I used to think shepherds inhabited only fairytales or romantic pastoral scenes in the style of Boucher, but Nizas has a real-life shepherd. We never learn his name; he is universally referred to as le berger, the shepherd. He lives sur les causses, on the bare, windswept plateau above the village where the Aéroclub de Pézenas-Nizas maintains a primitive landing strip. Les causses seems to refer to a particular geographic formation, and in this part of France there are many areas of causses, all similar in appearance and vegetation, with some, far more extensive, classified as natural parks.
On this unwanted patch of ground the shepherd has staked a claim and built a basic hut attached to ramshackle sheep pens. With no land of his own, he takes his sheep to pasture every day, sometimes letting them browse along the roadside or the old railway line, sometimes in the pruned vineyards near l’Escoute or on the airstrip. We hear his approach from a distance, the bells around the necks of the leaders tinkling as they move. In winter there’s no risk of the sheep nibbling the vine leaves and they do a service to the vigneron in keeping the weeds down, but some owners, says the shepherd, are now preferring to spray with herbicides. He shakes his head, bemoaning the inroads of technology that will deprive his flock of feed.
A solitary individual, the shepherd does not invite immediate contact. It’s thanks to Madame Molla’s son Vincent that we first exchange formal bonjours. Vincent is on his tractor when we stop to talk to him on the side of the road, while behind us the shepherd approaches, leading his musical flock. The shepherd also stops to talk—but in a language that is totally incomprehensible to me. Puzzled, I strain to interpret one word, unsure whether it’s because he is speaking too quickly or his accent too strong.
I had trouble understanding the shepherd the other day, I say to Vincent next time he comes to the garage beneath us. J’avais beaucoup de mal à comprendre.
Ah, says Vincent, il parle en patois.
This local patois is my first encounter with the original language of the Midi. It’s a version of the Occitan spoken, in one variant or another, throughout the south of France and into Catalonia in the medieval centuries. Though French was decreed the official language of the whole of France in the 16th century, people continued to use Occitan in daily life. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers who wrote about the differences between North and South in France commented on the incomprehensibility of people they met on their travels. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that this chance encounter with the shepherd would eventually inspire me to study this ancient language, and certainly never could I conceive that a course in Ancien Provençal would eventually lead me to culinary history.
Once we’ve been introduced, in a fashion, the shepherd is happy to talk, using his heavily accented French. He tells me he has about a hundred sheep, plus a few goats—just enough to earn a living. Long-legged, sparsely fleeced, the sheep produce lambs that are born throughout the year, except in summer when it’s too dry. One day, looking out the window, I see him in the vineyard opposite, bending over one of his ewes that had just given birth, so I quickly dress the children in outdoor clothes and take them downstairs to inspect the new lamb. Perhaps exhausted by her effort, the mother is not at all concerned by this small crowd of spectators.
You have sheep in Australia? the shepherd asks.
Yes, sheep for wool as well as for lamb and mutton.
How many sheep would a man have in Australia?
Well, I explain, we don’t have shepherds. The sheep are in paddocks, enclosed by fences, and so a farmer might have a couple of thousand sheep.
He rolls his eyes and shakes his hand in that typically southern gesture that shows disbelief and amazement.
Impossible! Un homme, et trois mille moutons?
But he has sheepdogs to help, I explain, and he manages the sheep differently. He doesn’t have to bring them home every evening.
He scratches his head and leans on his crook, puzzled, trying to envisage a flock of two or three thousand sheep. It is clearly a concept beyond his imagining.
But how, he asks tremulously and incredulously, how can the farmer remember all their names?
It’s a mystery that stays with him. He has no reason to doubt my answer but it is so far outside his understanding of the world that, however often he returns to ponder the concept, it defeats him.
We often come across the shepherd on our afternoon walks, after Stephanie and Dylan have woken from their afternoon nap. Exploring beyond Nizas is my way of getting to understand this region, though I tell myself that I’m educating the children at the same time. Unlike the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, who had only two routes for his walks—the path on the Guermantes side or the one past Swann’s house—I have multiple options. Almost any direction will lead me to something of interest—a weed I recognise, the pattern of lichen on a stone wall, a view of l’Escoute from a different angle, an ancient iron cross by the roadside.
The easy route skirts the edge of the village to arrive at the terrain de boules at its eastern end. The terrain is quiet now, in the middle of winter, and the tall plane trees on either side are bare, but I can imagine it loud and boisterous in summer as holidaying visitors compete with locals, a cool and shady retreat at the end of the afternoon. The homewards circuit takes us past our neighbour’s house. She’s not a near neighbour, living about half a kilometre from l’Escoute, but it’s the only other house outside the village on our side. Madame la Voisine, as I name her, is also something of an outsider. Unlike the other women of the village, she is not from Nizas, nor is she old. She is educated, drives a car and reads books, which she offers to lend us. In addition, her husband has an important white-collar job at the cave coopérative. All these qualities distance her from the other women of the village. Yet like them she is curious about les Australiens and stops us as we pass. Sensing less of a social distance between us, I’m less diffident about asking questions, though her knowledge of Nizas and its affairs is more limited.
If we take the opposite direction, toward Caux, we come to the stream and its lavoir municipal. There’s nothing remarkable about the Nizas lavoir—most villages in the Midi have a set of tubs like these, either next to a stream or an underground spring—but the idea of a dedicated public place for women to do their washing strikes me as both enlightened and controlling. I thought my mother’s washday work enough when the only aids were a copper and a wringer. The prospect of soaking and scrubbing and rinsing in icy water to the elbows sends shivers down my spine.
The dirt track on the western side of l’Escoute takes us up a slight rise and around a bend to the remains of the old railway line. At the turn of the century, when trains promised escape and new horizons, Nizas had a regular service, but now thorny weeds poke up between the tracks. The stationmaster’s house is just visible beneath rampant vines and the two platforms, barely the length of a single carriage, are slowly dissolving into the natural vegetation. Here, on this windswept plateau, I discover wild herbs—thyme, rosemary and sage. It’s a miracle that they survive in such hard, stony ground. Like the village women, I collect small bunches and take them home, tying them with string and hanging them above the kitchen bench. Thyme, say the women, is obligatory with rabbit.
There’s another path that we take far less often. It starts on the opposite side of the village, beyond la place, and runs alongside the high stone wall enclosing what I like to think of as the château. The wall is thickly covered in ivy and far too high to scale, and what lies behind it is a mystery; perhaps a spidery old miser and his faithful retainer, living among cobwebs and tatters.
If we were to continue beyond the end of the wall, we would end up at the caravan of les gitans, the family of gypsies. We have seen their encampments, sprawling and unkempt, on the outskirts of towns such as Montpellier, where a near-permanent settlement has been established in the wedge of land where two highways meet. Fringe dwellers and outside society, by their own choice as much as by community will, gypsies are not beholden to its norms. Attention aux gitans! Madame Molla tells us, and I am reminded of the poems of A.A. Milne, where gypsies are ‘other’ and vaguely unsettling. So we avoid their sinister territory and keep following the wall around the other two sides of the estate to return to the village. Occasionally, in the square, we see the gypsies, the man as swarthy as any encountered by Christopher Robin, the woman aloof and proud. Comme elle est belle! exclaims Madame Molla. Elle est superbe. Broad-hipped and firm-breasted, la gitane epitomises Bizet’s indomitable Carmen, strong and resilient, and I realise that Madame Molla’s standards of beauty are based less on aesthetics and supermodels, and more on utility and functionality.