Encore Provence Read online

  We were passing an extremely thin house, only as wide as a single room, and glanced through the open door. One side of the room was furnished normally, with carpet, table and chairs. Three members of the family were sitting there watching television. The other half of the room was taken up by a well-polished Citroën. It wasn't one of the bigger Citroëns, admittedly, but big enough, and somehow it had managed to creep in through the door and park itself without obliterating the furniture. I wondered how long it had been there, and if it was ever allowed out for a run.

  Presumably, it had been confined to the living room to keep it safe in what we had been told was an unsafe neighbourhood. But once again, Marseille was failing to live down to its reputation. Children and old ladies were out in force, not visibly in terror of their lives. Many of the houses had their doors and windows wide open, and one or two had been turned into tiny restaurants and épiceries. It was more charming than threatening, the only risk of physical injury coming from the occasional flying football.

  As we reached the top end of the rue du Petit-Puits, we had our first sight of one of Marseille's most fortunate and elegant survivors, the pale rosy stone mass of La Vieille Charité. Designed by Pierre Puget and built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the buildings at one time provided a home for Marseille's homeless, who were probably too relieved at finding shelter to appreciate that they had been installed in some kind of architectural heaven: a vast quadrangle, nearly 100 yards long by fifty yards wide, surrounded by three storeys of arcades which overtook a magnificent chapel topped by an oval dome.

  In fact, despite its name, its early history is far from charitable. The residents of seventeenth-century Marseille – or, at least, those with a roof over their heads and money in their pockets – were alarmed at the number of beggars and vagabonds roaming the streets, who were considered a source of unrest and delinquency. Clearly, the city needed its own squad of riot police, and so a sergeant and ten archers dressed in red were hired to round up and lock up all those without resources who couldn't prove they were natives of Marseille. These duties were performed with such enthusiasm that in 1695 there were 1,200 men and women crammed into La Charité. They were put to work under the direction of armed supervisors, but were allowed out from time to time, closely guarded, to make up the numbers in funeral processions.

  Came the Revolution, and La Charité became more charitable. Over the centuries, it offered shelter to a long, sad list of temporary tenants: the elderly, the destitute and the orphans, the families displaced by urban redevelopment, and finally, those evicted by Nazi dynamite. And then, the war over, it was left to rot.

  It took more than twenty years of enlightened restoration to bring it back to its present immaculate state. Perhaps because we had arrived through cramped and shadowy streets, the impression of space and light as we stood in the quadrangle was almost overpowering. It was a moment for looking rather than talking. There is something about architecture on the grand scale that seems to subdue human speech, and the thirty or forty people wandering around the arcades never raised their voices above a murmur. Not quite an awed hush, but very close. As it happened, we were told that we had picked a quiet day, a between-season lull in the programme of events and exhibitions. Even so, there is a Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology and an excellent bookshop on the premises, and these can easily take up the rest of your afternoon.

  We walked back to the port and a more recent local monument, Le New-York, a brasserie with a west-facing terrace and a view of the spectacular Marseille sunset. The day had been too short, and there was too much we hadn't seen: the Château d'If, due to the weather (which remained perfect throughout the day); the many museums; the dozens of fine old buildings hidden among the high-rises; the cathedrals (one of them supported by 444 marble columns); the Bar de la Marine, where the characters in Pagnol's Marius played cards; the Château du Pharo, built by Napoleon III for his wife; and Marseille's stomach, the Marché des Capucins.

  But although a day in a city is no more than a sip from a barrel, it had been enough to make us want to come back for more. Marseille may be a rough old girl with a dubious reputation, but she has considerable charm, and there are patches of great beauty amongst the modern ugliness. Also, I happen to like Marseille's independent, slightly overblown personality, and I particularly admire the cheek with which it has appropriated both the French national anthem and the most popular aperitif in Provence.

