by Peter Mayle
Scores of artisans are at your disposal throughout the Vaucluse, masters of their various crafts. But whether they work their magic in wood, pottery, stone, marble, wrought iron or steel, they all seem to share similar characteristics. These become apparent during the course of the job, revealing themselves according to the number of visits that you make. And a summer's afternoon, when lunch has made you sufficiently benign to look upon the whole process as a form of entertainment, is as good a time as any to make a start.
Your first visit will almost certainly include a guided tour of the atelier, where you will be invited to admire commissions undertaken for other clients. Marvellous half-finished objects litter the workshop floor, and you feel fortunate to be in the presence of an artist who can make exactly, precisely, what you want. Not only that; he is encouragingly eager for your business, ready to drop everything and come to your house to take measurements, maybe that very same evening.
At the house, details are noted down in the curling pages of a weather-stained exercise book. There are, of course, complications that you, an innocent in these matters, couldn't be expected to understand without a short lecture. Irregularities and difficulties are revealed to you, the ravages of rust and decay pointed out with many a sad shake of the head. A delicate and sympathetic touch is needed, but you are reassured that you have found the man for the job. Pas de probleme. A price is quoted and agreed, and then you plunge into the realm of the unknown by asking when he might be able to deliver. He counters by asking when you would like that to be. You think of a date, add on a month, and tell him.
This is the cue for the artisan's motto, which I have heard so often that I think it must be taught to every young apprentice on his first day at work. In response to your suggestion of a delivery date, there will be a short silence followed by an intake of breath and a thoughtful nod. ‘C'est possible,’ he will say. You will notice that he hasn't actually said yes, merely that what you ask is not beyond the bounds of possibility. It is a subtle but important distinction, as you will discover. However, for the moment you feel that the two of you have come to a clear and businesslike arrangement.
Not wishing to appear like an aggressive and impatient foreigner, you let a decent interval elapse before calling to check on the job's progress. It will be an unsatisfactory conversation – if you can call it a conversation – because the artisan's telephone is always situated in the loudest corner of his workshop, the area of maximum din. I'm sure this is a deliberate tactic designed to scramble unwelcome questions of a specific nature, or maybe it's a recording that cuts in automatically. Anyway, it works. Nobody can talk for long to a wall of noise made by a buzz saw or a stone-cutter or an enthusiastic welder in full cry. A few half-words might penetrate the clatter, bang and screech, but not enough to make any sense, and so the seeker after truth is obliged to make another personal visit.
Nothing much has changed in the atelier. The same marvellous objects are still there, still half-finished. If you're lucky, another one – yours – will have joined the collection, and this will be shown to you with the pride of a father introducing a favourite daughter. It's beautiful, just what you had hoped for. Is there any chance, you ask, of having it next week?
The intake of breath, the thoughtful nod. C'est possible.
Of course, it won't be ready. But what the hell. The house isn't going to fall down without it.
Shopping
I would be interested to know if any research has been done on the connection between a well-served stomach, a few glasses of wine, and the urge to go forth and acquire. I am not by nature a shopper, and the idea of trailing around on the lookout for something I don't need has no appeal for me – except when I've had a good lunch. It is then, in the early afternoon, replete, good-humoured and expansive, that I become a willing and susceptible mark; a consumer, ready to consume. In cities, this has occasionally led to expensive embarrassments and stern words from American Express. I'm safer in Provence, where there is a nostalgic fondness for cash.
Many of our neighbours are avid collectors and supporters of petits fournisseurs – the small, unadvertised suppliers who grow or make their own products and, ignoring chain stores and supermarkets, sell directly to the public. Their headquarters, les bonnes adresses, are usually lost in the countryside or tucked away in the back streets, simple and inconspicuous, hard to find without directions. The speciality of the house might be anything from white anchovies to custom-made espadrilles, but whatever it is will not be sold to you without a bonus. Education is included in the price – a dash of history, a few remarks on the manufacturing process and a generous measure of self-promotion, with the occasional sly swipe at mass-produced competition. In other words, the customer should not be in a hurry. This is how I like shopping to be, and a slow hot afternoon is when I like to do it.
