I am besieged (there must be two, maybe three of you) by requests for photos while we’re here in France. It ain’t easy. I don’t shoot a lot, for one thing, and for two I’m a persnickety, meticulous, if not obsessive worker. So usually no photo appears [snap] just like that.

But this was easy. I shot a few shots just outside my door. No muss, no fuss.

These images are all, as the French say, "nature," which is not to say they’re something other than natural—I mean they’re photos of flowers for God’s sake—but they are unadulterated: unedited and unchanged, more or less direct from the memory card of my camera. This also means I am disinclined to respond to critiques from the photo-geeks and other geeks out there. These are not optimal photographically speaking… not ready for prime time. But they’re more than good enough.

You have to go to the bertha Web site to see the mini-portfolio:

http://bertha.com

I made it easy, on the home page, click on the link (the photo or the words) with the picture of the flower.

What you’ll see are common hollyhocks, which abound in the village in every imaginable hue, from deep purple (almost black) to white. The three specimens here are what, as I say, are 15 feet from our door. The other shots are of what we call oleander (which are even closer to the door, in huge pots), and what the French call (and I prefer) laurier rose. Either way, for you botanical and Latin freaks, that’s Nerium oleander. The hollyhocks are Alcea rosea. In the background of one of the oleander shots you can even see the white slatted bench made famous in my by now world-renowned obsequies for the former owner of our little house, M. Jean-Michel Braunstein < http://perdiem.bertha.com/2007/06/2007june13wedne.html >.

That’s it. No more for today. No. No questions. Please.

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Villecroze, le vieux village, June 2007

Nominally, the animal for which France is best known is not the coq, the cock or rooster that is the symbol for the country. It is the dog, for which the French have a legendary abiding affection, one that transcends even that most dog-loving of countries, the United States. In the U.S., we lavishly treat our pets with an unrivaled level of fiscal imprudence. We spend money on our dogs like there’s no future. We ostentatiously display our love for our animals for all the world to see and, presumably, envy for its manifestation of our national traits of grandiosity, generosity, and publicity.

I wish to take nothing away from Americans’ love of dogs. Most dog owners are serious and sincere lovers of their animals, and they treat them accordingly to the best of their ability.

However, we have nothing on the French for their sense of inclusion, and their undemonstrative (it is unconscious, the absolute opposite of ostentatious, not to mention vulgar, that is, the depths to which some Americans stoop to provide proof of their affection) willingness to make dogs part of every aspect of their lives. In America we tolerate barriers, especially in public, to the presence of dogs where humans gather, especially for purposes of nourishing themselves, imbibing, gathering socially, bathing or any number of quotidian activities that, within the constipated American sensibility are somehow vaguely private in nature, and, being private, their violation is tantamount to spreading a disease intentionally. Hence, we treat dogs like terrorists and exclude them from the most public of places.

The most familiar example is dining. In Cambridge, dogs are even excluded from sitting with their humans when they are seated outside, at tables and chairs that occupy space that is otherwise used as a public walkway.

In France, famously, the dog is welcome wherever his human is welcome (though there is a sinister and growing countervailing sentiment at work in France and certain establishments are beginning to exclude canine guests). The one disgusting and increasingly uncontrolled consequence of the casual acceptance of dogs in the lives of the French is the universal presence of dog shit wherever you go that has paved byways. It’s a sign of the ubiquity and the otherwise unparalleled acceptance of dogs as equals. You travel the roads in rural France, and hardly out of sight are men stopped at the side of the road, relieving themselves. I suggest the nonplussed (at worst) response to dogs relieving themselves, without constraint or self-consciousness (on the part of their humans, naturally — a dog’s gotta’ do what a dog’s gotta’ do, unless they’ve been trained to do it some other way: dogs are pretty much trained about the same way the men are) is the final proof of the fundamental identity of dog and human in the French sensibility. Dogs are merely a furrier, four-footed kind of human here in La Belle France.

Hence my thesis. The real king of the roost of the animal kingdom, at least here in rural France, is the cat. Cats rule. Every village, every town, every city throughout the great southern plains and the massifs that penetrate them is overrun by felines. Cats are everywhere, untamed and untrammeled. There are two, perhaps three, types of cats in the taxonomy of the domestic feline Français.

The house cat, that most pampered of beasts, who lives with its human, and stays indoors when not allowed gingerly out to lounge for a bit in the confines of the town square, take in a little sun, warm its interior organs is readily identified. It redefines clinical obesity. It is capable of no more than a waddle so fat is this creature with overindulgence. It disports itself in aloof regal splendor, magnified by its own bulk. Its importance is increased by its sheer physical mass, like some U.S. Senators. It disdains contact, and, as the quintessence of all cat behavior displays the greatest amount of sheer ignorance of the human presence. Its human, who supplies that overabundance of provender, is tolerated.

