Epilogue

FIN

PAUL ALWAYS FELT that closing up La Pitchoune after a stay was “a symbolic death.” But that seemed awfully gloomy to me. I didn’t think of closing our house for a few months as a “death” at all. To me, life moves forward. Leaving La Peetch now just meant that there would be a good reason to come back the next time. And go back we all did, year after year.

In 1976, Jean and Simca gave up their little apartment in Neuilly, outside of Paris, and moved down to Le Mas Vieux full-time. Every summer she conducted cooking classes there, mostly for Americans, who loved her accessible and genuinely French recipes. And in ensuing years both she and Louisette would write two recipe books apiece.

Then came a period when our intimate friends and family began to slip off into the Great Blue Yonder. Charlie and Freddie died of heart attacks. Jim Beard died in 1985, at age eighty-one. Jean Fischbacher died the following year, at age seventy-nine. Simca, living alone in Le Mas Vieux, refused to put herself into a retirement home or to hire a nurse. I worried about ma belle soeur, but, as always, she was determined to do things her own way.

“I do often think of we childless ones, with no offspring to lean on,” I wrote Simca. “Avis, for instance, who evidently has only a year or so to live with her internal cancer, has her grandchildren to take her shopping, etc. Eh bien, we shall take care of ourselves . . . which we do very well. But I realize at our time of life the great difference between ourselves and those who have produced!” There were melancholy moments when I wished I had a daughter of my own to share things with.

But we cooks are a hardy lot: Escoffier survived to be eighty-nine, after all, and my old chef Max Bugnard lived to be ninety-six. Perhaps Simca and I would make it to eighty-five, or even ninety.

Simca was eighty-seven years old in June 1991, when she fell in her bedroom at Le Mas Vieux and caught a chill, which led to a terrible pneumonia. Although she held on for another six months through force of will, La Super-Française finally succumbed that December. “We have lost a remarkable person who was a fond and generous sister to me,” I wrote with a heavy heart.

Paul never fully recovered from the effects of his heart troubles, and slowly became un vieillard. In 1989, he suffered a series of strokes, which, on top of prostate problems, made travel an ordeal. He was brave about it, but the aging process was rotten. It no longer made sense for him to get up at 5:00 a.m. so that I could do cooking demonstrations and TV shows in places like New York and Washington, D.C. I sharply cut back my work and travel schedule.

And I came to a decision. Without Paul to share the house with, or my grande chérie Simca, or all of our other favorite friends and family, it had come time to relinquish La Pitchoune.

People seemed surprised when I told them that it wasn’t an especially difficult or emotional decision. But I have never been very sentimental. La Pitchoune was a special place, but the heart had gone out of it for me now. It was the people I shared it with, more than the physical property, that I would miss.

Besides, Provence was no longer the quiet refuge we had all loved. It had become hideously expensive (a head of lettuce cost twice as much in Cannes as in Cambridge), and the coastline was more jammed than ever. Houses were multiplying on the hillsides, and the winding country roads were clogged with streams of cars and enormous trucks. Our little village of Plascassier, which had always had a butcher, baker, vegetable shops, and electrician, now had no little businesses left at all; everyone went to the big supermarket down the hill. As Paul had accurately predicted years earlier, the place was turning into southern California. And that I could walk away from sans regret.

IN JUNE 1992, Dort’s daughter Phila, her husband, and baby boy joined me for a final, month-long stay at La Peetch. The house was filled with familiar smells and memories, but, rather than dwell on them too much, I preferred to keep busy. Friends dropped by; I played a round of golf (my favorite game); we took long walks, marketed, and ate very well in Cannes and Nice and Grasse. There was little water pressure at the house, and I had to take sponge baths the whole time, but one gets used to that. Every night I would set the alarm for 2:00 a.m. so that I could call Paul, who was now ninety years old and living in a nursing home outside of Boston.

In a leisurely way, Phila and I packed up my batterie de cuisine, Paul’s paintings and photographs, and our glassware from Biot. We left Simca’s furniture and tidied up all the legal and financial loose ends, in order to return the house to Jean’s family—just as Paul and I had promised we would nearly thirty years earlier.

As the month drew to a close, I was feeling upbeat, and was surprised when Phila began to cry. I asked her what was wrong. “Oh, I’m all stirred up because this is the last time we will be here like this,” she said.

“That’s true,” I replied. “But I will always have such wonderful memories of the Peetch.”

“But aren’t you going to miss it?”

I shrugged, and said: “I’ve always felt that when I’m done with something I just walk away from it—fin!”

On our last day at La Pitchoune, we invited a group of friends over for dinner. I lit a match and turned on the four-burner cuisinière; the stove made a dramatic pouf! noise when the gas lit, which scared everyone but made me smile. Then I cooked a boeuf en daube à la provençale, a splendid braised pot roast with wine, tomatoes, and herbes de Provence. Yum! It was a jolly meal indeed, and a fitting way to close the curtain.

Just before going to bed that night, I stood on the terrace in the dappled shadows of the mulberry tree. A pale moon hung in the sky over the red-tiled roof. A cool breeze brushed my face and rustled the trees on the hillside across the valley. I inhaled the sweet scent of flowers, listened to the nightingale-and-frog chorus, and felt the familiar rough stones under my bare feet. What a lovely place.

The next morning, it was a classic Provençal day—sunny and cool, with a sharp blue sky. After breakfast, I handed the keys to La Pitchoune over to Jean’s sister. Then we climbed into the car and bumped down the dusty, rutted driveway for the very last time.

I TRIED TO HOLD on to my impressions, but it was hopeless, as if I were trying to hold on to a dream. No matter. France was my spiritual homeland: it had become part of me, and I a part of it, and so it has remained ever since. Now I was moving forward again, into new experiences, in new places, with new people. There was still so much to learn and do—articles and books to write, perhaps another TV show or two to try. I wanted to go lobster-fishing in Maine, visit a Chicago slaughterhouse, teach kids how to cook. I viewed our recipes as a sacred trust, a set of rules about the right way and wrong way to approach food, and I felt a duty to pass this knowledge on. In short, my appetite had not diminished!

In Paris in the 1950s, I had the supreme good fortune to study with a remarkably able group of chefs. From them I learned why good French food is an art, and why it makes such sublime eating: nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should. Good results require that one take time and care. If one doesn’t use the freshest ingredients or read the whole recipe before starting, and if one rushes through the cooking, the result will be an inferior taste and texture—a gummy beef Wellington, say. But a careful approach will result in a magnificent burst of flavor, a thoroughly satisfying meal, perhaps even a life-changing experience.

Such was the case with the sole meunière I ate at La Couronne on my first day in France, in November 1948. It was an epiphany.

In all the years since that succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite—toujours bon appétit!