TWO KITCHENS IN PROVENCE

Anything can be a lodestar in a person’s life, I suppose, and for some fortunates like me, the Kitchen serves well. Often the real influence of a lodestar is half understood, or partly unsuspected, but with a little reflection it grows clear to me that kitchens have always played a mysterious part in my shaping.

Since I wrote about two of them I knew when I stayed several years in Provence, I have known two more in that fair country, in Aix and Marseille. Like the first ones, they are vivid in my recollections, each with its own smells, its own views onto the world and into myself.

The one in Marseille, in 1973 I think, was perhaps the least dignified of any of a long lifetime of them. It was part of a miserable little bathroom: a two-burner gas plate beside the washbowl, a saucepan and a soup pot on the shelf for toothpaste and combs. To pretend to bathe in the small scarred tub, which never ran anything but tepid water whether it came from the hot spigot or the cold, my sister and I had to duck under the sagging string that held our dish and face towels. Above the spigots there was a high window perhaps ten inches square, which we had to stand in the tub to open or close. It opened onto a dim air well, so that we knew intimate things about our unseen neighbors.

But past this dreadful cell were two big airy rooms with good red tiles on the floor, with a big window in each room looking far down on one of the most exciting places in the world, the Old Port of Marseille, and then far out to sea, far up into the blanched cruel hills. For part of the months we lived there, rapt by all we saw, we could watch the sun both rise and set, so high and wide were the windows. We never stopped looking, except when we slept lightly through the night-sounds of police sirens, small ships, bugles blowing in the barracks across the street, now and then a band rehearsing on the empty sidewalks for some celebration.

We ate as close as possible to one of the windows, shut against the mistral, open to the warm sun. The foul little bath-kitchen produced miracles of good plain food from its two pans, and we bought some plates and bowls of Provençal pottery, and two sturdy wineglasses, so that everything tasted even better. Salads were easy. So was good café au lait, and we soon learned where to find the most commendable croissants, the most pungent mountain honey. We could get local cheeses, and homemade pâtés sent to our shopkeepers by cousins in Normandy or Alsace. Now and then we bought a little roasted chicken from an elegant catering shop on the Rue de Rome. And the vins rosés were ever-flowing.…

The kitchen in Aix-en-Provence, a couple of years later, was nothing but a counter in the single room, with a shoddy little “frigidaire” at one end and a small dauntless water heater at the other, and a typical hideous sink in the middle, like the first two I had known in that part of the country: scooped from a slab of gritty brown marble and completely inadequate for anything at all that one has to do in a kitchen sink. Like the others, it was probably at least two hundred years old, made in the days of pitchers and pails and open drains, not meant to have water splashing into it from a tap.…

Again I was with my sister, and again we found a big airy room to live in, twice the size of the two in Marseille, and on the second storey instead of the ninth. There was no view this time, but the sky and its wheeling whistling swallows was close to us. The floor was of red tiles, of course, and we could keep a few pots of geraniums in the windows, since we were on a narrow street out of the mistral’s way.

The fruits and vegetables of Aix were, as always, picked at dawn and meant to be eaten by nightfall. It was exciting once more to find myself racing decay, as I had learned to do at Le Tholonet and then L’Harmas. A peach bought cool and unblemished from the greengrocer on the Cours Sextius at nine in the morning looked sulky by noon, and by suppertime was bruised and voluptuously dying. The bright yellow blossoms on zucchini from the Marché aux Herbes had wilted by noon, and the first waxy glow of the slender squashes was gone by the time they made our supper. But eggs and unsalted butter stayed fresh in the miserable little icebox, and the wine was always cool.

That time in Aix, there was a rebirth of local pride, and along with the clean restoration of beautiful old façades and courtyards there was a new interest in regional cooking, so that we could buy excellent breads and cheeses and pâtés from a dozen somewhat artsy “caves” and “boutiques.”

In Marseille, not long before, we had eaten well but in a limited way in our flat, and had satisfied more than our basic hungers in many restaurants both great and small. In Aix we ate better food in our one-room flat than we could find in the town. We had perhaps four pans and kettles instead of two, and could braise little quails for a treat, or make a lusty ratatouille, or even a dainty omelet … and of course it was pleasant not to have to push aside the toothpaste to find the forks and spoons.

