Aix-en-Provence is the setting for the narrator’s first sustained life away from his mother: he enrolls in law school there, lives in a rented attic, and builds a student’s social world around an improbably well-stocked larder. The city also frames a later reunion with Adèle, turning an early romantic possibility into a comic account of the family life he did not enter.

Studies and departure

The narrator’s mother’s sale of a seven-story building helped make his first year at the University of Aix-en-Provence possible. Toward the end of that year, he enrolled in its law school and left Nice in October 1933. Their parting was painful: as the bus pulled away, his mother followed it for a few steps before stopping to cry, still holding the violets he had given her. He tried to maintain a manly, faintly ironic expression under the gaze of his fellow passengers, and found himself helped by the presence of a pretty girl who watched the scene. On the journey, he struck up an acquaintance with her; she ran a delicatessen shop in Aix.

The attic and its larder

His room on rue Roux-Alphéran cost sixty francs a month. His mother was earning five hundred, of which a hundred went to insulin and doctors’ fees and another hundred to cigarettes and other expenses; the remainder supported him. Almost every day, a bus from Nice brought provisions taken from the storeroom of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts. Before long, the sloping roof around his attic window looked like a stand at the Buffa Market: onions hung on strings, eggs lay in the gutter, and cheese, hams, mutton, and other food crowded the tiles. The deliveries also included pickles, mustard, halva, fruit, and nuts.

Local traders added their own specialties. M. Pantaleoni sent pizza with cheese and anchovies; M. Peppi supplied garlic pastries whose flavors unfolded from cheese and anchovies to mushrooms and garlic; and M. Jean delivered whole quarters of beef. The abundance, assembled through his mother’s deliveries and gifts from the Buffa Market’s friends, became a social resource: as the larder’s reputation spread along the Cours Mirabeau, the narrator made a number of acquaintances.

Student life and writing

Among those drawn into the narrator’s circle were a poet and guitarist called Sainthomme, a young German student and writer, and two students attending Professor Segond’s philosophy lectures. The young delicatessen owner he had met on the journey also became part of this Aix-en-Provence chapter of his life. He spent free time at the Café des Deux Garçons and wrote a novel beneath the plane trees of the Cours Mirabeau. The city’s student life thus emerges not only through formal study but through shared food, cafés, and the friendships gathered around his attic room.

His mother remained present from a distance through frequent letters urging courage and tenacity. The narrator recalls her writing after getting up early, preparing her insulin injection, and going out to post the message before the market. Her exhortations imagined his return crowned with laurels; for him, their language of victory and honor later recalled the rhetoric he encountered on French walls in 1940. Aix-en-Provence was therefore also the place where separation made her encouragement a recurring part of his daily life.

Return and retrospective meaning

The delicatessen girl’s story continues beyond the student years. The narrator met her again in 1952, when she was the mother of nine children. Later, in Aix-en-Provence, Adèle introduced those children to him. He viewed the prosperous, tranquil household and its shelf of comic books with gratitude that he had not married their mother: in his account, his abstention had spared her a cruel destiny and made him, by not becoming their father, a successful one at least once. The reunion gives the city a retrospective role: Aix-en-Provence holds both the beginning of a youthful acquaintance and the later scene in which its possible consequences are gently, and comically, reconsidered.