The Vaucluse is becoming our home away from home. After three years, the thrill of the new has morphed into the comfort, the pleasure, and sometimes even the boredom of the familiar. It was inevitable. My father was right. The butler no longer relishes the fantasy of presiding over a well-run household. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean he isn’t enjoying the reality.
We know the drill. We buy our plane tickets. We land in de Gaulle, hop on the fast train to Avignon, sit in the right seats, pick up the rental car, and navigate the rotaries like pros. We head off in toutes directions toward L’Isle sur la Sorgue, past towns whose names we know by heart, drugstores where we’ve filled prescriptions, stands of plane trees, restaurants where we’ve eaten more than once, and ATMs where we’ve turned credit cards into euros. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it breeds familiarity. It’s good to be almost home.
We’re headed for a different medieval house in a different medieval town near the top of yet another charming hilltop village, Bonnieux, population 1,408, not counting us. A new house is the novelty on which we thrive. It challenges us to make ourselves at home. The same is true for a change of town. We like our address—rue Voltaire. As was the case with Goult, our house is in the center of town but far enough away from the town’s two churches to allow for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
Instructions from the house’s American owner advise us to park our car in the street below, across from the twelfth-century ramparts. We soon find out that the ramparts also serve as the foundation of our terrace. They’re our ramparts! We are off to a very good start.
We asked Ulli and Bettina to check out the house before we signed the rental contact, but in spite of several drives through Bonnieux searching for rue Voltaire, they had been unable to locate it. Now we know why. The so-called street leading to our front door is narrow, unmarked, one way, and so steep that one could easily assume it’s a driveway. To approach our front door, one must angle one’s body forward, like Miss Clavel from Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeleine.
No one in their right mind would rent a house most easily approached on all fours, but we are not in our right minds. We are pretending to be French. The cant of our street will also have the virtue of canceling out my caloric intake of sacristans and croissants even before I reach the best pâtisserie in town, which, we will soon learn, is even further up the hill.
Rue Voltaire isn’t the only ridiculously steep road in town. There’s the hill that leads to the town’s most famous landmark, the well-named twelfth-century High Church, La Haute Eglise, which sits defiantly at the top of eighty-six steps, testing the devotion of the faithful. In medieval times, the locals, charged with carrying the coffins to the church, used to complain that the dead buried the living.
Larry and I arrive at our rental home, panting and laughing. We stand askew, our hands planted on our hips for balance. Does somebody else’s life get better than this?
Yes it does. We will spend the next month living in a view. When Vincent, the caretaker, opens the door, our eyes are ineluctably drawn right through the house to the panorama below. We cross the living room and open the French doors—what else?—and step onto a very large stone patio, twice as wide as it is deep, bordered by the rampart. Our eyes widen at the sight that lies below: first the cockeyed geometry of the orange tile roofs; then the wide and deep Luberon valley—its towns, its patchwork of farms, its church spires, its miniature roads and tiny cars. We identify Goult, our last hilltop hometown, just across the highway and a bit to the east. There’s the Pierre Cardin-branded ancient town of Lacoste, easily recognized by the crenellated de Sade castle where, in the eighteenth century, the Marquis spent his adult years, when he wasn’t in jail or an asylum for the insane. And that’s definitely ochre-colored Rousillon, and Apt even further to the east. On a clear day, we can see Mont Ventoux.
To the extent possible, we will live our daily lives on this terrace. Larry, wearing a floppy white canvas hat, will paint the rooftops and the houses below, angling his watercolor pad on the rampart’s rough edge. Or, if I’m not around, he’ll steal a smoke. We’ll play Scrabble on the large, round metal table, or we’ll eat, or read, or stare into space. Is it possible that we have caught a touch of la flemme? Are we relaxing?Perhaps we’re turning into lowercase type a’s.
Nighttime on the patio is even better. The lights of the towns below us will begin to turn on, creating grids, star shapes, and arabesques of illumination. At exactly 9:06 the lights of the castle go on—not all at once but gradually, theatrically. It takes several seconds for the castle to emerge from the dark in all its crenellated glory. Why 9:06 p.m. instead of 9:00 p.m. we can’t imagine. We ask. Nobody knows for sure, but a friend blames the lag time on the new sluggish, energy-saving fluorescent lighting that, by law, has replaced incandescent bulbs. We, of course, were hoping for a more romantic explanation. Still, whenever we are at home, we will watch the clock and make sure we’re on the terrace in our places to watch the lights brighten.