In Marseille we had ushered in the Free Market vegetables and fruits being shipped enthusiastically, if without experience, from Israel and Portugal, which in their dried-out, half-ripe, half-frozen state were almost nostalgically like the California supermarket produce my sister and I had hoped to escape. Every time we went by bus from Marseille to Aix, which happened more often as we bowed to our helpless devotion to the town, we brought back good things to eat. We felt disloyal, because we loved the city too. But it was better than ever to sit by one of the big windows above the Old Port and eat real green beans instead of the ersatz half-dead things for sale in Marseille.

And in the flat in Aix it was good to sit by one of the big windows and pretend we were looking down at the Old Port instead of across at a line of dripping red and pink laundry hung from a neighbor’s kitchen out over the street. Perhaps the fish of Aix was eighteen miles older than in Marseille, we agreed, but its radishes were as fresh and delicate as dewdrops … the cherries were as crisp as new almonds.…

It is fortunate to recognize lodestars as such. They light our paths, and shape us mysteriously, and in the process can teach true humility. How and why, I now ask myself, have I known not one or two but four kinds of kitchens of Provence?

I

I have had two kitchens in Provence. The first was above the empty stables at the Château du Tholonet, about five miles easterly from Aix, near the village of Le Tholonet. My two young girls and I were living there for a few months in 1956, before we had to leave, after a long stay, for America and home.

The kitchen was about nine by nine feet, with a ceiling fourteen feet high and a window looking west toward Aix, over two rolling meadows bright with scarlet poppies and sweet grasses and then to the slopes of the Châteaunoir, covered with humming pine woods. It was one of the best kitchens I ever worked in, although it was inefficient, inadequate, and often filled with flies.

The walls were plastered stone. There was a hood built into the east wall over a low platform with three grates in it. A long time ago, this had served as a stove for the grooms and stableboys who slept and ate there above the carriages and horses of the château, and now a small white enamel butane stove sat with an air of embarrassed practicality upon its red tiles. Behind it was a black iron plaque about three feet square, of a wild-haired hero whipping a giant lizard—St. Michael, no doubt, worsting his dragon. I forget the antiquarian name for these iron chimney guards; they were used to protect the soft chimney stones against the steady blaze on such hearths, which all kitchens once kept hot and bright.

To the right of the hearth, by the window, which looked down on a fast brooklet and a rocky path where the shepherd led his flock each night and morning, was a marble sink with a tap that now ran water, now did not, depending on what the farmer was doing in his garden. It was a shallow oval hollow in a slab of the local stone quarried up behind us in Bibémus, where Cézanne used to roam and struggle with his vision of what light is made of. When there was water and I used it, I always kept it as clean as I could, for it splashed out directly from the hole in the wall onto the shepherd’s path twenty feet below. The sink was faced with the same red tiles as the old stove and the floor—the rough glazed squares of red and pink and ochre clay that comes from the soil of Provence, the clay that makes the roofs there glow and burn even in the moonlight. They were cool in summer, warm and comforting in winter, and easy to clean, and altogether so pleasing that the prospect of ever having to walk about on another surface was painful to me. Except for the tiles, the kitchen was whitewashed. There were three shelves above the drab little sink, which was reinstated several times a day in my favor because it had, if I wished to go into the bathroom and light a heater, hot as well as cold water. Or perhaps I esteemed it merely because it had water at all.

There was a worn pine table, on which I kept a clay water pitcher, and the wine bottles, and a wicker tray for the vegetables, and a reed satchel filled with rapidly staling bread. Then there was a shallow high cupboard with screen doors, where I kept everything that was not on the table and the sink shelves—food, plates, the rare leftovers, tubes of mustard and concentrates. I had very little equipment. I had borrowed two pans and a skillet, and I made a pleasurable investment in Provençal pottery casseroles, plates, and bowls. The Monoprix solved in a fortunately temporary way the problem of decent knives and forks and spoons, except for one viciously beautiful all-purpose blade.

Downstairs, in the enormous, echoing stone carriage room through which we passed to our ironwork stairway, was a little wire-screen box in which I was supposed to safeguard things. But in Provence food spoils very quickly, and except for a few hard-rock sausages and green bananas, which I left down there, I found it simpler to buy the minimum of butter and so on and keep it upstairs in the kitchen cupboard.

