Paris is magnificent with its streets along the Seine, small bookstores, cultural salons, glasses of white wine to cool the hearts burning with youth. Then from Paris, I let my soul drift back to 19th-century Provence through Alphonse Daudet's Summer Letters, the endless, free, and unrestrained summer fields that decorate the days when we were still very naive.
But the South of France is not all sweetness and gentleness, the undercurrents, the scorching summer sun and the irresistible sadness of youth, of impulsiveness and frivolity have taken over the "journey" with the poignant sad story of one of France's most prominent writers, Francoise Sagan.
ENDLESS FESTIVAL - “Paris never ends”
Among the three authors who wrote so passionately about France, Ernest Hemingway, Alphonse Daudet, and Francoise Sagan, only Hemingway was an American writer, but when reading The Endless Summer Festival, we will clearly feel the great writer's deep affection for Paris. That affection is sometimes even more passionate and poetic than that of a true Frenchman.
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, it will stay with you wherever you go for the rest of your life, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
The Endless Summer Festival - Ernest Hemingway
The Endless Summer is Hemingway's memoir about his stay in Paris with his wife Hadley from 1921 to 1926 to write. Although it is a memoir, the work has a novelistic tone because it is divided into chapters and each chapter has a complete, continuous story. The language in The Endless Summer is still full of vivid description; characteristic of Hemingway, especially in the passages where he describes his elegant experience in Paris even though it was a period of extreme economic hardship for Hemingway and his wife. But because it was Paris and because they were young at the time!
They can enjoy the Luxembourg Gardens on an empty stomach or stroll carefree in the art museum to look at paintings. The afternoons sitting over a cup of coffee and talking about literature with writers and poets whose names we will immediately enjoy when we see the chapters like "F. Scott Fitzgerald", or "A Very Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel", "Sitting at the Dome with Pascin", "Evan Shipman at the Lilas", he even devoted a chapter to the famous bookstore; to this day still one of the most visited tourist destinations in Paris; that is "Shakespeare and Company", thanks to which readers know the owner of the bookstore, Sylvia Beach, and interesting anecdotes about this place and its owner.
Small bookstores and streets of Paris
Although throughout the book Hemingway names places and shops as a suggestion to visit and talks about them as places of memories that shaped his youth. Paris through Hemingway's lens is not just a quick visit, but also a life that is closely linked to the writer's fate. Hemingway's Paris is a city with all the sounds, flavors and ways of life.
He described in detail the mornings when people came to deliver goat milk, the fragrant loaves of bread permeated the air and rushed into his nose. He wrote long paragraphs describing the Seine River with waves of people stopping to fish, about the street bookstores selling English books that few people bought. Most special of all, cups of creamy coffee and cold white wine were always present with Hemingway. If it is said that "the profession also requires a lot of effort", then perhaps Hemingway himself chose the right place to sublimate his writerly soul. Because there is certainly no second place in the world that can make him put pen to paper:
“There is no end to Paris and the memories of each person who has lived in this city are different. We always return there no matter who we are, or how the city has changed, and no matter the difficulties or the advantages, the city is always within reach. Paris always deserves it and we receive in full what we give it.
But this Paris is from the beginning. When we were very poor and happy.”
Is it true that we, modern people today, also talk about Paris? The city of freedom and immortal liberal spirit, of soaring artistic souls that at the same time hides within it a rebellious streak, just like the way the people in this city were born and nurtured.
PROVENCE AND THE SOUTH OF FRANCE - Memories and Forgetting
If Hemingway was nostalgic for Paris, Alphonse Daudet jokingly wrote in Summer Letters:“And now how can you make me miss your noisy Paris?”. Similar to the way Francoise Sagan describes in the very first chapters her feelings when immersed in the Mediterranean sea, she writes:“The cool, clear water I plunged into, I struggled until I was exhausted to wash away all the darkness, all the dust of Paris.”
Summer Letter - Alphonse Daudet
Two French writers, centuries apart, writing stories about the South of France, completely different in setting, customs, and people, yet still intersect at one point: they chose the peaceful, beautiful, and gentle Provence to convey their feelings about their youth. Alphonse Daudet chose Provence to remember the beautiful days of his youth.
“This work has reminded me of the most beautiful moments of my youth. The crazy laughter, the moments of passionate love without regret, the faces and figures of friends that I will never see again.”
Alphonse Daudet chose Provence to remember the beautiful days of his youth.
And Francoise Sagan chose this place to say goodbye to the remaining frivolities and innocence, as her character said Hello Sadness. Francoise Sagan's pen, then not yet twenty, wrote a youthful sadness that penetrated the soul, penetrated the heat of the Mediterranean in Hello Sadness. The detail when Cécile's father had to pick up the special woman of his life at Frejus station helps us imagine the story was also written in the context of Provence, Southern France. The Southern region is considered a precious pearl in the Mediterranean; A place famous not only for Provence but also for Nice with its emerald green sea, or symbols of art and luxury like Cannes, the “lemon town” Menton… In this place of rich and sweet nature, some people come here so that the sparkling beauty of this place evokes memories of the most beautiful memories of their lives, while others want to drown the melancholy, vague emotions of youth lost under the waves and the scorching heat of the June sun.