Although we didn’t bother to notice the interior of the house when we made a beeline for the patio, it will turn out to be almost as extraordinary as the view. When we step from the patio into the salon and refocus our eyes, there, on the coffee table, in front of the fireplace, is a welcoming vase of sunflowers from Vincent and a bowlful of home-grown organic tomatoes from Vincent’s father. They live in the house next door. We value this welcoming neighborliness. Larry will quickly respond with his version of peasant soup, which M. Giles’s father will pronounce “the best he’s ever eaten,” thereby initiating a month-long potlatch of culinary exchanges.
Clearly, the house has been added to over the centuries. The kitchen is located two steps down from the salon. It’s small but large enough to cook up some boiling oil to throw over the ramparts. Larry must duck down in order not to hit his head. People were smaller in the thirteenth century. We figure such historic legitimacy is worth a few cracks on the head.
I look under the sink and attempt to translate the small print on the mysterious plastic bottles. No matter which house we live in, the owners stock different brands of cleansers. They’re for washing—but what? The label on one box reads Le Chat. It can’t be cat detergent. I read the directions but am still unsure, due to my ignorance of a word or two. Place in the what? Turn dial on what and wait for what? It’s either dishwashing or laundry detergent. A picture of a T-shirt, nearly concealed by the price sticker, solves that problem. After three seasons in Provence, I still have to rely on rebus.
A tower near the entrance to the kitchen and just off the salon leads by way of a daunting spiral staircase to the bedroom floors above. I hug the walls, mounting the isosceles-shaped stone steps, wide at one end and narrow at the other, with extreme caution. If a twenty-first-century preosteoporotic person were to fall, her bones might crumble like halva. That can’t have worried women in the thirteenth century since most people didn’t live long enough to develop osteoporosis. They didn’t know about fitness or weight-bearing activities either, unless it was a hoisting a load of firewood or swinging a battle-ax. This is the oldest house we’ve ever lived in. Age is authenticity to us. More than any of the other centuries-old houses we’ve rented, this one gives us the illusion that we are living in a time we never knew.
We like Bonnieux’s dark and bloody past. From Neolithic times until the sixteenth century, inhabitants of villages perchés like Bonnieux were perched for defensive purposes, first to fight off the various raids and sieges by Franks, Arabs, and Berbers, kicking up limestone dust in the valley below. In Roman times, Bonnieux, the largest hill town in the area, saw the worst of these sieges due to its strategic location on the route between two popular Roman destinations, Cadiz and Milan. The town took such a beating from rival, warring tribes that in the twelfth century it was moved further up the hill, and ramparts were built for extra protection. Our ramparts. These villages were not located on the tops of hills so that centuries later tourists could enjoy their charms, or so that Larry and I could climb onto our bikes and compete to see who could get to the top first.
By the sixteenth century, most of the town’s inhabitants were Catholic, many of them wealthy bishops who lived in mansions. This situation so infuriated the less wealthy Huguenots in the neighborhood—later known as Protestants—that they laid siege to Bonnieux, killing three thousand of its four thousand citizens. The town has never recovered its population.
We do not dwell on the negatives of medieval times, when life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” even before Hobbes said so. Our teeth would be rotten or gone altogether, my hair would be white, and, with a life expectancy in the thirties, we’d both be dead by now, most likely of the bubonic plague. Medieval is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Vincent Giles is more than a good neighbor and caretaker. He rents the Neolithic cave across the street, where he sells antiques. In between waiting on customers, he sits on a tiny wooden chair, which wobbles a bit on the uneven limestone cavern floor. Small antique items—silver spoons, bowls, candlesticks—rest on centuries-smoothed ledges dug into the cave walls.
Le Fournil, the restaurant at the bottom of our hill, where we will dine often and happily, is also set into a natural troglodyte cave, which formerly served as the village bakery. These caves are blatant evidence that the earliest people, before there was a Provence or a France for that matter, lived in these caves.