The other two types are almost indistinguishable. If the domestic household fat cat is somebody’s, very much so and exclusively, there is usually a bevy of beasts of somewhat a less definitive status, slightly tame, slightly domesticated, and clearly very much tolerant of the human presence (as they know whereof is the source of their dried bits of baguette, of their smidgens of table scrapings, of their anonymous small piles of kibble, which appear and reappear mysteriously in various spots in every neighborhood). These are, like that poor creature, one of the characters in "West Side Story," and the only female member of the gang of Jets, known as "Anybody’s." It is likely, though I am only speculating, that one of the more favorable of this breed, usually a matter of temperament or a comely appearance, that from time to time, one of these essentially unclaimed beasts becomes a house cat, trades up as it were, exchanging a far ranging freedom for the security of an assured supply of excessive grub at all hours of the day and night, only having to tolerate immoderate displays of affection from their adoptive human, who no doubt will actually expect to make frequent and, hard as it is to say, affectionate physical contact.

I used to be cat-tolerant, at worst ambivalent, allowing myself the delusion that these "pets" were actually capable of interacting in a way that engaged at some primal level the sharing of sympathetic feeling and attraction, if not an actual mammalian emotional interdependency. I am over that now. I do not delude myself that cats are capable of anything more than looking at me, sometimes with a gaze one can be persuaded by oneself is a gaze of gentle tolerance, if not the mildest of affection, but is actually the look of a predator pondering the ease or difficulty of converting a particularly large specimen of prey into meat.

The cats that are "anybody’s" are sustained by the community. The community consists of a certain number of permanent residents who see a superfluity of small, seemingly harmless creatures, covered with fur and so with the potentiality of being the recipients of loving caresses and hence being the willing receptacles for excess amounts of expressions of human kindness (dogs are not sufficient in this regard, especially as they are, as I say, essentially a four-legged form of human that actually seeks our company, no different than another companion, of the hominid two-legged variety, and we all know how fickle and unsatisfying and unpredictable those relationships can be). So deluded these members of the community make regular, if not frequent, and continual contributions to the kitty larder, that is, the paving stones and asphalt streets, the steps and walls and alleyways of the village. Scraps and crumbs, bits and pieces, manufactured feed and leftovers appear mysteriously, and without end, in the same places.

The cats have it made. Furthermore it would seem that all that is expected of them is that they reproduce. Which they do of course. And their prolificacy is prodigious (if I may use a redundancy to describe the legendary proportions of this animal’s ability to reproduce far beyond the biblical injunction regarding fruitfulness). Just as there is an endless supply of food, from unidentifiable sources, there is an endless supply of cats to consume it. This means that at any time, there is a vast population of adults, adolescents, and kittens that abound. They work in shifts. Some lounge on cars, on terraces, tabletops, chairs, chaise longues, benches, tops of stone walls, on steps, in archways, doorways, and on window sills. There are flower pots, flower boxes, gutters, drains… In short they are everywhere, sunning themselves, scampering, playing and pawing one another. These latter activities are the speciality of the kittens who seem to know they elicit the most heartfelt response to their seeming helplessness and diminutive stature.

But one should never mistake this temporary appearance for anything more than their part in the larger strategy of keeping the food chain open and full.

The cats, from kittens to doddering elders, are of every hue and variety (I refuse, despite the insistence of zoological experts, to differentiate one "breed" from another, purely on the basis of some insignificant superficial characteristics of coloring and abundance or lack thereof of fur, its thickness and length also notwithstanding). There are calicos, and money cats, there are tabbies of every possible variation of hue, there are brindled cats, palominos, pintos, all black, and all white, and all of every color in between. In short there’s a design choice for every possible taste. Again, an unscrupulous, if not brilliant strategy, to ensure that every susceptible human will respond favorably to one of these creatures, and leave out FOOD. Which is always commonly consumed, as it is impossible to single out your favorite for exclusive feeding rights, unless you have become so susceptible as to take the rash step of bringing one of these creatures into your home so you can treat it like a favorite duck or goose whose liver needs fattening to grotesque proportions.

Finally, there are what I suspect are the only real workers, and the only really worthwhile members of the species within this taxonomy. I speak of the essentially semi-feral cats, who are, admirably, so disdainful of humans, and sufficiently honest about it, that they avoid us altogether. They are visible, if at all, at best, as skulking shadows, running in an instant the opposite way if they suspect from your regard or your posture, or your sudden change in direction as you move, that you may show the slightest interest in lessening the distance between yourself and them.

Presumably these latter subsist on the meager leavings of their more duplicitous and narcissistic cousins, and as well by hunting for their natural prey, which, as we are, after all, in the country, is lying out there in abundance. They needn’t worry about the competition from their semi-civilized brethren, and not ever at all in the least from their fully domesticated relatives who, even if the instinct bestirred them, their sheer bulk would prevent them physically from taking the proper steps, never mind a proper pounce, so as to be able to catch the odd field mouse, or chipmunk, or baby rabbit, or whatever other disgusting forms of wild rodentia they feed upon.

So there it is. The Provençal cat. Ubiquitous, unavoidable, and hence the true animal of France.

Continue reading →

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There is a story running in the NYTimes today, entitled “The Boys in the Band are in AARP,” about how middle-aged band members, reaching back to their younger years, and still playing in their suburban garages the same raucous music that stereotypically drove their parents crazy have now entered the age of retirement. To allude to another stereotype, I must suppose that the sub-text, the ironic sub-text, is that they are supposed to be grabbing shuffle boards, or perhaps tennis rackets, not their “axes.”