We had been given an address in Cavaillon where one could find the ultimate melon, a melon whose exquisite bouquet and ravishing juiciness were only matched by the erratic and often disagreeable nature of the proprietor. It sounded like an interesting combination, and after some geographical difficulties we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac on the edge of town, not far from the main produce market.
The little street was deserted, quiet enough to hear the flies that had gathered in a buzzing cloud around the open doorway of what might once have been a stable. The pervasive smell of sweet ripe fruit was in the air, and a white Mercedes was parked in the shade opposite the open door. It must belong to a prosperous customer, I thought. He's probably inside haggling with the old melon king, a peasant from the fields, appropriately gnarled and dusty.
We pushed our way through the flies and stood on the threshold of a dim, perfumed space almost entirely filled with yellow-green melons piled on a thick bed of straw. Seated at a scarred metal table just inside the entrance, a man was snarling into a portable phone, his language adding to the ripeness of the atmosphere. He was slight and dark, with strands of black hair pulled across a tanned pate, a neat moustache under a sharp nose that supported wraparound sunglasses. A striped, open-necked shirt, iridescent dark-blue trousers, black shoes with vaguely equine brass snaffles decorating each instep. Could this natty apparition be the melon king?
He finished his conversation with a grunt and reached for a cigarette before turning his sunglasses towards us. ‘We'd like to buy some melons,’ I said, ‘and we've heard that yours are the best.’
Perhaps the compliment was enough to make him amiable; or perhaps he, too, was still under the influence of lunch. But he stood up politely and waved his cigarette at the massed display behind him. These, he said, are the best of the best, the Charentais sublimes, the favourite melons of Alexandre Dumas the elder. But of course, he said, that is well known. He picked up the end of a coiled hose and turned a fine spray of water on to the piles banked up against the back wall. I had the feeling that this was step one in the melon salesman's manual, because it emphasized the scent of the fruit, heady and moist and dense. He selected one, pressed the base with his thumb and sniffed the top before passing it over to me and turning to look in a corner behind his metal table.
The melon felt surprisingly heavy for its size, the skin freckled with beads of water, the stem end slightly soft. We inhaled and made admiring noises. The melon king smiled, his expression at odds with the eighteen-inch machete he had found in the corner. ‘Now you must see the flesh,’ he said, taking back the melon. A flick of the blade, and it was in two halves, vivid orange, brimming with juice, a treat that he told us would charm the throat and cool the belly. (I later found out that he had borrowed the line from a melon-fancier who was also a poet, but it was most impressive at the time.)
Demonstration over, he looked at us expectantly. ‘I can quote you a good price per ten kilos,’ he said, ‘with a discount if you take more than a tonne. But you must arrange transportation.’ His eyebrows appeared above his sunglasses, hovering in wait for the order.
How were we to know? Our friends hadn
't told us that he was a grossiste, a wholesaler, a man who shipped thousands of tonnes of melons to the best tables in Paris every summer? To his credit, and contrary to his reputation, he let us buy a dozen, throwing in a handful of damp straw to line the shallow wooden box which he gave us to carry them away.
We stopped at a café before going back to the car, and found that we had another melon expert in our waiter. The thing to do, he told us, was to cut off the top, scoop out the seeds, pour a bottle of vodka into the hollow, and leave the melon in the fridge for twenty-four hours. The vodka is soaked up by the flesh of the melon, making a potent dessert of unimaginable delicacy.
Something to charm the throat and cool the belly?
‘Voilà,’ he said. ‘Exactement.’
A museum to drive you to extraction
Is there any other country in the world that has a frog fair or a snail festival? An official celebration of the sausage? A special day dedicated to garlic? Where else but France could you find cheeses, sea urchins, oysters, chestnuts, plums and omelettes honoured by a blaze of local limelight that in other countries would be reserved for victorious football teams or national lottery winners?
