And speaking of stereotypes (well, I was, but you wouldn’t know it, as that essay hasn’t been posted yet), let us not deny, we Americans, the bulging sack we bear of images of our French brethren that are none too complimentary. With the onslaught of recrimination that ensued the French refusal to implicate themselves three years ago in our adventures in Iraq, that sack well nigh unto burst, with a renewal of invective, a revival of old stereotypes, and a passel of largely invented, if inventive, new ones built on somewhat twisted views of history, and utterly devoid of any true experience in the vicinity, never mind the company, of a living breathing French person.

All that being said, and my bona fides consisting chiefly of having lived among them for increasingly longer periods of time over what will soon be two decades, I will say, certain things are true.

I won’t indulge the more rabid appetites of my red-blooded countrymen who are ready to brand the French as inveterate cowards, and devour them whole. The propensities of the French, like that of Americans, to pick their fights and engage sometimes in the worst of fights for the worst of reasons are not material to this discussion.

Rather, it is more the perennial domestic behavior, the true nucleus of the national character of a people, if not a whole continent below a certain parallel (I’ll get to that by and by) that is under my scrutiny. It is the disposition of the French toward work and their fellow citizens that is my subject, and my thesis is, it’s true, the French national character is to be summed up non-verbally, as a shrug.

Let me instance you some for instances. I am here on a mainly administrative mission on this trip. The necessity for it and the compulsion was shared, if not inspired, by my beloved wife, who could not accompany me, and whom I miss terribly. I got on the plane somewhat reluctantly, much as I love it here short of comparison, but not of being exceeded, only because of my feelings for Linda, for the few paltry tasks that one must do as a homeowner anywhere. They all fall into the category of you gotta’ be there or it won’t get done.

We’ve owned our house here, it will be five years in February, long enough, and had enough work done—to the tune of many thousands of dollars, lest you think these are ordinary chores, better suited for Monsieur Bricolage [“do-it-yourself”]—to know the latter thought is a truth and a truism. You can count on an artisan, kind of a jack-of-all-tradesmen (who does a little electrical, a little plumbing, a little carpentry, a little masonry, etc.) to get work done unattended, and only with the promise of payment, even if you are an eighth of a world away, and incapable of supervision or scrutiny. It’s especially reassuring and there’s a stronger guarantee of completion if you are away for extended periods of time (that is, months, not mere weeks or days) with no stronger bond than a handshake and a farewell. But first, you must get the artisan to agree to begin, and accept a key to the premises.

We have had two excellent artisans work on our house, both at the recommendation of my dear friend Yann, who knows more about these things than I will ever know, including how to do the work himself if need be. The first of these excellent gentlemen is now off in some posh place, engaged in a two- or three-year process of renovating from roof to basement a magnificent ruin, purchased by some baron of industry or commerce here in France, who has the predicated patience, and the very deep pockets, necessary for such an enterprise.

The second is actually a transplanted Brit, who spent parts of his youth in Provence and speaks the lingo fluently, and now has lived here on a permanent basis for almost 20 years himself. He did a wonderful job tackling what turned out to be an arduous and dirty job of ripping up our rooftop terrace and making it waterproof (which the previous owner was only led to believe had been done by his favorite artisan). In the process the job got dirtier and more arduous because he discovered that a very short wall (thank goodness for short) separating the kitchen up there from the terrace, and also serving the very important perpetual mission of having a very large window installed in it, was rotten, in a word, and either had to be re-built or have a new wall built alongside it, like an intentional Siamese twin of masonry. We chose the more difficult and expensive recourse of ripping out the bad and building anew—on the verge of the rainy season in spring. That he managed it, without getting more than a few drops inside our property, endeared him to us further.

However, some smaller, less challenging, spit on your hands and leap into the fray, dare I say, picayune, projects remain. And these are not his meat, or his daube de boeuf. They are not even his pot au feu. And so he eludes us—easy enough to do by email. When I arrived here, I left a message on his mobile. Unanswered as yet. I sent another email. Rien.

Then I stopped in to say hi and chat with his wife, who owns a little boutique in a nearby market town, painting in the inimitable local provincial style—the main decorative motifs being floral, including native flowers and lavender, plus the equally inevitable olives and olive branches. The style is attractive, if you are well-to-do and have decided to bend your decor in this direction, and the work is professional, nay artistic. In short, she is an artisan in her own right. She always assumes a certain gentle, but steely-eyed, air of amusement, or, possibly, bemusement whenever I ask about her husband.

I asked if he was in the country, meaning the terroir, meaning anywhere within 250 kilometers. He likes to go on adventure expeditions. Our last trip here, this past summer, he assured us that after his kayaking trip somewhere near Kashmir, assuming he didn’t break anything or render himself permanently invalid, he would be ready to tackle our little projects—even with marching orders only from afar.

Having not heard from him, I gave him the benefit of being somewhere exotic and involving gear you buy from Eastern Mountain Sports or REI. But no. “He’s in his tower,” she informed me. Which I immediately understood to mean he had a chantier [work site] in operation, and it was located in a tower somewhere nearby. It’s possible he didn’t get his email, because their computers had been screwed up, sometimes she was getting his email (though she didn’t receive the one I had sent), etc. etc. And, they were about to leave briefly, until yesterday, which was Sunday. A visit to their college-age daughter, in university in the motherland of England.

Saved by circumstance for another five days! But I must track him down and pin him down. The wife offered no excuses, except to note that their son was getting more and more like him everyday, being at home at the moment doing homework, which would be due on his return (that would be today) and hence taking advantage of the holiday last Wednesday, the day I went into her shop, but which he should have done before this trip, etc. etc. I noted that hubby had gotten very French. She didn’t demur. Indeed, she observed that it seemed to be a quality that deepened with each passing day.

What one would expect, right? Situation normal, all Frenched up… The sort of thing you read about in those obnoxious fictions created by Peter Mayle, who re-ignited all the fuss among English-speakers for Provence, and raised property prices at a faster rate than anything else might have—except that his colorful, if lovable malingerers are always quintessentially French. And, in such a circumstance, one can always pretend incomprehension on both sides of the conversation. But my guy is British! It’s something in the air, in the earth, in the food and the wine. It gives me an idea for what I can tell Linda, when I have to report not exactly getting to everything we needed to get done here.

But wait!

I’m not done.

I ordered some items on-line to assist in implementing the expanding communications needs of the household (don’t scoff, dear reader, as you are a beneficiary; broadband has finally reached our tiny out-of-the-way community, and now we must outfit ourselves with new paraphernalia and gadgets to make the most productive use of the technology). I ordered from Amazon, whose long profitable arm has long since reached France and the rest of the European Union. I ordered the items delivered rapide, that is, by expedited means through the French equivalent of Express Mail from the U.S. Postal service.

I ordered the items on Wednesday, the holiday I referred to earlier (and, in part, the subject of another blog entry, stalled in the parturition, so to speak, and still not posted) and this meant, as they made clear, that they would not ship until Thursday, for delivery Friday, guaranteed, before 1pm.

It is at the moment, Monday, past noon, and they still ain’t here. Here’s what it says on the ChronoPost site, where they allow you to track your shipments:

lun 06/11/2006
07:22        TOULON CHRONOPOST
Envoi en cours de livraison       

sam 04/11/2006
05:29        TOULON CHRONOPOST
Envoi mis en instance le samedi au point de retrait       

sam 04/11/2006
05:29        TOULON CHRONOPOST
Tri agence d’arrivée effectuée       

ven 03/11/2006
01:31        ROISSY CHRONOPOST
Envoi ayant pris du retard pendant l’acheminement       

jeu 02/11/2006
18:36        ORLEANS CHRONOPOST
Tri agence de départ effectué       

jeu 02/11/2006
12:07        ORLEANS CHRONOPOST
Envoi prêt chez l’expéditeur

The package was prepared for shipment on the day it was supposed to leave at the shipper’s quarters, though it was, essentially, in the hands of the post office. That was at noon on Thursday. By 6:30 that evening it had been sorted. All this took place in Orleans, a city to the south of Paris.

On Friday, the day it was intended to arrive at my door, eleven-and-a-half hours before the promised latest time for deposit in my hands, it was at Roissy, the town in which a little airport called Charles De Gaulle is situated, in honor of the national hero of World War II and later (I know, I said I wouldn’t bring these matters up). For those of you not aware, Roissy is north of Paris. It can take an hour by car  to get there, as any of you do know knows, trying to get from Paris to your flight home. Having arrived there, the shipment was delayed (“having taken [part in] the routing backlog”). It’s the fault of the package.

Nevertheless, in only 28 hours it reached Toulon, which is a 70 minute flight away. However, it arrived on Saturday. Hence, the moment it arrived, or at least during the same minute, it being Saturday, the package was put in a holding area (a point de retrait, given the ambiguous and multi-purpose functionality of so much of the French language, could also be interpreted as a “retirement home” or, perhaps, the staging area for a retreat, but, as I said, I’m not going there…) The plain and simple fact is, although the mail is delivered on Saturday, the banks are open for business, and posting to accounts, on Saturday, all shops are open on Saturday, it’s Saturday, for God’s sake! You can’t expect an express delivery to be made on Saturday!

Then this morning, everybody woke, refreshed, renewed, and hungry for providing service, and at 7:22 this morning, my packages were en route from Toulon, and now they are in my hot and sweaty little hands, having arrived while I was writing this paean to the wry sensibilities of those who determine the French way of life—the very people who live it. Indeed, all the electrons making up the bits that form the bytes that constitute these less than sanguinary, but also less than sanguine, more than sarcastic, doubtless ungrateful, words will for the briefest of moments, briefer than the imagination of a native Frenchman can conceive of, pass through one of the marvelous high tech devices I procured with so much trial on my part, impatient American that I am, and so much imposture and mastery of indecipherable euphemism, such is only one facet of the genius of the French (none dare call it turning the obvious into pure bullshit).

By the way, another shipment, two audio CDs that are a lot cheaper here, even with the egregious value added tax, than in the U.S., where there is little call for the wonderful new music that is hard to categorize, sort of an amalgam of World music and cabaret, arrived in the mail this morning, before my express packages. I ordered those on Friday, and I relegated them for standard shipment, which is free. My express packages will also be free, as they didn’t deliver on time. But still. [One CD is the latest, but one, of my absolutely slap-down, Han Sho King Duck favorite French singing group, called Lo’Jo, whose music is indescribably wonderful, well, to me: check it out, http://tinyurl.com/y6pdap; try listening to anything, but in particular, try De Timbuktu à Essakane. or C’est la vie.]

