Ramuntcho

In December 1891 Julien Viaud (Loti) took command at Hendaye of Javelot, a gunboat charged with watching the French-Spanish border at the mouth of the Bidassoa, an area where smuggling was particularly prevalent.

In the first months it appeared to him a colourless place, as his diary of the time indicated, but then its charm worked upon him, to the point where he wanted to buy the house he was renting.

Two years after his arrival in the Basque country, his diary noted the start of the writing of the novel: " Tuesday 1 November 1893 – A calm day.

A great malancholy of dead leaves, dead things...in the solitude of my study I conceived the plan and began to write Ramoncho, which will perhaps be the great thing I shall turn towards, against the infinite sadnesses of this winter... " At this point Loti was about to become only an episodic visitor to the Basque country so his diary, already filled with impressions and anecdotes was used almost without modification in the novel.

According to the French critic Patrick Besnier [fr], ( introducing a 1990 edition of the novel), Loti's book is one " shaped by the rapports between father and son – their non-existence, their impossibility.." In Ramuntcho the Basque country is presented as a quasi-paradisiacal land.

The outside world doesn't intrude, even military service is left hazy – the reader learns only that Ramuntcho departs for 'a southern land.'

According to Besnier, Loti, in his Basque life, lived protected from the realities and cruelties of existence, and in a state of perpetual adolescence.

The characteristics : young lovers, inexperienced, a mix of naive sensuality and chastity, an exaltation of simple life and frugal ways, a timeless world enclosing one, a beautiful and beneficent Nature, seem to appear again, a hundred years later, in Loti's work.

But the critic Patrick Besnier has argued that more than the idyll, Ramuntcho belongs in the Bildungsroman tradition, to the novel of apprenticeship and of formation.