The Great Depression

The Great Depression appears in the memoir as an economic shock arriving in a household that had long depended on precarious work. When the crisis of 1929 reaches the Riviera, the narrator’s mother expands her efforts to provide for the family; her labor sustains the narrator’s schooling and ambitions, even as their finances remain fragile.

The crisis reaches the Riviera

The narrator places the downturn in the context of earlier hardship. In Nice, his mother had already spent her days selling luxury goods on commission, earning ten per cent on each sale and sometimes charging above the agreed price. The business was humble and uncertain, but it paid for necessities and helped provide the beefsteak she proudly set before her son. The account makes clear that economic vulnerability preceded the Depression; the crisis deepens an existing struggle rather than creating it from nothing.

The narrator explicitly marks the change when the economic crisis of 1929 finally reaches the Riviera and the family’s financial position deteriorates again. The emphasis falls on the delay and the domestic consequence: a distant economic upheaval becomes legible through the return of difficult times at home.

Work multiplied to meet need

His mother answers the worsening circumstances by widening the range of work she undertakes. She arranges displays of luxury goods in hotels, acts as an intermediary in property sales, takes an interest in a taxi and a twenty-five per cent share in a grain-delivery lorry, sublets two rooms in a larger flat, and devotes time to a knitting business. Her ventures span sales, transport, lodging, and piecework; their variety suggests how survival rests on assembling several modest sources of income rather than relying on one secure occupation.

As the family’s position worsens, she also turns a room into a kennel for boarders’ dogs, cats, and birds, reads palms in restaurants and nightclubs, takes in lodgers, manages a commercial building, and works as a property agent. The narrator helps in his own way, trying to write what he hopes will be an immortal masterpiece. Their efforts are not equivalent: her work directly supports the household, while his writing is bound up with the future she imagines for him. Yet he presents both as part of a shared attempt to endure.

The costs and supports of dependence

The narrator’s education remains closely tied to his mother’s earnings. After he leaves Nice for law school in Aix in 1933, she is making five hundred francs; one hundred goes to insulin and doctors’ fees, another hundred to cigarettes and other expenses, and the remainder is for him. She supplements that money with provisions sent on the Nice bus from the storeroom of the family’s Hôtel-Pension Mermonts. The sloping roof around his attic window gradually becomes a makeshift market stall, with food such as onions, eggs, cheese, and meat. The detail makes her support tangible: the family’s care travels with him as both money and carefully gathered supplies.

The memoir therefore records economic hardship not only in sums or business arrangements, but in the labor that keeps daily life going. The Great Depression sharpens the pressure on a family already living close to its means; the mother’s ingenuity helps preserve her son’s education and gives him room to pursue writing, while leaving his future inseparable from the work and resources she provides.