savoie and Valais in the 19th century. Arrested for making counterfeit coins, which he generously distributed in mountain villages, he escaped several times. This popular hero, whose life was full of romance and adventure, died at the age of 35, in 1880. Fifty years later, Ramuz seized on the character and made him the hero of a classic tale, as breathless as an adventure novel, but carried along by his unique style: the irruption of the present tense in the middle of a sentence, a mixture of tenses that makes the present dense and incandescent, a Vaudois language with peasant accents transfigured by a singular, modernist style of writing, at the crossroads of the artistic revolutions of the 20th century (he was fascinated by Cézanne and Stravinsky). Farinet is said to have hidden for a time at the bottom of the Chamonix valley, in a cave above Vallorcine. A small memorial has been set up there.