This article offers an ethnographic reading of a Gascon novel by Simin Palay, Los tres gojats de Bòrdavielha (1934). The novel provides materials on the habits and customs of 19th-century Béarn society, particularly on marriage, property and inheritance in a farming family. It also contains a description of the psychological dispositions and motivations associated with the local categories which shows how the modern world is rooted in the local social order. Beyond its literary dimension this book gives a fine description of the complex interactions of this indigenous world with the wider society. It gives new insight into the processes of modernity and so supplements existing historical and ethnographic accounts on the region.