I give. I admit it. I’m an American. I have to be taught a lesson once in awhile. A true Gallic lesson.

As a coda to this sad tale, let me tell you that, not having learned as of last Thursday the fate of my packages and their premature, if brief, retirement-to-be in a bonded warehouse belonging to the French government in Toulon, I foolishly ordered a really big item. It’s a new dishwasher, because our old one, the main unit, in the kitchen where I do all my cooking on the first floor (remember, there’s another kitchen, fully equipped, sort of for show, on the third floor, just next to the terrace; probably intended to make sure ice cubes are always at hand, and that the brandade de morue stays warm, and the lobster salad stays cold) has shit the bed, as we so impudently like to put it in the ‘hood. It overflows.

I bought the new one from Darty, which is kind of the Best Buy of France. They are all over the country, and they’ve got the Web thing sewn up tight. I hope. They deliver on Wednesday afternoon in their own trucks, and cart the old clunker away, for free. So they say.

Supposedly, it is the behavior I describe, in the land of farniente, and bordered to the southeast by Italy, and to the southwest by Spain, if one should not say the whole of the Iberian peninsula, lands where the concept of tomorrow takes on eternal proportions, that makes France an innately Latin country. It’s certainly hard to tell otherwise down here in Provence, but let me remind you, all of France is warmed by the Gulf Stream. And we excuse it in Italy and Spain somehow, because, well it’s warm and soft and dreamy, and you can’t count on either of these countries for anything when it comes to a good honest fight. But the French! The French! Our bankers in the Revolution (never mind that it bankrupted the country and the king, and was the proximate cause of their own Revolution)! Lafayette! Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham!

Baloney. Or should I say, saucisson! Sit down my dear, have another glass of rosé, and try the brandade de morue, it’s fresh and warm.

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[Fox-Amphoux, Var, Provence] One of the implacable, albeit stereotypical, facts about France is that it is an overwhelmingly Catholic country that is also consummately irreligious. Almost no one goes to church with any regularity, and the hand-wringing, to which not too many people pay attention, sounds unremarkably like the hand-wringing that garners more attention from, say, American-Jewry. In the latter case it is especially the rabbinate that wrings its hands as it wonders at the modern propensity of largely assimilated young Jews to marry out of their faith.

Such is not the problem in France. If I recall seeing the percentage accurately, something like 88% of the country is Catholic, or so identify themselves as of not too many years ago. So when young Jacques marries young Marianne, no parental feathers get ruffled about the perils of mixed marriage. Of course, even if they weren’t both Catholics, there’s little likelihood of remorse. Scratch a Frenchman or woman, and you will find some taint of another religion or ethnicity under there somewhere. But in the main, the French wear their religion as easily as their skin.

The purest of the pure Gallic French are small in number. Mixing it all up is Celto-Ligurian-Greco-Romano-Teutonic-Nordic-Anglo-Saxon inter-breeding over two millennia. For all that, and perhaps because most of the world surrounding France—not to mention occupying it—about the time that the Moors and other elements of the Caliphate left the Iberian peninsula was Catholic one way or another, France is Catholic, whatever the purity of the stock.

Around here, in the lofty reaches of the central Provencal department of the Var, there are many Italian surnames to be encountered. This sort of clinches the deal. My personal theory is that the reason name after name on the headstones and tombs of the permanent inhabitants of the cemetery just down the hill end in vowels (as we say in the ‘States) is that some time in the late fourteenth century the black plague decimated town after town. Those towns and villages that didn’t die off altogether were abandoned.

A slightly complicated set of political alliances resulted in Nice and a significant part of the Var (essentially most of the land between the river of that name, west of Nice, and the Rhône River as it courses its way more or less southwesterly, into the Mediterranean) becoming the property of the House of Savoie. In league with the Duke of Anjou and the Count of Nice, that august state (now, itself, also a part of France) repopulated with the good citizens of Liguria the towns and villages ravaged by pestilence. Liguria was, and still is, Italian. Indeed, where the present French Riviera ends and the Italian one begins is Liguria. If we can thank them for nothing else—aside from my thanking them for repopulating this part of Provence—we can thank the Ligurians for pesto. However, there is so much more for which they are responsible, and someday, someday, my friends, I will tell you about it.

Whatever their roots, here and elsewhere in France, the people of this great nation remain mindful of their spiritual inheritance. They honor it largely in the breach of course, until it comes to that great invention, le jour ferié. It’s what the British call a bank holiday, and everyone else, including us, calls a national holiday, that is, when banks, the stock market, and hence, most businesses, are closed. The United States, despite all appearances, not being a particularly deterministic society, has, as one would expect from a country where CEO salaries are a multiple by several hundred times of the lowest salaried worker, and productivity is unequalled, and two weeks vacation is standard, very few national holidays that close the banks. The French, who are smarter than we think, and had a very smart scientist, named Laplace (Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace, who, despite the marquis title, lived from 1749 to 1827, in short, he beat the Revolution…) who believed that if you could account for every atom in the universe you could pretty well predict everything that was going to happen—in short, a guy who was just waiting for computers to happen—have a lot of jours feriés. And funny thing, a damn lot of them correspond to, well, the Christian—let me be more specific, the Catholic—calendar.

After years and years of arriving here late in May for an all too brief two weeks of the most glorious weather anywhere, never mind that of one of the most enduringly beautiful places on the face of the planet, I wondered for awhile, being innately stupid and unobservant, why we always seemed to arrive on a three day weekend, when everything was closed. Turns out, there’s this little phenomenon called Pentecost (you could look it up—lunar calendars, Easter, all that stuff…) and it’s, well, it’s a national holiday in France.

Which brings me, among all the other subtly crypto religious jours feriés, to the one I essentially just discovered, called, in common parlance, “the day of the dead.” That is, it’s the Jour des mortes, and it occurs on the day after the one we know as All Hallow’s Eve, or All Saint’s Day, or, dadgummit, it’s called Hallowe’en for chrissake. The French close their banks, their stores, their supermarkets, they close everything but the emergency room, on the day after Hallowe’en… And we think they’re craven and irresponsible, smug, self-satisfied, and contemptuous.

Think about it while you’re workin’ a Hershey’s miniatures gastric hangover with extra-strength Pepto-Bismol.

So the French have figured out how to take a lot of holidays. And when they don’t take holidays they’ve figured out how to provide minimal service short of dysfunction (see my next blog entry, “Customer Disservice,” which actually was posted before this one; why? jour ferié. I’m union.).

Lest I give you the wrong impression, let me add this very important set of observations.

Just like the high holiday Jews who show up at synagog on the high holidays, and primp in their high-price ticket seats, the only time they will appear in a place of worship, there is a certain reflexive response from the media (who else) when it comes to All Saints’ Day. They send photographers to the cemeteries and take photos of the lugubrious assemblages of entirely sincere people who gather to honor the dead. It’s become, apparently, prelude to observance of that day, a little later this month, that used to be called Armistice Day and is now Veterans’ Day (no doubt, just to make sure that veterans of the First World War, most of whom we should remember are dead at this point, don’t gain some kind of memorial hegemony). A lot of veterans’ groups and town officials gather in the local cemetery and lay a wreath. The local paper the next day is filled with snaps of this sort, from one town to small village to another.

In the local daily for the Var, and a major Provence news vehicle, the lead story on the Day of the Dead concerned the rapidly increasing cost of burial, thereby making this day a matter of mercantile greed. It’s a valid issue, but the Day of the Dead isn’t official burial day. It’s a day to remember the departed. That’s what the French call them, les disparus (which immediately conjures up for the Anglophile with peculiar cognate propensities the spectre of the “disappeared,” and there is a weary, yet disquieting sense of death as a disappearing act).

I was told by our lovely vivacious neighbor, Paule—whose appearance and liveliness vastly belies her apparent years—that one couple in particular (she pointed out their car, parked near the cemetery of the village) appears every week at the cemetery, yet every day of the week leading up to the Jour des Mortes, to honor their daughter, who died in her 20s in an automobile accident. This occurred four years ago. Who am I to say, let it go, already?

During the days before le Jour des Mortes there is indeed, on a country-wide basis apparently, a significant increase of such visits. As it turned out, there was no let up, even after last Wednesday, on which the day in question fell this year. There is no sign of lugubriousness about any of this activity. No sign of obsessive preoccupation. There are few signs of grief, unless, of course, the departed departed fairly recently.

For some, in short, the Day of the Dead is an honest and solemn institution. The chapel, which lies mere meters from my front door, showed signs of increased activity the day before. A squadron of locals, vaguely familiar, but no faces I could identify for sure, appeared in the village, disappeared into the chapel, and for about 15 minutes there was the sound of benches and other furniture being moved about, let us say, by force, mainly scraping the 13th century stone floors.

The next day, le parking at the foot of the village filled with cars. And the inhabitants thereof, in turn, filled the chapel. There was no joking, no vainglory, no kibbitz, no grand gestures of greeting and kissing of the cheeks. Just a stream of middle class, mainly middle aged people who showed up to do what they gotta’ do.

Now, there are officially 380 inhabitants of the town of Fox-Amphoux, including our little village. And I can assure you, there were not 380 people in that chapel, nowhere nearly. Whatever the number, no doubt it was a fraction. Probably it was a fraction greater than the fraction reported to the census as “devout” from among the 80-odd percent of Catholics in this nation, yet significantly less by a very long shot, of the 80-odd.

And it is, of course, for them that the banks and the stores and the supermarkets and just about everything else (though Wednesday is a market day, and we did have a market…) is closed on le Jour des Mortes. And who are we to say that they don’t deserve the holiday, even as much as the price to be paid is the mindless exploitation the rest of us engineer on a day that our thoughts about the departed, or anything else of any spiritual significance, may take a back seat to thoughts typical of just another day off? And don’t we deserve it anyway?

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One of the deficiencies of Chris Schlesinger’s great grill and restaurant, East Coast Grill on Cambridge Street in Inman Square, right here in Cambridge (and just a twelve-minute walk from our door) is that in its 21-year history he’s never seen fit to open it for lunch. It’s not clear why, though one reason must be that the prep, including firing up the grill, and preparing certain menu items in time for meal hours, would mean putting people to work in what are the wee small hours for restaurant folk.

