Year of publication: 2008

Publisher: Éditions Hurtubise

This is a children’s novel that Gabrielle suggested as bedtime reading. She had borrowed it from the library back in high school. In fact, it’s thanks to ChatGPT that she was able to track down the title, from a description of the vague memories she still had of the book, almost 20 years later.

The story follows Ludivine, a little girl who lives in a cave with her parents in a kingdom ruled by a wicked brute named Brutus. One day, while Ludivine was watching a ray of sunlight come through one of the cracks in the cave, a bird dropped a pearl that landed in her apron. Fascinated by the beauty of what she took for a small polished stone, she made a decision that changed the course of her life: “from now on, she would polish her rocks to make them as beautiful and as smooth as that white stone.” Much to the despair of her parents, who think she’s suddenly cracked, Ludivine becomes obsessed with polishing stones. From one day to the next, it’s all she does with her days.

What follows is a string of events that are as unpredictable as they are (often) random. Here are the ones I remember, though I know I’m forgetting several:

A doctor visits the family and decides to swallow Ludivine’s pearl (her polishing model), thinking it will cure her. Apart from making Ludivine sad, it changes nothing.
Ludivine’s parents have a second child, Joseph.
One day, Ludivine’s parents leave the cave and never come back. We never find out what happened to them.
One day, the spring Ludivine uses to polish her stones dries up. Joseph goes looking for the cause and discovers that a man has built a dam to dry up the mountain’s streams, so that the spring will serve as hunting bait for the small animals now dying of thirst. The man threatens to kill Joseph, but Joseph manages to topple him, and the man smashes his skull on a pointed rock and dies on the spot!
Another day, while Joseph is out looking for food, he finds a starving little girl. Her name is Capucine (nicknamed Pucette) and she’s the niece of Brutus the despot, whom she was fleeing because of his mistreatment. Joseph decides to bring her home to save her.
Brutus enters Ludivine’s home looking for his niece. Despite her hiding place, a sneeze from Pucette gives her away. Brutus offers Ludivine to spare Pucette’s life in exchange for all the polished stones she has accumulated over the years (about twenty in a small box). Reluctantly, Ludivine agrees.
One day, while walking in the woods, Ludivine finds a dying she-wolf. She brings her back to the cave to save her.
One day, Joseph meets an old man who turns out to be Pucette’s father. Joseph tells the father that Pucette lives with him in his cave. But sadly, the father dies before seeing Pucette.
One day, Ludivine has the brilliant idea of getting herself captured by Brutus to find out where he hides his stones. She hopes to escape afterwards. She gets captured successfully, but then she’s a prisoner.
Pucette and the she-wolf become best friends and learn to speak telepathically by looking into each other’s eyes.
Joseph decides to go looking for Ludivine, and Pucette and the she-wolf secretly follow him.
One day, Joseph gets stuck in quicksand. A blacksmith and his son hear his cries for help (he’s not the first to end up in this mess; really, someone should put up a sign warning passersby!) and rush to his rescue, but don’t know how to save him. Pucette and the she-wolf appear out of nowhere and, with a rope, manage to pull Joseph out of the quicksand.
Since Pucette is Brutus’s niece, she knows where his castle is. She guides the group there successfully.
The group comes up with a plan: once at the castle, Joseph will trick the guard into believing that a little herbal tea would improve the skin of his face while Pucette and the she-wolf sneak inside to free Ludivine.

… I could go on like this for a long time, but I think you get the idea. It’s a children’s story. Things happen. Some characters enter and leave the story, never to return. Big chunks add nothing to the story. Actions aren’t always very well thought out, and apart from Pucette and the she-wolf, who seem to have an extraordinary intuition (which kids will like), the characters don’t introspect as often as they should, in my opinion. In short, no character will impress you with their depth. That’s normal, and I probably should have expected it… But hey, I’m giving you my honest impressions.

At its root, the author wrote her story from a vision she had in a dream: in a cave, a girl polishes a stone. I think it really shows in the atmosphere of the story. The pacing and the descriptions do remind me of a dream.

