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| Fortunio/Editions de Fallois, 2004 |
<< Je sais à quoi tu penses. Ça te met mal à l'aise l'idée que tu pourrais le sauver. Eh bien, moi, je dis le contraire. Je dis que c'est pour son bien. Et toi-même, un jour, tu me l'as dit : s'il fait une réussite cette année, même petite, il va continuer, et l'année prochaine, ça recommencera, et ce sera un malheureux tout sa vie, jusqu'à ce qu'il crève au travail ; tandis que si toutes les plantes sèchent sur pied, il comprendra, et avec l'argent que je suis tout bienveillant à lui donner pour lui acheter sa ferme, il peut retourner s'installer en ville, et ça sera beaucoup mieux pour lui. Même s'il n'y avait pas la question des oeillets, moi je ne lui prêterais pas le mulet, parce que si on ne l'aide pas, on lui rend service. Tiens, voilà cinquante francs. Va dormir, et demain matin file à la gare d'Aubagne, et sans regarder derrière toi ! >>
'I know what you're thinking. The idea that you could save him makes you uneasy. All right, I say the opposite. I say it's for his own good. And you yourself said to me one day: if he makes a success of it this year, even a little one, he'll keep going, and the next year, it'll all start again, and it'll be a misfortune to him all his life, until he dies from overwork; while if all his plants wither under his feet, he'll understand, and with the money I'm so kindly going to give him to buy his farm, he can go back to the city, and that'll be a lot better for him. Even if it wasn't a question of the carnations, I still wouldn't take my mule to him, because if we don't help him we'll be doing him a favor. Here's fifty francs. Go to sleep, and tomorrow morning hurry off to the station at Aubagne, and do it without looking behind you!'
The Novel: The Provençal village of Bastides is a small farming community, deeply rooted in tradition, which steadfastly resists the modernity that is beginning to make its presence felt in most other regions of rural 1920s France. Its inhabitants go about their business as they have for centuries, their lives governed by the seasons, the size of their goat herds, their annual harvests of olives, chickpeas, wheat and grapes and the amount of game they can trap or shoot to help boost their incomes and supplement their meager diets. The village is not a place where change is encouraged or strangers are welcomed, particularly not if they hail from the neighboring town of Crespin –– a community Les Bastidiens hold a longstanding ancestral grudge against, one which sparked a drunken argument at a wedding which saw the male and female populations of both villages fight a pitched battle in its streets, leaving several people, including the town priest, injured and bleeding.
The most important family in Bastides is the Soubeyran clan which, after several generations of inter-marriage, has been reduced to just two surviving members –– the nearly sixty year old bachelor César Soubeyran, locally known as 'Le Papet' [literally 'grandfather,' but in his case more like 'the patriarch'] and his unmarried nephew Ugolin. Both men are farmers, obsessed with money and the need to protect the precious 'sources,' or springs, which provide the water required to successfully grow crops in such dry and rocky soil. Theirs is a hard but profitable life, its physical and agricultural challenges matched only by their stinginess and their unrelenting desire to obtain more land so they might increase their zealously guarded wealth. Apart from their weekly visits to town, where they drink Pernod at the local café and play a game or two of boules with the mayor, Papet and Ugolin mind their own business and expect their friends and neighbors to do the same.
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| Farrar Straus Giroux UK edition, 1998 |
It is the redheaded Ugolin –– thin as a goat but large in the shoulders and impressively strong for his size, who also suffers from a nervous tic which causes him to blink repeatedly whenever he's nervous or upset –– who stumbles upon the unprecedented idea of growing oeillets [carnations] on their land. These flowers, so popular during the season of religious festivals and also for funerals, have begun to sell for impressive prices in the nearby town of Aubagne, leading Ugolin to experiment with growing a small number of them on his farm without his uncle's knowledge. His experiment pays off, however, when he sells his first crop to an Aubagne florist for the respectable sum of forty francs, proving to Papet that they would be wise to take the risk of growing the flowers on a commercial scale.
The problems –– as they have always been in and around Bastides –– are obtaining enough land and water to make this new flower growing enterprise a viable proposition. Carnations are thirsty plants, requiring daily saturation to survive the harsh Provençal summers. A lot of land is also required to grow them in profitable quantities, leading Papet to offer to buy 'Romarins,' a neighboring farm, from its irascible owner Marius Camoins, better known to the villagers as the acquitted (but later self-confessed) murderer of a trespassing braconnier [poacher]. Papet only wants the extra land and access to the long forgotten spring he knows is on it, but Camoins stubbornly refuses to sell, climbing down from the olive tree he's pruning to threaten him and Ugolin when they refuse to leave his property. Compelled, as they see it, to defend their family honor, the Soubeyrans trip the old man, who falls flat on his face and dies right in front of them. After dragging his body back to the olive tree to make his death appear an accident, uncle and nephew depart, secure in the knowledge that the land they covet will soon be theirs because whoever is due to inherit it is unlikely to have any interest in working such an arid and unprofitable property. All they have to do is wait, Papet assures the anxious Ugolin, and they will be able to snap up the land at a bargain price, having secretly returned in the meantime to block its re-discovered spring with cement.