There’s an active street life just outside our door. Weddings march by on their way to the church. Shoppers duck in and out of Vincent’s antiques cave. Friends stop to chat. Others trudge by at a slant, carrying groceries from the convenience store at the bottom of the hill. Tourists pause in front of our house, which is about halfway up the hill, to catch their breath. Attracted by the view, they peer shamelessly into our front windows. One exhausted woman plops herself down on our doorstep and calls for help. We lift her up and haul her in for a glass of water.
These villages seem like natural communities to us. I understand that I’m in danger of naïveté and that even as I sing its praises, village life in the Vaucluse is on the way out. Here the old and the new mix uneasily. The ringtones of cell phones compete with bongs of church bells; plumbing pipes that run down the outsides of thirteenth-century homes disperse wastewater from twenty-first-century bathrooms. People park their cars in old stables. Some streets are simply too narrow to drive down, but the government doesn’t respond by seizing the houses on one side or the other by eminent domain to widen the roadways. If they did, these towns would lose the aesthetic authenticity and the richness of history the French, the tourists, and we so cherish.
M. Giles, the father, and his retired cronies make a daylong occupation of leaning against the doorway of their house next door, shooting the merde. There they stand at a constant tilt, one foot on the up side of the street, the other anchored on the down side. If Darwinian adaptation worked at warp speed, these guys would have developed one long and one short leg, but so far they haven’t mutated.
Housewives call to one another from window to window across the narrow street. To find community in my suburban hometown, people have to get in their cars and drive somewhere to something organized—a library activity, or the women’s club, a bridge game, a reading group, or the senior center. It’s hard to imagine an old man or woman being lonely in Bonnieux, as long as they are still able to lean against a wall.
I have begun to worry about my old age. So have my friends. We fear the loss of our spouses. We fear loneliness, dependence, and declining health. We don’t want to be a burden to our children, although, only God knows why; they’ve been a burden to us.
We’ve had lots of conversations about how we might live communally. We’d sell our houses. Maybe we’d buy an abandoned summer camp. We’d all share a kitchen and cook together. We’d take care of one another. Those of us who could still walk would push the wheelchairs of those who couldn’t.
The discussions invariably break down. Pool our money? Share a bathroom? Live in Florida? Why not the Berkshires?
Americans are individualists; the French not so much. When the time comes, we’ll probably all end up in what Larry calls “insistent living.” The French have developed their own version of continuing care, much of it government funded, but at least in villages like Bonnieux, it is still common for elderly parents to be cared for by their children. Apparently, they’re not a burden, at least not yet.
The More Things Change, the More They’re Different
Our first act after unpacking is a phone call to Ulli and Bettina to invite them to dinner. We are eager to see them. We last saw them when they visited us in the wintertime on their tour of New England. Even though their jobs didn’t allow them much spare money, the euro was still high against the dollar; they couldn’t resist the temptation. Besides, it was Bettina’s fortieth birthday, and Ulli had never been to the United States. Bettina was eager to show her around. The climax of their trip would be a side trip to New York City where Ulli was determined to sample American jazz. Their spirits were high, or at least we thought they were. We had had a wonderful time in their company. When they headed north toward Boston, Lexington, and Concord to visit American revolutionary sites, we sent them off with a bottle of champagne, since they’d be in Boston on Bettina’s birthday.
Ulli answers the phone and accepts the invitation. We instruct her to park her car at the bottom of the hill and meet us at Le Fournil. At the appointed hour, we go to greet Ulli and Bettina and find only Ulli. They have broken up. Ulli tells us that Bettina has fallen in love with another woman who is married and has three children.
“I was happy with Bettina,” Ulli tells us over dinner at Le Fournil. “I thought Bettina was happy with me. I thought we’d be together for a lifetime.” Ulli cried for a few days, she allows, but now she has pulled herself together. Her French is good enough so that she has secured a position working with handicapped children in the very same facility where Bettina works. In fact, Bettina helped Ulli get her job.
Why isn’t she carrying on as I would? How could Bettina be so unkind, so fickle? How could Bettina commit to a lifetime with Ulli, move with her to a foreign land, buy a house, and then, after only two years, leave Ulli in the lurch? I am prepared to share my outrage with Ulli, but she’s having none of it. Is she already that French, all that c’est la vie? Or maybe her stoicism is leftover Teutonic.
