Marcel Pagnol

I’m reading Marcel Pagnol’s novel, Jean de Florette. If you don’t know Pagnol, he was a successful film director and producer in France who wrote his own scripts, in the early days of film, when small budgets produced amazing, lucrative results. He’s the Frank Capra of France. That was American-centric! Let's say that Frank Capra is the Marcel Pagnol of the United States.

If you don’t read French, there are some beautiful English translations of his novels: My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle; Jean de Florette, and Manon des Sources. Pagnol writes of the almost forgotten rural France of Provence between the Wars. You can rent a video of La Femme du Boulanger and spend an hour or so in a real, live French village of 1939. The film was shot on location at a time when LOCATION meant LOCATION. If a stray dog or child walked through the shot, they weren’t edited out.

At dinner the other night, I mentioned this movie, and Roger said that he saw the movie when it was first released in 1939, at the Hotel du Nord in Prayssac. He would have been around thirteen years old. Sadly, the Hotel du Nord was abandoned a few years ago. When I see the hotel, I sometimes romanticize opening it up again.But having once owned a bar and restaurant, realizing that I’m not a “people person,” I abandon the idea until I once again drive by the lonesome building.

We have a very sexy femme du boulanger in Prayssac, and when I called her that at a dinner at Therese’s, the table erupted in laughter. I told my first joke in French and it was a hit! She and her husband remodeled their bakery this spring, regrettably removing a very large, sexy, framed photograph of the femme that she proudly hung near the handmade chocolates. Her daughter is a younger exact replica and sometimes works behind the counter. Hopefully, there will be a continuous line of femmes des boulangers in Prayssac.

Pagnol’s body of work has often brought tears to my eyes for he has preserved the reality, and perpetuated the epic myth, of a pure, rustic, romantic, rural France in clear, poignant writing that perfectly captures the clash between the modern economic maw and the paradise that is has consumed.

Pagnol became a success both financially and artistically, owning his own large film production company headquartered in a chateau near Marseille. He understood and celebrated the immeasurable value, and complex psychology of French peasant life. This reverence for the peasant life spun his gold for him.

If you’d like a taste of Pagnol at his finest, extracting poignant beauty from the daily struggle of peasant life, take a few minutes and read the following passage from Jean de Florette:

Ten years earlier in a little village in Piedmont, Baptistine had married Guiseppe, who was apprenticed to his father. But instead of setting himself up at once in a thatched cottage and producing a brood of infants, Guiseppe, who was an adventurous spirit who had no wish to die poor, had kissed the brow of his young bride as they left the little church, and had left for France, where woodcutters – so it was said – ate meat every day. Two years later he sent for his virginal beloved.

He came to the railway station at Aubange to wait for her arrival on a train that had jolted along for thirty hours. He wore a fine pair of maroon corduroy trousers held up by a wide blue belt, a shirt with large red squares separated by thick black lines, and a handsome green corduroy jacket. A glossy curly forelock emerged from a flat hat on the back of his head; his eyebrows were shining and his moustache was as long and bushy as King Victor Emmanuel’s. On his feet—supreme luxury—he wore a pair of shoes of real leather, as beautiful as a soldier’s, and the platform resounded to the magnificent ring of the nails in them.

They exchanged scarcely a word because of all the people passing by who had no need to know their secrets, and they set off on the road, loaded with bundles and packets.

Guiseppe walked in front, and suddenly turned to the right to take the path up the hills. At the end of an hour they stopped in front of a dry stone wall that closed off the entry of a cave at the foot of a sheer drop of blue rock, high above a wild ravine. There was a door in the wall, and a little window on either side.

He entered first and opened the shutters.

In a corner was the bed covered with a thick blanket of yellow wool on a frame of strong holm-oak branches barely stripped of bark, under a copper crucifix shining in a patch of sunshine. Along the limestone wall there were some stools, two chests decorated with large nailheads, and a tin alarm clock on the lid of an old kneading trough.

On the left, near the door, in the corner where the wall joined the rock, there was a hearth, with a red plaster mantel marked with deep fingerprints. Against the wall on the right, suspended from thick wooden pegs, there were pruning hatchets, billhooks, and two big axes with narrow curved blades protected by leather muzzles.

Baptistine gazed with astonishment and joy at their wild love nest.

Giuseppe raised a finger and said: “Don’t make a sound: listen!”

They heard a twittering of birds, and from time to time a light ringing sound. He took her by the hand and led her to the bottom of the cave. There, under a mossy chink in the rock, was a little pool full to the brim with clear water.

“The spring!” he said.

The water ran along a furrow that went through the wall on the right.

He made her sit on the bed.

“Baptistine, my darling, this is where I’ve lived for two years. I don’t know who the master of this old sheepfold is—nobody has ever asked me for anything. I came here because it was convenient for my work, and besides, it saved money. But I have the money to buy a house in the village: look.”

He went and plunged his arms in a hole in the rock and pulled out a small narrow canvas bag, like a tube. He took one end of it and shook it over the blanket, and some pieces of gold fell out. Baptistine clasped her hands in ecstasy.

“There are sixty-two of these,” said Giuseppe. “I made them with the blows of my axe, and now they’re yours. I didn’t buy the house, because it’s the wife who should choose. So, this is what I say to you: if you want to, we’ll live here until you have the first sickness. Then at that moment you will go and choose a house in the village. There, that’s my idea. But if this cave doesn’t please you . . .”

“Oh, Giuseppe,” said Baptistine, “for me it is the palace of a king. It’s a cave, and for me this cave is a palace of gold and marble. But don’t say any more. I’ve been your fiancée for five years and your virgin wife for two years . . . Come quickly, so that I may be married.”

And she tore off her dress, and she gnawed at his mouth, and they stayed in this palace; they stayed all these years because the morning sickness had never wanted to come.

I know I shouldn’t have selected this excerpt . . . the next time I want to remodel some aspect of the house or buy new furniture, my husband will refer to this passage! Yes, I am a hypocrite.

We just had a brief rain shower, and now the morning sun is shining strongly as the clouds pass through. I have to close my shutters, we're in for another scorching day. And then I'm off to visit the femme du boulanger and attend a big fete of the Americans who just arrived from New York and New Jersey. Maybe I'll take Roger along . . . I'd be interested in hearing his opinion after seeing a bunch of type-A Americans having dinner.