But things do not proceed according to plan for Papet and his nephew. The heir to Romarins turns out to be the hunchbacked son of Camoins's long departed sister Florette whose wedding, so many years before, was the scene of the violent confrontation which drove the final wedge between the citizens of Bastides and those of neighboring Crespin. Considered a great beauty in her day, Florette was also a former sweetheart of Papet's whose relationship with him ended unhappily on her side –– a fact not lost on the old man nor his anxious kinsman. When news arrives that Florette is dead, Papet and Ugolin begin to breathe a little easier. They soon learn that 'Le Bossu' [the hunchback] is a tax collector by occupation, someone who can surely be relied upon to sell them the Romarins property at the cheapest possible price.
But once again the Soubeyrans are mistaken. Jean Cadoret intends to farm his dead uncle's land and arrives at Romarins shortly afterwards with his wife Aimée, a former opera singer, and his little girl Manon. A man of culture, philosophy and science whose greatest pleasure is playing the harmonica, Jean plans to make a new start with them in what, after a lifetime spent in the city, he naïvely mistakes for a peaceful bucolic paradise. Armed with a generous selection of 'How To' books and seemingly limitless supplies of energy and enthusiasm, he sets about transforming Romarins into a productive working farm, buying rabbits to breed and sell and planting a specially imported variety of Asian squash with which to feed them, certain in his heart that his land contains a spring he is bound to find before the fierce Mediterranean summer forces him to haul water from a well six miles away to keep his livestock, crops and family alive.
At first Jean succeeds, provoking even greater anxiety in the heart of his closest neighbor Ugolin who, on Papet's advice, makes a conscious effort to befriend him, eventually providing the tiles the newcomer needs to mend his leaking roof. But this plan has unexpected consequences, finding the greedy but basically simpleminded Ugolin becoming genuinely fond of the hunchback, his wife and their pretty, perpetually suspicious little girl. Forced again and again to bide his time, Ugolin finds himself drawn in to his neighbor's schemes to dig himself a well, half wanting his 'scientific' method of farming to succeed in spite of what it will cost him in terms of growing his carnations and the chance to add to his well hidden but frequently counted stash of gold coins.
But no amount of science, it seems, can save Jean when summer arrives and the mistral –– the strong hot wind which blows north across the Mediterranean from the coast of Africa each year –– begins to kill off his crops and threaten the lives of his rabbits. Soon this obliges him, Aimée, Manon and their Piedmontese housekeeper Baptistine to spend their days marching back and forth between the farm and the well located in the hills to keep its rapidly emptying cistern at least partially filled with water.
The hunchback barely survives this grueling daily task, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion and beyond only to have the rain –– long overdue according to his frequently consulted weather charts –– fail him right when he needs it most. Determined not to give up despite being urged by his 'friend' Ugolin to do precisely that, Jean stakes everything he has on finding the spring he is positive is on his land, teaching himself the art of water-divining from a book to avoid paying a sourcier [professional water-diviner] to find it for him. In time he begins to dig a well which, without realizing it, is only a few metres from the site of the farm's cement-blocked spring. He keeps digging, stopping only when he encounters solid rock –– rock which must be blasted away with dynamite, he decides, to grant him access to the water he remains convinced must lie beneath it.
Ugolin is, by now, frantic with worry –– not only for his carnations, but also for the hunchback he has genuinely come to admire and does not wish to see injured, maimed or killed. But Papet remains unmoved. They must not help this outsider, this bossu who, like all his kind, has the power, or so the local superstition has it, to put the 'evil eye' on people. Helping Jean and his family will only make matters worse, offering them false hope and prolonging the amount of time they must wait to acquire the land and water needed to grow their flowers on a commercial scale. Only by refusing to help this couillon [damn idiot], Papet insists, will they gain what should have been theirs, as true Bastidiens, right from the beginning.