The story is here on the Times site: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/fashion/17dadbands.html?em&ex=1182225600&en=d6146faca9a61581&ei=5087%0A [may require registration to be read]

I guess if we had all taken up Mozart on period instruments in our teens, we’d all now be playing chamber music in the garage, and that would still be newsworthy, but not ironic… So the irony is the news, not the revivalism. What’s wrong with people continuing to play the music they played their entire lives? Why is it news? There was a story also about "tattoo regret" in the Times today. Maybe it would be news if former rockers had gone from the Monkees to Mendelssohn on period instruments.

Not that it would have made any difference to me. All of my parents’ entreaties to take up an instrument, meaning anything from the violin to the clarinet (I did toy with the idea of the oboe—I don’t know why the oboe, but there it is, though the Mozart oboe concerto is one great piece of music) had a resounding response from me, of “NO!” Most of my friends, from the age of ten on, had among their daily dose of chores music practice, and their weekly lessons. Some of them became quite proficient. Most not, and I never hear music played but rarely by my peers, I mean what has always been called classical music. There are no jazz players, alas, but one, and only a distant acquaintance, who is a famous blues and jazz pianist whom I met through another friend, and they knew one another, anomalously, because they all lived in the suburbs (now there’s a story, “Bebop Cats have moved to Belmont”).

When I was growing up, the only music to be taken seriously was classical music, and its study was as de rigeur as soccer team play now is in the affluent suburbs of most American cities, Boston included. Jazz was played by blacks, period, who smoked something called “reefer” that made you “high,” and it was all kind of arcane and forbidden, but not in a bad way so much as it was a mystery both not to be fathomed or explored.

The nature of musical preoccupations and the playing of it, even on a voluntary basis, with enthusiasm, began to change when I entered college in the early 60s, when rock ‘n roll began to enter the mainstream with the full effect on popular culture of the wild popularity of the Beatles, and the instantly legendary stories of their start in lower-class British “skifflle bands.” It was the music almost anyone could afford to play, and anyone could learn, it was so simple, at least at the start. And for boys, there was the cachet of being in a band, and more importantly the apparent allure to women (or girls, should I say, as we were all still gawky children, fondling and groping one another experimentally even as so many boys groped and fondled their instruments in the struggle to become proficient to the point of having something called “chops”).

For me, there was still no attraction, if anything greater repulsion, to the idea of learning to play even a guitar, with the aim of plunking away at folk or rock favorites. Perhaps if the prospect of playing Scarlatti keyboard sonatas with some grace and feeling were as easy as I was told it was to learn, say, the three basic universal chords of blues, I would have rushed out with the same avidity as my friends, and bought, well what? A used Steinway baby grand? They cost a great deal more than a Harmony Stratotone, and my budget didn’t allow that, not without a severe crimp in my vinyl record spending ability. And it was a lot easier to listen to records of great musicians, and took up a lot less timedoing so than trying to attain the same proficiency, less time than it would have taken first to begin and then to dedicate myself to learning, which I knew would have required years. Also I knew, that it was almost a hopeless case for anyone more than 10 years old, even those with the magical qualities called “prodigy,” to begin to learn with the expectation of being able to play anything seriously once you were well past that age. Some do it, but they do indeed have prodigious talent, and the attainment of their skills has taken what seems to me to be super-human concentration and dedication.

Of course, most of the people I knew, and the hordes I didn’t know, but only knew of, had neither the chops nor the zeal, nor the dedication to take their show on the road and try to make in the world of professional music, for even rock and blues and folk were serious and professional once making a living at it figured into one’s intentions. Indeed I have met far more classical musicians who took that road, meeting them later in their lives. Such individuals would not have been visible in my youth, being sequestered for hours of practice and further segregated into schools or among faculties far outside the ken of ordinary youths like myself.

One did hear about those garage bands however. And it never stopped. It has fallen out that, among my male friends today, at least, there are a number of former rock musicians—not professionals mind you, but many amateurs, and even a few who, in their past, reached a crossroads and chose the more mundane path of electrical engineering, let us say, than donning a motorcycle jacket, and greasing their hair (either with pomade or by the simple expedient of never washing it and never cutting it), and playing those immortal few chords on their six- or 12-string "axes" every night at “gigs,” fending off the “chicks“ (or it was the drums, or the bass, whatever, there was an enduring quality to the sense of kinship with the music and their instruments). Now that we are all thinking about the prospect becoming old and tattered, paltry things not so very long from now, it is not surprising to see stories, especially not surprising to see ironic ones, about how the music goes on.

Nevertheless, it is not such an unusual thing that people would cling to their music. Yet I wonder, aside from what I said, that is, it’s obvious that the playing into one’s seniority is not the news—classical musicians are notable for playing continually until they keel over, into their 80s and 90s; Vladimir Horowitz, the legendary Russian pianist, who played and lived into his 80s, said the playing kept him young—why it’s news. In fact it’s common.