Throughout the rest of the month, Ulli will invite Bettina to dinner whenever she invites us, but Bettina will always find an excuse to refuse. Perhaps she is embarrassed. Perhaps she finds it impossibly awkward to mix her old life with us with her new life and new love. Perhaps we do, too, since we never ask Ulli for Bettina’s current phone number. We never see Bettina again, and we miss her.
Happily, our friendship with Ulli will deepen. She introduces us to the special-needs adults with whom she works. She has joined a chorus. We go to hear her sing. After two years in Provence, she seems fully integrated in the life of the region.
We attend a concert of Haydn chorales together in the church in L’Isle along with her friend Dominique. After the concert, Dominique invites us back to her house in L’Isle for what she calls a snack. Do all fully employed French women have leftovers in their refrigerators that are the equivalent of a first-class, three-course meal? Out come a variety of pâtés, a rice salad, and an apricot tarte. Surprise me at my house, and you’d be lucky to get an apple and a PBJ.
We meet Dominique’s husband, Damien, and their two children. We sit with them in their modest garden at a table set beneath a fig tree, swagged with necklaces of twinkling white lights. Every so often, Dominique plucks a ripe fig and hands it to us.
This season, Ulli, not Monique, becomes the gravitational center of our social lives. In large measure, this is due to the fact that we have decided not to study with Monique. Why? We have difficulty distinguishing our reasons from our rationalizations. Because we have moved further east, it would take us at least forty-five minutes to get to her house. And there’s the matter of money; the dollar remains weak against the euro. And then there’s our perception that Mo has changed. There’s a new love in her life. She has begun to invest modestly in rental real estate. She must look out for her retirement. We will visit with Monique, we will have her to dinner, we will delight in her company as always, but she will no longer fill our hours or jumpstart our social lives. Although I’m a Democrat and don’t endorse the Republican theory of trickle-down economics, I do favor my own theory of trickle-down fluency.
We’re convinced that if we stayed here for six months in a row, just wandering around, without even taking lessons, we will become something resembling fluent.
We spend a lot of time window-shopping, or what the French more aptly call “window licking.” Wouldn’t you know it would have something to do with tongues? We venture into particularly appealing stores, hoping to strike up a conversation. Each of these forays is an opportunity to prop up our French. I learn how to say “zipper,” “Will the waist band stretch?” and “Do you have this in a large?”
One week into our sojourn, we are smart enough to realize that without some focus, without some order to our days, we will be in danger of slipping into our very own version of continental drift. We find a French teacher. She comes highly recommended. Her name is Solange Brihat. She lives in Bonnieux. We can walk to her house.
Studying French for two hours, two days a week serves as a much-needed organizing principle. The fabric of our lives this month feels flimsier. The minimal routine of our lessons keeps the threads from unraveling altogether.
We were right to soldier on in our pursuit of fluency. Mme Brihat is a very good teacher. She looks like Joanne Woodward. She is married to Denis Brihat, an internationally acclaimed naturalist photographer. He looks like Santa Claus. We study with her twice a week for two hours, seated at her dining room table in a lovely room full of books and art.
Her home, her husband’s work, and her pleasant manner make us want to know her, but she maintains a professional demeanor. She doesn’t offer conversation and lunch—even for a price—nor does she make any effort to introduce us to the community. We like her, and we sense she likes us, too, but, not surprisingly, she’s doesn’t want to be friends. She wants to be our teacher and get paid, just like teachers in real life. We call her Madame. We look forward to our lessons. Our French improves.
About midway through the month, Madame wonders if we’d like to take a daylong tour of Aix en Provence. Her fee is reasonable, and we’re always up for something new, especially if it takes us out of the classroom. We fail to realize that being out of the frying pan will catapult us right into the fire. We will have to speak and be corrected for an entire day—a rare opportunity to suffer, learn, and enjoy.
Larry and I were in Aix three seasons ago, but our visit, because we’re lazy tour snobs, was superficial. We visited the university and wondered carelessly about whether we’d like to study there the following year. We even picked up some brochures. What’s a fantasy without brochures? We stopped to listen to two musicians playing Baroque music next to one of the city’s many fountains. We had a coffee on the main drag, Le Cours Mirabeau.