Indeed, my original introduction to the place was by my boss at the time, when I was a VP of one of Boston’s hottest advertising agencies at the time. East Coast Grill had just opened. It was 1985. The place consisted of two side-by-side holes in the wall, one of them the grill/bar/restaurant in a single bay of a building, perhaps 22 feet wide. The other hole in the wall deserved to be, being a simulacrum of a roadhouse barbeque joint that Chris dubbed Jake ‘n’ Earl’s, and really with no seating to speak of, but intended mainly for take-out (and in those days, a pulled pork sandwich with two sides, cost $3.95—a sit-down restaurant and wait staff would have put him out of business). Unfortunately, my boss, who was treating me to lunch, was not aware that the Grill did not open for lunch. The only benefit of this excursion was that I learned of the existence of the place at all.

Continue reading →

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My life happens to span the age of nuclear proliferation, as we now refer to it.

It’s not about me, of course, as my chief concern about anything nuclear (as in radioactive materials) involves the location of the nuclear medicine department in a couple of nearby hospitals for reasons that are personal. I also regularly cut out the inedible core of cabbages, artichokes, and fennel, but these are hardly nuclear issues to be concerned about.

Continue reading →

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I am writing from the lobby of the W Hotel in Victoria Square Montréal.

We’re here essentially to celebrate Linda’s birthday, and, well, to be in Montréal, where we have not been in some time.

I had thought by today I would long since have posted a different essay—a proto-review of a new barbeque joint in Boston, but somehow it became a fiesta of divagations, diversions and digressions. How do these things happen? And I’ve written over 2000 words so far and haven’t even mentioned the name of the place, so it will have to wait for a later posting date.

In the meantime, here are some preliminary notes about our digs for the next three days.

Victoria Square is within walking distance of the vieux port or old town of Montréal, by the waters of the St. Lawrence, where the French is thick as pâté en bloc, and the streets as labyrinthine as a Paris neighborhood. It’s a recovering part of Montréal, Victoria Square is, having been allowed to degenerate into a kind of bureaucratic, semi-industrial squalor.

W goes a long way to dispel all that. It is owned by the Starwood Group, whose flagship chain is Sheraton. You’d never know it from a W.

It’s relentlessly modern, indeed modernist. In this one, the prevailing lighting is red, and dim, and lest you begin to conjure images of bordellos and women in bustiers and net stockings, the illumination in the lobby (the halle) is mainly provided by some six monoliths lit from within by red sources of illumination. Red cubes of plexiglas adorn the floor, and are themselves adorned with small sandblasted cylinders of smokey glass with a votive candle within. Above my head are huge globes fashioned of fiberglass strands that were molded around spheres that were then deflated and removed after the epoxy setting the strands in a circumferential matrix had hardened. Centered within each globe in a cluster of five globes is a dim clear incandescent bulb dangling from a chrome cylindrical socket.

There are also tiny halogen down lights in a ceiling of hardwood stained rosewood crimson, and so far above our heads as to be useless as illumination. In short, the brightest thing in this large, echoey space is the screen of my laptop, and the screen of another geek, sitting opposite me, no doubt also too cheap to pay the 20 bucks a day (Canadian, but these days, same difference) for 24 hours wireless service in the room. Here in la halle, it’s free.

We’re lying like Passover celebrants, truly half-reclining because the cushions of the sofas are too deep—I’d say about four feet—and the absence of any but soft pillows for support make it necessary either to sit bolt upright with the laptop on one of those crimson cubes, or to lie as I am, as if wondering where the fourth glass of wine went, and who the hell stole the afikomen anyway?

We arrived an hour ago. From the valet dispatcher, to the bellman, to the receptionist the staff is flamboyantly cheerful. It made me think, having stayed at a W (the one in Union Square in New York last Christmas) before that was not half so friendly, shall we say, that they’ve got the staff drinking a lot of the Cool-Aid, a sort of fancy version of which they bring you in a cup as a refreshment from the journey while you’re standing there checking in. The dispatcher and the receptionist both wore headsets into which they murmured French once every so often, and who apologized profusely to me each time, as I responded with a “wha’?” And I soon realized, of course. They’re not juiced up. This isn’t some corporate facade of packaged bonhomie. Of course, this is Canada. The last civilized English speaking democracy left on the planet. Well, French and English. Well, mainly French and a little English, with a flip on that ratio just across Lake Ontario into Toronto.

Our room is also a cube of extreme dimensions. Big couches must be a theme. If we make friends they can sleep over, all six of them.

The theme of the room is black and white. At least I think so. It’s a little dim in there. I did have my laptop on for a bit before discovering the hook-up ain’t free in the room, which required dialing the front desk, which, in the spirit of zestful relentless modernity, is labeled tout divers/whatever whenever. I had visions of calling at three in the morning for a gram of cocaine, just to see what would happen… The bellman, zealously friendly, but sincere somehow, and in a postmodern kind of forlorn-looking tee-shirt, and with a day-and-half growth (don’t get the wrong idea—published rates for the rooms here start at $339US) showed us how to swipe our room key in the elevator to get to our floor, which is above the first few floors, and he explained that the clubs and disco crowd had to be discouraged from wandering the hotel. I asked, “But what if you’re lonely?” and he took that in his stride, chortling and suggesting we could wander the floors of the clubs.

The bathroom is a kind of open design, at least for bathing and washing up. The toilet is in a separate chamber with a huge floor to ceiling door that swings shut, but doesn’t latch, and in addition to the tub, perfectly square, there is a tiled shower stall about as large as my small office back at the apartment at home. All the fixtures are cylindrical, stubby chrome horizontal tubs that pull away at the stroke of a lever, also chrome, a kind of attenuated cylinder, slender, and levered, pulled it controls the flow, turned it controls the temperature. I don’t have the heart to tell them this all went out somehow when Walter Gropius died, although it does raise interesting questions about the degree to which modernism can penetrate the redivivus gestalt of post-modernism.

For all my sarcasm, this is, in fact, a very nice place. Quite luxe, for all the hard surfaces, and studiously subdued sensoria (music is constantly playing, which is moody, suggestive, not quite the bilge that’s called “soft jazz” or “smooth jazz” or whatever euphemism is used to cover the fact that it’s not jazz at all but some kind of white-bread pap. It’s not soul. And it’s not mood music. It’s probably some package from Muzak, and it’s probably called MZ647 World Pop Instrumental).

It’s a little déclassé if you ask me to charge for the Internet connection in the rooms. What’s that all about? In the halle any geek with a laptop can walk in and jack in. Where’s the cachet in that?

Nevertheless, the bed is very comfortable, and huge, and the surface obliterated with pillows and soft fabrics. And I know they leave delicious candy for you when you turn in, when they steal in, while you’re eating out, and turn down all those layers of finery.

Two last things: there is other music; it just played out… Vocals, vaguely African, and now there’s what is clearly Arab stuff playing, so I have a hunch (in my best mock humble shoulder-shrugging style, I ask, “but what do I know?”), but with a soprano sax hook, so someone is up to something (and it’s probably for sale on a CD on the “W” label somewhere in this joint—everything has a price). And finally, for those of you who care about these things, those globes of fiberglass strands are called “Random Lights.” They’re made in the Netherlands, and were designed by Bertjan Pot for Moooi.

I figure the rig here in the lobby is worth about three grand retail, plus installation.

Look it up yourself if you’re interested. I’m tired of doing all the work, and this is supposed to be kind of a vacation.

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[written from the United States, but retrospectively; prepared in part from notes taken in France and in mid-flight from Nice to New York]

Nice, Sunset during a rainstorm, 2006 August 6

Morts et vivants, tout dormait. Et le silence qui regnait était un grand silence de province.

Everyone, the dead and the living, was asleep. And the silence that reigned was a deep, provincial silence.
—Paris, by Julian Green; tr., J.A. Underwood

Aside from the food, the views, the air, the culture (by which I mean the pace and style of everyday life), the essential prevailing climate (meteorological), and the people on a one-on-one basis, there is another significant advantage to life in rural France. It is there, not here. By which I mean that, perspective being all, the vantage of 3500 miles makes things, if not clearer, at least not so hazy, if not removing the fog of incoherency altogether.

For the writer, any writer, whatever his or her merits, clarity is all. For me, there is inspiration in the clarity of being in France. Combined with what is, no doubt, and even after over 20 years of regular intimacy with the life, the sheer otherness—the strangeness to me, plus my overwhelming ignorance—of life in France, there is always a great deal to write about.

To my mind, I am often writing less about the French (though some readers seem to think so, and react solely to this nominal subject), and a great deal more about what are our similarities, if only by way of delineating differences. In short, it is a way to write about myself, or, to depersonalize this, as the subject loses interest rapidly, and most of all for me, when it is a matter of pure self-reflection: it is a way of writing about us, yes, we Americans, but, more importantly, we humans.

One thing to remember, after three weeks in another country, at every conceivable remove, except the electronic, from what is familiar and routine, is that I am not only a long way away from that reality. I am also a great deal closer to another reality, yet one which preoccupies so much of the civilized world. It’s not my purpose to disabuse my fellow Americans of any presentiment they may have about the fate of the civilized world insofar as it consists of the lands contained by territorial borders of the United States. Rather, it is, for starters, to remind them that civilization does not end at the departure gate at Logan or JFK, or wherever.

We are deeply troubled by the state of the world, even from our largely still untouched enclave of a continent buffered by the two largest oceans on the planet—and before the wrath of God and righteous Americans rains down on me, I am well aware of the awful event, and its consequences, known as 9/11. And I do not forget Pearl Harbor. And I remember the Maine.

However, for the sake of defining a certain psychic perspective, I also have the capacity to recall the bombing of Dresden (and innumerable other cities in Europe, including the fire bombing and rockets that rained down on London), the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the siege of Stalingrad, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and the War of 1812.

Our own latest suffering, however severe and inhumane, is yet another chapter in the lamentable history of human civilization on planet earth. To keep that history at bay, we have, for much of the history of our nation, more or less kept the world at bay, as if we do, indeed, inhabit an enclave. Though if it is an enclave, it is increasingly unclear (at least to a polarizing degree) of exactly what.