It should have come as no surprise, therefore, when news reached me of a museum devoted to that noble and necessary tool, the corkscrew. After all, in a country where the making and drinking of wine is regarded as one of the more civilized religions, it seems only fair that some recognition is given to the implement that uncorks the pleasures of the bottle. But an entire museum? It must be tiny, I thought, a midget among museums, with a few dozen corkscrews that had been discovered in the attic of an acquisitive ancestor. I wasn't expecting a miniature Louvre.
In fact, the museum is only part of a transformation that has taken place on the D188 just below Ménerbes. This used to be a stretch of road much like dozens of others in the valley. There was an old farmhouse set in fields of vines on one side, and Monsieur Pardigan's garage (guarded by two geese) on the other – a few hundred yards of unremarkable countryside, pleasant enough, but nothing to make you slow down, let alone stop.
Now the garage and the geese are gone, and the farmhouse has sprouted wings and annexes, built with such sympathy and cunning that it's difficult to see where the old ends and the new begins. The vines have been groomed, with rose bushes planted at the end of each row. A short avenue of century-old olive trees leads from the road to the building. Wherever you look, you see evidence of a tasteful eye and a generous budget.
The man behind this recasting of the countryside, Yves Rousset-Rouard, is the current mayor of Ménerbes. An interest in wine led him one day to the Drouot auction rooms in Paris, where one of the lots was a collection of corkscrews. He bought them, fascinated by their variety and by their history. He bought more, and became known to other collectors and dealers. He continued to buy. He's still buying. Now he has hundreds of corkscrews, all different. A nightmare to store – unless you happen to own a vineyard, a cave and a handsome building in which to keep your hobby.
You will see a hint of what is to come in the tasting room. Lying on a wooden table is a giant's corkscrew, three feet long if it's an inch, and requiring both hands to lift, a bottle of several gallons to do it justice, and a muscular assistant to help with the extraction – far too big to be displayed in the vitrines of the museum itself. This you will find beyond the tasting room, an austere, elegant space, as dim as a church, the only light coming from dozens of glass-fronted cabinets recessed into the walls.
And there they are, more than a thousand corkscrews, each with a brief description of its origin and its place in corkscrew history. It is a testament to man's love affair with the bottle, and his ingenuity in turning a functional tool into a decorative, humorous, whimsical, occasionally lewd accessory. The corkscrew as a phallus, the corkscrew operated by the closing of a pair of female legs, the corkscrew as part of a pistol or a hunting knife, the corkscrew concealed in a walking stick or attached to what appears to be a set of brass knuckle-dusters – every embellishment you can imagine, presented in the atmosphere of a jewellery showroom. (Appropriately enough, a Bulgari corkscrew is among the exhibits.) Handles made from horn, olive wood, bakelite, a deer's foot, or the effigy of Senator Volstead, the father of Prohibition; folding corkscrews, vest-pocket corkscrews, an example – one of only three known to be in existence – of the earliest corkscrew, and its more elaborately engineered twentieth-century descendant; and, as if this incomplete list of attractions weren't enough, it is the only museum I know where you can get a drink. Even better, you're encouraged to have one.
Back in the tasting room, blinking in the late afternoon light, it is very pleasant to spend half an hour sampling the wines made on the property, and perhaps toasting one man's obsession. Not surprisingly, you can even buy a corkscrew.
Planning your own château
We never seem to tire of rummaging through the contents of strangers' attics, and brocante markets, selling everything from chamber pots to grandma's old armoire, do a brisk business throughout Provence. But market-hopping is not without its dangers. Picking through those stalls can become addictive, often leading to what an American friend calls antique escalation – the search for bargains that are so enormous you need a truck to take them away. Why settle for the contents of a house when you can buy the house itself, or at least great chunks of it? The official term is architectural salvage, and there is, on the outskirts of Apt, a wonderful example of it, a repository where you can spend a happy hour or two mentally constructing the château of your dreams.
