The Time of Love (1977)

Summary

The year of seventh grade; the discovery of one’s poetic “vocation”; the lamb, the heroic dunce, and again and again Lili, who, along with Marcel, supports Joseph during an anthology game of bowls…

Announced as “to be published” as soon as Time of Secrets was released, Time of Loves was postponed by a Pagnol who was busy with other projects and who, perhaps, was delaying the moment of leaving the heroes of his childhood. No one believed in it anymore when, three years after the writer’s death, his relatives found in his files a number of completed chapters which, put end to end, constituted this long-awaited Time of L oves. More heterogeneous than the first three, this fourth volume nevertheless contains some of Pagnol’s most beautiful pages, in particular a story about the plague in Marseilles, which the writer particularly cared about.

” It was only much later that I discovered the most surprising effect of my new school life: my family, my dear family, was no longer the center of my existence.”