From the headline to this story, the allusion to ”The Boys in the Band,“ I was sure the narrative, and the point, would be about closet gays, now in late middle age, being mainstream, utterly out of the closet. The play and movie with that name dates from the same garage band era, the late 60s and early 70s, that the news story about greying amateur garage musicians still rocking on alludes to. But it is not the story, of course, but should have been. Now that would have been news.

In my youth, everyone admitted to a love of rock, and, those who could, would broadcast their involvement with the playing of it. But no one admitted to being gay. That was a true forbidden zone. It’s not news that something so ordinary and quotidian — playing music, however raggedly or with finesse — has remained so for an entire generation. It is news, however, when the verboten has become so mainstream as no longer to be noticeable. The phenomenon itself, the transformation of the extraordinary and the banished to the ordinary, if not the mundane, gives eternal hope to the prospect that what is always so hard to accept today for the mainstream will become not only acceptable, but alluring.

This Times story reaches back not quite far enough, for the true bad boy days of rockers goes back to the 50s, when the few musicians who played the evil music called rock ‘n roll, the ones who originated the greaser image and the clothing emulated by those poor British boys who made such dress common and desirable, were themselves in their 20s and even 30s way back then (when we were merely children, or none even born yet, as some AARP members can attest), which means they are well into their dotage — not into their garages — if they are not already dead. And the death of old people, who used to do things that were outrageous in their day, but are commonplace now, especially among middle class respectable people with bulging waist lines and dust bunnies on their Stratocasters, isn’t front page. Not to me. It’s not even back of the book.

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The basic centuries-old Provençal stone farmhouse, with terra-cotta tiled roof, shutters, and surrounded by a wheat field in which also stands a lone tree of classic proportions of such beauty it drives Elaine Scarry to write a sequel to her essay is called, in the indigenous language, a mas. The “s” is not pronounced. Just as silent is a Provençal realtor if you ask him to show you one. “There are no more” my realtor told me it’s almost six years ago, when I showed up to go house-hunting.

The proverbial song for which you could buy such a treasure for pennies on the dollar, back in the 60s, or the 70s was it, is the song without words in the 21st century. They’ve all been snapped up and rebuilt and rebuilt and expanded, tricked out, and swimming pooled, and the prices are through the roof. Yet what always sells every American, Brit, Swede or what have you on trying to realize that romance instantly triggered in every Western soul whose body sets foot on the deep russet soil of deep Provence is the mas, the ancient home of man and beast living off that great red earth, and taking in the beauty that surrounds at every degree of the compass.

We first tasted the heady wine of French provincial life in a mas. It is a three bedroom beauty, or a nondescript typical entity, depending on your point of view, that was owned by a sister Cantabrigian I encountered only by the serendipity of the concentration of like sensibilities in the city that’s the home of the world’s most opinionated zip code, and the happy coincidence of my seeking something a little different for my first vacation in mythical Provence, and her willingness to rent to any vetted American with 500 bucks to pay her rent for a week in what proved to be paradise.

Joanne’s farmhouse is down on what I now refer to familiarly as the plain (as we are up another 150 or 160 meters or so in the village atop the hill that overlooks not only all the mas below, but every other grange (barn), chateau (not “castle,” but simply a very large house with many rooms and usually owned by a very rich man as traditional lineal descent of ownership is through the male), every bergerie (sheep barn), cabanon (cottage) and every sort of any kind of appartenance (outbuilding) visible from our commanding height for about three or four miles around). There are not only the aforementioned bedrooms, but one bathroom, with a huge tub next to a window through which a friendly neighborhood goat would often stick its head while you were washing your altogether, and a toilet, but no sink—on the ground level, you washed your face and hands in the sink in the kitchen, with the produce and dishes. A water closet and wash basins were randomly distributed in the upper floor, reachable by two separate, yet equal stairways. Neither stairway provided access to the other part of the floor. The stairway from the salon, or living room, curved to the right and left you at the door to a bedroom which had a separate toilette including water closet and hand sink. The other stairway, which faced the entry door, curved to the left, and left you in a hall off which were disposed two bedrooms—the master bedroom, because it was largest, with the largest bed in the house, and with a large armoire, but no amenities by which one could perform one’s ablutions, and next to it, a small bedroom with two very tiny beds accompanied in one corner by a triangular hand sink set into the walls where they met.

Off this latter hallway was another doorway, locked, about which we received no instruction in the lengthy typewritten sheaf of papers that told us a variety of things about life in “Le Cleou,” which is how I learned early on that even the most humble of dwellings had a name, and which included what to do with the poubelle (trash—trudge up the hill with it and about ten yards down the road to a town dumpster with a lid, made of puke-green thick-walled polyethylene: the standard issue throughout Provence and all France. On trash collection day, these get lifted by a hydraulic device on a garbage truck that makes the rounds). We found a key that fit the lock and turned it, and found a rustic, unfinished attic, smelling sweetly yet vaguely of hay, of which there was little evidence, and which contained a rude wooden stairway, roughly but sturdily fashioned, and fairly recently, leading to a door in what seemed to be a gable, and which offered the lure of the possibility of a view, from the roof, of the wheat field and abandoned stone piggery below the facade of the house. On the door was a sign that said not to open it, so of course we did, and found a little terrasse (a platform or deck, tiled with terra cotta) and a breathtaking view not only of the wheat field in front of it, but another to the right of the house and on to the fields and hills beyond.

