Marcel Pagnol in Grambois (84)

The village of Grambois has served as a backdrop to several scenes from the films of the books of Marcel Pagnol, notably the autobiographical La Gloire de mon Père and Le Château de ma Mère. In front of the Mairie is 'La fontaine aux Bartavelles'.

Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz (1938)

Yet another Marcel Pagnol book (in fact a play) that was a film as well. You won't find schpountz in any dictionary as far as I'm aware, but it means 'idiot' here: it's used as idiolect, film language to describe a wannabee film star who has no chance. And of course Fernandel (Irénée Fabre here) plays the spountz in the film of the same year.

Irénée is the nephew of a hard-working but relatively poor grocer Baptiste and his wife, who have pledged to bring up Baptiste's dead brother's sons Irénée and Casimir, in the hope that they'll one day take over the business. Casimir welcomes it, but Irénée is useless, full of ideas that he has a gift for the cinema, and confident that one day he'll be a rich and famous actor. 

Irénée tags onto a film crew passing through the Marseilles area, who quietly make fun of him by giving him a 'film contract' which isn't worth the paper it's printed on, as his uncle knows. In spite of Françoise, a member of the film crew, trying to persuade him that the whole thing is a joke at Irénée's expense, Irénée spends his savings on a train to Paris only to be thrown out of the studios as one of the many wannabee clowns.

However, the schpountz isn't such a schpountz as he initially seems, and due to a number of circumstances turns the tables on those who mock or doubt him.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhône (13)

Le Garlaban near La Treille, being the rock which held so much importance to Marcel Pagnol. This shot was taken from the centre of Aubagne.

A closer view shows the cross at the top more clearly.

 

Le petit monde de Marcel Pagnol is a recreation of Pagnol's fictional world in miniature, using santons – typically tiny Provençal figurines – to illustrate his characters.

Notice Le Garbalen in the background to the middle right at the back.

Marcel Pagnol by Daniel Scaturro on the centenary of his birth.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhône (13)

The birthplace of Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974), film maker, writer, academician, etc, is 16 Cours Barthélemy in Aubagne. At the time of visiting the house (today, as I write) external renovations were being made. This meant that a photo of the house itself would have had a very negative look, so I avoided taking one. Sculptor Daniel Scaturro's bust of Pagnol, revealed on 28 February 2015, on the 120th anniversary of Pagnol's birth, was covered in very closely woven blue netting. However, I was able to point my lens through it and obtain photos that are at least recognisable.

Marcel Pagnol was the son of Joseph and Augustine, and the family lived in a flat on the third floor. The reconstruction of some of their rooms, is now on the ground floor.

None of the furniture or clothing presented here are original to the Pagnol family, although they are in keeping with the period and are from the Provence area. This is a reconstruction of the salon, and Marcel's mother tended to produce the children's clothes.

The reconstruction of the salon.

Joseph, the father of the family, was teacher at the Lakanal school, and supplemented his income by drawing maps for the publishers Vidal-Lablache.

There are photos of two other noted people from Aubagne: Louis Sicard (1871–1946), the creator of the famous ceramic cicada, who also lived in the house. His sister Thérèse Neveu found a means of making santons (tiny Provençal figures) more durable.

A reconstruction of the Pagnol kitchen.

Bartavelles, or royal partridges, so often mentioned in La Gloire de mon père.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône (13)

Marcel Pagnol (1875–1974) was born in Aubagne (13), although he is more associated with Marseille, perhaps with the small village of La Treille in particular, which is mentioned in his novels Le Château de ma mère and La Gloire de mon père, which his family passed on foot on their way to their rented summer holiday home which is in reality slightly outside of La Treille: Les Bellons is a hamlet in the commune of Allauch. He is buried with his mother Augustine and his three-year-old sister Estelle.

There is another Pagnol tomb here containing members of the same family. Marcel fell out with his father Joseph (1869–1951) for marrying someone younger than himself, Madeleine (1887–1949). Along with his father and step-mother, Marcel's brothers Paul and René and his sister Germaine are buried here.

Marius Broquier (1899–1977) was a mason by profession and a childhood friend of Marcel Pagnol's, who employed him for set decoration in several of his films.

Also in this tiny cemetery is Baptistin David Magnan (1898–1918). He was another childhood friend of Pagnol's, killed in the First World War, but Pagnol novelised his relationship and named him Lili des Ballons in Le Château de ma mère and La Gloire de mon père.

At the entrance to the village is a mural, at the side of which is a quotation by Pagnol (with a sketch of him) from La Gloire de mon père: '... nous sortîmes du village, alors commença la féerie et je sentis naître un amour qui devait durer toute ma vie' ('... we left the village and then began the enchantment and I felt a love growing within me which would last all my life'). This is the hold that Pagnol has over people today, and his grave is visited by many people of all ages.