Our watery isolation (of an immensity we forget, unless flying over it, however swiftly—it takes five hours of an eight-hour transatlantic flight at over 500 knots to traverse open water to get from America to Europe, or vice versa) has lately proven its inadequacy for preserving a sense of political isolation, for those for whom this has always been a preferred modality. However, whether you are an isolationist, cocooned in the fantasy that the world can somehow be kept not only away, but kept out utterly from a properly defended fortress, or you are more a citizen of the world, with some sense that we have neighbors whose fate just might very well affect ours, we do seem to harbor one frail sense of calm. It’s best expressed in the throw-weights and range of weapons in the hands of those we deem dangerous. For now, we are safe to some degree—what else can we do but think it—as long as Hezbollah can hurl rockets only 20 miles, or North Korea can reach Seoul or the frontier of Japan, but no further.

Tell that to an Israeli or a Japanese.

We do worry about the price and availability of oil, the preponderance of which, even with our record thirst for it, comes from elsewhere, and, in particular, the volatile Middle East. And one must fly even greater lengths to reach these climes than the downrange capability of the missiles of members of the Axis of Evil. I mean to excuse nothing, on any part or any side. I merely wish to point out that weapons—real or suspected—in the hands of Arab states are much closer to another set of first world countries, otherwise known as Europe (new or “old” it makes no difference). And the weapons that we know are in the hands of Israel, for one, because a great many of them we sold them, paid for with money we give them, may someday—with their application—set off a war that will be one time zone away from our friends on the “Continent.” And, incidentally, a single time zone from our bucolic village near the foothills of the Alps.

Hence we have the paradox that shapes the perspective I referred to when I started. One sees things more closely, in a quite literal sense, when one is in Europe. As we sat rapt, watching CNN on our hotel television in Nice the night before departure, for three hours as the Israelis bombed even more of Beirut in a “daring” and rare daytime raid, and, in bloody riposte, the Hezbollah fired six very deadly rockets (the deadliest yet in a single attack) into an Arab neighborhood in Haifa. This too was daring, as they fired the rockets at dusk—which they never do as it immediately pinpoints their position; and indeed, during the night the IDF overran and destroyed the launch site.

What I was mindful of, as the sun set over the Mediterranean just outside our window, during a premature twilight as a brief storm set in, was that we were watching in what I’ll call “very real time.” As it was noon in the U.S. when the rockets struck Haifa, this very live story would have a certain distance, not only in miles, but in time, when it opened that evening’s news broadcast in New York. For me the story happened just across that azure sea, whose coast touches Nice with such allure, but touches Beirut and Haifa too, and gives one a sense of the salty consanguinity of fishermen from Maine to Key West. And one may fly from Nice to the Middle East in the time it takes to fly from Boston to Charlotte Amalie in the Virgin Islands.

As we waited, indolently, at Nice airport to get through passport control, our line was regularly interrupted by late arrivals for the flight in the next gate over. We were flying to New York, they to Tunis. It makes for intimations of a shared fate not felt so keenly on our still safe shores.

The paradox arises from the famous languorous pace of life on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea set against the time it would take to fly to Haifa (or Beirut, if you prefer) from Nice—1600 miles apart. More or less the distance between Houston and Cambridge.

No one has ever said it to me outright, while I’ve been in France, but one is mindful of how much closer things are to each other, when speaking of “hot spots,” than those very places are to our homes in the United States. I must assume this mindfulness, this vintage thought, sitting quietly, half-forgotten, in the wine cellar of one’s mind is true for natives, whose stay is permanent. We can only imagine the effect of this condition on the thinking of Europeans, who have seen their homes destroyed utterly—indeed twice, in the course of less than a hundred years.

We weep for Beirut, and for Haifa, of course. And the tears are most bitter for the fellow citizens of these homelands. Hardly less so are the tears for inhabitants of a continent that saw the utter destruction of Dresden and Coventry within the living memory of many.

It is therefore not with the same poignance that one experiences the beauties of life that we know we will miss when we are gone.

Frequent visits like ours only make the poignance sharper, if anything. Sweet partings that much more so, from our friends, so recently made dear. Each passage is a reminder that life, as we have noted since the Greeks and Romans who first settled the Mediterranean basin, is short. Fondness even fonder. The beauty of the land so much more beautiful.

I don’t know if this makes it better or worse to visit the way we do, in spurts of weeks, brief sojourns spread apart as they are. It’s taken me 18 years of visiting Provence to have visited now every month of the year. By now I should be used to it. But every leave-taking is a wrench, a cloying tug that begins days before the date we must lock up and bid the village farewell until another time. The distance is nothing for the nearness of it all. And I would like to suggest that this mode of constant longing, which does not abate even as we measure each day by the rising and the setting of that piercing Provençal sun, is the stuff of love and deep remembrance.

Beneath the rasp of the cicadas, the buzz of flies, the rustle of Mistral-driven foliage, beneath the random rumble of trucks through the village to pierce the drowzy minutes, the whoops of the neighbors at bowls in today’s contest, beneath the clamor of the chapel bell at each breaking hour, below the stentorian bark of this neighbor’s dog, and the insinuating meow of that one’s cat, beneath it all is a silence, a kind of stillness. Enduring and perhaps only truly known to the sheep and the goats, to the donkeys, and the quail, the rabbits, and the wild boar deep in the woods—the original inhabitants of these eternal hills, a reverie.

But once again, we have left all this. And we force ourselves to scheme for the next visit. And we force ourselves to tamp down that deeper hurt.

Endings have a special melancholy. What has been will no longer be. No matter how much we may expect to return. Any break in continuity is an end. Whatever the promise that one may begin again, and however soon, there is the promise within that beginning of another end.

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Now that the readership of this blog has swollen to dozens, I feel there is the necessary critical mass to bring to your attention the ongoing labors of an inestimable cultural worker (he would never consider himself management, though he has found himself in the odd position of having the title of editor innumerable times and publisher somewhat less often—indeed, if truth be told, one of his very few deficiencies is, let me say, a certain inattentiveness to the quotidian requirements of managing the exigencies and demands of life; but this mainly because he lives for his son, his canine companion, the equally inestimable Rosie—a yellow Lab of nobility and gentility—and his art, and likely in precisely that order, and sometimes his own needs receive less than the requisite regard).

Robert Birnbaum—the redoubtable and irrespressible “Izzy” whose chastening remarks
and gentle if insistent chiding now give all signs of appearing regularly on these virtual pages—is a literary journalist, raconteur, and literary conversationalist of national repute. In the past 20 years he has conversed (he eschews the term, “interview” for reasons readily apparent when you read any representative transcript) with upwards of 500 or 600 companions of letters. These are, in the main, published authors, of fiction and non-fiction alike, who have grounds for the designation, “literary.” This is as opposed to your garden variety pot-boiler types.

I commend to your immediate attention, that is, after first checking these haunts for the latest post, which you must read before hying off to some other outpost with a URL designation, either of the Websites through whose channels Robert emits his verbal exertions.

The conversations (you may discover that either or both of these Websites refer to them as “interviews;” I certainly, and Robert likely, accept no responsibility for such misnomers) appear here:

His main outlet, added since the original posting of this essay, is now his own blog, Our Man in Boston: http://ourmaninboston.com, to whose feed I strongly suggest you subscribe.

His many conversations have appeared in a number of places, but mainly in the two following, which maintain an archive of his interviews and where it is safe, for the time being, to go looking for the more historic encounters.

Identity Theory, The Narrative Thread: http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/ and also here:
The Morning News: http://www.themorningnews.org/

In the fullness of time, that is, once I’ve learned how Typepad allows such things, I will place these as permanent links on the pages of this blog. Until then, you are on your own to roll your own. Go hie, and godspeed…

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In the middle of the city of Aix-en-Provence, generally referred to as “Aix” (and pronounced “e(gg)ks”—the parenthetical double-g is in there to suggest that the sound is softened from a hard “ex”) there is a large asphalt paved plaza in front of the Palais de Justice, or court house. I honestly don’t know how much justice has to do with it (in the sense that, on hearing a companion exclaim, “My goodness!” on seeing Mae West’s jewelry and finery, she quipped, “Honey, goodness had nothing to do with it”).

One of the last times we saw this particular plaza was during a visit in March, more than a year ago. The French were demonstrating, specifically the teachers and students, and many other workers as well, but in Aix, the University town, it was your education base of demonstraters. Nothing unusual in this, though, I suppose, it wasn’t entirely usual either. It was orderly. There was a lot of smoking. And they filled this plaza—essentially a huge car park most days, with grand, broad steps of stone leading to the imposing collonaded entry, with metal detectors just visible inside. Then they congregated on the steps, which is where I believe the police preferred them to be.

The students were aroused, but not rowdy, and seemed to be having a good old energy-infused time. They chanted rhythmically, something about “taking it to the streets,” only in French of course, so the word rue was invoked. They carried signs and placards, and ultimately massed on the steps, as if they were on a major, but really big, slightly rowdy school trip, maybe associated with the Future Farmers of France or the high school traffic crossing guards, and had been told to assemble for a group photo.

[Ex post facto correction: Before my vigilant French readers take me to task—they are small in number, but eagle-eyed and armed with facts, which they are not afraid to wield: The particular demonstration I described, involving myriad students in the Aix school system, actually involved the imminent implementation of the "Fillon Law" (Fillon being the Minster of Education, who proposed sweeping reforms). The students and some teachers, on their behalf, particularly objected to a proposed core curriculum, which was noteworthy for excluding the arts,  and the abandonment of a program of  personal study, guided by teachers, and which combined several subjects, research, and independent study. These are not labor issues, as I go on, below, to discuss. However, the degree of backlash is as much a template as the actual law I do mention. I don’t know the fate of Fillon, but I do know what I go on to say about Villepin, who was vilified as a primary villain in the hiring law—later modified and gutted—is true. Sorry for the incorrect implications, and the temporary memory lapse. However, this did give me a chance to use three words, and one a proper name, beginning with the syllable "vil" in one sentence.]

The issue was a labor issue. France, as you may or may not know (one can never tell with Americans), has an unwieldy unemployment problem, as does much of Europe, save for Great Britain and Ireland. The government (the French one) cooked up a scheme whereby the laws concerning hiring and firing would be relaxed sufficiently as to allow employers—small businesses in particular—to engage new hires on a probationary basis, up to two years (without getting into really messy details—the Napoleonic Code is filled with those) without penalty. To the businessman that is.