We bothered ourselves not at all with the mystery of interdicting the use to guests of this little secret taste of the purview of masters of the land (probably something as prosaic and sad as an insurance constraint). We bothered ourselves every chance we got that visit and every visit thereafter for several years, by ourselves, and with friends who had the daring and the wanderlust sufficient to join us in what we thought of a poor man’s paradise—it was not, after all, a chateau—to share a glass of Provençal rosé—the wonderful secret, among so many secrets, of imbibers in the south of France, the land of wonderful reds and whites—and watch the sunset.

Also clearly evident from this attic was a part of the house that clearly was meant to be sequestered. From the locked confines of the large loft that gave out onto the deck we could see there was another locked chamber, only the upper portion of which we could see: essentially a view of the joists of the ceiling of a room below. Clearly proper access to this room, hitherto unnoticed and unsuspected, was from the ground. In our haste to enter the house through the front door, we had sashayed with our bags and baggage right past a decrepit pair of barn doors, dark with age, and with no sign of an invitation to be opened. We opened them, and discovered the source of that deep sweet smell of mown wheat or straw. Sheafs of it, scattered in odd places on the packed earth floor, for who knows how long. There was a capacious loft within this space, quite deceptively small from outside of it. Rusting odd bits of metal, of some previous indecipherable utility, hung on the walls. Garage? Storage for equipment?

I later researched the architecture of such buildings and discovered that, in fact, it may likely have been put to both uses and more. However, originally, there was a singular intent to this room. It was the home of the animals, the sheep and goats in this part of France, that belonged to the farmer who had built the mas originally, and plowed that field below, which Joanne owned, but prudently rented out each year to a neighboring farmer to plant in wheat for his own uses. No doubt it kept his donkey or horse, for the plowing, as well.

The mas, in short, was a duplex, home to man and his beasts, living close by, and sharing one another’s warmth and company. The farmer was spared the exertions of creating extra buildings to house his few animals, and their proximity ensured an economy of many dimensions, of additional effort to milk the beasts, of extra fuel and extra storage to keep them warm and keep them fed. And, though this must have been some ingrained knowledge, the lesson that we are all meant to be one, not only with the earth, but with our fellow creatures, even the dumb beasts, who give of themselves for our sustenance, and sometimes give even of their lives for our hunger for flesh. And we do not idly eat a beast we have fed, and milked, and led to pasture, and embraced for warmth. We do not idly live in intimacy with other warm-blooded creatures without learning something about the need to live a certain way with all creatures, if not most of all our fellow men.

We would no doubt call it an experiment in living today. But it was necessity in the day. And we would not do it at all in the great American cities in which we cluster and call civilization, because civilization circumscribes our lives in ways we no longer think about. And harboring a sheep in one’s house would require the sundering of dozens, if not hundreds of ordinances, all created for the public good, and our own safety.

Next time, I will speak of the way we live today, both in that great American city, huddled as close to one another as the peasant was to his goats and chickens and sheep in a time not so long ago, as well as among the descendants of those peasants, who still farm the land, and milk the sheep and the goats, and savor the rich heady golden eggs of those chickens that still cluck among my neighbors gardens in the plain down below.

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In France, I live in a 14th century (mostly) stone house, a maison de village, in a tiny village with a sufficiently intact air about it that it was used, with little to hide, as the setting for many scenes in a French movie shot here last summer. The movie was based on two books by the beloved master French novelist, Marcel Pagnol, largely autobiographical as was so much of his work, and more or less taking place over one hundred years ago when he was a boy growing up in Provence.

Our house has many faults, including an elusive irreparable dampness (a fault of centuries-old meter thick walls of rock and rubble and other elements of masonry through several ages of the art). It has had several other defects needing repair. Nevertheless, it is, in all respects, relatively no trouble at all, and a place of readily assumed contentment and pleasure. The little house has no doubt grown (in height, and perhaps breadth, sunk into the street, and been added to, haphazardly, if pragmatically, through the centuries, and through the administration of these regions by many ducal and county and monarchical administrations prior to the present epoch of a succession of five republics.

It has been renovated and revived, most recently since the middle of the 20th century. But it is basically sturdy and well-constructed. Its faults in workmanship are no hardship to correct.

In the United States, I live in a condominium apartment, in a very small complex with eight other owners. Our condominium was originally three buildings — brownstones of a block of brownstones built by one developer in approximately 1890 — to house three families, each in a separate dwelling. Time, and the vagaries of the self-serving mischief of typical city dwelling owners of property close to a world-famous university, with an eye to fortune and little regard to the law, have converted our three buildings into two, now housing, in the aggregate, nine separate apartments and as many households. Among the several alterations made to the buildings in their first 39 years, all quite illegally we understand from the Cambridge Historical Commission, was the addition of first wooden porches that were later converted with a skin of brick to permanent additions to the rear of the three—now two—buildings.

