Toujours Provence Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TOUJOURS PROVENCE

  Peter Mayle has contributed to a wide range of publications in England, France and America, and his work has been translated into twenty-two languages. His books, many of them published by Penguin, include A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence, Hotel Pastis, A Dog's Life, Anything Considered, Chasing Cézanne and Encore Provence.

  PETER MAYLE

  Toujours Provence

  Illustrated by Judith Clancy

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LONDON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1991

  Published by Pan Books 1992

  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  12

  Copyright © Peter Mayle,1991

  Judith Clancy's drawings copyrighted and used with the permission of the Estate of Judith Clancy

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192520-2

  To Jennie, as always, and to the friends and partners in research who have been so generous in so many ways: Michel from Châteauneuf, Michel from Cabrières, Henriette and Faustin, Alain the truffle hunter, Christopher, Catherine and Bernard.

  Mille mercis

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  1 Buying Truffles from Monsieur X

  2 The Singing Toads of St Pantaléon

  3 Boy

  4 Napoleons at the Bottom of the Garden

  5 Les Invalides

  6 The English Écrevisse

  7 Passing 50 Without Breaking the Speed Limit

  8 The Flic

  9 Mouthful for Mouthful with the Athlete Gourmet

  10 Sporting and Fashion Notes from the Ménerbes Dog Show

  11 As Advertised in Vogue

  12 Mainly Dry Periods, with Scattered Fires

  13 No Spitting in Châteauneuf-du-Pape

  14 Dinner with Pavarotti

  15 A Pastis Lesson

  16 Inside the Belly of Avignon

  17 Postcards from Summer

  18 Arrest That Dog!

  19 Life Through Rosé-tinted Spectacles

  FOREWORD

  An eyewitness account of the invasion of Provence by 500,000 British thugs

  It was an unusual sight, possibly unique in the long history of Ménerbes. A Rolls-Royce had been seen nosing, in its stately fashion, through the village.

  To most people, this would have been worth a second glance only because some of the streets of Ménerbes are narrower than a Rolls-Royce, and therefore provide interesting opportunities for a one-car traffic jam. To others, however, the arrival of the Rolls had great and gloomy significance, to be welcomed with as little enthusiasm as the reappearance of the Black Death, or news that cirrhosis of the liver was contagious. An expatriate resident summed it up for the Sunday Times in one despairing sentence. ‘It is’, he said, ‘the end of the Lubéron.’

  Worse, much worse, was to come, according to another expatriate, a distinguished lady resident of Aix. She claimed that busloads of British hooligans were about to descend on Provence. This was immediately transformed into a precise and infinitely menacing statistic: overnight, through the magic of journalism, mere busloads became 500,000 thugs, probably awash with lager and looking for some vicious diversion to keep them amused until the start of the football season. It was possible, so the distinguished lady from Aix said, that all British expatriates – even those of impeccable rectitude – would be expelled from France, presumably as a punishment for the unspecified but certainly ghastly acts that the thugs would commit. This was reported, with distant relish, in the New York Times.

  Meanwhile, a part-time Provencal squire muttered about ‘Gadarene swine’ and the ruination of the spirit of the region, and there were numerous stories (mostly written by experts from their vantage points in Wapping and the Home Counties) of how the peaceful tenor of life in the Lubéron was being destroyed by maddened hordes of tourists.

  Throughout the early part of summer, these alarming and curiously repetitive despatches continued to appear. And there I was on the spot, in the seething vortex itself, perfectly placed to observe the horrors of invasion without even having to leave the Café du Progrès.

  I spent one morning there in a state of trepidation, half-expecting to witness dreadful scenes of vandalism, mugging, attempted rape, mass intoxication and bellowed demands for fish and chips from an advance party of thugs. As it happened, the dramatic highlight of the morning was a Dutchman falling off his bicycle trying to avoid a cat.

  I went further afield, to Goult and Buoux and Cabrières and Bonnieux. Friends there, some of them chefs with a professional interest in tourism, were unable to give me any first-hand reports of the invasion. Tourism was slightly down this year, they felt, undoubtedly because of the recession.

  Where were the thugs? Every morning I looked up and down the road outside the house, and every morning it was deserted except for an occasional tractor and the van parked by the side of the melon field. Not a busload of hooligans to be seen. Maybe they'd lost their way, or become trapped on the périphérique outside Paris, doomed to go round in circles until they ran out of lager.

  By August, I had given up; but other, more diligent reporters were still trying. A camera crew from CBS television arrived at the house one day, hot and puzzled. They had been sent over to film the tourist explosion, and had just spent a couple of hours in Ménerbes.

  ‘Is it always like that?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Kind of empty.’

  They had a beer and left to cover a reported outbreak of illegal nude sunbathing in Saint-Tropez.