I took a while to get into what is basically an easy rhythm of marketing, and a couple of times I found myself facing one withered lemon, a boiled potato, and a bowl of subtly rotten green beans for supper. Alone, I would have gone to bed with the latest edition of a Georges Simenon, but with my little girls Anne and Mary there, it seemed providential that the Restaurant Thomé was only a quarter mile away. We would walk down past the château and its tranquil ponds of water, teeming in the late spring with still speechless froglets, and under the rows of trimmed and untrimmed giant plane trees, and across the bridge above the lively little river, and there would be the welcome, as it had been for almost a hundred and fifty years—the smiling owner, his nice wife, all her sisters and brothers, and always a new baby somewhere under an impeccable mosquito net. Perhaps the fancy electric spit would be turning a few pullets for a big country wedding tomorrow, tablecloths would be fluttering in the garden, and not a sound now from the discreet little viny pergolas where Prince Edward and his less noble but equally gallant imitators used to entertain their traveling companions.

There was a bus that zoomed through the village three mornings a week, on market days in Aix, and at least once weekly my girls and I hopped it, at five minutes after nine. At the markets, we would fill the two string bags we carried with us, and the two or three woven baskets, all bulging with hard vegetables at the bottom and things like wood strawberries on top, and head for our favorite taxi at the top of the Cours Mirabeau, picking up packages along the way—a square of Dijon gingerbread and a pot of Alpine honey at the little “health-food store” on the Place Forbin, an onion tart for a treat at the pastry shop on the Rue Thiers, a bottle of vermouth at the Caves Phocéennes. We would be loaded to the gunwales, full of hope that we had purchased enough for another week.

In a short time, I learned that I was lugging things home from Aix that I could get in the village, and then only occasionally did I find myself with either too much, all withering and spoiling, or nothing at all and no bus for two days and the store in the Relai de Cézanne (the store is the other half of the old café-inn where Cézanne often stopped when he was painting along the Route du Tholonet) in Le Tholonet, across from the Restaurant Thomé, closed because of a wedding-funeral-christening—or just closed. (I soon found that on Mondays it always was.) I knew that the good bread from Palette, which leaned like fat and thin bean poles in a big basket in the corner, was fresh on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and that on those days I could usually buy some milk and butter. Saturday mornings, there would always be a few crates of fresh vegetables. I could buy, for instance, little artichokes, new potatoes, carrots, zucchini, tomatoes, bananas;bread and butter and milk, of course, and some Gruyère cheese; a couple of soup sausages; and a copy of the weekly Mickey comics for the children. In the middle of the week, though, the stock at the store might consist of some dusty packages of noodles, a few big cubes of yellow laundry soap, and penny caramels for the twenty-eight children of the school district.

In addition to the store, there were several little trucks that came regularly up the narrow roads from the national highway at Palette. On Wednesdays, the butcher drove right up to the front of the château, blowing his horn long and merry, and the shepherdess would come from the beautiful stone barns, where she lived with her husband and two hundred sheep, several rams, two goats, three astonishing sheep dogs, and forty chickens and four pigs; the farmer’s wife would come from the wing of the beautiful hollow stone château, where she lived with her husband and a little abandoned child they had saved; the gardener’s wife would come up from the beautiful gate cottage; the miller’s wife and mother would come down from the beautiful stone house in the mill beside the waterfall behind the château; and I would come from the beautiful stone stables. We would watch one another’s purchases and spendings casually, and talk in a somewhat artificial overcordial but friendly way about whose children had whooping cough and whose had chicken pox and whether it would rain, while the suave young butcher, with the remote, weary face of a night clerk in a cheap hotel, cut deftly into his slabs of meat, and weighed out black and green olives, cheese, and marbled lard. Gradually, we would go back under the chestnut trees and the plane trees to our kitchens, and he would drive away, to return Sunday at noon, when he would stop in front of the water pump in the village and blare his horn commandingly to the people returning from Mass and sitting in front of the Relai with their milky pastis in front of them on the little tables.

Fridays at Le Tholonet, a small fish jeep tooted in, with an old cornet cracking out its jaunty message, past the tranquil straight ponds in the front of the château. By the time it got there, only a few fish would be left, but they were still fresh, and usually good. All Mediterranean fish seem much stronger in their smells and flavors than those of colder waters. Once, I remember, I bought the tail end of a large silvery one with a tough skin and a big backbone, and it sent off quite a fume from the beginning, although not at all a tired or suspicious one. I rubbed it with olive oil, put some thin slices of lemon on it, and poured about a cupful of white wine over it in a shallow casserole. Then, instead of allowing fifteen minutes as the fisherman had advised, I baked it for about a half hour in a gentle oven, which was the only kind I had—the two burners on top of the little stove on the hearth were almost too lively, but the oven never worked up much enthusiasm.

