The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy

David Middleton celebrates the artist Jean-François Millet's sympathetic realism depicting the harsh life of French peasants in the nineteenth century and honoring their essential human dignity. Middleton follows Millet, picture by picture, in taking a lowly pastoral theme and elevating it to epic and tragedy. He seeks to describe Gruchy -- the small Norman village near Cherbourg where Millet grew up -- and explore that rural world in relation to the American South and his own career as a Louisiana poet.