  ‘La Marseillaise’, that stirring call to children of the motherland, was actually composed in Strasbourg as the battle song of the army of the Rhine. It was taken up and sung by 500 volunteers from Marseille who were marching to Paris, and when they reached the capital it became, of course, la chanson marseillaise that they were singing. (In fairness, it does sound a great deal better than ‘La Strasbour-geoise’ as the title of France's number one song.)

  More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille's most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon – he once took 1,500 of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope – decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn't an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addictive absinthe was banned in 1915. But Pernod didn't invent pastis either; according to legend, a hermit did. As you would expect from an ambitious, gregarious hermit, he took his invention and opened a bar – in Marseille, naturally. But it was Ricard, with his genius for publicity and marketing, who gave the drink its Mediterranean pedigree. He, and he alone, made what he called le vrai pastis de Marseille. He promoted the phrase as if it were a guarantee of the genuine article. And it worked. Something over fifty million bottles a year are sold now.

  A final story that illustrates Marseille's independence of spirit. After years of cocking a snook at central authority, which in those days was Louis XIV, the city was taught a lesson. The walls were breached, and the cannons of the fort protecting Marseille from attack by sea were turned around and aimed at the inhabitants, who were considered more of a threat than any invaders.

  I don't know exactly why, but it gives me pleasure to think that the Marseillais are still here, as rebellious as ever, while the kings are long since gone.

  7

  How to be a Nose

  Drive north from Apt, and within an hour you will be in Haute Provence. It was the setting for Jean Giono's novels, and a place he sometimes saw with a dark and unforgiving eye. Here is one of his less inviting descriptions: ‘The houses are half caved in. In the streets overgrown with nettles, the wind roars, bellows, bawls out its music through the holes of shutterless windows and open doors.’

  It might be that in the interests of literature he was taking an extreme view, but it's one that reflects the nature of the place – wild, empty and hard. Coming from the cultivated prettiness of the Luberon, with its postcard villages, carefully restored houses, cherry orchards and row after orderly row of vines, Haute Provence feels like another country, great stretches of it deserted and virtually untouched. Villages are separated by miles of countryside, sometimes jagged and bleak, sometimes rolling and beautiful. The sky is vast. If you stop your car to listen to the scenery, you might hear the distant, hollow clank of goat bells coming from an invisible herd. Otherwise, there is the wind.

  Drive on, past l'Observatoire de Haute Provence, where they say you can breathe the clearest, purest air in France, and head for the foothills of the Montagne de Lure. There, set in a bowl of lavender fields, you will find Lardiers, a village of perhaps 100 inhabitants. Their houses are bunched around the Mairie and the Café de la Lavande – the kind of restaurant one always hopes to find at the end of a day's drive: good food, good wine and charm in equal doses.

  Lardiers is an unlikely place to find a journalist, let alone dozens of them. But on a sunny day in June, with the lavender just on the turn from grey-green to purple, the press had gathered in force and come to the village for the opening of an educational institution which, as far as I know, is
unique.

  The idea started in Manosque, Giono's home town and the headquarters of one of the few genuinely Provençal companies to have an international reputation. L'Occitane made its name by word of nose. Its soaps, its oils and essences, its shampoos and creams are made in Provence, many of them with ingredients grown in the fields of Provence. Not only the lavender that you would expect, but also sage, rosemary, fresh herbs, honey, peaches and almonds.

  Depending on your inclination, you can have a peach-scented bath, a rubdown with oil of thyme, or a shave that tingles with rosemary. And not long ago another ingredient was introduced, simple and obvious in hindsight, as many good ideas are: labels were printed in two languages, the second being Braille. This made it possible for the contents of a jar or a bottle on the bathroom shelf to be read by the fingertips as well as by the eye. From here, another idea evolved, based on the adjustments that nature makes to the human body when one of its primary functions is affected – in this case, the ability to see. To make up in some way for the loss of sight, the other senses compensate by becoming more acute, particularly the sense of smell.