That was the night we tried a package of dried mushroom soup that the Aix grocer had given me to prove that such innovations could be good, and we enjoyed the smooth, well-seasoned creamy mixture so much that we decided to eat the fish cold the next day, with a mayonnaise I would make with an egg from the shepherdess and a plastic gadget I had bought some time before from a very fat man in a chef’s bonnet, who was showing at a little table in the market how it could be done in twenty seconds with never a failure. I put the fish back in the cool oven, and the next morning took it out to skin and bone, when I heard the postman’s whistle at the château. Quickly, I covered the casserole with the breadboard and a towel, to protect the fish from flies, and went over to talk with him about if and how I could register a letter without going in to Aix.

On the way back, Whisky, our guest poodle, who came three miles by himself every day or so from the Châteaunoir to amuse us and sample our cuisine before he puffed up the hill again to his real home, dashed away from me, through the stables and up our long flight of stone stairs in the dim coach house. Just as I got to the bottom of them, the biggest black cat I ever saw, and one I had certainly never seen before, whipped down past me and then out the enormous door, with Whisky yapping nobly at a safe distance.

Of course, the kitchen was a shambles. That stranger cat had caught, perhaps from miles away, the pungent invitation of my baked fishtail. He had come to it as unerringly as one rare insect in a jungle finds his only possible mate. He had snatched open the cupboard door, which was too warped to latch shut, and had fiercely tossed to the floor everything unfishy. Then he had slapped his way through the wastebasket. Finally, he had clawed off the heavy breadboard and towel from the casserole and he had dragged and flapped the whole oily, dripping mess down onto the red tile floor, where, from the look of things, he had not only torn the meat to small bits but rolled in it. So we did not have to try out the mayonnaise gadget for a while longer.

Saturday afternoons, there was always the visit of the rolling épicerie, with things like shoelaces, aspirin, custard powders, and boxes of cookies with bright-pink frosting on them and names like Bébés Délices or Nounous de Titi. The man who jolted it around that rocky country had a good face, like a tired village doctor or lawyer. Usually I would need almost nothing, but I would buy two lemons, perhaps, or a piece of good soft-firm reblochon cheese from the Savoy—the kind that the houseman I had when I was living in Switzerland used to smuggle dramatically across the Lake of Geneva in a rowboat on dark nights and sell at a high sum to me and other dupes in Vevey. It tasted just as good from the back of a beat-up old grocery truck in Provence.

We always added the lemons to the artichokes and the tomatoes and the other vegetables I kept on the wicker tray, in vague memory of a still life seen somewhere with the same whitewashed walls for background, and we would eat most of the cheese for supper after big bowls of the broth from the soup—the sausage soup, which seemed to be standard in that part of the country and which I soon grew to make almost automatically, like the other housewives. The sausages were lean, dry things, and were boiled whole with whatever vegetables were at hand and then either sliced into the broth or fished out and eaten cold the next day with bread.

I could agree with all the women living in that wild, beautiful country only five miles from Aix and less than two from the screaming Nice-Marseille highway and with three buses to the market a week: it was good to hear the brave, bright, insistent horn-blowing and know that there would be food for our families. And it was good, in a way hard to explain even to myself, after years of deep-freeze and run-of-the-mill marketing in California, to know that, willy-nilly, the fish would spoil by tomorrow, the chops would be practically incandescent in thirty-six hours, and the tomatoes would rot in twelve. It was a kind of race between my gluttony for the fine freshness and my knowledge of its fleeting nature.

To cope with this inescapable rapidity of decay in a warm, bacteria-rich, fly-infested ancient land without any means of cooling except the stone cellars and wells, I kept a small supply of canned vegetables and fruits, and the omnipresent and very handy tubes of everything from salmon butter to various good mustards to concentrated milk and tomato sauce. Then I had on hand several packages of those ugly but valuable soup powders (potato-and-leek, chicken-consommé, fish), which I found made good sauces, too, in a pinch. I had wonderful olive oil, ladled into my bottle from an unctuous vat in Aix that I would not mind being shipped home in, instead of malmsey, and good gutty red-wine vinegar, and I could go up to the farmer’s garden whenever I wanted to for tough but delicious salads. Salt is a lot saltier in Provence than at home, and less refined; the pepper is called “grey” and has an overtaste of turpentine, somewhat like the berries I used to chew when they dropped from the feathery pepper trees when I was a little girl in California. And then, of course, there were things that most tin-can cooks have in any modern country: sardines, anchovies, Alsatian sauerkraut for a moment of gastronomical debauchery for my children, one little can of lark pâté for me—complete with the first French can opener I had ever been able to work, which I paid rather a lot for in the cutlery shop across from the Palais de Justice.

