The Time of Secrets (1959)

Summary

Vacations at La Treille continued, but were no longer the same: Lili had to work in the fields with her father, and Marcel met Isabelle, the daughter of poet Lois de Montmajour. Then, the arrival of the sixth grade class and the entrance of the inenarrable Lagneau…

Driven by his readers and for his own pleasure, Pagnol decided to turn his diptych into a tetralogy and his Childhood Memories into a genuine formative novel, similar to Kim or The Jungle Book. In Le Temps des secrets (1960), young Marcel betrayed – temporarily – Lili’s friendship for the illusion of love, and Pagnol the writer proved, when he sketched the alcoholic poet and his grotesque wife, that he had lost none of his vis comica. The project grows and the book ends without being completed, waiting for the Time of Lovers.

” The queen, naturally, was her, and the knight was me. We began by making our costumes, for like all girls, she loved to play dress-up.”