  A company whose business is fragrance is always interested in finding sensitive and educated noses. Perfumes are never accidents, but recipes, usually very complex recipes – a balance between sweet and sharp, a cocktail of essences. Choosing and mixing and judging these is a great art, and great artists are as rare in the perfume world as they are anywhere else. For a start, they need to be born with a natural aptitude for the work, and the most important requirement is an unusually receptive nose. A nose in a million. Over the years, with the proper training, this can be developed until it is capable of identifying even the ghost of a fragrance – the crucial drop that lifts a perfume from the ordinary to the unforgettable. But first, you have to find those talented nostrils.

  Where does one look? It's relatively easy to spot outstanding ability in almost everything from football to mathematics, from music to languages. These are gifts that become evident quite early. A hypersensitive nose, though, is a hidden asset – personal, private and, under normal circumstances, not likely to be noticed. Imagine two mothers comparing the merits of their children, for instance. ‘Well, I know Jean-Paul's a mischievous little brute, and it's true I caught him biting his sister on the leg the other day – but I can forgive him everything because he has such a wonderful sense of smell.’ It doesn't happen. The young nose is a neglected organ.

  This is something the people at L'Occitane started to change on that sunny day in June, when a handful of pupils arrived in Lardiers for the opening session of a different kind of school. The pupils were between the ages often and seventeen, and they were blind.

  The official name of this academy of the nose is L'École d'Initiation aux Arts et aux Métiers du Parfum Destinée aux Enfants Aveugles – the School of Initiation into the Arts and Skills of Perfumery for Blind Children. The classroom is in a small stone building on the edge of the village, and it will probably never again see so many international visitors. The journalists had come from North America, Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and Japan, noses and notebooks at the ready as the pupils took their places around a long table in the centre of the room.

  Classroom equipment was laid out in front of each pupil: flasks of different fragrances and a supply of paper tapers. Lesson one was the technique of the informed sniff, and I quickly learned where I had been going wrong all these years. My instinct when presented with something to smell has always been to take aim with my nose and breathe in like a drowning man coming up for the third time. This method, so I was tactfully informed, is recommended for sinus sufferers inhaling medication; any fragrance student caught behaving like that would go straight to the bottom of the class. Apparently, prolonged nasal suction – I think that was the technical term – delivers a knockout blow to delicate membranes, making further olfactory investigation temporarily impossible.

  Having failed the first test, I was taken aside and shown how sniffing – or, more elegantly, ‘tasting with the nose’ – should be done. The demonstration looked marvellously graceful, like an orchestra conductor limbering up with his baton before attacking the woodwind section. The end of a taper was dipped into the fragrance to absorb a few drops, then removed and passed beneath the nostrils in a single flowing motion that ended with a jaunty upward flick of the hand. This brief moment is enough for the nose to register the aroma. A message is sent to the brain for reaction and analysis. Et voilà. There is no need, I was told again, for crude and prolonged snorting.

  Watching the pupils, it was clear that they were doing a great deal better than I had done with the technique of the sniff, and it was wonderful to see the mixture of furious concentration and pleased surprise on their faces as they began to read the signals picked up by their noses.

  To help them, they had a formidable professor: Lucien Ferrero, who must have one of the most experienced and knowledgeable noses in France, and who has personally created more than 2,000 perfumes. He had come from Grasse to take the class through its paces, to train young noses in good habits and, with a little luck, to discover talent that could be developed.

  Monsieur Ferrero is one of life's natural teachers. He has a passion for his subject and, unlike many experts, the ability to explain it with clarity and a sense of humour. The children could understand him – even I could understand him – as he described how perfume works on two levels, the perception by the nose and the interpretation by the brain; and the five broad types of perfume, from alcoholic to the couverture des mauvaises odeurs. (This accompanied by giggles from the class and a most eloquent wrinkling of the professorial nostrils.)

