Ramuz was very fond of alpine legends and he was inspired by a number of them in his texts. This paper examines the case of La Grande Peur dans la montagne (1926), showing that the novel is crossed by several legendary common places, such as the devilish hunter and the glacial purgatory where damned souls wander. In the fashion of some of Maupassant's novellas, the main character of La Grande Peur, Joseph, faces supernatural events which gradually draw him into an eerie, fantastic, even phantasmatic, universe. On the other hand, the ending of the novel, at least in the original edition, may let one think that the whole of the narrative is a legend.
Ramuz; La Grande Peur dans la montagne; legend; the fantastic; glacial purgatory