At that time, we were nearing the end of our first season in the Vaucluse and had been thinking about what kinds of authentically Provençal gifts we might bring home to our friends. Other friends who have visited Provence have already gifted them with enough patterned cloth sachets of herbes de Provence to last a lifetime. Surely there must be something else. As we walked about, we couldn’t help but notice the profusion of boxes of inexpensive cookies, called Calissons d’Aix, on display at the numerous souvenir shops we passed. Monique had once suggested that these cookies made very nice house gifts. They were, she explained, cookies with a fascinating past.
In the fifteenth century, Good King René, Provence’s last ruler, wanted to give his future wife something unique, so he ordered his pâtissier to invent a special treat. The baker created a calisson, an almond-shaped cookie, made, not surprisingly, with almonds and studded with candied melon and orange peel.
We bought a few tiny boxes, one for ourselves and the rest for our friends. When we got back to Saumane that year, we opened up our box to take a taste. Or tried to. The calissons were stale—rock hard, actually, very fifteenth-century, very authentic.
A visit to Aix with Mme Brihat is different and fascinating. Mme Brihat knows her historical and architectural stuff. She walks us through the concentric rings of this originally Roman city. Like the rings of a tree, each circle tells its age. Collectively, they demonstrate how the architecture changed as the city developed toward le Cours Mirabeau. We make a quick stop at the Musée Granet, the walls of which should be but are not hung with paintings by Cezanne, perhaps Aix’s most famous citizen. The largest collection of Cezannes is far from home, at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.
Madame suggests we return to Bonnieux by the Route de Cezanne so that we can see la montagne Ste.-Victoire. Approaching it from Aix on a winding road, one catches periodic, dazzling glimpses of the mountain, the bright sunlight illuminating the white limestone of its highest ridges. Each brief sighting builds our anticipation until, after a final turn in the road, we are rewarded with a full view of the mountain in all its massive glory.
La montagne Ste.-Victoire, in spite of its name, seems more like a craggy, gigantic boulder that has been placed on the landscape than a mountain that has erupted from the ground. It is 3,317 feet high, half the altitude of le Mont Ventoux, but its base extends over eleven miles. It crouches majestically alongside the highway, its weathered limestone bare of all greenery, except at its base. It is one of the most stunning, natural sites I’ve ever seen. Perhaps part of its wonder is that we are seeing it up close. La montagne Ste.-Victoire so demands my attention that I don’t want to leave.
No wonder Cézanne was obsessed by it, painting over one hundred versions from all angles, in all weather, in all seasons, and at all times of the day. We pay homage by taking about ten photographs and then reluctantly get back into the car and head for home.
Larry has found a recipe for joues de porc (pork cheeks) that has over ten ingredients, marinates over night, and takes most of the next day to prepare. He pays a visit to “his butcher,” M. Isnard, to order the pork cheeks. Upon arriving in any town, Larry’s first stop is la boucherie, where he likes to chat up the butcher. On an earlier visit, they bonded over the subject of worldwide sanitation rules and how “they” are making it impossible for the French to export or import certain foods, including Larry’s favorite semisoft cheese, Reblochon, that, because it’s not pasteurized, is banned in the United States.
“How are you planning to prepare it?” the butcher asks. Larry answers him in French that is comprehensible enough to engage the interest of the women shoppers who are standing behind him, waiting their turn. The butcher advises Larry to flour the cheeks before braising them. That way the sauce is thicker. One of the women volunteers that she cooks her pork cheeks for three hours; another says two and a half is enough. A third says that she marinates the meat the night before in red wine. Another serves hers with steamed potatoes. The customers are in no hurry to place their orders; they are far more interested in talking about Larry’s meal. Larry wonders what he should serve for dessert. About this there is agreement. Figs are in season. Cut them into star shapes and place a dab of vanilla ice cream in the middle and add a splash of brandy. There’s a woman at the foot of the hill who sells artisanal ice cream. Nothing less will do.
