The final entry in Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy takes place 20 years after the second installment. Fanny has grown older, too. She hasn't forgotten her first love, Marius, but she has been happy with Panisse who loved and provided for her and her son. At the start of this film, Panisse is taken ill. He is bedridden in what many think is his deathbed.
Friends gather around and a priest is called in.
He agrees to confess his sins, on the condition that his friends stay in the room to hear them. The confession scene is characteristically touching. Panisse confesses his little peccadilloes, appreciated now for how funny they are, and for how much fun they were to commit. He confesses to a lie of omission that catches the priest's ear. It is the lie that most everyone in town already knows, namely, that he hasn't told Cesariot he's not his biological father.