The mating season

The fifth year; the discovery of his poetic "vocation"; Lagneau, the heroic dunce, and always and ever Lili, who, with Marcel, supports Joseph during a legendary game of pétanque...

Announced as "forthcoming" upon the release of Le Temps des secrets, Le Temps des amours (1977) would be delayed by Pagnol, who was busy with other projects and perhaps putting off the moment of leaving the heroes of his childhood behind.

No one believed it anymore when, three years after the writer's death, his relatives found a number of completed chapters in his files which, put together, constituted this long-awaited Temps des amours.

More eclectic than the first three, this fourth volume nevertheless contains some of Pagnol's most beautiful pages, notably a history of the plague in Marseille, which the writer was particularly fond of.

"It was 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."