I would like to invite you somewhere slightly different to celebrate the start of the summer.
Summer has a strange way of staying with us. In the scent of warm grass, in the sound of cicadas, in the taste of a peach eaten in the sun, or the feel of the wind on your salted skin after swimming in the sea. Perhaps it stays through a song, a road, a sea breeze through an open window, or the memory of a long afternoon that seemed as though it would never end.
Summer has a strange way of escaping time. Years pass. Places change. People come and go. Yet certain summers remain untouched, glowing quietly somewhere within us. Perhaps because summer is more than a season. It’s freedom.Adventure. Idleness. First love and last evenings. The feeling that life has briefly stepped outside its ordinary rhythm.
For this special atelier, I wanted to gather a few of the voices that have shaped French literature and let them accompany us into the season.
Here, Colette remembers the abundance of childhood summers. Camus walks beneath a blazing Mediterranean sun. Proust lingers in those endless evenings when daylight seems reluctant to disappear. Duras waits for a summer that refuses to arrive. Maupassant captures the dizzying heat of the countryside. Le Clézio listens to the night, to the insects, to the stars.
« L’été se marque non moins par ses mouches et moustiques que par ses roses et ses nuits d’étoiles. » Marcel Proust
Together, these texts form a small literary promenade through the season. Read them slowly. Let them awaken your senses. And when you reach the end, I invite you to add your voice to theirs.
Follow the road that summer opens before you. You may write a memory, a reflection, a poem, a fragment, a scene, a letter or simply a few lines about what this season means to you. And perhaps, in French, to discover it anew.
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