With the mistral surging and leaning against the windows and the chestnut trees and the red poppies in the meadows, and the spiritual food a part of the whole, we would eat at breakfast canned grapefruit juice, large bowls of café au lait with brown sugar, slices of Dijon gingerbread with sweet butter and Alpine honey; at noontime whole new potatoes boiled in their jackets in a big pot of carrots-onions-sausage, which we’d eat later, sweet butter, mild cheese, and a bowl of green olives and little radishes; then for supper the vegetable broth, with the sausage cut in thin rings, the whole new carrots and onions drained and tossed with a little butter and chopped parsley and celery tops from the farmer’s garden, and a bowl of three cans mixed together of peaches-pears-pineapple, all with hot, delicious, somewhat charcoalish toast made on one of those flat grill things our parents used at least forty years ago. The next day, there would still be some clear broth, and I would make a jelly from the fruit juices. And I would start over again—probably a big salad, which I would soak in the fountain to rid it of most of the innumerable critters that are considered correct for country produce in Provence, and then a pot of hot small artichokes to eat with melted butter and lemon juice, and sliced tomatoes that had lasted two days after marketing instead of only one because the mistral was blowing, and then maybe soft-boiled eggs from the shepherdess for supper.

There was always that little rich decadent tin of lark pâté in the cupboard if I grew bored, or we could stroll down past the great ponds under the plane trees to the deft, friendly welcome of the Restaurant Thomé and eat a grilled pullet or a trout meunière, and an orange baked à la norvégienne. Or we could stay home and I would try at last the mayonnaise maker I had bought from the fat man in the market.

II

The second kitchen I had in Provence, when we lived in a part of an old farmhouse at L’Harmas, about three miles from Aix on the Route du Tholonet, was somewhat different from the one at the château a few years before. There was much more luxury. There was a small noisy electric refrigerator called, as everywhere in the world—except, perhaps, America—a “frigidaire.” There was an imitation-modern white enamel stove with an oven and four burners. Two of the burners always blew out at once, so, except for the oven, which could not be adjusted to anything but a blasting roar and which I never used, I was just as before, in the older kitchen at the château, with the portable two-burner butane stove. There was the same slab of hollowed marble for a sink, with a round instead of oval basin scooped in it, but it had two taps, which usually had water in them, and quite often there was hot water without my having to light anything, unless someone had taken a bath in the past twelve hours, or there was a drought, or the farm pump was out of order. And there were several more shelves, for dishes and pots.

Two windows, not so high from the ground as in the kitchen over the stables, gave upon a terrace shaded by the tall trees of that country, which must bend to the mistral and shed their branches almost to their tops—a little like the wild pines in Monterey in California, but higher and thinner. The terrace was half wild, too, and could be deep in voluptuous sweet grasses and flowers in the spring, or dry and stinging with pointy weeds, or almost bare until the snow brought soft rains again. It heartened me to watch it and to smell its changing wildness as I stood in the kitchen, using it for its destined purpose—to feed people near me.

The food was the same in both kitchens; it dared me daily. But I must go to Aix for everything this time, for the jeeps and trucks that had come to the château did not seem to come this near the big town. I must get to the open markets and to a few little shops, and then on home, fast, before things spoiled. I went on foot. I did not want to have a car; it was too rare a thing to miss, that walking along the little Route du Tholonet—Cézanne’s road—in all weathers, against all tides, between the farm and Aix. I rose very early to head for town, carrying a nest of the light straw baskets that the Gypsies still wove, and then bringing them back full and heavy in a taxi. (There were few paper sacks in that country, and baskets and string bags were uniform.)

The Big Market is held three times a week—on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday—but every day, behind the post office, there is the Little Market. Both of them are beautiful and exciting and soothing, a tonic to the senses, but I think I loved the little one more.

