The Glory of My Father (November 1957), The Castle of My Mother (April 1958), The Time of Secrets (June 1960), The Time of Loves (1977): more than forty years after first reading them, I return to these battered books with the same freshness, constantly (re)discovering details that shed new light on a story I thought I knew by heart. Marcel Pagnol intended to publish for an adult audience, and was surprised to receive letters from child readers. "The Time of Loves" became a posthumous publication because Pagnol hesitated before the flood of letters from very young readers, "alone or with their parents, entire classes, asking him if such an anecdote was true, or if such a character was real." But these Loves are so tender that they become "books for everyone and forever." To read alone; to discuss with parents; to share with entire classes.

I have just returned from yet another pilgrimage to one of our small towns. May it come to pass that one distant day, our children transmit in turn all the love that Marcel Pagnol had for his country, he who was born in Aubagne and buried in Treille. His tenderness for his own—"a testimony to a vanished era, and a small song of filial piety." The veneration of the Book: "The reader, I mean the true reader, is almost always a friend. He went to choose the book, carried it under his arm, invited it to his home. He will read it in silence, settled in the corner he loves, surrounded by his familiar setting. He will read it alone, and will not tolerate another person reading over his shoulder." The passion for words: "the delicious ones (damascened, anthology, filigree), the grandiose ones (archiepiscopal, plenipotentiary)," because "words with a noble sound always contain beautiful images."

The "Childhood Memories" are a landmark in the other century: "This happened around 1905, and according to my calculations of that time, the family was seventy-three years old: two for my little sister, six for my brother Paul, nine for me, twenty-six for my mother and thirty for my father." An era when a tenured schoolteacher "infallibly earned fifty-three francs a month" while a junior office clerk could "count on three hundred fifty."

Marcel Pagnol marveled that "Uncle Jules and Aunt Rose lived in a beautiful apartment on Rue des Minimes, it was lit by gas, and Aunt cooked with gas." At his friend "Lagneau's" house, there was electricity, while his father, a "master carter" at the head of an army of horses, after twenty-five years of labor, could "have his name painted on the three sides of fifty carts, in white letters, and below the name, there was a number which, by a sort of magic, corresponded to a telephone machine housed in a box with a crank that was screwed to the wall." Oil was not yet automobile, and hand-drawn carts delivered coal throughout the city of Marseille.

At the Pagnols', the cellar workshop was lit by a kerosene lamp: "it was made of slightly dented copper, and bore a Matador burner, that is to say the circular wick emerged from a copper tube, and rose under a small metal mushroom, which forced the flame to bloom in a corolla. This corolla was quite wide and, to contain it, the 'glass' that the English excellently call 'the chimney,' had at its base a bulge of the finest effect: it gave a bright light while emitting a violently modern smell." In the countryside, the family lit themselves with the "prodigious storm lamp": "its ovoid globe, protected by a nickel-plated grille, topped with a metal cover was a wind trap. It was pierced with holes that welcomed the night breeze, wound it upon itself, and pushed it, inert, toward the impassive flame that devoured it." At the same time as "the fleshy butterflies, burned by an impossible love."

Running water at home, by the magic of the "Tap of Progress," constituted an extraordinary luxury. The phonograph a magical device reserved only for millionaires. Radio nonexistent. France, Marseille, Bastide-Neuve