Jean Giono

Les Grands chemins is a 1951 novel by the French writer Jean Giono. It was the basis for the 1963 film Of Flesh and Blood, directed by Christian Marquand.

In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. Ten years later, after the war, he visits the …