It occurs to me that this is my fourth stay in Provence and I have not yet heard anyone say “calories,” or “cholesterol,” or even “arterial plaque.” The French do not season their food with regret, at least not here in Provence, the birthplace of French cuisine.
However, it is also true that more and more French people are like Americans—solitary fast-food eaters, stuffing themselves with quick take-out calories, followed by periodic dieting. Le régime, a diet, the word that once dared not speak its name, has now worked its way into the vocabulary, along with Jennie Craig and McDonald’s, which the French familiarly called “McDo.”
In 1999, a French sheep farmer named José Bové drove his tractor into a partially constructed McDonald’s restaurant in Millau, a midsized town just west of Provence, thereby striking the first blow against what the French call malbouffe, or junk food. He needn’t have bothered.
There are now at least 1,200 McDonald’s franchises in France, second only to their number in the United States. On the Champs Elysées in Paris, the golden arches of McDonald’s compete with the Arc de Triomphe. There’s a McDo in the Louvre, and the Mona Lisa is still smiling.
The French franchisers of McDo have designed the restaurants and the menu to suit French tastes. Upholstered chairs invite the French to linger; the Mcbaguette Burger transforms a Big Mac into haut-ish cuisine.
The McDo-ing of France may be its culinary undoing, but in the small towns around us, the table still comes first. When Ellen enrolled her eldest child, Anna, in school, the principal instructed Ellen to bring une serviette. Because Ellen was still new to the language at the time, she looked up the word, learned that it meant either “towel” or “napkin,” and sent Anna to kindergarten with a towel. The principal, who commands the norms of etiquette, had a napkin in mind. It should be brought to school clean on Mondays and retrieved on Fridays to be taken home and laundered. Fastidiousness didn’t stop there. Anna, along with all the other children, was provided with a pair of delicate slippers to be worn at school, except during recess.
Anna spends at least an hour eating lunch at school, where the children enjoy a three-course meal of salad, fish or meat, and dessert. There are no trays, no cafeteria lines, no twenty-minute lunch periods, at least not yet, at least not in these small towns. The children sit in small groups around tables, where they are encouraged to help themselves and their tablemates to each course, to pass the bread, to take only their fair share from the communal platters, and to engage in conversation. This leisurely scenario exists in contrast to the fuel stop of a lunch at Anna’s school in San Raphael, California. American children are, in effect, taught to rush, to wolf down their food, and to separate the idea of eating from the pleasure of socializing. Here, civility and sociability are taught at the grammar school table.
When Larry cooks, he likes to listen to opera, preferably bel canto. He turns the volume way up, like a teenager, and sings along. This house, like all our medieval rentals, comes equipped with a television, CDs, and DVDs, among which he finds one of his favorite operas, La Bohème. He is on such familiar terms with it that he calls it La Bo.
“Che Gelida Manina”—“What cold hands,” Larry sings loudly to an imaginary, freezing cold Mimi, the tubercular love of his life. Blending his voice with Placido Domingo’s, he doesn’t sound half-bad. He gets so carried away by the infamous high C, the note that even Caruso was reluctant to attempt, that he sets his knife down in order to fling out both arms without causing injury.
Fresh from his triumphant visit to the butcher, he is also in the mood to speak French. If he doesn’t know a particular word, he speaks English with a French accent, like Charles Boyer. “Choppez et donnez-moi zee parsley,” he says.
In Provence, I often act as Larry’s sous chef, chopping, grating, scraping, melting, and unrolling nasty little anchovy tins. I hand him knives, spoons, and parchment paper. I create neat little bowls full of carefully measured ingredients, and I place them on the counter in the order in which they will be needed. The French call it la mise en place.
The final moments of food preparation are conducted with solemnity and precision, as if we were in an operating theater. Larry stops singing.
“Romarin,” Larry says, and I hand him the rosemary.
“Estragon,” he says, and I slap two sprigs of tarragon into his waiting hand.
Larry adds and stirs. Mimi coughs.
When our meal is fully cooked and the sauce is reduced, Larry transfers the cheeks gently to a platter, sprinkles the dish with chopped parsley, gets out his camera, and takes a picture of dinner. Larry celebrates all our meals with a photo. He takes more pictures of his dinners than grandparents do of their grandchildren.