It seems it’s very difficult to be fired in France, even for what we call “cause.” In France, I think sometimes, the word cause is used, and may only be used, for circumstances that lead to the massing of many French people waving banners and placards and smoking cigarettes on the steps of impressive federal buildings, or, if the cause is really hot, and the people especially incensed, to storm police barricades. This is as I understand it, and I will admit I have spoken only to a very small number of small businessmen (two or three more and it’s probably statistically significant for a group you would still be forced to call “Friends of Howard”—there is a great tendency over here, as there is in the U.S., to form a group at the drop of a hat; the streets are practically awash in posters with arcane acronyms; I myself, having seen a number of likely recruits in the streets of the cities AND the country, want to organize a group for which I already have a name: HFF, which stands for Hooligans Futurs de France (I think it’s kind of neat that the words are practically cognate in English, which means it will be very easy to import, if it catches on; the only difference is, I think, they only mainly look like hooligans over here… I’m assured they’re all very nice boys, but I digress)). You simply cannot call someone to account, never mind fire them. I mean, that is, unless they do something really outrageous like threaten your life with a kitchen knife, and maybe draw a little blood. And even then, you better have iron-clad proof and, I think it’s, six witnesses.

With the proposed law, there would actually have been more people put to work. French business people are remarkably astute in the application of what is called logic. They prefer not to hire beyond a certain point, if the risk is too great that they will be stuck with a dud. In large companies and the government, otherwise known as the biggest company of all, l’état, the State, a fairly huge percentage of duds only keeps the country perking along at some steady state of what is still high productivity. The productivity here, remarkable as it may sound to Francophobic U.S. patriots, is maintained at a fairly high rate—though it slowly erodes, as one must expect, when so many remain unemployed, and so many of those unemployed are third world immigrants who simply refuse to be deracinated (imagine that…).

The people in government aren’t stupid either. Though they do often give the appearance of let us say, losing attention, through several governments over the years hovering around the center mark of a political spectrum, which has shades of left and shades of right of sufficient bandwidth to make the U.S. look like a one-party state, not unlike, let’s say, Russia, but don’t tell anybody I said that. This too is not surprising, as they, the senior French government members, mainly all went to the equivalent of Harvard, Cal Tech, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, and, oh, what the hell, Johns Hopkins, combined. They want not only to extricate the country from what is a current mess, but what promises to be an even greater mess, entropy being what it is in the course of human affairs, and there being an equivalent desire to preserve what is, after all a unique culture, having been preserved for at least a thousand years, with some variations, and which suits a lot of people who, for lack of a better modern defining principle, simply don’t want to live like we do. I mean Americans.

Part of that culture renders all other parts sacrosanct, or such is the common myth here in France. So try to change the status quo, and the people rise up and say, “Don’t touch that.”

In the end, the forces of labor, represented there on the steps of the Aixoise Palais de Justice (don’t get labor and justice confused in this sentence), prevailed, and the Prime Minister, for one, found himself in deep doodoo (also don’t make the mistake of saying “doodoo” in French, as they won’t know what you’re talking about; toutou is a term of endearment for a pooch, and chouchou (little cauliflower [sigh]) is what you call your sweetie, even if she’s not in the produce game, but shit is merde—and Villepin is still, today, in the merde profond because of that little fiasco over a year ago).

But that demonstration was an anomaly for us. We love Aix. It’s a beautiful city, easy to get around in. Lots of places to shop and eat. A general absence of demonstrations and, in fact, most other disturbances. Even the Musée Granet, the one major museum in the city, has gotten its act together, totally renovated itself a year ago, and is worth visiting more than the once we managed about 11 years ago where I feel asleep while walking through one of the galleries. Every so often, cooped up as we are in the briar patch of very rural Provence, we like to get into a metropolis, kick back, and have a citron pressé at the Deux Garçons, which is the Aixois equivalent of the Deux Magots café in Paris, and more or less as old, being in operation since 1792 (this is what I mean about a culture that don’t fix what ain’t broken).

We don’t always make it to Aix, but this trip had an added frisson for us in that the “Cezanne in Provence” exhibition—a major show of his works associated with his studios in Provence, and mainly in Aix and environs, as this was his hometown—dreamed up and largely curated at the U.S. National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it opened first, opened next at the aforementioned Musée Granet in Aix. So we demurred from a trip to Washington and planned on catching the show here. It is so popular that tickets obtainable from other outlets and on-line, that is, other than the ticket office of the museum, are now sold out up to three weeks in advance. Like American museums, they let you in by the hour at a scheduled time. It turned out you could get tickets by standing in line at the ticket office for an hour, but I’m glad I didn’t know that. I ordered the tickets on-line in advance from FNAC, which is a strange combination of consumer electronics store, café, serious bookstore, and DVD and CD shop, oh, and also a good place to get a new telephone, whether wired or mobile.

They mailed the tickets to us here in Fox, which is a scary proposition. It turns out the French do this all the time, without worrying about the consequences. As it also turns out, La Poste, the national postal service, is NOT the USPS, despite popular rumor. The tickets arrived two days later.

As a kind of reconnoiter, and because we didn’t want to wait the additional week that Nicole’s schedule required if she was to join us (though, as it turned out, she didn’t), we decided to take a trip to Aix in addition to our scheduled museum visit. We arrived around lunch time as is our wont. We parked, a bit of an ordeal, as always in summer, as the underground parking garages fill up by about 10am. We couldn’t park in the plaza in front of the Palais de Justice, because there is a marché in the plaza, and in other plazas around the city, every Thursday, until 1 pm.

We headed for the plaza anyway, because there’s a small brasserie there that we like. The plaza, incidentally, is named Place de Verdun. This is significant, and I’ll explain this way. It would be as if a plaza in a U.S. city—albeit the likelihood of a plaza in the U.S. with a major courthouse, and ringed by cafés, boutiques, bookstores, pharmacies, and immediately contiguous to a carriage trade kind of neighborhood of even smarter little boutiques and antique stores is remote in my experience—were to be called Plaza of the Battle of the Bulge.

Verdun, for those of you weak in history, and especially deficient in the European variety, was, of course, one of the great protracted battles of the First World War, prior to the entry of the United States. It occurred because the Germans, in a massive effort to end the war by effecting as many French casualities as possible—the German general in charge of their effort spoke of “bleeding the French white.” The battle produced 400,000 casualties on each side. In the end, the Germans did not prevail, because the defensive strategy of the French, masterminded by General Pétain (thereby rendering him a great national hero, at least for next 23 years) prevented the Germans from overruning the French positions around the town of Verdun. These included a salient, or bulge, ironically (for purposes of my analogy), just like the bulge of the ensuing World War II battle, which very much involved American forces.

In 1944, again to force an end to the war on better terms than Germany otherwise might expect given the progress of the war to that point, the Germans mounted an offensive intended to split the Allied forces into four splinters. The Germans thought this would be cause enough to effect a stalemate and cease-fire, and would allow them to sue for peace on more favorable terms. The Germans did not succeed, as they had not in 1916, against the French, though the Allies, and the Americans in particular, suffered heavy casualties in what was the largest battle of the war for them to that point.

The café we like is, indeed, Café de Verdun (so, again, imagine a delightful restaurant, with outdoor seating, traditional American favorites, wonderfully prepared, an excellent wine list, and snappy waiters, called: Battle of the Bulge Café, in, I don’t know, Providence, RI, which is about the size of Aix, and you’ll get some understanding of the somewhat subtle, but not too subtle differences in the ways the two cultures assimilate their own history). I make no invidious comparisons, mind you, so please don’t assume there is some innate advantage to one way of looking at the world versus the other. I just happen to prefer one to the other, and I leave you free to make your own favorites among any set of choices you care to define.

We arrived at almost exactly 1pm. That’s a kind of witching hour. The marché is officially ended. All the goods (produce, clothing, jewelry, gewgaws, tourist junk, etc.) must be packed up, along with their stalls, the huge parasols to protect customers from the fierce sun, and the vehicles which carry all thereof must be removed. The cafés, bistros, brasseries, and other eating establishments which line the plaza’s periphery will then as hurriedly as they may set up tables and chairs, and their own parasols, to the limit of their “territory” encroaching on the public space of the place. The people setting things up and the people breaking things down work in a kind of improvised primitive ballet, always managing to stay out of one another’s way.

It’s when the vendors are gone, and the restos are still setting up that the fun really begins. It seems the parking must be once again available to the public at about 2pm. The city is also very much interested in preserving its image, and the image thereunto appertaining, and so they send in a crew from pubic works, with coveralls and vehicles emblazoned with the logo “Ville Aix Propre” (essentially “A Clean Aix”).

Some fairly burly dudes haul a very long hose onto the place. There are high pressure spigots in the street, and the spraying and hosing begin—the technique consists largely of using the high pressure jet to drive the jetsam and detritus of the marché to centralized piles, where other workers with brooms and pans can pick it up. It is then my new champion appears. He, a vaguely devilish looking fellow with a very closely shorn brush cut is behind the wheel of a cleaning truck, aptly called (by its manufacturer) the Scarab Majeur. The truck—indeed, a huge white beetle of a thing—is rigged with a water tank and a storage tank. It sports outrigger brushes on flexible arms, with a large rotor brush underneath. Clearly the guy has trained in a combination of a French bumper car park and stock car rally.

He speeds the truck through the place, making a bee-line for curbs, restaurant barriers, and piles of garbage. He stops on the proverbial dime. He spins the steering wheel like the controls of an X-Box 360. He clearly delights in terrorizing the pedestrians who should have better sense than to venture, at the usual French pedestrian’s indolent saunter, across this temporary battle zone—workers against trash.

It also seems to me, having witnessed it twice now, that this is a bit of impromptu revanche des ouvriers (revenge of the workers). At one point, on our first visit (the food was so good, added to the endorsement, post hoc, of Café de Verdun in my bible of restaurant recommendations, the Guide Gantié, we decided to return the following week, that is, two days, ago, for lunch before our visit to see Cézanne) I watched from my seat in the café across the plaza as the Scarab dive-bombed a prematurely matronly woman, carrying three large shopping bags, and stopped likely just feet from her, from behind. I saw both her feet leave the ground, her legs bent, before she landed and scurried off.

