Jean de Florette. Manon des sources

“In 1952, Marcel Pagnol had filmed Manon des Sources and its sequel, Ugolin. Four hours of footage, ultimately reduced to 3 hours 10 minutes, were broadcast in their entirety on television in March 1968 as a serial (18 episodes of thirteen minutes each). René and Martine Pagnol had handled the editing and cutting under the author’s direction, for a “true story that once took place in Aubagne, told to me by a peasant when I was thirteen or fourteen and used to play truant across the sun-scorched, fragrant hillsides.”” (Interview with Marcel Pagnol, Télérama, March 1968).

In 1962, no doubt eager to return once more to the enchantment of his beloved hills — and perhaps also won over by this new mode of expression, prose — Marcel Pagnol took up the screenplay he had used for the film and turned it into a novel: L’Eau des collines, with Jean de Florette as its first volume.

He set the action in the years following the First World War, at a time when the Marseille canal was still far from serving all the towns and villages of the region. The two novels take place three years apart, in the territory of Les Bastides Blanches, “a parish of one hundred and fifty inhabitants, perched on the prow of one of the last foothills of the Étoile massif, two leagues from Aubagne… A dirt road led there by a climb so steep that from afar it looked vertical; but from the hills there was only a mule track, from which a few paths led toward the sky.” Thus begins Jean de Florette. Both novels were magnificently adapted for the screen in 1986 by Claude Berri, with a cast at the height of its fame: Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Béart.

A very fine copy, a rare condition for this numbered printing.