“On Sunday mornings, housewives in small villages make tomato soup. Tomatoes cut in half and cleaned of seeds-appropriate, as they say-water, a cruet of oil, a frying pan of fine onions. All this on an earthen pot on the stove. When eleven o'clock arrives, all the pots start boiling and the whole village smells of tomato soup. The shepherd has arrived in the morning, and heavy with fatigue and dust, he rests under the plane trees. This smell of tomato soup is for him the smell of Sunday, the beautiful Sunday when you have the day free, a house, a clean table, a fresh, washed fireplace, blue from the blue to the stone and washed to the board of the cupboard; the beautiful Sunday when you have your housewife ready to lie against you, with all her flesh, when you are no longer a shepherd, this sailor of the land, this runner of stopovers, this wanderer... All this in a dream, because the shepherd is alone under the plane trees and the village belongs to others. “

Jean Giono, Le serpent d'étoiles, Editions Bernard Grasset, 1933