The Chabaud brothers, Henri and Jean, occupy several acres of what appears to be an ancient city in ruins. Whenever I go there, it is with modest intentions – to find a cast-iron chimney back, an old stone garden tub, a few handmade tiles. But it doesn't take long before these are forgotten, and I find myself entertaining ideas well above my wallet, as impractical as they are grandiose.
This time, delusions of nobility start to occur just inside the entrance, set off by the sight of a reclining amphora balanced on the bulge of its stomach. It is large enough to engulf a tall man, a good seven feet in length, with an opening wider than my shoulders. It would look magnificent in the garden, at the end of an alley of cypress trees. But what would we put in it? Three tons of earth and some geraniums? A guest who overstayed his welcome? I delegate that problem to the imaginary head gardener, and move on.
In the distance I can see something else that would add a personal touch to the domestic environment: an entire gateway, stone columns joined by a stone arch hung with ornate iron doors. Coming closer, I see that the address has been chiselled into the arch. Château Lachesnaye, in emphatic capital letters. Now all we need is the château to go with it.
The elements are all here, even if fitting them together might take a lifetime: tiles for the roof, flagstones for the floors, monumental cut-stone fireplaces, oak beams, pediments, Palladian columns, and staircases for every destination – straight ahead, curving to the left, or curving to the right. The scale of almost everything is gigantic, more suited to basketball players than the original owners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. People were smaller in those days. Did they enjoy being dwarfed by their living rooms? Did they need maps to find their way through the corridors and antechambers? Did they ever mislay their servants in the maze of attics and garrets?
The sun is fierce, and I sit in the shade next to a curious statue of a woman with a prominent bosom who has inexplicably turned into a lion from the waist down. Looking past her I can see a middle-aged couple with a younger man, whom I take to be their architect. He has just finished measuring a very old, very fine fireplace.
‘Too big for the room,’ he says.
‘Nonsense,’ says his client. ‘We'll just cut it down to fit.’
The architect winces, his feelings written on his face. Here is a beautiful, perfectly proportioned piece of stone furniture that has somehow survived all the pillage and destruction of the past 200 yea
rs or so, from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the Second World War. Now it is in danger of being sacrificed to fill a nook.
Beyond the group around the fireplace, a staircase as wide as a room rises fifteen feet before ending in thin air, with a cat dozing on the top step. Crumbling grandeur stretches as far as the eye can see, and I wonder about life in a château. What would it have been like, spending your days in one of these extravagant stone caves? Once the thrill of having a dining room the size of a football field had worn off, realities would have to be faced, particularly the winter: no central heating, rising damp, spartan hygienic arrangements, inadequate lighting, food grown cold during its long voyage from the kitchen to the table – very similar, as it happens, to life in one of England's more expensive boarding schools.
Not for me. Not this afternoon, at any rate. Châteaux are at their best in the permanent summer of the imagination, and that's probably where mine will stay.
A guided tour of the housing shortage
After a week or two in Provence, you will have had plenty of sun, wandered through a dozen markets, visited vineyards, paid your respects in churches and sat on a piece of ancient history in the orchestra stalls of a Roman theatre. In other words, you will have seen what any active, curious tourist sees. Now, perhaps, you would like to see a little more; you'd like to see how the natives live. In fact, you'd love to have a good look around some of their houses.
Other people's houses fascinate us, and if the other people and their houses are in a foreign country, they somehow have an extra fascination. When you're invited to see one, small details catch the eye: titles on the spines of books run the wrong way; the brands of everything from soap to refrigerators have unfamiliar names; windows open inwards instead of outwards. There are wooden shutters in those marvellously faded colours, stone fireplaces, vaulted rooms. The house even smells different. It's all faintly exotic. You find yourself thinking how delightful it would be to have a home away from home, here in Provence. And what more pleasant way to pass a free afternoon than to inspect a selection of charming possibilities?
