Encore Provence

by Peter Mayle

  Enter the real estate agent.

  While I don't have exact figures, it certainly appears that agents immobiliers in the Luberon are almost as numerous as bakers. In every village large enough to have its own fête and official car park, there seems to be at least one boutique-sized office, its window glowing with seductive photographs: tiny ruins ripe for conversion, farms with cherry orchards and twenty-mile views, bastides and maisons de maître and bergeries, entire hamlets – there they are, sitting in the sun and waiting for the loving touch of a new proprietor. What a choice!

  The agent is most happy to see you, and how wise you were to bypass his competitors and come to him first. Although you wouldn't think it from the selection in his window, there is, as he explains, a shortage of attractive properties in the Luberon. But he is remarkably fortunate in having the pick of them on his books, and it will be his pleasure to escort you to them personally.

  At this point you might run into a snag. In an effort to be considerate, you say to him that you'd prefer just to see the location of three or four promising houses before taking a tour of any interiors. You have a car and a map. If he would tell you where to find the properties, you wouldn't have to take up his time or bother the owners unnecessarily.

  Mais non. That, unfortunately, will not be possible, and here is where you learn lesson number one. All kinds of excuses may be given for declining your thoughtful suggestion, but you've already heard the reason. There is a shortage of attractive properties in the Luberon. However, there is no shortage of real estate agents; in fact, there's a glut of them, and it's a situation that leads to intense competition. When a single property is given to three or four agents, as is often the case, the agent who introduces the property to the eventual purchaser is well placed to claim the commission. (Which is healthy: 5 per cent or more of the purchase price.) First come, first paid is the rule. That is why the escorted visit is crucial. It enables the agent to mark the territory.

  Lesson number two. Such is the level of suspicion and secrecy that the most obvious and innocent question can provoke miracles of evasion. Let's say you have seen a house advertised in Côté Sud, the glossy magazine of the south, and you like the look of it. You call the agent whose name is at the bottom of the advertisement.

  YOU: ‘I wonder if you could tell me a little about one of your properties – the reference is F2637.’

  AGENT: ‘Ah, un charme fou!’

  YOU: ‘Yes, it looks very nice. Where is it?’

  AGENT: ‘Come to my office, and I can show you all the photographs.’

  YOU: ‘I'm sure. But where exactly is the house?’

  AGENT: ‘It's between St Rémy and Avignon, only forty-five minutes from the airport…’

  YOU: ‘But where?’ (The area mentioned is large enough to hide an army, let alone a house.)

  AGENT: ‘… with a ravishing view of the Alpilles from one of the upstairs windows…’

  YOU: ‘Close to a village?’

  AGENT: ‘…facing south to catch all the sun, in fact gorgée de soleil, secluded, but not isolated…’

  YOU: ‘Which village?’

  AGENT: ‘… and if you'd like to make a rendezvous, I can take you to see it tomorrow.’

  And so it goes on. The agent will go into rhapsodies about the Roman roof tiles, the courtyard, the 200-year-old plane trees, and the wine cellar. He will tell you about the micro-climate, sheltered from the Mistral but perfectly placed to benefit from the summer breezes. He will tell you every last detail about the house except where it is. And finally, if that still doesn't convince you that a rendezvous at his office is your first step to paradise, he might, in desperation, agree to send you a dossier with more photographs and a written description of this jewel among houses.

  Lesson number three. A coded vocabulary is used in these descriptions which, after a few educational expeditions, you will learn to translate.

  To start with, the price is often not specified, but indicated as being in one of three main categories:

  Prix intéressant, the interesting price. This is almost certainly not as low as you might expect from the way it's described, but it's the best they can do if you're determined to have something with a roof.

  Prix justifié, the justified price. Well, it is an enormous amount of money. However, it does include a marble bath and a fabulous twelfth-century dungeon, complete with the original manacles. Think of the parties you could have.

  Prix: nous consulter, the ultimate price. The sum being demanded is so outrageous that they hesitate to put it in writing. But if you come to the office and sit down, they will whisper a figure in your shocked and unbelieving ear.