Their wait is not a long one. Having taught himself, via one of his 'How To' books, how to blast through rock with dynamite, Jean runs towards the site of the explosion in the hope of seeing the precious water he needs come gushing out of the hole, unaware that much of the debris created by the explosion is yet to fall to earth. A large shard of this still airborne rock strikes him on the head, knocking him unconscious and causing a hemorrhage that, in what proves to be a pitifully short time, robs him of his senses and ultimately of his life. Although Ugolin and Papet are sad –– neither of them, they piously tell themselves, wanted things to end this way –– they are also relieved and secretly satisfied by this unexpected if not altogether unwelcome tragedy. With Jean dead and the grief-stricken Aimée in no position to run the farm alone, Papet makes his move and offers to buy Romarins from her, 'generously' telling her that she and Manon can continue to live in its house for as long as they like. But the thought of staying on the farm without their beloved husband and papa is too much for the heartbroken women to bear. One morning, Papet sees them loading their possessions into a cart so they can be transported to their new home –– a converted cave in the hills they plan to share with the silent, unfailingly loyal Baptistine.
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| Film tie-in edition 1986 |
In the meantime, Papet and Ugolin have 're-discovered' and removed the cement from the mouth of the blocked spring, meaning they now have unlimited access to the water they need to succeed as carnation growers. Immediately following the departure of Aimée and Manon, Papet returns to the spring to find his nephew kneeling beside the new creek the water has begun to carve from the hillside, a crown of white flowers perched atop his head. 'Le Papet crut qu'il rendait grâces, et qu'il allait boire: mais il versa l'eau sur sa tête, et dit solennellement: << Au nom de Père, du Fils, et du Saint-Esprit, je te baptise le Roi de Oeillets! >>'. [Papet believed he was giving thanks, and that he was going to drink: but he tipped the water on his head, and solemnly said: 'In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize you the King of the Carnations.'] It is left to their fellow villagers –– and Jean's still distrustful young daughter –– to judge if their discovery of this source was the lucky accident they claim it was or a calculated attempt to deprive the hunchback of the water which, had it been found in time, would have saved his farm and spared his life.
The story of Papet, Ugolin and Manon does not end here. It continues in the 1963 sequel Manon des sources [Manon of the Springs] – a tale best summarized in the words of its cover blurb: 'Après la mort du Bossu, et la vente des Romarins, Manon et sa mère s'installent dans les grotte de Baptistine. Quelques années plus tard, Manon trouve l'occasion de se venger...'. [After the death of the hunchback, and the sale of Romarins, Manon and her mother install themselves in the cave of Baptistine. Several years later, Manon finds the occasion to avenge herself… '] Like Jean de Florette [Jean, son of Florette], Manon des sources examines the nature of evil and guilt and the terrible effect greed has upon those for whom the pursuit of wealth for its own sake matters more than any human relationship, no matter how intimate and loving it may be or, in time, may promise to become. What makes these stories –– which are collectively known as L'eau des collines [The Water from the Hills] –– so haunting is their startling combination, in the figures of Papet and Ugolin, of buffoonery and immorality, of shameless greed and opportunities wasted that, once gone, can never be recovered.
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| MARCEL PAGNOL, c 1920 |
The Writer: 'When I recall the long string of characters I have played in my life,' Marcel Pagnol once wrote, 'I wonder who I am…' It's not surprising that Pagnol suffered from an identity crisis, given that he first worked as a teacher before embarking on his later, remarkably successful parallel careers as playwright, novelist, memoirist and one of France's most beloved and respected filmmakers. His most famous novels –– Jean de Florette (1962) and Manon des sources (1963) –– had their beginnings in the two part film he made of the latter in 1952 in which the tragic story of 'Le Bossu' [the hunchback] was dealt with only in a brief flashback scene. It was this that inspired Pagnol, a full decade later, to re-tell the full story of Jean Cadoret and his tragic run-in with César and Ugolin Soubeyran in literary form. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to adapt his novels to the screen, leaving that task to Claude Berri whose two part adaption of L'Eau des collines, both released in 1986, were among the most widely acclaimed French films of all time, breaking box office records not just in France but in many other parts of the world as well.
Pagnol was born in Aubagne, a town in southern Provence not far from the bustling port city of Marseille, on 28 February 1895. Although he grew up and attended school in Marseilles –– where his father, a teacher, was posted in 1904 –– it was the farm 'Bastide Neuve' ['New Country Farm'], rented by his father and uncle in the nearby village of La Treille, that was to become in many ways his true home. It was in La Treille, where his family spent most of its weekends and vacationed every summer, that he heard the tale, told to him by a local paysan [farmer], of the hunchback from the city who had inherited a local property and killed himself in the fruitless quest to find the spring he was certain it contained. It was these golden childhood summers that Pagnol would go on to immortalize so movingly in his memoirs La Gloire de mon père [My Father's Glory, 1957], Le Château de ma mère [My Mother's Castle, 1958], Le Temps des secrets [The Time of Secrets, 1960] and the posthumously published Le Temps des amours [The Time of Love, 1977].
