Cours Mirabeau appears in the narrator’s account of his student years in Aix-en-Provence as more than a street: it is a public setting where food, companionship, literary ambition, and self-invention meet. Its plane trees shelter his writing, while the reputation of his attic larder and his theatrical manner make the boulevard part of his emerging social identity.

Setting and Student Life

While living in a small attic room in Aix-en-Provence, the narrator wrote a novel at Café des Deux Garçons beneath the plane trees of Cours Mirabeau. His mother supported him from a distance with money and provisions, and food from the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts and the vendors of the Buffa Market gradually filled the space around his attic window. The abundance became a talking point in the neighborhood: the narrator says that the reputation of his larder spread rapidly along Cours Mirabeau and helped him make friends.

A Social and Literary Stage

The boulevard also became a place where the narrator performed the identity suggested by a psychoanalyst’s report on his rejected novel. After the report described him in terms of several supposed psychological complexes, he treated the document as an unlikely badge of distinction and cultivated the air of an homme fatal. He carried small scissors, affected a fixed grin, and was known around Cours Mirabeau and at law school as a disciple of Freud, though he never spoke of Freud. The street thus connects the private labor of writing with the public persona he fashioned among fellow students and acquaintances.

Narrative Significance

Cours Mirabeau gathers together the contrasting materials of the narrator’s early life in Aix-en-Provence: dependence on his mother’s practical care, the communal pleasure of sharing food, and the ambition to be recognized as an artist. The larder’s local reputation brings him friends, while the boulevard gives him a setting in which to display a literary identity that is at once comic and earnest. In the memoir, the place is remembered through these human uses rather than through a formal description of its architecture or history.