The Place Richelme et aux Herbes is small, and shaded by very tall and noble plane trees, which in summer sift down such a green light as I have seldom seen. Perhaps some fortunate fish have known it, but for human beings it is rare to float at the bottom of the deeps and yet breathe with rapture the smells of all the living things spread out to sell in the pure, filtered moving air. There are snails in cages, ducklings bright-eyed in their crates, trembling rabbits. There are baskets of fresh herbs, and little piles of edibles gathered at dawn in a hundred gardens: peas and strawberries in the spring, small cabbages, apples, new potatoes, and onions and garlic, following inexorably the farmers’ almanac, so that one soon accustoms the purchases and their uses to the crops that have been sowed and harvested thus for two thousand years at least.

Sometimes there was a man with a tiny donkey, selling baskets of fresh lavender, or crude mint drops from the Pyrenees, or cough lozenges made from Alpine herbs and saps. He always put a ringlet of what he was selling that day over the patient head of his little beast—in hot weather, on her hat. On one corner, behind the beautiful old grain market that now housed harried postal clerks, there was a quiet man with a folding table, making metal nameplates for people’s doorways, in every kind of painstaking elaborate lettering. Once, he gave me a tiny ring, cut from a peach stone. It was for me, he said without irony, but it would not have fit a newborn babe.

At either end of the little square are small cafés and shops, and opposite the post office is a bleak, busy annex lined with fish markets and shops selling poultry, butter, and all kinds of smoked sausages and hams. Underneath this annex is a well-run and modern public toilet, new since our first stay in Aix and built by the city.

The other market, the big one, is comparatively gigantic, and always very crowded and amusing, but not dream-like, not deep golden green, even in its generous summer shade. I came to know it well, and soon. It is in a long square that is not square at all, with the Palais de Justice on one side, and many small shops and cafés and pharmacies and honorable bookstores and even the Girls’ High School fringing it, dominated by the somber, vaguely sinister Church of the Madeleine and—at the time I was there—by two monuments. One of these, the statue of Mirabeau down by the Palais, is now gone. It is said to have been the most ridiculous public monument ever erected in France. This is a broad and daring statement, given the evidence against it, but certainly the small furious figure of Mirabeau, his wig askew and no pockmarks showing, with a knee-high lion cowering against him like a fat poodle, the two shooting up from a stony froth of great-breasted Muses, was very funny, even to the respectful. The monument that remains, the obelisk at the opposite end of the square, is fine indeed, and it rises pure and classical from the fountain at its base, where people dip water for their stalls and the flower women douse their posies.

At the low end of the unsquare square, on the regular Tuesdays, Thursdays, and—especially—Saturdays, is the Flea Market, a reputable debauch of canny snoopers for the great antique dealers of Paris and London and New York, and housewives looking for old wineglasses or copper pans, and happy drifters. Next come the merchants of nails and screws, junk jewelry, clothes, and kitchen stuff—and very few of them are fly-by-nights; most have their regular patrons among people like the farmers and the Algerians, who prefer to shop under open skies. Then there are always a few barkers under umbrellas, selling the kind of paring knife that for them alone will cut everything but the Greek alphabet with a flip of the wrist, or patterns for chic dresses that can be made from four dish towels. Even Bibles.

And then come the real market stalls, the ones where people buy to live. First of all, next to the café where we had long liked to eat couscous occasionally, there was (and probably still is) a woman who sold fresh peanuts in their shells. She was Algerian, I think, or half so, and she had such a delectable texture and color to her skin that I was glad she sold something I could buy from her, in order to talk a little and look at her. She was like a ripe, washed apricot, with the same glowing deep color coming through, as if from far underneath her smooth, tight skin. I have seen such tones in a few faces and in some stained glass in churches. Most of her customers were the thin and thick Algerian women who drifted by twos in their floating flowered dresses along the aisles of the market, and sometimes I listened to her speaking with them in their breathy language. She thought I was very funny, to be so plainly Anglo-Saxon and to be buying peanuts from her.

All the stands were alike and violently different, of course, and the prices were much the same, and the high quality was, too. It seemed to be a question of growing used to one vendor instead of another, and I soon confessed to myself that it was part of the pleasure to be recognized by some of the quick, tough people who carried on that never-ending business. They looked so fresh and strong, three times a week, and I felt flabby and exhausted to think that every day—not just three—they must buy, or grow, and load their wares, and drive to this town or that, and set up their stalls, and then at the end start home again. They were cheerful, and as watchful as cats and as impersonal, and yet they knew most of the people who traded with them, and smiled and joked as if I, or she, or that old woman with no teeth, or the smart young matron in white gloves, were a special pet. “Ah, how did they remember me?” one would ask delightedly, piling the brass weighing bowls higher with the new potatoes round and hard as plums, the stiff buds of artichokes purple and succulent.

