Walnuts & Goat Cheese

A candid, sometimes raw and often humorous autobiographical account of Léonard Lassalle’s life written from a child’s perspective as he develops into adulthood.  The book begins with his birth in Nice in 1937 and the years growing up on a small wild naturist island in the Mediterranean. He and his family move to the village of Dieulefit in Provence during World War II, where his mother makes rabbit stew for the French resistance. Léonard then recounts his teenage years at the progressive Summerhill School where he finds self-confidence, learns about girls and discovers ‘English culture’. Art-student life follows in the 1950s in Paris and then in London where he meets a life model who becomes his wife.


This book highlights how controlled and uncontrolled life circumstances and different education systems shaped his character and had an impact on the dynamics of his development.


Walnuts & Goat Cheese is the first part of Léonard’s autobiography. The story continues in the book Source of Life where Léonard shares the unusual experiences that wove through his life after starting a spiritual training when he was 19 years old, and how that dramatically changed his life.