After gaining a degree in English Literature from the University of Aix-en-Provence –– a period which saw him co-found the student literary magazine Fortunio which would later transform itself into the important revue Les Cahiers de Sud [Notes from the South] –– Pagnol joined the French army. His war service was brief, however, with his weak physical condition seeing him discharged on medical grounds shortly after he enlisted. Between 1915 and 1922 –– taking time out only to marry his first wife Simonne Colin in March 1916 –– he worked as a teacher in the cities of Tarrascon, Digne, Pamiers and Aix. In 1920 he returned to Marseilles, where he would teach until 1923 when he was offered a new teaching post at the Lycée Concordet in Paris.
His arrival in Paris coincided with the composition of his first work for the theater, Les Marchands de gloire [The Merchants of Glory, 1924], written in collaboration with his friend Paul Nivoix. This was followed by Jazz, a non-collaborative work for the stage which premiered in Monte Carlo on 9 December 1926 and also ran in the French capital for several weeks. His next two plays, Topaze (1928) and Marius (1929), proved equally popular with Parisian audiences and resulted in an offer from British director Alexander Korda to adapt the latter to the screen. The subsequent film appeared in 1931, with a screenplay written by its author, and was followed in 1932 by two more films adapted from Pagnol plays –– the aforementioned Topaze directed by Louis Gasnier and Fanny directed by Marc Allegret.
Pagnol's own career as a director began in 1933 with La Gendre de Monsieur Poirier [Mr Poirier's Son-in-Law], his adaptation of a play by Emile Augier. Between 1933 and 1940 he directed nine more films, including a second version of his play Topaze and three adaptations of the work of his fellow Provençal novelist Jean Giono including Regain, Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger [The Baker's Wife]. (The star of the latter film was Raimu, with whom he formed a close friendship which ended only with the legendary French actor's death in 1946.) The invasion and occupation of France by the Nazis meant that Pagnol was forced to abandon work on what would have been his thirteenth film, La prière aux étoiles [Prayer to the Stars], before he could complete it. The war years saw him participate in the production of only one more film, a 1943 adaptation of the play Arlette et l'Amour [Love and Arlette] for which he was only permitted to provide 'additional dialogue' by the occupying Germans.
His directing career resumed in 1948 with the release of La Belle Meunière [The Beautiful Miller's Daughter], a musical starring singer Tino Rossi in the role of Romantic composer Franz Schubert. His next film as a director was a third version of his play Topaze (1950) but it was the project he began shortly after this –– a film so long its distributor insisted on releasing it in two parts –– that would set the seal on his reputation as a director. Manon des sources (1952) and its sequel Ugolin (1952) met with instant approval from critics and audiences alike, with the captivating performance of Pagnol's second wife Jacqueline Bouvier, whom he had married in 1945, quickly establishing her as a major new star.
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| MARCEL PAGNOL, c 1970 |
In 1946 Pagnol became the first French director to be elected to the Académie Française –– an honor which saw him, during the next decade, turn his back on filmmaking and producing to focus on the writing of novels, essays and the memoirs collectively known as Les Souvenirs de mon enfance [Memories of My Childhood]. What proved to be his final film, Les Lettres de mon moulin [Letters From My Windmill] appeared in 1954, the same year his three year old daughter Estelle suddenly died of the blood disease acetonemia. For the next two decades, until his own death in Paris on 18 April 1974, Pagnol would publish more than a dozen works of prose including collections of many of his screenplays, translations of the work of the Roman poet Virgil and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, and Le Masque de Fer [The Iron Mask] –– a history of the famous 'iron mask' mystery involving Eustache Dauger, the allegedly imprisoned brother of Louis XIV, which inspired Alexandre Dumas's frequently filmed 1847 novel The Man In The Iron Mask.
The 1986 film versions of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, directed by CLAUDE BERRI and starring GÉRARD DEPARDIEU as Jean, YVES MONTAND as Papet, DANIEL AUTEUIL as Ugolin, and EMMANUELLE BÉART as Manon remain widely available in most regions of the world.
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| Film poster UK, 1986 |
A two part graphic novel adaptation of L'Eau des collines, featuring the full French texts of Jean de Florette and Manon des sources dramatized in bandes-dessinées [comic strip] form by artist JACQUES FERRANDEZ, was published by Casterman in 2011 and should be obtainable via your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer, as should the French and English versions of the original novels.
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| Éditions Casterman, 2011 |
Last updated 29 January 2021
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