Library

"Drowning" and "The Story of Sayan" are two parts of the posthumous work "Lieutenant Colonel Mummer" by the famous French writer and Nobel Prize winner Roger Martin Dugar. They can be written separately or read in conjunction with each other. This is the chapter that took the most time and revised several times in the posthumous work. It was called by Gide "the most solid and personal work Martin Dugar ever wrote." In "The Story of Sayan", the protagonist Bertrand de Moumel tells in the first person the story of his relationship with his cousin Guy and his tutor Xavier in his family's castle of Sayan when he was twelve or thirteen years old, and Xavier became the protagonist in "Drowning". The narrator Bertrand interweaves memories and scene reenactments to depict the dual changes in the body and mind of teenagers during adolescence, highlighting the mutual causal relationship between the two and the importance of sex education. It also reflects from the side the way teenagers in the upper class of France are educated and the huge differences between Paris and the provinces.