  Ménerbes, 1991

  1

  Buying Truffles from Monsieur X

  The whole furtive business began with a phone call from London. It was my friend Frank, who had once been described in a glossy magazine as a reclusive magnate. I knew him better as a gourmet of championship standard, a man who takes dinner as seriously as other men take politics. Frank in the kitchen is like a hound on the scent, sniffing, peering into bubbling saucepans, quivering with expectation. The smell of a rich cassoulet puts him in a trance. My wife says that he is one of the most rewarding eaters she has ever cooked for.

  There was a hint of alarm in his voice when he explained why he was calling.

  ‘It's March,’ he said, ‘and I'm worried about the truffles. Are there still some left?’

  March is the end of the truffle season, and in the markets around us, as close as we were to the truffle country in the foothills of Mont Ventou
x, the dealers seemed to have disappeared. I told Frank that he might have left it too late.

  There was a horrified silence while he considered the gastronomic deprivation that stared him in the face – no truffle omelettes, no truffles en croûte, no truffle-studded roast pork. The telephone line was heavy with disappointment.

  ‘There's one man,’ I said, ‘who might have a few. I could try him.’

  Frank purred. ‘Excellent, excellent. Just a couple of kilos. I'm going to put them in egg-boxes and keep them in the deep-freeze. Truffles in the spring, truffles in the summer. Just a couple of kilos.’

  Two kilos of fresh truffles, at current Paris prices, would have cost more than £1, 000. Even down in Provence, bypassing the chain of middlemen and buying direct from the hunters with their muddy boots and leather hands, the investment would be impressive. I asked Frank if he was sure he wanted as much as two kilos.

  ‘It wouldn't do to run short,’ he said. ‘Anyway, see what you can manage.’

  My only contact with the truffle business consisted of a telephone number scribbled on the back of a bill by the chef of one of our local restaurants. He had told us that this was un homme sérieux as far as truffles were concerned, a man of irreproachable honesty, which is not always the case in the murky world of truffle dealing where petty swindles are rumoured to be as common as sunny days in Aix. I had heard tales of truffles loaded with buckshot and caked with mud to increase their weight and, even worse, inferior specimens smuggled in from Italy and sold as native French truffles. Without a reliable supplier, one could get into some expensive trouble.

  I called the number that the chef had given me, and mentioned his name to the man who answered. Ah, oui. The credentials were accepted. What could he do for me?

  Some truffles? Maybe two kilos?

  ‘Oh là là,’ said the voice. ‘Are you a restaurant?’

  No, I said, I was buying on behalf of a friend in England.

  ‘An Englishman? Mon Dieu.’

  After a few minutes of sucking his teeth and explaining the considerable problems involved in finding so many truffles so late in the season, Monsieur X (his nom de truffe) promised to take his dogs into the hills and see what he could find. He would let me know, but it would not be a rapid affair. I must stay by the phone and be patient.

  A week passed, nearly two, and then one evening the phone rang.

  A voice said, ‘I have what you want. We can have a rendezvous tomorrow evening.’

  He told me to be waiting by a telephone cabine on the Carpentras road at six o'clock. What make and colour was my car? And one important point: cheques were not accepted. Cash, he said, was more agreeable. (This, as I later discovered, is standard practice in the truffle trade. Dealers don't believe in paperwork, don't issue receipts, and regard with disdain the ridiculous notion of income tax.)

  I arrived at the phone box just before six. The road was deserted, and I was uncomfortably conscious of the large wad of cash in my pocket. The papers had been full of reports of robberies and other unpleasantness on the back roads of the Vaucluse. Gangs of voyous, according to the crime reporter of Le Provençal, were out and about, and prudent citizens should stay at home.

  What was I doing out here in the dark with a salami-sized roll of 500-franc notes, a sitting and well-stuffed duck? I searched the car for a defensive weapon, but the best I could find was a shopping basket and an old copy of the Guide Michelin.

  Ten slow minutes went by before I saw a set of headlights. A dented Citroën van wheezed up and stopped on the other side of the phone box. The driver and I looked at each other surreptitiously from the safety of our cars. He was alone. I got out.

  I'd been expecting to meet an old peasant with black teeth and canvas boots and a villainous sideways glance, but Monsieur X was young, with cropped black hair and a neat moustache. He looked pleasant. He even grinned as he shook my hand.

  ‘You'd never have found my house in the dark,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  We drove off, leaving the main road for a twisting stony track that led deeper and deeper into the hills, Monsieur X driving as if he were on the autoroute with me bouncing and clattering behind. Eventually, he turned through a narrow gateway and parked in front of an unlit house surrounded by clumps of scrub oak. As I opened the car door, a large Alsatian appeared from the shadows and inspected my leg thoughtfully. I hoped he'd been fed.