  To the base price, of course, must be added the costs of adapting the house to your personal requirements, and these costs will depend on the general state of repair and decoration. Here once again there are three main categories:

  Habitable. You can in theory bring your suitcases and move right in, even though the plumbing and electrical wiring have seen better days – many of them – and there is a disturbing sag in the roofline. Nevertheless, you can live in it. The present owners do.

  Restauré avec authenticité. Old flagstones, exposed beams, curious crannies and, often, a maze of small, sombre rooms – all reflecting the way peasants used to live in the eighteenth century. Should you want more light and larger rooms, be prepared to hire a jackhammer and half a dozen masons.

  Restauré avec goût. Taste is always difficult to define. Your idea of bon goût – or even goût raffiné, with all its swags and sconces and trompe-l'œil murals – is unlikely to be the same as that of the current owners. To an agent, though, all goût is considered bon, as it helps to establish a high price.

  There are other code words which you'll pick up as you go along, but these should be enough to see you through your first afternoon. Courage! (And don't forget your cheque-book.)

  Pretending to read

  If there is a single Provençal tradition that every visitor should experience at least once, it is the siesta, taken externally.

  Oddly enough, we have often found it very difficult to convince our guests that this is a healthy, sane and refreshing way to spend a hot afternoon. They have arrived in Provence with their work ethics intact and their Anglo-Saxon distrust of self-indulgence poised to resist undisciplined, slightly decadent Mediterranean habits. Fear of inactivity comes bubbling to the surface. We haven't travelled all this way, they say, to do nothing.

  I try to point out the mental and digestive benefits of doing nothing, but my advice falls on suspicious ears. The lunatic idea of an after-lunch game of tennis, however, is welcomed. Don't ask me why. I can only assume that the physical labour and potentially fatal strains on the heart involved in running after a ball in 100-degree weather have some kind of perverse attraction. When reasoned argument fails to persuade the players of the risks they're taking, I'm obliged to call Monsieur Contini, our local Florence Nightingale. I ask him to come and park his ambulance next to the tennis court, and to leave the engine running. That will almost always bring the game to an end, and we are proud of the fact that we haven't lost any players yet. But there is still the problem of finding a civilized distraction for them that won't induce feelings of guilt and long faces around the dinner table.

  The solution, we've discovered, is to give them a literary excuse, an opportunity to add to their knowledge and enrich their minds by reading a book.

  The choice of the book is all-important. Thrillers, adventure stories and bodice-rippers won't do; they don't have enough weight, either mentally or physically. An improving tome is what's needed here, something that you've been meaning to read – something that you feel you ought to read – if only you could find the time. There are hundreds of suitable titles and authors, and we have a small selection of them, which is known as the Hammock Library. It includes Trollopes, Brontës, Austens, Hardys, Balzacs, Tolstoys and Dostoevskys. But the book that has never failed – ever – in its appointed task i
s the three-volume boxed set of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  Tuck a volume under your arm and make your way through the trees to the shaded corner of the garden that overlooks the valley. Roll gently into the hammock, adjust the pillow, and let Gibbon come to rest on your stomach. Take in the sounds: the cigales are hard at it in the bushes, their tireless, scratchy, strangely soothing chirrup rising and falling in the warm afternoon air. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks – a half-hearted, heat-muffled bark that tails off into a falsetto yawn. Underneath the hammock, there is a hurried rustle in the dried grass as a lizard seizes a bug.

  Supporting your elbows on the sides of the hammock, you lift Gibbon into the reading position. How heavy he is. Beyond the pages of the open book you see your toes, the rigging of the hammock, the motionless leaves of the scrub oak and the long blue panorama of the Luberon. A buzzard quarters the sky in lazy, graceful curves, its wings barely moving. Gibbon feels as though he's gained weight. He declines and falls back to his resting place on your stomach and, as many have done before you in similar circumstances, you decide to allow yourself a brief doze, no longer than five minutes, before getting to grips with the Roman Empire.

