Two small commemorative plaques, an enchanted holiday route which crosses an activity zone. A bar-tabac-PMU and its two plane trees. A piece of rickety house. A cave still intact in a massif from the top of which time seems to freeze. In Marseille, follow in the footsteps of Childhood memories by Marcel Pagnol, who died fifty years ago, is not so easy.
However, the story of his summer holidays spent in the hills of Marseille marked “the happiest days of [l] a life” of perhaps the most emblematic author of Provence. And to these big holidays at Pagnol, Damien has already devoted almost ten years of his life to it. Although originally from Béziers, the tourist guide “fell into Pagnol at a very young age”: “I left school at 14. And the Childhood memories were the only books I could read. There were films too (in 1987 and 1990), and it became a passion. »
A fada, brambles and the castle of Buzine
Damien, 45, therefore logically came to live in the Marseille region seven years ago and has since devoted himself to satisfying his obsession. With success, since he found the shortcut, that of My mother’s castlethe second part of the trilogy of Childhood memories. “A secret passage”, partly running along the Marseille canal and hunted for many years, which he ended up unearthing just two years ago, through reading and archival work.
“Part of the path was invaded by brambles, I found remains there and even the real last door! », Enthuses the guide. This same “horrible black door, the one that did not want to open on vacation, the door of the humiliated father…” wrote Pagnol, whose family was caught in this passage by a guard and his dog. “It is located at the bottom of a garden, in a private home, along the northern enclosure of the Château de la Buzine,” explains Damien. The same castle today at the heart of a conflict between the Pagnol heir and the Marseille town hall.
Ugly France and a PMU bar
But before reaching this shortcut which divides by four the three hours walk between La Barasse and the Quatre-saisons crossroads, marked by a bar, you had to take the tram from Les Chartreux, in the city center of Marseille. Today, there is no longer a tramway and the ten kilometers between the former Chartreux public school – now a college, where only a meager plaque reminds us that Pagnol was there – are traveled by car. made his first studies and his father taught there – and La Barasse, the first step in the famous family’s journey to the “holiday asylum”.
A first journey today without interest, in an urban continuum which leads to the outskirts. In other words, ugly France, that of pavilions, warehouses, camps and activity zones, all crossed by the A50 motorway which links Aubagne to Marseille and which has nothing to do with holidays. But it is from here, from the old La Barasse tram station, that the adventures of young Marcel really begin.
The Quatre-saisons crossroads, shaped like a crow’s foot, still exists, as does the eponymous bar and its “two large plane trees” described by Pagnol, the last stop before the three kilometer climb towards the village of La Treille then the Bastide-Neuve, their summer residence rented for 80 francs a year. The bar changed its name to “La source”. Rest assured: pastis is still served there and, in the summer, tourists come to cool off there. Today run by Eric, the bar also serves as a PMU and tobacconist. Inside, yellowed photos, undated but which one imagines come from the 1920s, sit alongside an OM scarf and a TV screen broadcasting the equestrian races.
“For me, Pagnol is above all folklore”
No doubt, for Eric, it’s “the Pagnol bar”. A universe into which Jean-Pierre, a Picard who arrived in Marseille in 1997, was immersed. He now lives in La Treille, and, inevitably, Pagnol had to get involved. “I have a house with quite a bit of land. And the first year since it didn’t rain from April to the end of summer, I watered a lot. When I got my first water bill of 7,000 euros, I understood the importance of water in Provence, one of the main subjects of Pagnol’s writings. So, I did some drilling. But anyway, for me Pagnol here is mostly folklore. Have you seen the iron owl on the roundabout below, in reference to the Grosibou cave? Well, that’s it,” says Jean-Pierre. And the fifty-year-old leaning on the zinc continues: “what’s a shame is that here we are surrounded by closed residences while Pagnol is quite the opposite: freedom and wide open spaces. »
“An enchanted scrubland desert”
To find freedom, wide open spaces and the enchanted hills of the writer, you will still have to climb a handful of kilometers along a road dotted with private clinics and villas. We finally reach the village-district of La Treille, its church, its cemetery, its school with a fresco by Pagnol, its small fountain of Manon from sources and its streets the width of a horse-drawn carriage in which tourists get stuck – which annoys the locals. Only further on comes the hamlet of Bellons, in the commune of Allauch. The same one where Lili lived, Marcel’s great summer childhood friend, the one who would introduce the writer to the secrets of the scrubland, its springs, trap hunting and gathering.
It is then that the Bastide-Neuve, which the Pagnols reached after a grueling day of travel, can be seen. An old house surrounded by olive trees today separated into two properties according to sales. Two thirds of it is inhabited by a couple who inherited Belgian grandparents and who, explains Damien, “suffer a little” from the intrusion of curious people looking to see a piece of Pagnol. The remaining third was acquired by the association of friends of the writer who undertook a slow voluntary renovation. A simple small plaque indicates the history of this building, located at the end of a dead end.
After him, finally, beyond the pine forest “the scrubland desert” of the Garlaban massif opens up and the promises of adventures of the Porvence minot. A massif that Damien surveyed, fascinated by the idea of following in his hero’s footsteps and discovering the water sources mentioned in the books or the rocky bar from the top of which Marcel brandished the two bartavelles felled by his father Joseph in the same rifle salvo. “With my little bloody fists from which four golden wings hung, I raised towards the sky the glory of my father in front of the setting sun”… Or in front of hectares and hectares of hills on which the mistral blows regularly, which decorates the oxen and makes the spindly pines dance, although they cling tightly to their rocky ground.
“There is no need to tell the children”
Arriving at the summit of Taoumé after two hours of walking among scree, juniper, thyme and argela trees, stands the Grosibou cave, where Marcel Pagnol tried to become a hermit to escape the start of the school year. From this small rocky slot now marked in painting and well known to poachers of yesteryear (its opening onto two valleys made it possible to evade the surveillance of the gendarmes), the view is magnificent: to the north, the Sainte-Victoire announces the presence from Aix-en-Provence, towards the West, the northern harbor of Marseille, its cranes raised towards the azure sky, and, to the South, Marseille again and the undulating roof of the Vélodrome. Further on, Cape Canaille and its ocher rock which contrasts with the white limestone of the virgin surrounding hills.
The firefighters’ DFCI tracks aside, time seems to be frozen here. The kind of decor that Damien’s clients can come to find, whose fascination with Marcel Pagnol pushes him to accompany his clients in period clothing: “in our society today which is a bit cold, most come to eat nostalgia and go back for a moment to 1905.” Because from the top of the hills a violent contrast is also expressed: that of a rural landscape adjoining the urban which is always gaining ground to the detriment of “the eternal games” of a Marcel Pagnol who had captured the cruelty of the world. “Such is the life of men: a few joys, very quickly erased by unforgettable sorrows. There is no need to tell the children,” wrote the author in the epilogue to the second part of the Childhood memories. It was there that he announced the death of his mother and that of his friend Lili des Bellons. The two friends are buried together today in the small cemetery of La Treille.