It was insane to impose these changes, especially in defiance (if not sheer willful ignorance) of what few codes and regulations were in force at the time, and particularly through the use of the inferior materials and shoddy designs and bad workmanship that were implemented to accomplish the creation of these enlarged tenements. For such did the elegant three-story townhouse become after these violent transformations.

It all reminds me of the difference [you think I’m weird from my other utterances—hold on to your metaphorical hats] between what appeared as one of the first expressions or mottoes of our young nation and that of another country, with whom we had and have close ties. I mean, in the first instance, the statement on the Great Seal of the United States, “E Pluribus Unum,” in continuous service as an official phrase of our notional essence since the end of the eighteenth century. Its usual meaning, more or less directly from the Latin, is taken to mean, “From the many, one,” which is to say we are a single nation comprised of many people. That is the least antagonistic way I can think of providing some explication of the phrase. I will have other interpretations to apply by and by.

At about the same time, in France, an equally (by now) famous phrase became the standard, the watch cry, and the motto of this great nation. I am speaking, of course, of the triumphant formulation of three nominatives of significant import and meaning, then, and continuing so today: namely “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” Three nouns that even the most doltish and ill-schooled U.S. college attendees can translate and recognize, given the easy cognate relationship with their English equivalents. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. It appears everywhere in France, and almost universally in one most unusual place, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

In the U.S. we buttress a whole phalanx of mottoes and sayings, perhaps starting with E Pluribus etc. and ending with that ringing phrase that appears on the preponderance of our coinage, much of our other currency, and wherever we can stick it on governmental buildings, especially courthouses and the chambers therein, and that is, “In God We Trust.”
Now, the curious place that the French rallying cry, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity appears almost universally, is above the doors of churches, especially those of the Napoleonic era. At that time, the doughty Corsican emperor had whatever might have been graven above the entries of the mostly Catholic places of worship struck out—obliterated. Further, his regime simply seized these edifices for the state—to ensure that the citizenry understood that there was now only one power on earth to rule their lives, and its central figure no longer resided in Rome, but in Paris. And above each doorway, he ordered that the new order—those three familiar words—be painted for all to be reminded that in his realm all were equal and free and consanguineous, if only in some metaphorical sense.

Also, he wanted, of course, of his citizens that the kingdom, or more accurately the empire, they should quiver with excitement to revere was not the kingdom to come, but the greatest kingdom on earth, that of the beautiful (La Belle) France, and that the ruling principles were no longer of spirit, but of pure abstraction, and they applied to all who submitted to the designation "French," before all other identities they believed themselves to embody. And this was a distinction not merely for an elect who took the spirit of one who had died some two thousand years before into their hearts so as to qualify their election and make it holy.
Not quite a state religion, but, as it was for us in the fledgling United States, some attention was being paid to the bad results of the mix of church and state. Of this proposition, and several others suggested by this mere handful of words I’ve cited — the words that separate our sense of ourselves from the sense the French have of themselves, and the consequences on our daily lives—even into our homes, our houses and apartments and all our dwellings, I will take up the discussion tomorrow. At the moment, it’s late evening in France, and I’m going to bed.

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We bought our house from the wife and daughter of the man named Jean-Michel Braunstein. Indeed, the easiest way to identify where we are located to locals is to say “chez Braunstein.” No shame in this. It’s like saying the Longfellow House on Brattle Street in Cambridge, or that so-and-so up the street bought the William James house, or, diagonally across the way from it, the e.e. cummings house. Don’t ask me who the current proprietors’ names are. I have no idea.

In short, Braunstein stuck by way of appellation and identity. Maybe by the time we have lived here as long as they did, at least some 30 years, and with the same infrequency of residence — the Braunstein famille came here mainly on weekends, with some regularity, but that still only adds up to a maximum of 104 days a year, more or less, and we are already achieving that, I think, even with our ragged and unpredictable schedule of visits — the locals will know this venerable pile of rocks as chez Dinin-Kennedy. We’d prefer “L’Antidote,” the name we gave it when we bought it (and the specially commissioned terra-cotta emaillé plaque we ordered still sits in a drawer, for lack of incredibly thin masonry screws that will be needed to mount it because the artisan made very tiny holes for them when he fired it in the kiln), but we’ll settle for the more familiar and likely nominal, as opposed to notional, designation.

In any event, however the house is known now or will be, the no doubt estimable Jean-Michel Braunstein, like Longfellow, James, and cummings, must now be counted among the deceased. We just learned this from our neighbors a day or so ago. In fact, the fatality occurred only days ago itself, apparently as Braunstein, exiting his house in Marseille, entered the street and was struck by a motorcyclist. That suddenly, and that final.

Unfortunately we live in a time, with activities at all levels and modes of social organization, under circumstances both personal and universal, that hardly another memento mori is needed. Nor would any greater notice be taken, save that, as always in these cases, when it strikes so close to home (in the several senses of that expression in this particular case), it has a greater shock.

