You know, I read your book, I reread it, meditated upon it, I experienced it within myself, and when I thought I possessed the secret and felt its pulsing, I wanted to make others part of that enriching experience. It was at that point that I came to know doubt and anguish. How could I translate this text, so exact in its distinct effects and fragile nuances, without betraying its resolute strength, its throbs of suffering and love? Where you have dialogue, study and description, the variations and nuances of the French language, of rural expressions in all their roughness, loaded with backwoods poetry and reality, I have nothing but the image, a luminous synthesis that must, in a lightning flash, project the drama in all its numerous variations, rich with nuances like a living page. […] But now what would you say? Of the healthy, robust country girl, of Ceres, firm and lustrous like a grain of wheat, camping out in your georgic, I will make a frail maidservant with an unpleasant, fearful body, tired from work, devotion, poverty. I however fool myself into thinking that I will be forgiven. The blame, once again, is to be attributed to that terrible camera lens. Everything onscreen is expressive and rapid. The details are spread here and there, the notes dispersed, suddenly everything is condensed by a ray. What the writer analyzes, I show.

Letter from de Baroncelli to Ernest Perrochon, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 9, 15 March 1923