  I could smell truffles as soon as I went through the front

  door – that ripe, faintly rotten smell which can find its way through everything except glass and tin. Even eggs, when stored in a box with a truffle, will taste of truffles.

  And there they were on the kitchen table, piled in an old basket, black, knobbly, ugly, delicious and expensive.

  ‘Voilà.’ Monsieur X held the basket up to my nose. ‘I've brushed off the mud. Don't wash them until just before you eat them.’

  He went to a cupboard and took out an ancient pair of scales which he hung from a hook in the beam above the table. One by one, testing the truffles with a squeeze of his fingers to make sure they were still firm, he placed them on the blackened weighing dish, talking as he weighed them about his new experiment. He had bought a miniature Vietnamese pig which he hoped to train into a truffle finder extraordinaire. Pigs had a keener sense of smell than dogs, he said, but since the normal pig was the size of a small tractor he was not a convenient travelling companion on trips to the truffle grounds below Mont Ventoux.

  The needles on the scales hovered and then settled on two kilos, and Monsieur X packed the truffles into two linen bags. He licked his thumb and counted the cash I gave him.

  ‘C'est bieng.’ He brought out a bottle of marc and two glasses, and we drank to the success of his pig-training scheme. Next season, he said, I must come with him one day to see the pig in action. It would be a major advance in detection technique – le super-cochon. As I was leaving, he gave me a handful of tiny truffles and his omelette recipe, and wished me bon voyage to London.

  The scent of the truffles stayed with me in the car on the way home. The following day, my carry-on luggage smelt of truffles, and when the plane landed at Heathrow a heady whiff came out of the overhead locker as I prepared to take my bag past the X-ray eyes of British Customs. Other passengers looked at me curiously and edged away, as if I had terminal halitosis.

  It was the time of Edwina Currie's salmonella alert, and I had visions of being cornered by a pack of sniffer dogs and thrown into quarantine for importing exotic substances that might endanger the nation's health. I walked tentatively through Customs. Not a nostril twitched. The taxi-driver, however, was deeply suspicious.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘what you got there?’

  ‘Truffles.’

  ‘Oh, right. Truffles. Been dead long, have they?’

  He closed the partition between us, and I was spared the usual cab-driver's monologue. When he dropped me at Frank's house, he made a point of getting out and opening the back windows.

  The reclusive magnate himself greeted me, and pounced on the truffles. He passed one of the linen bags round among his dinner guests, some of whom were not at all sure what they were sniffing, and then summoned from the kitchen his domestic commander-in-chief, a Scotsman of such statuesque demeanour that I always think of him as a General-Domo.

  ‘I think we need to deal with these at once, Vaughan, said Frank.

  Vaughan raised his eyebrows and sniffed delicately. He knew what they were.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the bonny truffle. This will do very well with the foie gras tomorrow.’

  Monsieur X would have approved.

  It was strange to be in London again after an absence of nearly two years. I felt out of place and foreign, and I was surprised how much I had changed. Or maybe it was London. There was endless talk about money, property prices, the stock market and corporate acrobatics of one sort or another. The weather, once a traditional English complaint, was never mentioned, which was just as well. That at lea
st hadn't changed, and the days passed in a blur of grey drizzle, with people on the streets hunched up against the continuous dripping from above. Traffic barely moved, but most drivers didn't seem to notice; they were busy talking, presumably about money and property prices, on their car phones. I missed the light and the space and the huge open skies of Provence, and I realized that I would never willingly come back to live in a city again.

  On the way out to the airport, the cab driver asked where I was going, and when I told him, he nodded knowingly.

  ‘I was down there once,’ he said. ‘Fréjus, it was, in the caravan. Bloody expensive.’

  He charged me £25 for the ride, wished me a happy holiday and warned me about the drinking water that had been his downfall in Fréjus. Three days on the khazi, he said. The wife had been well pleased.

  I flew out of winter and into spring, and went through the informalities of arriving in Marignane, which I never understand. Marseille is reputed to be the centre of half the drug business in Europe, and yet passengers carrying hand baggage stuffed with hashish, cocaine, heroin, English Cheddar or any other form of contraband can walk out of the airport without going through Customs. It was, like the weather, a complete contrast to Heathrow.

  Monsieur X was pleased to hear how welcome his two kilos had been.

  ‘He is an amateur, your friend?’

  Yes he is, I said, but some of his friends were not too sure about the smell.

  I could almost hear him shrug over the phone. It is a little special. Not everyone likes it. Tant mieux for those who do. He laughed, and his voice became confidential.

  ‘I have something to show you,’ he said. ‘A film I made. We could drink some marc and watch it if you like.’

  When I finally found his house, the Alsatian greeted me like a long-lost bone, and Monsieur X called him off, hissing at him in the way that I had heard hunters use in the forest.

  ‘He's just playful,’ he said. I'd heard that before too.