Ramuntcho

Ramuntcho (1897) is a novel by French author Pierre Loti. It is a love and adventure story about contraband runners in the Basque province of France. It is one of Loti's most popular stories—"love, loss and faith remain eternal themes"—with four French film adaptations. It was first published in 5 parts, from 15 December 1896 to 15 February 1897, in the Revue de Paris. Calmann-Lévy published the novel in two parts on 10 March 1897. A dramatized version was staged in Paris in 1910, with incidental music by Gabriel Pierné.

The novel is notable for its documentary description of French Basque culture.

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. He gave it a basque name Bakhar-Etchéa – it became the symbolic opposite of the old family home in Rochefort where his mother and father lived.

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. Luminous, cold. 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.

The novel was written as much in Rochefort as in the Basque country, to which Loti made trips however in 1894 and 1895, before returning to his post on the Javelot in May 1896. From February – June 1894 Loti visited the Holy Land ' from which he returned as atheist as before he had set out'. In 1894 too, he met Crucita Gainza (1867–1949) a Spanish Basque, a dancer and dressmaker, and installed her at his home in Rochefort. On 26 November 1893 he had written in his diary that he, " came to the Basque country to re-create my life. To choose a young girl who might be the mother of my children, to transmit me, prolong me, re-start me in the mystery of new incarnations and I feel myself full of will, of force, of youth.." In October 1894 he learned that Crucita was pregnant and wrote that he dreamt of " this little Basque who will be born of us.." Their child was born on 29 June 1895. She gave him 3 illegitimate children (1895–1900).

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