Each time I went in to the markets from L’Harmas, I had quite firmly in my mind what we needed for at least two days ahead, what we might need in case of company, and what I would undoubtedly fall heir to or in love with at the last minute—that minute of decision between a good clean rabbit hanging with his own dignity, albeit naked, or some plucked, blackish pigeons I had just spied in the poultry woman’s stand. I would start out with three or four empty baskets, and a coin purse full of the small change essential to such hectic purchasing. I would end with heavy baskets and the purse much lighter, of course; money goes fast for food, and even faster for good food, and although I knew better, I always thought in terms of pounds and ounces and I bought in kilos, so that often when I thought I had two pounds of new peas I was toting two kilograms, or more than double what my mind stupidly kept reckoning. Then I would add two kilos of soft, sweet Valencia oranges from Spain, and a half kilo of lemons; two kilos of beans as long as hairpins and not much thicker; two kilos of country tomatoes, smaller and more pungent than the big handsome ones from up near Avignon; a smoked sausage, the kind still packed into clean, uneven gut skin instead of smooth plastic; some cheese; a last generous basket of dead-ripe gooseberries; a kilo of fresh spaghetti from the fat woman by the fountain; and a clumsy bunch of pale-pink carnations: “Five dozen for two francs today—take advantage, my pretty ladies.”

I would be hot, harried, and overladen. Down on the wide shady Cours Mirabeau, which, perhaps rightly, has been called the most beautiful Main Street in the world, there are taxis. I would push toward them. The peanut woman smiled always at me with gaiety and some mockery—she so solid and ripe and apricot brown, I so tottery and foreign—and I would feel stronger for her casual warmth. And under the trees of the Cours, Fernand or Michel would take all my baskets and then me into his taxi for the drive out along Cézanne’s road, toward home.

Sometimes I would want him to go faster, for I could almost feel the food in the baskets swelling with juice, growing soft, splitting open in an explosive rush toward ripeness and disintegration. The fruits and vegetables of Provence are dying as they grow—literally leaping from the ancient soil, so filled with natural richnesses and bacilli and fungi that they seem a kind of summing up of whatever they are. A tomato there, for instance, is the essence of all tomatoes, of tomato-ness, the way a fragment from a Greek frieze is not a horse but horse itself.

As soon as I got back from the markets, I always reorganized everything I had gleaned, as fast as I could, against the onslaughts of time (especially summer time) and insects. First of all, there were the flies. The flies of Provence are said to be the most audacious in the world. People have remarked on this for at least twenty-five hundred years, and I have read that slaves being led in chains from the north to man the galleys anchored at Toulon marched fastest on this last lap of their death trip because of the flies that goaded them. Flourishing descendants of those foul, hungry insects still zigzag in a year-round dance there, especially in spring and summer, or perhaps autumn, and the grim acceptance of them is one of the requirements of life, especially on farms, where the soil itself is an age-old amalgam of droppings from beast and man. They were much worse at the château, of course, for there we lived close to the barns, where the shepherd kept all his sheep-goats-chickens-rabbits, and at least three or four pigs, in a timeless, fruity muck that must surely have glowed in the dark. At L’Harmas, there were only pigeons and two peacocks, but there was fine shade in the summer for the flies of that hillside, and warmth in the winter, and the general interest to be found in four families of two-legged creatures.

The ants are almost as powerful in Provence as the flies, surging relentlessly from the red earth, seeming to walk through wood and stone and metal and glass toward whatever they want. And there are other pests that like the cool tiled floors, or the dark of cupboards, or the moist dimness under old drains: scorpions, centipedes, bees, and wasps, earwigs, crickets, several kinds of gnats, now and then a snail or a tick. It was the flies and the ants I tilted with first and constantly, and I do not think I disliked them the most because they were the most but because I hated and still hate the sound and feel of flies, and the smell of ants. We are at odds always. Sometimes I can acknowledge their complacency—they will be here long after I have made my final stand against them.