I’d say the quality of the language is good and makes the text pleasant to read. For example, I was surprised by a sentence that used the rare imperfect subjunctive:

(p. 149) Pucette serait donc partie en direction du château de son oncle, même s’il n’existait aucune garantie que Ludivine s’y trouvât, et encore moins qu’elle fût toujours en vie.

(Pucette would thus have set off toward her uncle’s castle, even though there was no guarantee that Ludivine was there, and even less that she was still alive.)

There was also this pleasant alliteration that caught my attention:

(p. 243) Aucune tapisserie n’ornait les murs, aucun meuble d’appoint ne garnissait le vaste vestibule.

(No tapestry adorned the walls, no side furniture filled the vast vestibule.)

On the other hand, when it comes to nutrition, the characters are starving most of the time. Don’t follow their diet; it’s truly a fantasy to survive that long in such wretched conditions. Gabrielle whispered in my ear that one of the meals our heroes eat at the end of the story as a victory feast wasn’t even really a nutritious meal:

(p. 268) À la fin du jour, assis autour du feu, Ludivine et ses compagnons dînèrent d’un ragoût de tubercules cueillis à flanc de montagne que leur mit enfin une nourriture substantielle dans l’estomac.

(At the end of the day, sitting around the fire, Ludivine and her companions dined on a stew of tubers picked on the mountainside, which finally put some substantial food in their stomachs.)

All in all, I didn’t have big expectations going into this book. It’s a children’s book that I read with the simple goal of bringing back memories for Gabrielle. It was well written, but in my view there were lulls that often made me want to move on to something else. I appreciate the moral the author conveys with her story. She states it explicitly in the preface:

(p. 4) First, you must follow your inspiration without worrying about the result (or about what others will think!); second, […] fulfillment lies in the accomplishment of the work, not in its outcome.

As an author, these words can’t leave me indifferent. I sometimes feel like Ludivine, a crackpot who endlessly polishes the same stone with nothing in return. Yet it’s false that working on my book, Apprendre sans anxiété, gives me nothing in return. On the contrary, it truly gives me the feeling of living the life I’ve wanted to live since I was 10, precisely the age at which I would have been this book’s target audience. It makes me question all the effort I’ve put in to get where I am today. When will it be time to stop? If I go by Ludivine’s tale, the answer is that it will never be time to stop, not even when the emperor notices my work, because he’ll only ask me for more. There’s plenty to think about there. The image of the little girl polishing a stone in the cave is a strong symbol.

However, when I think back on my impressions throughout the reading, I’d say the road to reach this conclusion was really, really too winding, and for nothing. I would have liked a leaner version of this story. I’m convinced there’s another book out there somewhere that conveys the same moral with more impact. So I’m happy to walk away from this reading with a beautiful metaphor for what writing a book is like. But the metaphor is enough. I don’t encourage you to learn all the details of how Joseph, Pucette and the she-wolf manage to kill Brutus before freeing Ludivine from her prison. There are an infinite number of better stories to discover.

I’ll finish by saying I’d be interested in revisiting a book that completely won me over when I was in sixth grade and that I haven’t reread since: The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer. It will be another chance to prove T.S. Eliot right, who wrote in 1943:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

Le verdict de Félix

⭐ Starred quotes

(p. 4) First, you must follow your inspiration without worrying about the result (or about what others will think!); second, […] fulfillment lies in the accomplishment of the work, not in its outcome.
(p. 24) “But I’d rather…” “Ah! You’d rather… I tell you to believe in yourself and you answer me that you’d rather.”
(p. 174) The activity she had practiced all her life with pure happiness, her only joy, her one passion, had led her here, to slavery.
(p. 281) And so Ludivine the Cracked, who had devoted her life to polishing stones in the gloom at the back of a cave, became Pearler of the empire. In the end, having blindly followed her passion and given herself entirely to it had borne fruit. Even more, it was Ludivine herself who, like a stone, had been refined over time until she reached her essence and shone with her full worth.

Ludivine’s Pearls

⭐ Starred quotes