Marcel Pagnol was the first to bring cameras under the Dome. On March 27, 1947, his entry into the French Academy and his acceptance speech were filmed by his teams. Very present in cinema through films that have become classics, he then devoted himself mainly to literature, but did not neglect television, quite the contrary. On January 22, 1958, in
Lectures pour tous
, he answered questions from Pierre Dumayet on the occasion of the release of
The glory of my father
. Madelen invites you to discover, or rediscover this interview whose impact was immediate. The day after its appearance on the emerging small screen, the book began to be sold out in bookstores. In the history of literary broadcasts, this is a first.
Pagnol did not imagine it when, the day after the publication of a Christmas story in
Elle
magazine , he received hundreds of letters, mainly signed by women, who begged him to write a sequel. He then began writing the first volume of his
“Childhood Memories”
. When he mentioned him in 1958, on the only existing channel, still in black and white, he spoke little about him, cited the Château de la Buzine without dwelling on the subject, and mainly insisted on Joseph, this father who remained a teacher. in the service of children, whose intelligence and hard work he admired. He confides that if he had taken another professional path, he would undoubtedly have earned a lot of money.
It is ultimately his son who will hit the jackpot through a story that he continues with
My Mother's Castle
and
The Time of Secrets
. On the occasion of the publication of this volume 3, - theoretically the last -, on July 13, 1960 he returned to the stage of
Lectures pour tous
. Pierre Dumayet communicates the sales figures for the first two volumes: more than 380,000 copies. For the time, this is a record!
Pagnol responds by admitting to having been
“very greatly surprised”
by a success for which he gives the only explanation that seems plausible to him:
“we are living in an extremely troubled and dangerous time, where we are talking about atomic bombs and rockets. People who knew life before 1914 take refuge there willingly, those who did not know it discover it with perhaps already regrets
. He adds that originally, he thought of devoting a single volume to this
“very comfortable”
childhood world
that was his. He specifies that he told things as they happened in every detail.
As he wrote, everything that marked his very young years suddenly came back to his memory. With a smile on his lips, he compares this phenomenon to what had once been one of his favorite jokes: placing a spool of thread in his pocket with a few centimeters of his jacket sticking out. When someone pointed this out to him, he would innocently ask the person to shoot it. Six meters of wire unraveled in a matter of moments. Is there a scientific or even medical explanation for this memory phenomenon? In front of Pierre Dumayet, he put together a theory that he had thought about for a long time. According to him, a man loses his memory from the moment he can no longer learn Chinese, that is to say around 38 or 40 years old. From this moment on, the distant past comes to the fore, engraved in the brain on a small wax disk which hardens a little more as we age. If he were with us today, this technology enthusiast would rather be talking about a hard drive.
Finally, in this interview, his emotion is palpable when he reveals that extracts from his trilogy already appear, in 1960, in school textbooks and programs allowing you to obtain the school certificate. The true glory of his father.