The heat of the first emotions, of the first physical touches, of dreamy afternoons on the sand, the golden sand sticking to hair and skin, soaked with her own sweat and that of her lover, the heat of a free, carefree life always full of enthusiasm and burning passion, the heat of jealousy, the heat of the full moon, of a young girl ready to burn everything. And then they burned everything, burned a brilliant and hot summer, so that from there, she could feel the smoldering heat of sadness, smoldering and smoldering, spreading and spreading. And she looked at it with dreamy eyes: "Hello, sadness" - Hello, step into life. Bonjour Tristesse!
Hello Sadness - Francoise Sagan
Sagan's writing style is glossy, sparkling but straightforward and full of emotion, along with a tight plot and natural development, so readers can easily drift along with the successive events in the work. The writer once confided: "I would live very carelessly if I did not write and I would write very carelessly if I did not live." In the last years of her life, Sagan lived quite a difficult life. In 2002, she was sentenced to suspended prison for tax fraud. On September 24, 2004, she passed away from heart failure at the age of 69. In his eulogy for her, French President Jacques Chirac wrote: "France has just lost one of its most talented and influential writers - an outstanding figure in literary life." It can be said that sadness brought glory to Francoise Sagan. Sadness was her companion during a period of her youth, but it was also sadness that became the one that drowned her in the regret of readers.
Meanwhile, going back in time to the 19th century, Alphonse Daudet; a great French writer, a son of Nimes; wrote Summer Letters, a collection of short stories with pieces of different lengths, telling us about lives, anecdotes, things that the author himself saw and contemplated while in an abandoned windmill in Provence. The picturesque stories depicting a colorful Provence seem to guide our minds to travel across the grass, the sky from blue to golden or crimson of a beautiful but short-lived youth.
“A lovely pine forest, glowing with light, gently sloped down before me to the foot of the hill. The small Alpilles stood out on the horizon… Occasionally from afar came the sound of a flute, a lark in the lavender bushes, a bell on the road… The whole beautiful Provençal landscape lived only on light”.
And it is also in the Summer Letter that the Mediterranean is opened up for readers to touch the island of Corsica, then the bay of Ajaccio... "a beautiful place I have come to to let my soul wander and live alone" even though it is a land often affected by "mistral" winds (a special wind that only exists in the French Mediterranean and often blows very strongly). But if we can withstand those gusts, then right before our eyes is a seascape so beautiful that we no longer dream or think, we seem to escape from ourselves, turn into a seagull and soar, "the foam of water wavering on the surface of the waves under the sunlight, the white smoke rising from the ship going out to sea, the coral fishing boat with red sails, this pearl, that mist, you are everything but you are no longer you. Oh my!".
When we read Summer Letters, we will perhaps understand why Daudet chose Provence as the main pulse of his short story collection. A land of nothing but beautiful nature and light, is an absolutely ideal place for us to sit and reflect on the most beautiful and pure memories of our lives.
“That was the time when everything was still kept in a glass jar, illuminated by the sunlight with a thousand brilliant aspects. The time of fragility and dizziness, of waves of emotions that only came once and then were gone. The time of happiness and even pain was so beautiful. The glorious time in our memories. Now suddenly knocking on the door, dropping in to visit after many years of not seeing each other.”
Alphonse Daudet's youth did not take place in the South of France, but that youth is remembered right here, in the beautiful and gentle Provence, with the first emotions of life like when the shepherd watched his mistress fall asleep under the starry sky and in his heart there was nothing but pure, tearful love in "The Stars". Or the people who taught him sympathy and courage in "The Secret of Old Cornille". Or the passionate desires, sometimes shallow and foolish, told by him through the life of "Mr. Seguin's Goat" who left home to find a new horizon, higher and wider on the top of the mountain far away. He told with a romantic but extremely sincere and humorous voice imbued with French personality. He told that we could hear in the air the fragrant scent of grass on the fields of Provence, as if bathing in the patches of sunlight on the hillside and eyes sparkling with mysterious stars.
Alphonse Daudet does not stop at building a peaceful, orderly picture, but it is also a world made up of contrasting realities such as lavish Paris and peaceful Provence. Bustling cities and peaceful countryside. Development and tradition... From there we see that every picture in Daudet's literature has a transformation, the reader both goes back to the old days and understands the changes due to the laws of maturity and development of society. It is the love in the young and pure heart of his youth that keeps everything in his writing balanced and finally leaves behind beautiful nostalgic feelings, wonderful things that have come and gone. Only the place and the occasional emotions still take us back to the places we have been.
The world is so vast and time is limited, but I am always secretly grateful for literature and books. If my feet cannot touch the lands my eyes are looking to, then let the words, stories, and people in those books gently touch my soul. A journey in the mind. A pilgrimage through literature to find youth, to enter the future, to touch the present, to touch the distant lands on the vast globe.
As a saying goes:“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet” - (Jhumpa Lahiri)