In the part of the farmhouse where we lived at L’Harmas, there was a dim room that had once been a buttery, or even the farmer’s office, I think. It had an uneven tiled floor, two windows with the shutters left bowed to form a kind of airy cooler, an old piano with no wires in it, and several hooks let into the plastered stone walls. From these hooks I hung whatever I need not cook the minute I got home from Aix: white onions in a crocheted bag, two kilos of long purple eggplants that not even a bee could sting, a basket of small, satin-skinned potatoes. On the old piano I would put a tray of red tomatoes, which I had placed gently, bottoms up, with some soft ones, already doomed for tomorrow, to be eaten tonight, even though they had all been firm and greenish a few hours before. I would do the same with a tray of peaches and apricots, and then cover them against the midges.

Baskets of green peas and one of beans I put upon the table in the dining room, with pans to catch them when they were shelled and de-strung by whoever passed by. It was a house rule, and since everybody talked and sat and drank and worked in that big white room, as well as eating there when we were not out under the pine trees on the terrace, it seemed a pleasant and nearly automatic thing to prepare for cooking whatever was set out for that.

In the little kitchen, I put things away as fast as I could. If I had bought meat, it must be prepared for cooking at once, or at best kept in the minute frigidaire overnight. (In winter, of course, things could be thoroughly wrapped and put on a window ledge or into a wire cooler, but winter is not long in that country, and the rats and half-wild farm cats are very clever about getting around such casual arrangements.)

Then I would pack the sweet fresh butter into a crock and put it on the old piano in a bowl of water. I washed the strawberries and cherries tenderly and put them, too, in heavy bowls in the buttery, to be eaten that day. Salads I stripped of their bad leaves and soaked for a few minutes in a dishpan, and then shook out and wrapped in a towel, to be eaten within twenty-four hours. Sometimes I could store clean curly endive or chicory and the coarser lettuces in cellophane bags for a little longer, but not in summer. It was fine, in winter, to have plenty of good Belgian endive—so easy to clean, to store, to serve in many ways.

It takes little time to learn the tricks of any new kitchen if it is a question of survival, and after only a few days at L’Harmas I knew which pans had bad handles, which skillets heated unevenly, which burners on the stove were not worth bothering to light. I knew where I was going to put bottle caps and broken corks and empty anchovy tins, all separate, and what I was going to do about garbage, and where I would hang the dish towels. I also knew where not to trip on a loose tile, and how to keep ants out of the honey jar forever. I remembered a lot of tricks from the last time in Provence, at Le Tholonet.

I remembered that in summer it is dangerous to make any kind of soup and hope to keep some of it for the next day; it will send off the sweet, sickly death smell in only a few hours, even from a jar in the frigidaire. And I remembered how to stew fruits lightly, to keep them overnight for a cool bowl for breakfast or lunch instead of having to eat them all and immediately. Once more I was washing everything fast in pure water from the well instead of the tap, to keep my people from the queasy gripes and grumbles that can plague countryfolk and that used to frighten pioneer American mothers with names like “summer complaint” and “fruit fever.”

Soon I would go without thinking to the little icebox and that cool dark buttery, about twice a day, to sniff with my curious nose and to discard ruthlessly what it always hurt me to waste: a bowl of berries delicately veiled with a fine grey fuzz that was not there an hour ago, three more rotten tomatoes that were firm and fine last night. I would lift the lid from a pot of leftover ratatouille—was it really all right, or did I catch a whiff, a hint, of death and decay in it? A deep sniff might make me decide that it would be safe to bring it again to the boil, beat it well with some more olive oil, and chill it to be eaten cold with fresh bread for supper, before an omelet. There might be one lamb chop left. It would not be good by noon. I would eat it cold for a secret breakfast, with a glass of red wine, after the family had scattered. Tomorrow would be market again.

In winter, when alone, I ate by the fire on the hearth of the living-dining room. In spring, I carried my plate and glass into the new warmth of sunlight on the terrace, ankle-deep in wild flowers and a hundred tender grasses. In summer, I sat by the bowed shutters in the dining room, dim to baffle the flies, cool already against the blaze of white dusty heat, vibrating with the love call of the cigales. In the autumn, I walked a little away from roof and room to the meadows turning sere, to the pine woods past the wheat field, and I put my back against a tree and looked north toward the Mont Ste. Victoire, rising so arrogant and harsh above the curling foreground. I would think of what I must buy the next day, and load into the baskets, and then sort and store and serve forth in the order of Nature itself: first freshness, then flavor and ripeness, and then decay. And always there were the needs of the people who must live from Nature, and learn to do so to the best of all their powers and not die from the traps that she can lay for them, especially in this ancient teeming land.

It was a good way to live.

—St. Helena, 1966