I never really knew Monsieur Braunstein, except by hearsay. In fact, I met him only once, a chance encounter, as he happened to be here in their weekend house, sitting on the bench that sits itself just in front of the facade, inches to the left of the only window on our street level that faces the place in front of us. The bench is in the shade of the Napoleonic-era elm that looms above everything at this end of the village. We were somewhere in the midst of the complex legal process prelude to changing hands on the property.

Apparently, the bench was a favorite, or at least a regular, roost of his. He smoked cigars. This was a fact that, to me, immediately raised the promise that he was more likely than not a regular and reasonable fellow and a civilized gentleman, susceptible to logic, and innately of good will. Who knows?

For one thing, most likely, as with all cigar-smoking men who are married, he discovered the common antipathy of women for cigars, their smoke, their aroma (though usually a stronger designation of the impact on the olfactory system is used, often a term in the vernacular), and, as a consequence, for the smoker himself, however much and in however many other ways he might endear himself to his spouse. And he found, simultaneously, that if he chose to smoke, he should engage himself immediately in self-banishment to the out of doors.

In keeping with the tricks that memory plays on us, and not knowing in advance what would prove to be the singularity of our greeting that day (we were introduced by the realtor — one of Braunstein’s myriad friends among the locals), I did not pay very much attention. And in my mind at that time, and for eternity, as I have no reason to alter my recollections henceforth, he rose, cigar in his left hand, bearded, and shuffled over to where we stood. We were introduced one to the other, and we shook hands, and mumbled indecipherable words in French in tones of amity.

That was it.

I met his wife and daughter, the legal proprietors, in the lawyer’s office when all present signed various deeds and notarized documents and the large skeleton key to the front door was handed over to us. The wife was a well-endowed shortish, well-dressed bourgeoise of a certain age. I always thought of Braunstein as much older than myself, perhaps, because, even on the day we met in the bucolic shaded and very rural confines of the village courtyard under the elms and the chestnut trees, he was wearing a white dress shirt and tie, though he was shod in soft shoes of some kind, perhaps slippers, and dress trousers, suitable for work. In fact, he was probably about my age or not very much older. He was still working, as an avocat, a specialist in certain general applications of the law, and intellectual property law, in Marseille, when he was so violently struck down as to lose his life.

His wife, and the much jazzier appearing daughter, though giving off the same air of hauteur and the custom of habits of those who enjoy great comfort with frequent familiarity, were not attractive people. Comely enough, but this is not what I meant.

I don’t recall the precise sources of the gossip we received, but the reputation of the wife suffered by it in our ken. All in all, it seemed she was a shrill, loud-voiced termagant. And Braunstein often sat on that bench. Even more often, apparently, he would repair for an approximately 90-second amble down the hill, through the parking lot to the break in the shrubs and other flora of the grove of trees along the hillside just behind the town cemetery below. In this location is situated the “jardin” or garden as is the designation given in rural France to any bit of land that is not actually serving to support a dwelling on its surface. This jardin consisting of approximately half-an-acre, and entirely detached from our house, as the required walk for access attests, was part of the deal.

The jardin consists of protected land in these rural precincts, meaning that nothing can be built on it, or even in it, and it cannot be farmed, though plantings may be made, and we could maintain a potager or “kitchen garden” for the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, and herbs and such for our own use. On this bit of land, our very own tiny handle on French countryside, sits a picnic table of a sort familiar to picnickers in any park in America, a sort of one-piece set of rough joinery that combines benches that face one another across a table, and which requires a half-climbing, half-crouching operation to engage oneself in its confines. There is also a stone barbecue, on which sat a grill when we acquired the property, a bit of metal-work that has since disappeared. Emerging from the stoney facade of the barbecue, at a height of about 2/3 of a meter, is a spigot, meant for water. Emerging from the opposite side of the rocks supporting this device is a length of industrial rubber hose that disappears quickly into the ground, though it can easily be traced across the road that leads to the parking lot, and into the property across the way from our jardin. Apparently Braunstein had an arrangement with the owner of the opposite property whereby for some token or a nominal annual fee, water was fed through this hose as the spontaneous need might arise to extinguish the occasional barbecue embers once cooking was done. We have never used the barbecue in 5 1/2 years. Shortly after we acquired the property in February 2002, the water that emerged from the spigot when it was turned for a period of a day or two, was promptly turned off, and it has never run since.

The only other man-made item of note in the jardin is a very typical structure for this region (and others in France). It is designated a cabanon.It is constructed entirely of stone, except for wooden framed windows of glass on two sides, a wooden door for entry, with a lock, and a terra-cotta roof of common interlocking roofing tiles. It is a quite sturdy little structure, equipped with no utility services, neither water, nor electricity, nor gas.

The cabanon was built at some time in the past, though most likely during the tenure of the Braunsteins, and entirely illegally, given the interdiction on building any new structure of any size on practically any part of the surrounding countryside for many kilometers in all directions. The  cabanon measures, let us say, approximately three meters by three meters, and is tall enough to allow a man to stand inside of it.

