introduction

The light of summer that was too short

Summer 2011, Aix-en-Provence
Cézanne's Road and the Summer House at Borköil
The morning market in Provence and the scent of Cavaillon melons
Couscous after a nap
Sainte-Victoire and Cour-Mirabeau
A stranger in an unfamiliar city
Pilgrimage to the Fountain of X - Mazarin District
Walking through the City of Water - The Alleyways of the Old Town
Hidden Flower of the Luberon Valley - Lourmarin
Albert Camus's House
Madame Alice Moron of Saint-Rémy
Van Gogh's Landscapes
From Provence to Paris and the 100th anniversary of the Gallimard publishing house
The back of summer as seen from Venice
That light is so short that it's unforgettable

In search of a shepherd

Summer 2012, Haute-Provence
A village full of gold flowers
Geono and Manosque
Carelessness on the hill of 'Mont d'Or'
Basher's Blue Bell Tower
The blue 'cornflowers' revived on the hill of Banon by Jean Grenier of Simien
Lourdes and Giono's house, 'Le Parais'
Sending Raymond Zhang while looking at the red soil of Lucy Yong
The Village of Barley and the Abbey of Senanque
The Oak of Margot and the Ruins of the Four Queens
Dining at the Lusang Castle and the Quarry of Light
The towering Chateau de Grignan with a letter from Madame de Sévigné
Mallarmé's Tournon
Albert Camus' place of exile, Le Panelier
Learning Wuwei from the bells of Lenoe Village
The wedding of the bride of the castle of Baty Durpe and the village
The Path to the Lost Territory of 『Captain Monnu』
Became George Sand's neighbor at the Château de Nohant
The jewel of the Loire, Azay-le-Rideau and the white flowers of the valley of the Château de Saché
Marcel Proust's Combray
Aunt Leonie's House and Swan's House
Looking at the sky from Mallarmé's garden
The end of the journey? Rue Mouffetard in Paris

Lover of Albert Camus, Jean Grenier, Marcel Proust,
French Literature Journey by French Literature Scholar Kim Hwa-young

The true beauty of this place lies in the moments of our individual lives, swaying like a breeze between specks of light and shade, then pooling and then flowing.
The short summer light that falls upon it, its fleetingness, isn't that what we call happiness?
Pour your heart out quietly and gaze into the light that trembles as finely as a butterfly's wings.
And be glad to be alive in this world.
_Page 210, from “Lurth and Giono’s House ‘Le Parais’”

The short summer light that falls on life… … Even just writing it down is dazzling.
It could be love, it could be youth.
It could be a passion for work or an exploration of a subject.
Things that filled the brightest days of my life.
For Professor Kim Hwa-young, a literary critic and French literature scholar, the 'summer' of life cannot be imagined without mentioning the twenties and thirties spent in Provence.
The book "The Shock of Happiness," which contains the shock experienced by a young scholar who first set foot on the Mediterranean coast in 1969, became his first book after publishing and translating over a hundred books.
It was a record of my youth, spent freely crossing borders and in the land of “happy people, right here, right now.”

More than 40 years have passed.
He, who was once a foreign student full of wonders, is now a senior scholar.
He returned to Provence twice in the summers of 2011 and 2012.
The journey from Provence to Paris was accompanied by authors he dedicated his life to translating and introducing, including Albert Camus, Jean Grenier, and Marcel Proust.


“This is the story of a love potion matured in the summer sun of southern France over a long period of time.
And it is a story of literature that left an indelible mark on the scenery of the journey.”

In the summer of 2011, I visited Lourmarin again, the place where I remember laying flowers in front of Albert Camus' grave, where the young Kim Hwa-young had visited in 1974 after completing her thesis.
To visit Albert Camus's house.
Currently, Camus's daughter, Catherine Camus, manages her father's works in that house.
A Korean scholar who has been translating Camus's works for decades and Camus's daughter tour Camus's old study.
The sentence, “Camus must have thought of the happy and tragic human life in which ‘nakedness’ becomes one with ‘abundance’ in front of this splendid landscape,” contains Professor Kim Hwa-young’s deep affection and trust for Camus and his literature, as well as her special feelings about remembering him in the places where he stayed.

