From My Father’s Glory (1957) to The Time of Love (1977), more than forty years after my first readings, I still return to these battered books with the same freshness, constantly discovering details that shed new light on a story I thought I knew by heart.
Returning from a pilgrimage to one of our small towns, I hope that one day our children will pass on the love that Marcel Pagnol, born in Aubagne and buried in La Treille, had for his country. His tenderness for his kin was a testimony to a bygone era and a song of filial piety. He revered the book as a true friend, meant to be read in silence and solitude. He also had a passion for words, believing that those with noble sounds always contain beautiful images.
His Childhood Memories serve as a landmark of the previous century, capturing a time around 1905 when a schoolteacher earned fifty-three francs a month. Pagnol marveled at the technological shifts of his time: the transition from gas lighting to electricity, the rise of the trucking industry, and the early days of the telephone. He vividly described the domestic life of the era, from the copper oil lamps in the cellar to the ‘prodigious storm lamps’ in the countryside.
Running water, the phonograph, and the absence of radio defined that world. Comparing the Marseille of 1905 to our world of 2026, one realizes that the essence of human experience—the struggles, the progress, and the familiar rhythms of life—was already captured perfectly in the works of Marcel Pagnol.
Captured & Published at: 2026-08-01 05:38:45 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/08/cetait-dans-pagnol.html