THE PARTY was being held in a house outside Gordes, and we had been asked to join a few friends of the hostess for dinner before the other guests arrived. It was an evening that we anticipated with mixed feelings—pleased to be invited, but far from confident about our ability to stay afloat in a torrent of dinner party French. As far as we knew, we were going to be the only English speakers there, and we hoped we wouldn’t be separated from each other by too many breakneck Provençal conversations. We had been asked to arrive at what for us was the highly sophisticated hour of nine o’clock, and we drove up the hill toward Gordes with stomachs rumbling at being kept waiting so late. The parking area behind the house was full. Cars lined the road outside for fifty yards, and every other car seemed to have a Parisian 75 number plate. Our fellow guests were not going to be a few friends from the village. We began to feel we should have worn less casual clothes.
We walked inside and found ourselves in magazine country, decorated by House and Garden and dressed by Vogue. Candlelit tables were arranged on the lawn and the terrace. Fifty or sixty people, cool and languid and wearing white, held glasses of champagne in jeweled fingers. The sound of Vivaldi came through the open doorway of a floodlit barn. My wife wanted to go home and change. I was conscious of my dusty shoes. We had blundered into a soirée.
Our hostess saw us before we could escape. She at least was reassuringly dressed in her usual outfit of shirt and trousers.
“You found somewhere to park?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s a little difficult in the road because of that ditch.”
We said it didn’t seem at all like Provence, and she shrugged. “It’s August.” She gave us a drink and left us to mingle with the beautiful people.
We could have been in Paris. There were no brown, weathered faces. The women were fashionably pallid, the men carefully barbered and sleek. Nobody was drinking pastis. Conversation was, by Provençal standards, whisper-quiet. Our perceptions had definitely changed. At one time, this would have seemed normal. Now it seemed subdued and smart and vaguely uncomfortable. There was no doubt about it; we had turned into bumpkins.
We gravitated toward the least chic couple we could see, who were standing detached from the crowd with their dog. All three were friendly, and we sat down together at one of the tables on the terrace. The husband, a small man with a sharp, Norman face, told us that he had bought a house in the village twenty years before for 3,000 francs, and had been coming down every summer since then, changing houses every five or six years. He had just heard that his original house was back on the market, overrestored and decorated to death and priced at a million francs. “It’s madness,” he said, “but people like le tout Paris”—he nodded toward the other guests—“they want to be with their friends in August. When one buys, they all buy. And they pay Parisian prices.”
They had begun to take their places at the tables, carrying bottles of wine and plates of food from the buffet. The women’s high heels sank into the gravel of the terrace, and there were some refined squeals of appreciation at the deliciously primitive setting—un vrai dîner sauvage—even though it was only marginally more primitive than a garden in Beverly Hills or Kensington.
The Mistral started, suddenly and most inconveniently, while there was still plenty of uneaten shrimp salad on the tables. Lettuce leaves and scraps of bread became airborne, plucked from plates and blown among the snowy bosoms and silk trousers, scoring the occasional direct hit on a shirt front. Tablecloths snapped and billowed like sails, tipping over candles and wineglasses. Carefully arranged coiffures and composures were ruffled. This was a little too sauvage. There was a hasty retreat, and dinner was resumed under shelter.
More people arrived. The sound of Vivaldi from the barn was replaced by a few seconds of electronic hissing, followed by the shrieks of a man undergoing heart surgery without anesthetic: Little Richard was inviting us to get down and boogie.
We were curious to see what effect the music would have on such an elegant gathering. I could imagine them nodding their heads in time to a civilized tune, or dancing in that intimate crouch the French adopt whenever they hear Charles Aznavour, but this—this was a great sweating squawk from the jungle. AWOPBOPALOOWOPAWOPBAMBOOM! We climbed the steps to the barn to see what they would make of it.
Colored strobe lighting was flashing and blinking, synchronized with the drumbeat and bouncing off the mirrors propped against the walls. A young man, shoulders hunched and eyes half-closed against the smoke of his cigarette, stood behind the twin turntables, his fingers coaxing ever more bass and volume from the knobs on the console.