The following year, Camus visited Le Panelier, a farmhouse where he suffered from tuberculosis and recuperated in loneliness, separated from his family, and reflected on the novel The Plague and the play The Misunderstanding that he had conceived there.
The contents of the letters he exchanged with his teacher Jean Grenier even during his illness, and his state of mind at the time as revealed in the ‘Writer’s Notebook’, along with the description of the scenery in ‘Le Panelier’, evoke a strange sense of emotion.
“Camus once wrote on a snowy winter day, ‘It was only after everything was covered with snow that I noticed that the shutters and windows were blue,’ but on this bright summer day, 70 years later, the shutters in the somewhat stern-looking gray stone wall sharply reflect the dazzling light of broad daylight, stabbing my eyes with their blue light,” said Professor Kim Hwa-young, whose memories of her time with Camus’s literature must have been distant.

One day Camus said:
“Death comes to everyone, but each person has their own death.
However, even so, the sun still warms our bones.” While those bones feel warm, we should be thankful that we are alive in this world.
_Page 225, from “Sending Raymond Jean while looking at the red soil of Lucyong”

I also visited the high school in Tournon where Mallarmé had been working as a temporary English teacher.
I can only imagine the loneliness, helplessness, and boredom he must have felt in the countryside, unrelated to Mallarmé's meditative world of poetry.
The more difficult the teaching job became for Mallarmé, the more he yearned for a poetic world and suffered from creative pain. “In the summer, the pastoral poem ‘Afternoon of a Faun’, a harmony of sensuality, wisdom, and music, completely captivated him, and in the winter, the absolute beauty of ‘Herodiad’, as cold as ice.”
The Château de Nohant, the hometown of George Sand, the forest that served as the setting for “The Magic Marsh,” Jean Giono’s birthplace at 14 rue de la Grande, where his mother ran a laundry on the first floor and his father had a shoe repair atelier on the third floor, Le Fleuriel in Epineuil, the setting for Alain Fournier’s mysterious love story “Captain Monnes,” the Château de Saché where Balzac conceived and wrote over ten masterpieces including “Prince Goriot” and “The Lilies of the Valley,” Combray, home to the unforgettable “Madeleine” story in Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time”… The author’s in-depth guidance that allows us to relive the reality of the times, the life of the writer who lived there, the world of his works, and his life and works is as intense and bright as “the fresh light of summer.”



“It is an unexpected opportunity for you, Professor, to mentor this young Korean.”

In between her journey of encountering authors and their works, Professor Kim Hwa-young searches for memories of her youth and the connections she made back then.
In 1969, after arriving in a foreign country and facing difficulties, he studied under Professor Raymond Jean, thanks to the guidance of Madame Alice Moron, who was in charge of the French literature department at the University of Aix-en-Provence.
A concise letter of recommendation: “It is an unexpected opportunity for you to mentor this young Korean.”
From then on, Madame Morong became his “eternal guardian.”
The relationship between Mrs. Morong, who is approaching her nineties but is still energetic, and Professor Kim Hwa-young has lasted for over 40 years.
Long ago, Mrs. Morong, who had given her first daughter baby clothes as a gift, was surprised to see that the baby had grown up, gotten married, and become the mother of a two-year-old baby.

There are also memories at Prekatlang Park.
This is the park the author first visited in the summer of 1977 with his pregnant wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
“The image of my young wife struggling up the hill in her green maternity dress is vivid in my mind as if it were yesterday,” and “now, 35 years later, the child in my womb has become a mother,” the author writes, “I am once again taking a leisurely walk in the deserted park with my wife, her hair beginning to turn gray.”
In this way, the scholar's years are permeated throughout this book.
The people I spent those days with, the things that shook my heart, the irretrievable youth and passion remain as sentences to be savored with my eyes closed.

Where are all those friends who used to sit in front of me and chat all night long, listening to the fierce sound of the mistral?
Life has divided us and carved a path with no end in sight.
Spring, summer, fall, and winter passed along that road.
The olives are ripe and the figs are bursting.
The poppies dyed the fields blood red.
And time has scratched our faces and left wrinkles on us all.

_Page 15, from “Madame Alice Moron of Saint-Rémy”


“The brief moment when the body remains centered while the left foot moves forward and the right foot remains behind, the light, smell, sound, and touch of the world that opens the pores of the whole body and sucks them in—that is travel.”