He kept coming back to our end of the plaza, and stopping short of the borders of the plaza, including the barrier of the Café de Verdun. At the table of the next party over, sitting right on the waterproof divider set up by the Vietnamese workers of the restaurant—who had already done yeoman duty setting up tables and chairs for another 60 diners, plus the shade-producing umbrellas as coveralls, in the space of 12 minutes—a young woman in the party of eight, watching the antics of le Scarab with increasing dismay, suddenly arose and went off in search of someone, anyone.

Clearly she was on a mission to stop this menace to society. She returned, having consulted with the wait staff and the maître d’, shaking her head disconsolately, and glowering in the direction of the denizen of Ville Aix Propre, as he maneuvered his war chariot in several more, what can I call them, but pasobdobles. If only there had been musical accompaniment (we were, in Aix, only minutes from the cities of southern France where French-style bullfighting—no killing—is conducted). Another triumph for labor.

I am not sure, but it is possible that I recognized this young woman as one of those manning the barricades back in September. So much for solidarity.

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Ratatouille is one of the many recipes native to this region—and in saying this, as when I say so many things, I cut a wide swath—by which I mean to include any definition of the south of France called Provence, and Nice. The French nicely separate Provence from the Côte d’Azur, of which Nice is the undisputable capital. Our chief agency for France Telecom, for example is in Nice, and it is the office for all telephone business in Provence-Côte d’Azur, part of the official name. Same goes for our branch, and the larger managing office, for our bank, Crédit-Agricole, one of the largest banks in Europe, and the largest mortgage holder in France—it’s C-A/PACA, and now you know what “PCA” stands for, when you see it. In fact, officially, the region subsumed is referred to as Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, but usually the Alpes are left out of it (except in the case of the bank).

It’s my theory that it’s intrinsic in any organizing scheme or management scheme in France that things are viewed in this departmental way. Ultimately, of course, all things flow from Paris, and the central government. It is through and through, administratively, a federalized bureaucracy. France is a big country, however, and hard to govern. It’s not only the largest, or close to it (I simply won’t look it up on-line—not while FT/PCA has us in a holding pattern with regard to the Internet, and our connectivity is dial-up; besides Linda is on the phone, so I can’t use it anyway—and I don’t want the readers here, those even more obsessive than I, and who ache for the chance to tell me I’m wrong about something, to have that chance), sovereign land area in Europe, with one of the largest populations. It not only has one of the largest GNPs of the EU, and one of the largest federal budgets. But it produces umpteen many different cheeses, even more now than when Degaulle made his famous comment about the ungovernability of this country, purely in terms of the number of cheeses it produced.

All moneys come from the central government, but increasingly are not only distributed, but budgeted at the prefectual level. The prefect is the highest government officer in any department. There are 95 departments, or so (there’s that hedge again) in Metropolitan France, that is, what we’d call mainland France, as opposed to the islands in the Caribbean, which are not protectorates, or territories, or any of that wishy-washy stuff, that leaves them nominally (at least) subjugated. When you’re on French soil in Guadeloupe, or in the French Pacific islands, you are on French soil, and subject to French taxes and the entirety of the Napoleonic Code.

That’s a fairly far-flung way of keeping track of things, especially money, when it flows from a single source. It tends to force a people who grow up thinking of themselves first and foremost as French, immediately to think about themselves next in terms of that ineffable, rich French word, terroir, which is essentially untranslatable readily into English.

A French-English dictionary may translate it as “region,” but that’s not adequate, because terroir can be understood sometimes with the same degree of fineness as a micro-climate. It really refers to some unique combination of factors—some incontrovertible, like the chemical composition of the soil, and some more subtle, like the difference between a cheese distinguished by one form of mold (we’re talking blue cheeses; so don’t let your gorge rise) versus another, possibly identical to the untutored palate, with a slightly different mold.

Not all differences are chemical, of course, except possibly in the metaphorical sense. The chemistry is different in one terroir versus another, and it leads to differences in speech, differences in dress, and particularly differences in food, both the native flora and fauna to a terroir, and the ingredients that go into exactly the same dish—exactly the same at least in name. Terroir is the major taxonomical differentiator, I would say, in determining one AOC wine or cheese from another. May be the same mix of grape varieties, but it produces a different wine when the grapes come from one hillside (côte in French) as opposed to another. So there is Côteaux Varois, but there is also Côtes de Provence.

There are five departments in Provence, and the cuisine of most of them—excluding pretty much Les Alpes de Haute Provence, which is one of the two landlocked departments, the other being the Vaucluse—is what comprises what has become known as the essentially heart-healthy, longevity inducing Mediterranean diet of Provence and neighboring Liguria, the section of Italy immediately contiguous and also with a long coast, or riviera, on the ocean. Much of Ligurian cuisine migrated and mingled and became transformed to a variant called Niçois, which the natives of that city (for so long ruled by others than the French; it was Italian, it was Savoyard (named for the mountainous region, now in France, known as the Savoie)) will tell you is not Italian, though it features many pasta dishes, and, as one small example, a basil sauce called pistou, and which, with a little jiggering and the addition of another ingredient or two, becomes what we know as the ambrosial pesto of Liguria. But it’s not the same.

And in the same way, to move rapidly to the opposite end of Provence, the western end, which borders near Marseille on the Mediterranean, there are differences, matters of terroir, between what is called bouillabaise in Marseille, which is located in the department called the Bouches de Rhône (the “mouths of the Rhone,” a major river debouching into the Mediterranean Sea in a delta surrounding Marseille), and what is called bouillabaise in a little seaside resort town called Cassis, about ten kilometers east of Marseille, but in the department called the Var (which also happens to be where we are located). There are terrible arguments about the right constituents of a true bouillabaise, which fishes go into it, whether potatoes are part of the dish, how it is served, etc. There is even an official society of bouillabaise makers, represented by any number of restaurants serving the dish in Provence, and none of them serve it the same way. In this, we see the chief, and chiefly benign, manifestation of the concept of terroir.

I guess if forced to some up with a one-word translation it would be “turf” in the sense that gangs, at least, used to use that word in major American cities, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Distinguishable, inviolate, and ingrained, though with none of the political motive inherent in the ways gangs used the term.

So, what does all this have to do with ratatouille, that ineluctably wonderful vegetable stew indigenous to Provence, and possibly the apotheosis, in vegetal terms, of what Provençal cuisine is all about?

Without all the brouhaha that surrounds bouillabaise (and which gets its energy—the brouhaha, that is—no doubt from the money involved, as a dish of bouillabaise, often mandated in a restaurant as a dish to be ordered only for two persons, can cost as much as 160 euros for a serving; it is labor intensive, and tricky, and must be made from scratch to order, and has a number of constituent parts, is served in two courses, and involves some very expensive species of Mediterranean fishes), ratatouille also has its terroir influenced variations. But it is mainly a homely dish. More often than not served as a garnish to a fish or flesh main dish, though Linda and I just recently feasted on a huge helping of freshly made ratatouille served over a steaming mound of semoule (that is, couscous), and that was dinner.

I like to make ratatouille at least once, or twice a visit. And even the meager proportions of the recipe to follow (it’s coming, trust me), guarantees leftovers for at least two more meals, even if one of them is only lunch, with smaller portions to go around. For one thing, ratatouille is a dish best served, unlike Sicilian revenge, not only hot, but cold, or at room temperature, which has a lot to say for it.

There is a kind of basic list of ingredients, and it reads like the ur-definition of the Provençal or Mediterranean diet. It almost always includes zucchini, onions, eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. It is invariably made with olive oil, lots of olive oil, in which it is stewed. What I will tell you is you can add, within a fairly broad band of extras, just about anything you want, to push the flavor of the thing in one direction or another, grossly or subtly.

I like piquancy, and I like that so-called “fifth taste” called umami, so those are the variants I will include with the basic recipe I’ve contrived.

Those who know me, and know my cooking, know that I work as much as possible from scratch (but don’t be surprised to see some canned ingredients here; I’ll also include a way to be a little more pure, if you are even nuttier than I am, and must do virtually everything from the raw ingredients). When I say contrived, I mean that.

A long time ago, as is always the case when I am cooking something I have never cooked before, and often never eaten before (one of the “joys of cooking” is not reading recipes out of that horrendous collection—revered as it may be; salvation as it may have been to so many neophyte cooks; one of the joys of cooking is deconstructing a dish one has been served, without help, but with one’s analytic skills alone, and figuring out how to replicate it, or at least come up with an acceptable personal variation), a long time ago, probably very long, I read a recipe or two for ratatouille. After that, I’ve always winged it, and I cannot tell you how much is a vestigial remnant of some original recipe, which may have come from Julia Child, or from Larousse—two favorite sources from the period I would have first attempted a ratatouille, probably back in the 70s.

Further, here in Provence, where the ingredients in the summer are always local and always to hand, it’s much easier to just take the best of what looks good at the greengrocer at marché. The other requirement is to make sure the larder or pantry is stocked with at least a few basics that should always be on hand when cooking Provençal.

So the bottom line is, as I head into the recipe proper, this is a very localized version of ratatouille. Localized not only to the Var, not only to the Haut Var on whose edge our village sits, not only to our village (though nobody in the village has anything to do with the genesis of this recipe, but not a few have tasted it), but it’s localized chez nous, to our house… and I say that with neither defiance nor shame.

