This is the secret of Pagnol’s enduring power. He does not write from the safe distance of old age but from the raw edge of memory. The sunlight of Provence is so bright precisely because it illuminates the shadows of grief.

Before we meet the Pagnol family, we must first understand the land. Marcel Pagnol was born in 1895 in Aubagne, near Marseille, but his childhood heart belonged to the hills of the Bastide Neuve, a country house in the Provençal village of La Treille. For Pagnol, memory is not chronological; it is topographical.