The only thing that makes me cringe a bit is that, although Pagnol is undoubtedly an important southern French writer, how much of the adulation for him is due not to reading his works but to seeing his work on screen and to sentimentalising? For some reason (harshness? lack of sentimentality?) Jean Giono (beyond any doubt a deeper writer) doesn't receive anything like the same acclaim.

NB. Much of the information above about the cemetery and the Pagnol connections come from my reading of Bertrand Beyern's website: any factual errors here are almost certainly my fault.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
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Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Cimetière Saint-Pierre, Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône (13) #1: Vincent Scotto and Henri Alibert

Vincent Scotto (1874–1952) was born in Marseille and died in Paris. He wrote 4000 songs and 60 operettas: his 'opérettes marseillaises' (sometimes caricatural) were very popular in Paris and elsewhere. He also composed songs for some two hundred cinema films, some by his friend of the director and writer Marcel Pagnol, who even gave him the title rôle in Jofroi (1934). His most successful song is undoubtedly 'Sous les ponts de Paris' (translated as 'Under the bridges of Paris'). He also wrote a book, Souvenirs de Paris, in 1947. The Prix Vincent Scotto has existed since 1948 for the popular song considered (by the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM)) the best of the year. He lies here under this impressive memorial with his singer and actor son-in-law (Henri) Alibert (1889-1951), who was born in Carpentras.

Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle (1958)

This novel, translated as My Mother's castle, is a continuation of Pagnol's autobiographical work, being the second volume of the Souvenirs d'enfance cycle. Essentially, it traces Marcel's successful progress through school, although he prefers to play with his male friend Lili, prefers the natural world which he unsuccessfully attempts to escape into away from the continuation of his schooling.

Much is made of his holiday periods to La Bastide Neuve, near the village of La Treille now in the 11th arrondissement of Marseille. There's not as much hunting as in La Gloire to mon père, although the descriptions of the journeys on foot to their holiday home get a little repetitious. A perfectly readable novel which accelerates rapidly in time at the end, but nothing to shout about.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory (1957)

Marcel Pagnol's La Gloire de mon père (trans. as The Glory of My Father) is the first part of his autobiographical Souvenirs d'enfance cycle, and both this and the second volume, Le Château de ma mère, were immensely popular. I'm not too sure why though, and the Provençal literature of Jean Giono and Frédéric Mistral is much more powerful. I think its popularity has much to do with the readers' memories of Provence, the glorious sun, the smell of the herbs, the slow pace of life.

La Gloire de mon père, then, tells the story of Marcel Pagnol's formative years around Marseille, concluding before he was nine years of age. Marcel lives with his schoolteacher father Joseph, his mother Augustine, his younger brother Paul, and relations between aunt Rose and her husband Jules are close. Like any child, Marcel grows up half in the 'real' world of what's happening around him, and half in a fantasy world, in his case (for someone preoccupied by language and the magic of words) particularly by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Gustave Aimard (whom Pagnol calls 'Aymard' on both occasions the writer is mentioned.)

The problem for me is that the book concerns not so much information about Provence itself, even its wildlife as such, but the savage hunting of it, the tearing apart of it. In Claude Chabrol's movie Partie de plaisir, the protagonist scoffs at his lover's squeamishness about using a tiny crab as fishing bait, and almost merrily rips the carapace off for her to use; a little later he summons her to watch as he positions a ladybug in a spider's web and they watch the arachnid savagely eat it: his lover is appalled by the violence which is of course normal in the natural world. This is done for suspense by Chabrol, being an indication of the pathological nature of the protagonist. However, there's little suspense in this novel, and when Marcel performs atrocities on insects and other smaller members of the animal kingdom, he is just learning about the natural world, there's nothing pathological about this or about his father's approval of Marcel learning about the natural world.

The first time I visited Provence was a fair while back although I vividly remember sitting with my partner of the time on a bar stool in front of the zinc in Saint Remy de Provence, when suddenly locals around us greeted a visitor as if he were a movie star: he was in fact a bull-fighter: we were horrified, and made a hasty exit. But violence to animals appeared to be a part of the DNA of Provence.

In La Gloire de mon père we have naming of parts, those parts belonging to Joseph's father's rifle, designed not to destroy the parts of humans as in Henry Reed's poem 'Naming of Parts', but of the parts of 'game' – what a hopelessly insensitive and violent euphemism that is! – referring to birds in particular, although almost any moving wild animal is par for the killing course, and this is what the novel is largely about: Marcel's bookish father becoming a real man by killing a brace of rock partridges: that is what is 'The glory of my father'. Pathetic, cowardly, macho and shameful, many people would consider this as today. The book doesn't even redeem itself by brilliant writing.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Marcel Pagnol: Marius (1931)

Marius is the first part of Marcel Pagnol's play trilogy set in Marseilles, (or Trilogie marseillaise), as indicated by this cover shot of the Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde basilica in the background. The other parts are Fanny and César.