The two summers spent by Professor Kim Hwa-young show a journey that anyone can take, but no one can do.
This is especially true in this era where speed and abundance of information, and the 'smartness' of it, are given priority over experience and intuition.
We can recall on this special journey that the journey of life that preserves the “fresh light of our all-too-short summer” that everyone possesses, the attitude of not forgetting the “useless passion full of contradictions” – that is the attitude of life that truly loves life while cherishing the days that pass by.

introduction

The light of summer that was too short

Summer 2011, Aix-en-Provence
Cézanne's Road and the Summer House at Borköil
The morning market in Provence and the scent of Cavaillon melons
Couscous after a nap
Sainte-Victoire and Cour-Mirabeau
A stranger in an unfamiliar city
Pilgrimage to the Fountain of X - Mazarin District
Walking through the City of Water - The Alleyways of the Old Town
Hidden Flower of the Luberon Valley - Lourmarin
Albert Camus's House
Madame Alice Moron of Saint-Rémy
Van Gogh's Landscapes
From Provence to Paris and the 100th anniversary of the Gallimard publishing house
The back of summer as seen from Venice
That light is so short that it's unforgettable

In search of a shepherd

Summer 2012, Haute-Provence
A village full of gold flowers
Geono and Manosque
Carelessness on the hill of 'Mont d'Or'
Basher's Blue Bell Tower
The blue 'cornflowers' revived on the hill of Banon by Jean Grenier of Simien
Lourdes and Giono's house, 'Le Parais'
Sending Raymond Zhang while looking at the red soil of Lucy Yong
The Village of Barley and the Abbey of Senanque
The Oak of Margot and the Ruins of the Four Queens
Dining at the Lusang Castle and the Quarry of Light
The towering Chateau de Grignan with a letter from Madame de Sévigné
Mallarmé's Tournon
Albert Camus' place of exile, Le Panelier
Learning Wuwei from the bells of Lenoe Village
The wedding of the bride of the castle of Baty Durpe and the village
The Path to the Lost Territory of 『Captain Monnu』
Became George Sand's neighbor at the Château de Nohant
The jewel of the Loire, Azay-le-Rideau and the white flowers of the valley of the Château de Saché
Marcel Proust's Combray
Aunt Leonie's house and Swan's house
Looking at the sky from Mallarmé's garden
The end of the journey? The west gate of Rue Mouffetard in Paris

The light of summer that was too short

Summer 2011, Aix-en-Provence
Cézanne's Road and the Summer House at Borköil
The morning market in Provence and the scent of Cavaillon melons
Couscous after a nap
Sainte-Victoire and Cour-Mirabeau
A stranger in an unfamiliar city
Pilgrimage to the Fountain of X - Mazarin District
Walking through the City of Water - The Alleyways of the Old Town
Hidden Flower of the Luberon Valley - Lourmarin
Albert Camus's House
Madame Alice Moron of Saint-Rémy
Van Gogh's Landscapes
From Provence to Paris and the 100th anniversary of the Gallimard publishing house
The back of summer as seen from Venice
That light is so short that it's unforgettable

In search of a shepherd

Summer 2012, Haute-Provence
A village full of gold flowers
Geono and Manosque
Carelessness on the hill of 'Mont d'Or'
Basher's Blue Bell Tower
The blue 'cornflowers' revived on the hill of Banon by Jean Grenier of Simien
Lourdes and Giono's house, 'Le Parais'
Sending Raymond Zhang while looking at the red soil of Lucy Yong
The Village of Barley and the Abbey of Senanque
The Oak of Margot and the Ruins of the Four Queens
Dining at the Lusang Castle and the Quarry of Light
The towering Chateau de Grignan with a letter from Madame de Sévigné
Mallarmé's Tournon
Albert Camus' place of exile, Le Panelier
Learning Wuwei from the bells of Lenoe Village
The wedding of the bride of the castle of Baty Durpe and the village
The Path to the Lost Territory of 『Captain Monnu』
Became George Sand's neighbor at the Château de Nohant
The jewel of the Loire, Azay-le-Rideau and the white flowers of the valley of the Château de Saché
Marcel Proust's Combray
Aunt Leonie's house and Swan's house
Looking at the sky from Mallarmé's garden
The end of the journey? Rue Mouffetard in Paris