Universal Almost Foolproof Ratatouille (Provençal Vegetable Stew)

What I think you should have in your larder or pantry (especially if you’re cooking Provençal):

Pepper grinder (with black peppercorns—and, if gilding the lily, another with white, though white peppercorns have a different flavor and less bite and heat; the difference is not only on the palate, obviously, but esthetic, unless you don’t mind the color of pepper, even in a white sauce; personally I don’t mind at all, and it’s a pain to keep white peppercorns on hand)

Sea salt, preferably French, preferably Atlantic: mild, and generally in coarse medium-sized crystals

Green peppercorns, usually in a dilute vinegar solution

Capers

Tinned anchovies in olive oil, flat filets and/or flat fillets in salt, either tinned or in a jar

Tomato paste (or as they say in Europe “double concentrated”)

Whole Roma tomatoes, skinned, in their own juice, tinned—one can that has a gross weight of a pound will suffice; if you’re a purist, or prefer fresh ingredients, and you can obtain really good tasting Roma tomatoes, skin and seed about eight or nine medium sized fresh Roma tomatoes and chop very coarsely, and add to the recipe where stated as indicated for the tinned tomatoes

Fresh garlic, whole heads

Yellow onions, either medium or large

Harissa, which is a very hot Tunisian or Moroccan condiment, made mainly from pépins, which are quite hot fresh red peppers, perhaps like serrano, though hotter, and certainly hotter than jalapeño; there are recipes for making your own, but it’s a lot of work—hit the local Middle Eastern market, especially if they make their own (we buy ours in Aups from Chantal, the Olive Lady); it’s also sold under different brands in the foreign food sections of many American markets, either in tins or in tubes. Use it up, or throw it out; it loses its heat, efficacy and flavor very soon after opening.

Cremini mushrooms, medium sized.

Chicken stock, and/or vegetable stock.

Here’s definitely what you’ll need for the ratatouille:

Two medium Italian eggplants (these are smaller variety than the monsters usually sold in the U.S.; I also think they’re more flavorful, easier to work with, and less woody)

Two medium zucchini

Two large red Bell peppers (I wish I could import the local ones that are available everywhere here, even in supermarkets; so much more flavorful, with a musky peppery perfume that you rarely experience in the U.S.)

Celery, in a bunch; you’ll need one stalk of a large-sized bunch

Small amount, say 1/2 cup, of French rosé or white wine; if you use white, you can use a California or Italian dry white

Vodka

The trick, and the heartache, of this recipe is that you more or less sauté each ingredient separately, store it in a bowl along with the other ingredients to be returned to the sauce pan for final cooking.

Chop one medium to large yellow onion. (with this step and from here on, the directions and the measurements are coarse and approximate at best; if you really need precise measurements, this recipe, and most of my others, are not for you)

Slice at least two large cloves of garlic very thin, as if with a razor. The more garlic the better as far as I’m concerned, but two large cloves are minimal. Chop the slices coarsely.

De-stem and skin the eggplants, and slice into 1/2 inch slices. Line a colander with the one layer of slices, salt that layer generously, and flip the slices and salt again, add another layer, salt that layer on the exposed surfaces, and keep layering in this fashion until you’ve added all the eggplant slices. Cover the last layer with two thicknesses of paper towel, making sure the toweling clings to the surface. Let sit for at least 20 minutes, and no more than a half hour.

Skin the zucchinis. What I like to do with zucchini is to cut it into uneven polyhedrons, not bigger than about 3/4 to one inch in any dimension. This means cutting the zucchini along its length at acute angles, rotating it as you cut, forming these odd shaped objects with many surfaces at varying angles to one another. It’s the closest you’ll come to making round balls out of them, without making yourself crazy.

Cut the stem out of each of the red peppers. Cut each pepper in half, and with a very sharp paring knife, cut away all the whitish pith from the inside. Rinse each half of the peppers under running cold water to get rid of all seeds. With a very sharp knife, cut each half of the peppers into long strips about 3/8 of an inch wide. When all halves are in strips, cut all strips in half width-wise.

Take one stalk of celery (or more, if you really like celery, or none if you don’t) and cut into half-inch slices.

With the mushrooms, again, you’re dealing with an optional ingredient. Use at least a cup and-a-half, but no more than two cups. Cut off the stems, and cut the larger heads in half, or more parts than that if they’re monsters.

Keep each of these ingredients in its own bowl, ready to toss into the sauce pan. Have a large stainless or ceramic bowl handy to accept the cooked vegetables as you finish them.

For each of these ingredients, you will need one to two tablespoons of olive oil for each batch, except the eggplant, which will require three or four, and the mushrooms, which will require four or five. These last two are sponges for oil. The mushrooms will give up whatever oil they absorb once cooked, however, so don’t go crazy with the oil.

Heat the sauce pan (medium sized, probably at least six quart, with a cover) over medium to medium-high heat, depending on the efficiency of your stove’s burner. If it’s a “professional home” stove, use a proportionately lower flame—15,000 BTU burners and higher get quite hot. Add one to two tablespoons of oil while it’s heating up and when the surface of the oil shows it’s hot—it gets kind of roiled, as if a slight wind were blowing across still water—add the onions and garlic and toss, or if you’re not adapt at tossing things in a pan, use a wooden flat bladed spatula to constantly move the ingredients around and get everything coated with oil. Toss occasionally, or mix with the spatula, the onions and garlic should turn translucent and begin to brown around the edges. Probably five minutes of active movement cooking will be enough.

Dump the onions and garlic into the large bowl.

One or two more tablespoons of oil, and once it’s hot, toss in the zucchini. Same deal, only it won’t get translucent, but will soften slightly. The browning is more important. Don’t let it burn, but make sure it browns.

While the zucchini is cooking, remove the paper towel, now soaked with liquid from the eggplant, and rinse the eggplant in cold water. Rinse off all the salt. Keep your eye on the zucchini. Pat dry the eggplant.

While the zucchini continues to cook, cut the eggplant slices into 1/2 inch dice.

When the zucchini is done, dump it into the bowl with the onions and garlic.

Add three to four tablespoons of oil to the pan and when it’s hot, add the eggplant. It will soften and get brown, but keep it moving, little enough to brown, but enough to keep from burning. When it’s done, add to the bowl with the other cooked ingredients.

Add two tablespoons of olive oil to the pan and heat it, and add all the pepper strips. Brown them lightly. Don’t let them get overly limp. Add the cooked peppers to the other ingredients in the bowl.

Cook the optional celery, if desired, with a little oil (even less than the onions), and when lightly browned, add to the other cooked ingredients.

Use four or five tablespoons of olive and heat it for the optional mushrooms, add these to the hot oil and toss constantly. They will first absorb the oil and then begin to brown and then release the oil. With a slotted spoon or drainer, remove the mushrooms and add to the other ingredients once the mushrooms are browned. Don’t let the mushrooms get soft.

If there’s an appreciable amount of oil, say more than a tablespoon, in the pan after removing the mushrooms, drain the excess oil, and return the pan to the stove. The pan should be well coated with a dark brown fond from all the vegetables you’ve cooked in it. Heat the pan, but don’t let it smoke, and add the wine and a splash or two of vodka. You may also add some chicken stock, or vegetable stock, if you’re a purist, as much as 1/4 to 1/2 cup. Turn the heat to high and let the liquids boil rapidly and while they do, scrape the fond from the surfaces of the pan with a flat wooden spatula.

When the liquids have reduced to a very thick syrup, dump the can of tomatoes and their juices into the pan. Leave the heat on high. Mash the tomatoes with the flat blade of the spatula, and get the liquid boiling. Add a couple of pinches of salt and a few grinds of fresh pepper. Turn down the heat to medium, and add the cooked vegetables.

Then add from two to four tablespoons of tomato paste. It’s packed in very small cans in Europe. They’re about two-ounce cans. I add the whole can, scraping out all of it with a silicone rubber spatula.

While the vegetables heat up again (and keep an eye on the pan while you do this) drain the tinned anchovies, and dump the anchovy fillets into a mortar and pestle. If you use salted filets, rinse them thoroughly, shake them dry and dump these into the mortar and pestle. With some force, grind the anchovies into a paste. Do it thoroughly.

Once you have your anchovy paste, dump it into the sauce pan. Add from 1/2 teaspoon to 1-1/2 teaspoons—depending on the volume of vegetables, which is a function of whether you added the celery and or mushrooms—of the harissa to the mix, and blend thoroughly. (Warning: harissa is a very hot condiment; if you’re a spice-a-phobe, don’t add any; and if you do add it, in any amount, don’t blame me if you know what…) You may also add green peppercorns at this time and/or capers, depending on your preference, and the degree of piquancy you like in your ratatouille.

Stir occasionally, and when the whole thing is bubbling, reduce heat to medium-low or low, depending on your stove, cover to keep a simmer, and simmer for at least 10 minutes and probably no more than 20. Stir occasionally. Taste and add salt and pepper if required. Probably not.

Serve very hot over your choice of couscous, or polenta, or rice, or by itself as a side dish.

Can be kept refrigerated for up to a week. If preferred hot, reheat only to the point of serving temperature. Otherwise it’s perfectly good cold or at room temperature.

This is only a basic recipe, remember, so be inventive or experimental.

by

[no animals were harmed in the making of this blog entry]

I’ll try to make this quick, because it’s a little late, and I have other things to do before I go to sleep.

The walls are famously thick of the houses here in the village. The rule of thumb and usual reference is three feet. It’s not quite that, but probably at the base of the house it’s close to that. They are, indeed, masonry walls, and mainly on the periphery walls of stone, either as rubble within the wall or as large stones carefully fitted to one another.

As a result the windows are projections, and our pretty much modern windows, all of them casements opening inward, are set midway in the opening. Hence the sills are deep, and form a shelf in every window. These are commonly tiled. They are in our house. On the outside, to cover the window opening are shutters, which open outward, and these, like the windows, are either split “French-style,” that is there are two hinged shutters meeting in the middle, or there is a single shutter, hinged on one side or the other.

With the shutters closed, the house is quite dark within.

The front of the house, which constitutes one of only two walls with access to the out of doors, faces west. The other outer wall faces south. We sit, in short, on a corner, and our other inner walls are party to our neighbors: one to the north, and another “behind” us, to the east.

The result of this aspect and configuration is that the front of the house is in shadow until well past noon, but we see the sunny opposite side of the place almost as soon as the sun rises in the morning. The houses are sufficiently high opposite us, and slightly elevated relative to our position that we don’t get that much direct sun. So the inside of the house, on the first two floors, anyway, stays moderately cool and livable, even in the worst of the dog days, which have, incidentally, returned after a respite following a clamorous thunderstorm of two hours duration a few days ago.

The top floor where I toil away, entertaining you sporadically, is just under the roof, and there is no insulation, and it gets warm, unless we keep the air moving, which we do. My fingers move very quickly across the keyboard setting up a slight breeze. That and the four foot circular fan I described a few entries back make all the difference.

The house has no screens. Most houses don’t. On the plain, it’s a problem, because of the flies. Up here in the village the flies are less of a problem, and there are few mosquitoes, if any.