  Two hours later you wake up. The light on the mountain is beginning to change, a rim of sky above the crest turning from blue to violet. Gibbon is sprawled, pages akimbo, beneath the hammock where he fell. You dust him off, placing a bookmark at page 135 for the sake of appearances, before taking him back through the trees to the pool. A quick plunge is followed by the most wonderful sense of well-being, and you realize that a siesta isn't such a bad idea after all.

  10

  The Genetic Effects of 2,000 Years of Foie Gras

  Old age is unlikely to be a keenly anticipated period in anybody's life, and no amount of euphemistic camouflage by the senior citizen lobby can make it any more attractive than a long-awaited bill that finally arrives. Even so, it seems to me that growing old in Provence is not without its share of consolations. Some are mental, others are physical; one you can actually take to the bank.

  Let us say you have retired, and that your main asset is your house. It suits you, and you have every intention of living in it until you make your final public appearance in the obituary columns. But the expenses of old age – and there's always something: the Ferrari for your grandson, the services of a live-in chef, the ruinous price of vintage wines – will inevitably increase every year, and there comes a moment when a windfall might be very welcome. This might be the appropriate time to consider selling your house under that particular French arrangement which is called en viager.

  It's a gamble. You sell the house at a price below the full market value, but with yourself included as a fixture, having the right to continue in residence for the rest of your life. For you, it is like having your cake and living in it; for the buyer, it is a chance to acquire property at a discount – always providing that you, the ancient proprietor, have the good grace not to hang around for too long and make a lingering inconvenience of yourself. Some people find this system morbid. The French, always very practical in matters of money, see it as a chance for both buyer and seller to profit from natural causes.

  But the gamble can sometimes backfire, as it did not long ago in the town of Arles, itself a monument to old age. Founded before Christ and noted for its pretty women, Arles was until 1997 the home of Madame Jeanne Calment. Her story is a testament to the bracing air of Provence and a warning to all property speculators.

  She was born in 1875, and had met Van Gogh when she was a girl. At the age of ninety she decided to sell her flat en viager to a local lawyer, a mere sprig in his forties, who had every reason to think he was making an impeccably sound investment.

  But Madame Calment lived on. And on. And on. She treated her skin with olive oil, ate almost a kilo of chocolate a week, rode a bicycle until she was 100, and gave up smoking when she was 117. According to official records, she was the oldest person in the world when she eventually died at the age of 122. As for the unfortunate lawyer, he had died the previous year, aged seventy-seven.

  Madame Calment, obviously, was an exception, one of those blips that spoil the symmetry of actuarial statistics. But while her accumulation of years was quite extraordinary, it would not surprise me if her record was eventually broken by one of the lively octogenarians I see every week – the antiques dealers who predate some of their stock, the elderly ladies who elbow you aside in the épicerie with the vigour of young girls, those gnarled but stately figures muttering words of encouragement to the tomatoes in their vegetable gardens. What is it about Provence that sustains them? What is their secret?

  For several years, we lived near a family whose oldest member, known as Pépé, was a daily fascination to me. A small, lean man, invariably dressed in jacket and trousers of washed-out blue and a flat cap that never left his head, he would take his promenade along the road before coming up our drive to inspect the vines. He liked it best when there were people working in the long green alleys – weeding, trimming overlong shoots, distributing the ration of sulfate – because then he could lean on his stick and supervise.

  He was generous with his advice, which, as he often reminded his captive audience, was the result of more than eighty years' experience. If anyone had the impertinence and temerity to disagree with him on matters of wine or weather, he would reach back into his memory and produce some dusty scrap of evidence from the past to prove that he was right. ‘Of course,’ he once said, ‘you wouldn't remember the summer of 1947. Hailstones in August, big as quails' eggs. The vines never recovered.’ That kind of remark was usually enough to put a stop to any loose talk about conditions being perfect for a vintage year. Optimism and nature don't mix, he used to say. After an hour or so, having satisfied himself that the vineyard was being properly attended to, he would walk back down our drive, along the road, and into his daughter-in-law's kitchen, no doubt to supervise the preparation of the midday meal.