  The first session was no longer than an hour or so, partly because of one of the hazards of the occupation: the onset of fatigue nasale. After a while, even the most eager and professional noses become tired and lose their ability to concentrate. But also, this being France and the hour being close to noon, it was necessary to put academic matters aside for lunch. Long tables had been set up on the terrace outside the classroom, the Café de la Lavande had provided the menu, and I sat down with more journalists than I'd ever seen in one place.

  It was a slightly uncomfortable moment. My previous experience with the press en masse had been several years ago, during our time in Ménerbes, when it seemed that every British newspaper was going through a period of discovering Provence. Reporters would turn up on the doorstep, bristling with questions, their tape machines cocked to record the slightest indiscretion. If, as usually happened, I couldn't give them much of a story, they would ambush my neighbour Faustin on his tractor in the vineyard and interview him. Photographers flitted around in the bushes. One eager little news editor sent a fax to my wife expressing his great sorrow at our impending divorce (fortunately, she's still putting up with me), and asking if, as he phrased it, she would care to share her private feelings with his two million readers. Another paper printed a map showing where our house could be found; yet another printed our telephone number. In both cases, the information was wildly inaccurate, and someone else must have had the pleasure of unexpected visits and calls from British strangers. The final accolade was a letter from a tabloid offering to buy the house so that it could be given away as a prize in a sweepstake to boost circulation. Exciting days indeed.

  It was with some relief that I found myself sitting among reporters who were more interested in the school than in our domestic arrangements. They were mostly health editors and beauty editors, experts in skin care and makeup and the correct way to pluck eyebrows, students of cellulite and disciples of the balanced diet. Would these ethereal creatures, I wondered, be able to hold their own with the Provençal version of a light summer meal? There were three copious courses, including a sturdy aïoli with cod and potatoes, and enough wine to sink the afternoon without trace.

  From previous experience with the press, I should have known that professional training would come to the rescue. Journalists differ in their areas of interest, i
n their writing styles, in their aptitude for research and their ability to dig out a story. Some have prodigious memories, others rely on tape or shorthand. But in one respect they are alike: all journalists are good at lunch, and these women could pack it away with the best of them. When I looked down the table as coffee was served, the only bottles I could see with any remaining moisture were those containing mineral water.

  National characteristics then began to emerge. Anglo-Saxons tended to sit back and take their ease, giving in to a drowsy, after-lunch languor. But the journalists from the Far East, showing astonishing vigour, jumped up, unsheathed their Nikons and clicked away at the view. I thought it a great pity that cameras can't record what noses can, because the scent of a fine hot day in Haute Provence is every bit as evocative as the sight of lavender and sage fields disappearing into the glare of the sun. Baked earth and rocks, the tartness of herbs, the warmth of the breeze, the smell of spiced heat – it's a distillation of the scenery. No doubt one day they'll put it in a bottle.

  Meanwhile, a fragrant afternoon had been organized, with the first stop a demonstration of another kind of cookery. A few miles away, at the Rocher d'Ongles, plants were being turned into oil. I think I was expecting men in white coats pressing buttons in a laboratory; what I found was a huge, open-sided shed vibrating with heat, its tall chimney sending out clouds of scented smoke. It looked as though Heath Robinson had been in charge of construction, and the head alchemist, far from being a white-coated technician, was dressed in a very unscientific T-shirt and canvas trousers. But he could certainly cook.

  It's a recipe that uses the most basic ingredients: plants, fire and water. At one end of a contorted arrangement of tubes, pipes and vats, water is heated, and the steam produced passes through a tube to the plants – in this case, what looked like half a ton of rosemary. Steam releases the plant's volatile elements, carrying them through to a coil, and from there to a condenser circulating cold water. The steam then liquefies, and the essential oil rises to the top of the water. Scoop this off, put it in a flask, and there you have five-star VSOP essence of rosemary. The same process is used with roses, lemons, mint, geraniums, thyme, pine, eucalyptus and dozens of other plants and flowers.