analysis helped him to articulate a much darker view of human nature in his later years, and about whom he wrote the article "Monsieur Machiavel, ou le coeur humain dévoilé" (1951). In 1944, when France was liberated, Giono was again accused of collaboration with the Nazis, and was again imprisoned for five months before he was freed without charges ever being made. This led to his being blacklisted, so that for three years he was barred from publication. It was during this period of ostracism that he began in 1945 to write Angelo, metaphorically the laboratory in which he experimented, tested and attempted to integrate his new approach to his work. It contains not only a first version of the story of Angélo Pardi that took its final form in Le Hussard sur le toit and Le Bonheur fou, but also the nucleus of many other works of his second period, and makes use of new narrative techniques he developed further in other novels. He ultimately set it aside, no doubt considering it too derivative, and moved on to the other projects it gave rise to. Second period The first major novel of his second period to be published was Un roi sans divertissement (published in 1947, and made into a successful film for which Giono himself wrote the screenplay, in 1963). It takes the form of a detective story set in Haute Provence in the early nineteenth century, and reveals Giono's new pessimism about human nature in that the policeman is forced to the realisation that he himself is capable of being as evil as the murderer he is tracking. Stylistically brilliant, it consists of the juxtaposed accounts of events as told by the different people affected, devoid of explanation, from which the reader must piece together the meaning. The most famous novel of his second period is Le Hussard sur le toit, the first part of the definitive version of the story of Angélo Pardi he had sketched in Angelo. It was published in 1951, and made into a film by Jean-Paul Rappeneau starring Juliette Binoche in 1995. Angélo, like Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo (La Chartreuse de Parme) on whom he is modeled, is a chivalrous romantic whose quest constitutes an inquiry into the nature of happiness, while the cholera epidemic he finds himself confronted with in Provence in 1832 is an allegory for the wars that had