Pagnol Country

Santons by Daniel Scaturro

With Christmas coming up I think of Santons, those little characters you see all over France these days forming crèches or window displays, in shops and houses. Whilst they have kind of taken over the whole of the country, they are in fact from Provence and traditionally were made of the inside of a loaf of bread, squished between your fingers and rolled and prodded into shape, left to dry and then painted. The traditional Christmas characters are depicted but actually in the olden days it was more likely to be the butcher, baker and candlestick maker whose images were reproduced. Just looking at them and looking at the traditional Provencal scene created in the photo I found on the internet (from a blog of a Santon maker santons-creches-danielscaturro.blogspot.fr/) takes me back to our last holiday in Pagnol country.

Inside the church, then and now

I love Marcel Pagnol’s books, they are very easy to read, the stories are excellent and the images he invokes are so vivid. He was born and brought up in the heart of Provence, just north of Marseille and the sights and smells of Provence ooze out of almost every word he wrote. I have always thought of him as a novelist, but interestingly Pagnol was a film maker first. He didn’t write my favourite novels (Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources) until ten years after he had made the films of them, even though the most famous filmings of these books nowadays, are the Claude Berri versions made in the late 80s.

When we were in Provence in September, we decided to go on a Jean de Florette hunt. As this was a spur of the moment decision, sitting on a warm terrace, watching the sun go down behind the hills of the Luberon, we didn’t have time to do too much research. Out came the laptop and I put Google to work. The next day we were off to see the church and the fountain which were just down the road, the other locations were too far for a day trip.

Outside the church then and now

 

Interestingly the inside and outside of the church are not in the same village, in fact the two churches are not anything like the same shape, which is rather bizarre. The inside is in Ansouis a lovely, attractive village perched over the planes and the outside is in a village called Vaugines, a rather boring but traditional village in the hills. When I saw the inside of the church, I had no sensation of being anywhere special, just another Provencal church and not a very nice one at that, but as soon as I saw the outside of the church in Vaugines it was obvious where we were, we were with César and Delphine as she told him the secret that had been kept from all those years. Who can ever forget that scene in the film as César’s world comes tumbling down round his ears as he finds out that his revengeful and narcissistic actions have destroyed the one thing that he always wanted. As I walked up to the front of that church, I was there.

The fountain then and now?

The other place I wanted to visit was the village square with its fountain, which according to Google was also in Vaugines. However, when I saw the fountain I was a bit surprised, it didn’t remind me of the film at all, the fountain had become horribly overgrown with moss and didn’t seem to be either the same shape or have the same number of spouts as I remembered, even the square didn’t look right, but I took the photo anyway, to show I had been there.

On arriving home, we watched the films again and sure enough the village didn’t look the slightest bit like Vaugines, mainly I suppose because it wasn’t Vaugines at all, it was a village just down the road from there called Mirabeau. Oh dear, looks like we will have to back to Provence again to get that fountain picture and while I’m there I will have to stock up on some Santons for next year’s Christmas display.