This comedy is strongly steeped in the culture and mores of the time, essentially revolving around the relationship between the twenty-three-year-old Marius, who works in the seafront bar run by his father César, and the eighteen-year-old Fanny, who sells shellfish a few yards away.

This is a kind of he-loves-me-he-loves-me not story with an odd third person in the love mix: the besotted and slightly ridiculous Panisse, a widower of fifty who is a relatively prosperous sail maker only too eager to marry Fanny.

Fanny is truly in love with Marius, so much that she is willing to forsake marrying him for his real love: the world of the sea that obsesses him and his dreams of all the exotic places he can visit. But he's torn apart between his spirit of adventure and his love and perceived obligations towards Fanny.

The lovers' single parents certainly aren't torn, and as this story takes place long before the sexual revolution, César and especially Fanny's mother Honorine – whose memories of her 'fallen' sister Zoë lapsing into prostitution and causing the early death of their mother are still fresh – are keen for Fanny and Marius to marry and officially consummate the sexual relationship they are already enjoying.

But Fanny knows that the call of the sea and different climes will eventually intervene in any relationship between her and Marius, and feels incapable of standing in her lover's way: she's resigned to Marius leaving her either sooner or later, and the break comes sooner with Marius – under tremendous pressure – boarding the Malaisie and departing for years.

It is only in the second volume of the trilogy (Fanny) that the eponymous protagonist will discover that she's pregnant, and that the joyous Panisse is only too happy to marry her and have the child that he never had with his first wife.

Marius is shot through with the dialect of the area, and also the esoteric rules of the card game manille, which I'd rather not bother learning: I never learned belote, although I must admit I really enjoyed playing the card game tarot when I lived in France.

Interesting play though.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz

Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources (1986)

The writer most popularly associated with Provence is not Frédéric Mistral, or Jean Giono, or Henri Bosco, or even Alphonse Daudet, but Marcel Pagnol (1885–1974). Pagnol was born in Aubagne, a small town to the east of Marseille. Although his family later moved to Marseille, they spent all their holidays in the nearby hamlet of La Treille in the foothills of the rocky Barre St-Esprit, an area with a great formative influence on Pagnol, and where, as a film director, he would buy land and make the original Manon des Sources (1952), a tale of greed and retribution based on a story a local shepherd told him. Following the success of this, Pagnol wrote the novel L'Eau des collines (1962), which is in two parts – Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources, which are the titles of Claude Berri's 1986 remake.

Jean de Florette is set after World War I and stars Yves Montand as the ageing César Soubeyran (or Papet) and Daniel Auteuil as his nephew Ugolin Soubreyan, who intends to make a fortune growing and selling carnations. He wants to buy nearby property from Pique-Bouffigue, who dies in a fight and with the death of César's former friend Florette the land soon passes to her son Jean Cadoret (Gérard Depardieu), the 'Jean de Florette' of the title. Jean is an outsider because he's a former citydweller and a hunchback, which by tradition means he's a bringer of bad luck.

Jean's plan is to raise rabbits on the land but his downfall is that he is led to believe by Ugolin and César that the land has no water, the two villains having blocked the spring in an attempt destroy Jean's plans and buy the property cheaply. Their plot succeeds only too well, Jean dies in an attempt to sink a well on the property and Ugolin and César buy the land cheaply, but before the credits roll Jean's daughter Manon sees the pair all too hastily unblocking the spring and rejoicing in thoughts of wealth.

Manon des Sources is indeed Manon's story, which shows a reversal of the fortunes of the Soubeyrans. The stupid, ugly, and pathetic Ugolin falls secretly and hopelessly in love with Manon, who has grown into a beautiful young woman and who of course detests the Soubeyrans. She publicly accuses the pair of effectively murdering her father, and as her words are found to be true the lovesick Ugolin kills himself and César, who discovers all too late that Jean was his son by Florette, goes into a sleep that he knows he will never leave, after bequeathing all he owns to his granddaughter Manon (Emmanuelle Béart).

The risks of melodrama are obviously great, but in what I believe is a faithful interpretation by Claude Berri, the director skilfully sidesteps them. Nevertheless, in some scenes that I have mentioned and some that I haven't (particularly where the locals are represented), it would be difficult to ignore certain elements of stereotyping, and this is an area in which Pagnol has come in for criticism. It's still a wonderful film though.

My Marcel Pagnol posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marcel Pagnol's Birthplace, Aubagne
Le Petit Monde de Marcel Pagnol, Aubagne
Claude Berri's Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
Marcel Pagnol: La Gloire de mon père | My Father's Glory
Marcel Pagnol: Le Château de ma mère | My Mother's Castle
Marcel Pagnol: Marius
Marcel Pagnol in La Treille, Marseille
Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz