“Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources”: two of the most beautiful stories from the works of Marcel Pagnol. The narrative is set at the beginning of the 20th century, shortly after the 1914-1918 war: the automobile was still in its early, sputtering stages, and the telephone was a luxury that only a bar owner could afford; an era when it was said to be possible to walk from Aix to Nice “without ever passing in the sun.”
Twenty kilometers from the Old Port, the Bastidiens “resembled neither the people of Marseille nor even the Provençals of the greater suburbs.” They lived off their vegetables, goat’s milk, the lean pig slaughtered each year, a few chickens, and above all, the game they poached. It was a rural France of bigotry mixed with ancestral superstitions, even though the Third Republic was striving to train a generation of “secular, anti-clerical socialists” who were crusaders against the Jesuits.
Two peasants, “hard, bitter, sly, closed-off, and implacable,” opposed the return to the land of a city dweller portrayed as a gentle dreamer who swore only by modernity against routine. They blocked the spring on his land, driving “Jean de Florette” to his death and paving the way for the vengeance of his daughter, “Manon des Sources.”
Her friend, an old Piedmontese woman, with arms raised, cast a solemn curse: “May the pigs die! May the goats die! May the olives fall! May the beans dry up! May the women be sterile! The men one-eyed! The old ones twisted! Hail on the vines! Pip in the henhouse! Rats in the cellar! Fire in the barn! Thunder on the church!”
This terrible litany, only vaguely understood, made the non-believers laugh to tears. But two old women fled in terror, making the sign of the cross. “Watch out! Make her stop! She is casting a spell on us!” Pamphile and the baker, extending their index and little fingers from their clenched fists, pointed them seven times toward the witch, shouting the conjuration cry: “Hi… Hi… hiii.”
The priest’s maid, an expert in exorcisms, appeared with a bowl in hand: it was holy water, which she courageously threw into the face of the exalted woman. Then, the awakened Piedmontese woman made the sign of the cross and shouted: “It is the jettatura! You are all lost!”
At that moment, the village’s only fountain, whose water supply Manon had taken care to divert upstream in an underground cave in the hills, “sighed long and fell silent.”
“I told you she was casting a spell on us! You laughed, didn’t you? And now look what’s happening to us! There is only one thing to do: put the woodcutter back in his box, otherwise the fountain will never flow again! And if she doesn’t want to lift the spell out of friendship, we’ll make her drink a liter of holy water and heat her feet over some good embers!”
Captured & Published at: 2026-07-16 06:27:11 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/07/la-france-de-1918.html