Located in one future time after the era of the wars, no more precisely definite, the work makes the accound of the life
of Joseph Valet, a Magister Ludi who market his time by his brilliant and original personality at such that it became legendary. The teaching province baptized
Castalie forms the elite in all the disciplines of art sciences and the culture. Wedge in the middle of the
century, it recruits the young candidates as of the age twelve or thirteen year. Thus the young person Joseph Valet receives it one day, in the modest school, the visit of a master of music come to evaluate it, in the first raised years of training still held to engage definitively. The existance ant the studies that it carry out to it then remain inside Castalie where they become of the castaliens. By affinity of discipline, or choise or for any other reason, each castalien will find its place whithin the small company of castalie whose floret is the play of the glass shots. If the life of Joseph Valet is legendary for the future generations, while at the same time the worship of the personality and individualism were proscribed it is that its rise is exemplary and has the time except framework. Castalie is a privileged universe,which exists only thanks to the rich person familier financing of the century who sends their sons besides to it be formed. It is the case of Plinio Designori, whith which Joseph will bind friendship as of the first years of studies, and which will join the life of the century Joseph Valet will know a particular caurse. Even atypical it accomplishes a stay of several years to the convent of the benedictives of Mariafels where it will have the occation to be formed and be conforted whith the thought and the wisdom of the old Jacobus father. Historian and adviser of the Vatican the church was maintained, in spite of the era of the wars Joseph will also bind whith an atypical resident of Castalie the elder brother. Which lives whith the variation in its chineses hermitage of the wood bamboos, an orientalist ascetic who devoted his existence to the study of chinese philosophy and Yi Jing. Joseph Valet will become the youngest Master of the Play of the Shots the Glass, youngest to reach the top of the hierarchy. This Play, that Hermann Hesse has the skill to evoke without really describing it, is a kind of annual ceremony, mixing all the disciplines and all arts, and who represents in itself a work of art in which the "players" present at Castalie, and a less degree take part, the public which follows unfolding from there to the radio. This Play is actually accessible only to the elite from Castalie. For example, when Plinio Designori, which left Castalie too early, returns, several years later, for a short stay, it is not able any more to taste subtleties of them for lack of drive and discipline. Because, in Castalie, if one learns how to dig a subject being referred to any matter or art and to put them in report/ratio, one creates nothing, one is satisfied with what was created before. Formed and involved with the meditation, with the self-control, Castalien nourishes its spirit and its heart in other words, it is initiated with knowledge, with all the reserves that Hermann Hesse exposes in this book. This novel evokes also what Hermann Hesse calls the awakening: these moments, painful and splendid, of revelation and light, conscience and call, which mark out the life of Joseph Valet. These calls with the achievement of a human task, illustrated for example by the Master of Music which, before dying, reached a kind of state of holiness, peace and of serenity which the Order cannot name like such, but that Joseph recognizes like a state of achievement. The friendship of Joseph for Plinio Designori, which chose to live in "the century" where it married and will have a son, symbolizes the ceaseless questions that Joseph is posed on the future of Castalie, this privileged enclave. The question of the responsibility for each human being within an Order, of a community, the historical responsibility for each one. The choice of Valet, it is to give up its load of Ludi Magister to go to live in "the century" and to become the tutor of Tito, the son of his old friend Designori, who worries his father by his behavior. To take again teaching at the beginning, in a still malleable young being, it is the mission which henceforth seems in Valet most beautiful and most exciting. Joseph Valet does not flee Castalie in catimini, not, it writes a circular, a lengthily argued official request to cancel its function, and addressed to the Management of the Order, while at the same time it knows such an inadmissible request, by nature.