As for other insectivora there are plenty of critters, of every conceivable type. In particular there are wasps and hornets, though I’m hard put to tell the difference. One of them has wings that jut straight out, like a spy plane, and the other has wings that sit at an angle, sort of swept-wing, like fighter planes. It doesn’t much matter, as they don’t bother anyone most of the time, unless you’re eating, and they don’t usually get into the house. The eating thing is a problem only when we entertain out on the terrace on the roof.

On the third floor, the only windows that open are in front, as per the rest of the house, and facing south, again normale, but in the kitchen up here, and so around a jog in the wall, because of the doorway into the kitchen. there is also a unique fixed window, that is, it can’t be opened, but it looks out on the terrace and faces east, so there is mucho sun up here in the morning, starting at sunrise.

We leave the French double casement windows open in front on this floor. Hence there is a slow, but steady stream of either wasps or hornets—these particular beasts are on the small side and have the delta wing design. They fly to the fixed window. I would too. It looks like the way out again. But of course it isn’t. Poor things. And so they loiter, buzzing around the window, up and down, side to side. At night, once a crowd has accumulated—about the third day we had been here—they bunch up at the top of the window, as if keeping one another warm, not that it gets that cool up here. But there is a community thing happening. They’re in a bunch right now, a tight bunch, right in the corner, out of reach—though the last thing I would think of doing is reaching for them.This has been going on for almost two weeks now. Every morning, I come up here to check the mail that arrived overnight: and say, folks, the mail has been slim in this direction. You know who you are.

Every morning I expect to find a little pile of hornet or wasp corpses on the sill. But nothing. They’re keeping alive somehow. The size of the bunch has stabilized so maybe they’re eating each other, or maybe a few of them have an extra brain cell or two and they are finding their way back to the open window, or are feeling adventurous and going around the corner into the kitchen, where there’s about one and-a-half square meters of wide open window (that’s about 15 square feet for you culture-centric or math-challenged).

Anyway, that’s the wasp and hornet story. There’s a bunch of other singular specimens of a variety of species, very much smaller, except the moths, and they flit around, not bothering me or anybody else. And that’s pretty much their story.

On the floors, especially in corners in the dark, we find corpses, speaking of corpses, of beetles and tiny critters that look exactly like scorpions, but they are only related and don’t pack quite the same wallop. They’re about an inch and-a-quarter long, and their stingers rise maybe three-eighths of an inch above them. They move kind of slowly, and we’ve mainly seen dead ones. Nevertheless we check our shoes before we put them on. I do and Linda is supposed to. So far no stings. Nevertheless, they like dark tight spaces. And I guess they either have no olfactory development worth speaking of, or they like the smell of feet. And that’s the little scorpion-not-really story.

I mentioned the cicadas, cigales in French, and one of the symbols of Provence. There is at least one restaurant called Les Cigales for, I’d say, every 10,000 people who live in Provence. Our favorite Les Cigales, though we’ve hardly been to all of them (would make a nice project though) is in Aix. Their pizza is particularly good, and they have a nice terrace on the street.

The cicadas have been active and voluble of late, because of the heat, as I said.

One evening last week, a cicada landed on Linda’s shoulder while we were out eating at a restaurant in Aups, called La Provencale (not very good, and our waitress was trop attitude, so you won’t be hearing much about that place, much as I have a masterly way with a complaint or a disparaging word, but this was, except for the cicada, just beyond the pale and not worth my typing about). Anyway, this monster lands on her shoulder, and scares the crap, but only for a moment, out of Linda, who then did not know what to do.

I sat next to her, so I had the best view. It was a beautiful thing, a sort of matte medium gray, warmish in tone, and almost monochromatic. There was a couple of little kids at the table next to us, Irish as it happened, so I thought it would be easy to attract their attention without groping for French. But they didn’t take much interest. Though Grandpa did, and he remarked on the size of it. I had mistaken them for Americans, so I said it was a Texas cicada, and he allowed as it probably was, in quite a brogue, which immediately disabused me of their origins. Linda was getting tired of not moving a muscle, and I guess the little creature also was getting bored because in one leap or short flight it landed on a roost about five feet away, and we lost him. Perfect camouflage.

I like moments like that. These creatures are truly beautiful, and, though not privy to Linda’s fantasies as she sat there, at first unknowing, and then terrified—the thing was about four inches long and they are all legs and wings, folded back in a characteristic aerodynamic foil, even at rest—I myself wished for another encounter. In the end they are not harmful, or so I gather.

And that was that for cigales, or at least the larger species of insect beasts, until today.

Last night, as I leaned out the front window of the salon on the ground floor, I noticed Nicole, the innkeeper and our good friend in the doorway of the inn, returning from watering their plants on the facade. I noticed that the kitchen was dark and the kitchen door closed, though usually wide open, with the bug zapper and its eery blue light visible across the way, even with all the lights on in there. This meant their cook was, once again, hors de combat.

Nicole and Rudolf’s trials with kitchen staff would make a book, but I won’t get into that. I just knew, as I leaned on the tiles of the sill, which is about 28 inches above the floor (and yet, on the other side, the outside of our place, the bottom of the window is practically level with the street—but I’ll explain the significance of that in a moment), that Nicole was probably fit to be tied. With the cook out, the restaurant could not serve dinner even to the guests of the Inn who didn’t fell like driving the few miles to the nearest eatery, in any one of several towns surrounding us.

She usually notices everything going on within eyesight, but such was her reverie and preoccupation that I had to call, “Nicole” before she took notice, just as she was going to disappear inside. In effect, I said what gives and she told me he was calling in “sick” again. I said, well then come in and have a glass of wine, an invitation she rarely refuses if it’s possible to take it up.

I was in the midst of making dinner, and she came in and joined us, for just one glass of wine. We killed the entire bottle with her, and she also had dinner, as she couldn’t remember if she had even eaten (this cook business is very upsetting). She insisted she would replace the bottle—a rosé from the Chateau La Curniéres, which is in neighboring Tavernes, and a very good value: I bought half a case for 27 euros just that afternoon, and it’s a wine featured at the Inn (for 22 euros a bottle, and quite a value at that). We insisted she wouldn’t. Finally we bid one another good night and I locked up.

This morning, after looking through my sparse pickings in the email department (see above: inadequate communications from friends) I headed downstairs, and passing through the salon sensed more than noticed that something was amiss.

The window in there, as I say, faces the place with a sill about two and-a-half feet above the floor and about four or five inches above the pavement which comes right up to the stone wall of the facade of our house. The entire first floor of our house is below grade, with the kitchen floor down a deep step further. This means mainly that outside the house at least, the grade has been raised a number of times, I’d guess since our house was built. The town was established in the 12th century, probably late in that period. We are told our house is either 14th or 15th century in origin. That’s a long time to be putting layer on layer.

The chief deficit of this is, with stone walls, and a floor inside closer to the water table and below the grade outdoors, the walls wick moisture out of the ground and that moisture stays insulated by about two feet of earth and stone. Hence we have a perpetual decaying of the inside plaster on the front wall. We’ll suffer, thanks.

Window treatments in southern France are represented in a narrow band of interpretations. There’s your lace window curtains. There’s your lined drapes. There’s your wooden-beaded curtains—popular in doorways and windows down on the plain: they admit light and aren’t a barrier to humans and pets, but they keep out flies. There are some other treatments even less attractive to us than these. For four years now, and longer, we’ve had naked windows, though you’d never know it from outside, which is what counts, with the shutters closed. They mainly are closed, we’re so seldom here of late.

But you gotta’ have window treatments. The compulsion is Linda’s, and I don’t disagree. I’m just your usual persnickety picky mate, as I am with more or less everything else, and not just any treatment will do.

We both agreed that a nice, plain, sort of gauzy see-through kind of curtain would do. For the salon, we found a nice piece of gauze they would use up in about three minutes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, for a mere 150 bucks for this flimsy bit of, well, I can’t even call it cloth. About seven feet long, and about five feet wide, with ties attached at the top to go round a curtain rod. It took us six months to get it hemmed, possibly in the ‘States, flying it back and forth with us, because who knows a good seamstress in Fox-Amphoux? But I’m not sure of these details.

It does lend a nice dreamy romantic quality during the day to the light coming into the room. And you can’t really see in, because we don’t have lights on, certainly none brighter than the blazing sunlight. And, remarkably, no one looks into other people’s windows over here. At least not while I’m watching, sometimes deep in the shadows of the salon.

So this morning I detected something different about the room, and I looked around quickly and noticed the curtain was disturbed—pushed aside slightly—and there, sitting on the sill, was a bottle of Chateau La Curniéres Rosé 2004. Magic. I went over to retrieve it, and as I straightened the curtain on the rod, noticed a slight movement above my head.

A very large bug, with very big legs, what I originally thought might be a cigale (but have been told, by Pascal Masi, is not possible with such legs—more likely a grasshopper or locust, or maybe a cricket; all are related) was sitting there on the rod, and he suddenly leaped to the floor. I spotted him, not moving, and I ran into the kitchen, grabbed a colander, ran back, and threw it over him. I went up to the third floor and grabbed a sheaf of ink-jet paper to slip beneath the colander, retrieved my camera, and went back to the salon. I switched lenses, slid the paper under the colander, lifted the whole deal off the floor and put it on a table, raised the colander. Nothing. Gone. Vanished.

Actually he was clinging to the inner surface of the colander, and I gingerly coaxed him onto the paper, and then somehow onto the outside of the colander. Tough to shoot. Very small, maybe three inches long, and all tension. No way to tell when and in what direction he would spring. I grabbed a couple of shots, and then brought him to the open window, and he immediately jumped to the ground, a distance of maybe eight inches, thanks to the raised surface of the road. I took one more picture.

This last one was sort of mano à bêto I stared at him, and I know he was scrutinizing me. Big eyes, taking in everything. The rest of him blended beautifully with the leafy detritus on the ground outside our ill-kempt street front. I know what you’re thinking. What’s with all the brown leaves and junk? It’s summer. Well, they’ve probably been there since our last visit, in January. What I want to know is, how does he know, blending in perfectly, when you come right down to it?

This is wholly beside the point. What struck me is the way he studied me. I know he was memorizing every feature: the beard, the glasses, the wild white hair, the slight skin condition. The next time we meet, I know one of us will be ready, and it won’t be me.

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