Braunstein used it to store a variety of gardening tools as well as other associated implements. These he used, I understand, with some regularity, following that famous dictum of Pangloss to his protegé that one must cultivate one’s garden. Indeed, Braunstein most often could be found, I am told — when not in the confines of his wife’s snug little cottage (now ours), or sitting on his bench in the place — in his jardin, a long-handled tool of agriculture, a rake, or a hoe, or a spade, in his hands, vigorously working the ground, muttering to himself, a cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth, blowing puffs of smoke as he spoke  sotto voce and at length to himself. This happened often, after a short period of time had passed from a bout of loud female remonstrances that could be clearly heard issuing from the interior of chez Braunstein.

And this is how I see Monsieur Braunstein in heaven, if there is a heaven, cultivating the celestial furrows, cigar alight, and muttering unto eternity.

My image of him is tempered further and refined by my earliest musings on this mystery man, musings that lasted only a brief while after we had bought his wife’s wonderful little house in the country that affords us so much happiness and pleasure. We quickly faced the tasks of feathering this new nest, which was left bereft not only of every stick of furnishings, but, as is the French style when leaving a house, stripped of every fixture in every room. The only thing left (we are sure because of the inconvenience and expense of removing them, though French law seems to dictate that appliances that are fixed to the floor or walls cannot be removed) was a giant, expensive, cast iron stove of the venerable marque of Godin, still in business today — an excellent stove. It has been a long time that I have thought about Monsieur Braunstein at all, never mind to muse idly on his history, real or imagined.

There are at least two legendary Braunsteins I know of, and I doubt there is a connection, though one never knows, and I now probably never shall.

The company that makes the famous zig-zag cigarette papers (so named because of the zig-zagged pattern formed by the interleaving of each sheet of flimsy wrapping used to roll a cigarette of tobacco or what have you) was started by the Braunstein Fréres of Paris in the 19th century. Their famous logo, of a Zouave, a fierce French soldier of a type originating in North Africa, features the colorful costume and the wonderful flowing facial hair of these stout warriors — and one source of that image I have in my head of Braunstein with a healthy and enviable beard.

The other Braunstein was also bearded, though with a more delicate, if not effete, though distinctive, tonsorial trim to it. That Braunstein, which was his family birth name, was better known ultimately to the world as Léon Trotsky, his nom de révolution. It is too much to expect, let alone to ask, that there is any connection with one or the other of these possible sets of forebears. In fact I reel at the possibility that Braunstein, my Braunstein, was not only somehow connected with the famous rolling papers, but, in his bones, was a rabble-rousing, trouble-making yid as well.

If so, or if not, may he rest in peace cultivating that garden of his.

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• fraises des bois
• about fifteeen varieties of cherries
• stone fruit you don’t have to go to California for
• threee to five bakeries in any town of 2500 people
• Guilt-free foie gras (I should say Charlie Trotter-free foie gras, that little worm)
• Mediterranean rascasse
• the silver dollar sized crabs called favouille
• Olive oil mills in every other town in Provence that crush French olives and give you the best olive oil bar none — better than Spanish, Greek, Italian, Middle Eastern, wherever
• Brebis of any variety
• Goat cheese they made yesterday from goats that forage freely
• baguettes that crunch, but have a an indescribable crumb and then go stale in four hours and cost less than 90 (euro) cents
• Croissants made with 84+ butter and French wheat flour
• Onglet sold in chain supermarkets
• Thirty kinds of saucisson at marché
• Twenty kinds of olives cured by hand
• Citron confit sold by the piece
• Tarte au citron
• Pine-nut crescents
• Sacristans
• Calissons
• Fruits confits
• poivrons grillés a la Nicoise
• socca
• pissaladiere
• L’estocaficada
• Stockfish
• Fleurs de courgettes beignets
• tourte de blette
• soupe de poissons
• the only true bouillabaisse
• rouille
• truffes
• salty caramel
• fleur de sel
• Cavaillon melons
• Tomme de Savoie
• Reblochon de Savoie

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• Apple-smoked uncured bacon
• Carolina barbecue
• Alaska Sockeye Salmon
• Smoked Sable
• Char
• Shad roe
• Peanut Butter
• Ossabaw Hogs
• Masa Harina
• California Avocadoes
• Florida Avocadoes
• Sand Dabs

Thanks to the list of Pro Chefs for suggested additions, especially David, who understood the concept implicitly.

So it’s back to Mediterranean rascasse, fraises des bois, Cavaillon melons, Roquefort, Bandol rosé, etc. etc. etc.

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• Vermont Aged Cheddar
• New York State Aged Cheddar
• Maine Lobsters
• Maine Wild Blueberries
• Chipotle Peppers
• Poblano Peppers
• Soft-Shell [Blue] Crabs
• Cranberries
• Fiddlehead Ferns
• Bison
• Butter & Sugar Corn
• Cob-Smoked Virginia Ham
• Quahogs
• Dungeness Crabs
• Striped Bass
• Vermont Maple Syrup

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Natural Bedfellows

"Bush finds a friend in Albania"
— headline on a feature story above the fold,
in International Herald Tribune, p.1, June 11, 2007

"Microsoft has a friend in President Bush"
—headline on a news brief below the fold,
in International Herald Tribune, p.1, June 11, 2007

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