A Year in Provence (3 page)

The first time this happened, we had gone into Apt to buy veal for the Provençal stew called
pebronata.
We were directed towards a butcher in the old part of town who was reputed to have the master’s touch and to be altogether
très sérieux.
His shop was small, he and his wife were large, and the four of us constituted a crowd. He listened intently as we explained that we wanted to make this particular dish; perhaps he had heard of it.

He puffed up with indignation, and began to sharpen a large
knife so energetically that we stepped back a pace. Did we realize, he said, that we were looking at an expert, possibly the greatest
pebronata
authority in the Vaucluse? His wife nodded admiringly. Why, he said, brandishing ten inches of sharp steel in our faces, he had written a book about it—a
definitive
book—containing twenty variations of the basic recipe. His wife nodded again. She was playing the rôle of senior nurse to his eminent surgeon, passing him fresh knives to sharpen prior to the operation.

We must have looked suitably impressed, because he then produced a handsome piece of veal and his tone became professorial. He trimmed the meat, cubed it, filled a small bag with chopped herbs, told us where to go to buy the best peppers (four green and one red, the contrast in color being for aesthetic reasons), went through the recipe twice to make sure we weren’t going to commit a
bětise
, and suggested a suitable Côtes du Rhône. It was a fine performance.

Gourmets are thick on the ground in Provence, and pearls of wisdom have sometimes come from the most unlikely sources. We were getting used to the fact that the French are as passionate about food as other nationalities are about sport and politics, but even so it came as a surprise to hear Monsieur Bagnols, the floor cleaner, handicapping three-star restaurants. He had come over from Nîmes to sand down a stone floor, and it was apparent from the start that he was not a man who trifled with his stomach. Each day precisely at noon he changed out of his overalls and took himself off to one of the local restaurants for two hours.

He judged it to be not bad, but of course nothing like the Beaumanière at Les Baux. The Beaumanière has three Michelin stars and a 17 out of 20 rating in the Gault-Millau Guide and there, he said, he had eaten a truly exceptional sea bass
en croûte.
Mind you, the Troisgros in Roanne was a superb establishment too, although being opposite the station the setting wasn’t as pretty as Les Baux. The Troisgros has three Michelin stars and a 19½ out of 20 rating in the Gault-Millau Guide. And so it went on, as he adjusted his knee pads and scrubbed away at the floor,
a personal guide to five or six of the most expensive restaurants in France that Monsieur Bagnols had visited on his annual treats.

He had once been in England, and had eaten roast lamb at a hotel in Liverpool. It had been gray and tepid and tasteless. But of course, he said, it is well known that the English kill their lamb twice; once when they slaughter it, and once when they cook it. I retreated in the face of such withering contempt for my national cuisine, and left him to get on with the floor and dream of his next visit to Bocuse.

T
HE
WEATHER
continued hard, with bitter but extravagantly starry nights and spectacular sunrises. One early morning, the sun seemed abnormally low and large, and walking into it everything was either glare or deep shadow. The dogs were running well ahead of me, and I heard them barking long before I could see what they had found.

We had come to a part of the forest where the land fell away to form a deep bowl in which, a hundred years before, some misguided farmer had built a house that was almost permanently in the gloom cast by the surrounding trees. I had passed it many times. The windows were always shuttered, and the only sign of human habitation was smoke drifting up from the chimney. In the yard outside, two large and matted Alsatians and a black mongrel were constantly on the prowl, howling and straining against their chains in their efforts to savage any passers-by. These dogs were known to be vicious; one of them had broken loose and laid open the back of grandfather André’s leg. My dogs, full of valor when confronted by timid cats, had wisely decided against passing too close to three sets of hostile jaws, and had developed the habit of making a detour around the house and over a small steep hill. They were at the top now, barking in that speculative, nervous manner that dogs adopt to reassure themselves when they encounter something unexpected in familiar territory.

I reached the top of the hill with the sun full in my eyes, but I could make out the backlit silhouette of a figure in the trees, a nimbus of smoke around his head, the dogs inspecting him noisily from a safe distance. As I came up to him, he extended a cold, horny hand.

“Bonjour.”
He unscrewed a cigarette butt from the corner of his mouth and introduced himself. “Massot, Antoine.”

He was dressed for war. A stained camouflage jacket, an army jungle cap, a bandolier of cartridges, and a pump-action shotgun. His face was the color and texture of a hastily cooked steak, with a wedge of nose jutting out above a ragged, nicotine-stained mustache. Pale blue eyes peered through a sprouting tangle of ginger eyebrows, and his decayed smile would have brought despair to the most optimistic dentist. Nevertheless, there was a certain mad amiability about him.

I asked if his hunting had been successful. “A fox,” he said, “but too old to eat.” He shrugged, and lit another of his fat Boyards cigarettes, wrapped in yellow maize paper and smelling like a young bonfire in the morning air. “Anyway,” he said, “he won’t be keeping my dogs awake at night,” and he nodded down toward the house in the hollow.

I said that his dogs seemed fierce, and he grinned. Just playful, he said. But what about the time one of them had escaped and attacked the old man? Ah, that. He shook his head at the painful memory. The trouble is, he said, you should never turn your back on a playful dog, and that had been the old man’s mistake.
Une vraie catastrophe.
For a moment, I thought he was regretting the wound inflicted on grandfather André, which had punctured a vein in his leg and required a visit to the hospital for injections and stitches, but I was mistaken. The real sadness was that Massot had been obliged to buy a new chain, and those robbers in Cavaillon had charged him 250 francs. That had bitten deeper than teeth.