  I believe he was a contented man. The lines and wrinkles of his face went upwards, as though a smile were on the way. (It often arrived, more gum than teeth, but no less delightful for that.) I never saw him agitated or upset. He was mildly critical of some modern novelties, such as noisy motorcycles, but delighted with others, particularly his large television set, which enabled him to indulge his weakness for old American soap operas. He died when he was ready, somewhere in his nineties, his passing marked by an affectionate village funeral.

  There are others, plenty of others, like him. You see them moving, often quite briskly and always with great deliberation, to take up their seats in the café for a mid-morning nip of wine or pastis. You see them perched, like a row of amiable buzzards, on a wooden bench by the war memorial in the village place, their hands with swollen brown knuckles clasped over the tops of their sticks; or sitting on chairs in the shade outside their front doors, their eyes flickering up and down the street, missing nothing. By today's standards, they have had hard lives, working the land with little to show for their efforts but subsistence. No skiing trips, no winter breaks in the Caribbean, no golf, no tennis, no second homes, no new cars every three years, nothing of what is endlessly referred to as the good life. But there they are, spry, happy, and apparently indestructible.

  There are too many of them to be dismissed as exceptions, and whenever I see them I'm tempted to ask them to explain their longevity. Nine times out often, the only answer would be a shrug, and so I have been left to come to my own unreliable conclusions.

  Their generation seems to have escaped the modern affliction of stress, which may be a result of having spent their working lives coping with nature rather than with a capricious boss. Not that nature – with its storms and forest fires and crop diseases – is either reliable or forgiving as an employer. But at least it's free from personal malice and the pressure of office politics, and it has no favourites. The setback of a bad year is shared among neighbours, and there's nothing to be done abou
t it except hope for better times to come. Working with (or fighting against) nature teaches a man to be philosophical, and even allows him to derive a certain perverse enjoyment from complaining. Anyone who has lived among farmers will know the relish with which they discuss misfortune, even their own. They're as bad as insurance agents.

  There must also be something reassuring about working to the fixed and predictable rhythm of the seasons, knowing that spring and early summer and the harvest season will be busy; knowing that winter will be slow and quiet. It is a pattern of life that would probably drive most corporate executives, seething with impatience and ambition, into an early grave. But not all. I have a friend who, like myself, is a refugee from the advertising business. Some years ago, he moved to the Luberon, where he now makes wine for a living. Instead of the big glossy car and matching chauffeur, he drives to work on a tractor. His problems are no longer with fractious clients, but with the weather and the drifting bands of grape-pickers who come up to the vineyards for the vendange. He has learned to do without what the French grandly call his entourage of secretaries and personal assistants. He has some difficulty remembering when he last wore a tie. He works long hours – longer than he ever used to in Paris – and makes less money. But he feels better, sleeps more soundly, and has a genuine pride in his work. Another contented man.

  The day may come when he will want to join the ranks of what he calls the living antiques who spin out the days in the village café. In the meantime, he leads a life of sustained physical activity, and this must be an important ingredient in the recipe for ripe old age. The human body, so we are told by men of science (who spend most of their time sitting down), is a machine that thrives on use. When left idle, muscles atrophy, and other working parts of the system deteriorate more rapidly than they would if subjected to regular exercise. The urban solution is the jog and the gym. A more primitive alternative is the kind of manual labour that comes with country life, the rural aerobics necessary for existence. Bending and stretching to prune, lifting and piling sacks of fertilizer, cutting brush, clearing ditches, stacking logs – unglamorous chores, but wonderful exercise. A day of this produces an epic crop of blisters and excruciating stiffness. A month rewards you with a feeling of well-being and a distinct looseness of the waistband. A lifetime works wonders. Even during the winter doldrums, the joys of hibernation will often be interrupted for exercise in the form of hunting. Now that game has become scarce in the Luberon, this is usually nothing more than a man taking his gun for a walk. But what a walk it is – steep and hard, a challenge for the legs, a flood of clean air for the lungs, a workout for the heart. And there seems to be no age limit for these armed optimists. I have occasionally come across hunters in the forest who look old enough to have preceded the invention of gunpowder. In a city, you might offer to help them cross the street. In the Luberon, they will walk you into the ground, chatting while you sweat to keep up with them.