Le Chasseur de rats

The poet, novelist, playwright and publicist Viktor Dyk was inspired by an old Saxon tale in this novel (published in 1911-1912, in book form 1915), which he used as a loose framework for the story of a mysterious traveller who, at the request of the citizens, cleanses the Hanseatic city of Hameln of rats with his whistle, but, disillusioned by the pettiness of the conchels and betrayed in love, misuses the whistle and leads the whole city to destruction as punishment. The book's counterpart to the figure of the Pied Piper, the fate-shaped hero, the lonely and restless dreamer who embodies the world of the Boers, is the fisherman Sepp Jörgen, who comes to terms with reality and, by rescuing an infant, gives birth to a new hope. In this novel, which reflects the neo-classical direction of his later work, Dyk has thus managed to use an old subject to create a sovereign prose work about the conflict between illusion and reality. Its mysterious atmosphere foreshadows the later balladic prose of the 1930s.
Translated into French under the editorship of Xavier Galmiche and with revisions by Aurélie Rouget-Garma, with a foreword by Xavier Galmiche.