To save him further anguish, I changed the subject and asked him if he really ate fox. He seemed surprised at such a
stupid question, and looked at me for a moment or two without replying, as though he suspected me of making fun of him.

“One doesn’t eat fox in England?” I had visions of the members of the Belvoir Hunt writing to
The Times
and having a collective heart attack at such an unsporting and typically foreign idea.

“No, one doesn’t eat fox in England. One dresses up in a red coat and one chases after it on horseback with several dogs, and then one cuts off its tail.”

He cocked his head, astonished.
“Ils sont bizarres, les Anglais.”
And then, with great gusto and some hideously explicit gestures, he described what civilized people did with a fox.

By now, Massot was in a talkative mood. He lived alone, he told me, and company was scarce in the winter. He had spent his life in the mountains, but maybe it was time to move into the village, where he could be among people. Of course, it would be a tragedy to leave such a beautiful house, so calm, so sheltered from the Mistral, so perfectly situated to escape the heat of the midday sun, a place where he had passed so many happy years. It would break his heart, unless—he looked at me closely, pale eyes watery with sincerity—unless he could render me a service by making it possible for one of my friends to buy his house.

I looked down at the ramshackle building huddled in the shadows, with the three dogs padding endlessly to and fro on their rusting chains, and thought that in the whole of Provence it would be difficult to find a less appealing spot to live. There was no sun, no view, no feeling of space, and almost certainly a dank and horrid interior. I promised Massot that I would bear it in mind, and he winked at me. “A million francs,” he said. “A sacrifice.” And in the meantime, until he left this little corner of paradise, if there was anything I wanted to know about the rural life, he would advise me. He knew every centimeter of the forest, where the mushrooms grew, where the wild boar came to drink, which gun to choose, how to train a hound—there was nothing he didn’t know, and this knowledge was mine for the asking. I thanked him.
“C’est normal,”
he said, and stumped off down the hill to his million-franc residence.

W
HEN
I
TOLD
a friend in the village that I had met Massot, he smiled.

“Did he tell you how to cook a fox?”

I nodded.

“Did he try to sell his house?”

I nodded.

“The old
blagueur.
He’s full of wind.”

I didn’t care. I liked him, and I had a feeling that he would be a rich source of fascinating and highly suspect information. With him to initiate me into the joys of rustic pursuits and Monsieur Menicucci in charge of more scientific matters, all I needed now was a navigator to steer me through the murky waters of French bureaucracy, which in its manifold subtleties and inconveniences can transform a molehill of activity into a mountain of frustration.

We should have been warned by the complications attached to the purchase of the house. We wanted to buy, the proprietor wanted to sell, a price was agreed, it was all straightforward. But then we became reluctant participants in the national sport of paper gathering. Birth certificates were required to prove we existed; passports to prove that we were British; marriage certificates to enable us to buy the house in our joint names; divorce certificates to prove that our marriage certificates were valid; proof that we had an address in England. (Our driver’s licenses, plainly addressed, were judged to be insufficient; did we have more formal evidence of where we were living, like an old electricity bill?) Back and forth between France and England the pieces of paper went—every scrap of information except blood type and fingerprints—until the local lawyer had our lives contained in a dossier. The transaction could then proceed.

We made allowances for the system because we were foreigners buying a tiny part of France, and national security clearly had to be safeguarded. Less important business would doubtless be quicker and less demanding of paperwork. We went to buy a car.

It was the standard Citroën
deux chevaux
, a model that has changed very little in the past twenty-five years. Consequently, spare parts are available in every village. Mechanically it is not much more complicated than a sewing machine, and any reasonably competent blacksmith can repair it. It is cheap, and has a
comfortingly low top speed. Apart from the fact that the suspension is made of blancmange, which makes it the only car in the world likely to cause seasickness, it is a charming and practical vehicle. And the garage had one in stock.

The salesman looked at our driver’s licenses, valid throughout the countries of the Common Market until well past the year 2000. With an expression of infinite regret, he shook his head and looked up.

“Non.”

“Non?”

“Non.”

We produced our secret weapons: two passports.

“Non.”

We rummaged around in our papers. What could he want? Our marriage certificate? An old English electricity bill? We gave up, and asked him what else, apart from money, was needed to buy a car.

“You have an address in France?”

We gave it to him, and he noted it down on the sales form with great care, checking from time to time to make sure that the third carbon copy was legible.

“You have proof that this is your address? A telephone bill? An electricity bill?”

We explained that we hadn’t yet received any bills because we had only just moved in. He explained that an address was necessary for the
carte grise
—the document of car ownership. No address, no
carte grise.
No
carte grise
, no car.

Fortunately, his salesman’s instincts overcame his relish for a bureaucratic impasse, and he leaned forward with a solution: If we would provide him with the deed of sale of our house, the whole affair could be brought to a swift and satisfactory conclusion, and we could have the car. The deed of sale was in the lawyer’s office, fifteen miles away. We went to get it, and placed it triumphantly on his desk, together with a check. Now could we have the car?

“Malheureusement, non.”
We must wait until the check had been cleared, a delay of four or five days, even though it was drawn on a local bank. Could we go together to the bank and clear it immediately? No, we couldn’t. It was lunchtime. The two areas of endeavor in which France leads the world—bureaucracy and gastronomy—had combined to put us in our place.