The evenings were such a relief that we usually stayed at home, convalescing after the din of the day, and so we missed most of the social and cultural events that had been organized for the benefit of summer visitors to the Lubéron. Apart from a bottom-numbing evening in the Abbey of Senanque, listening to Gregorian chants as we sat on benches of appropriately monastic discomfort, and a concert held in a floodlit ruin above Oppède, we didn’t move from the courtyard. It was enough just to be alone and to be quiet.
Hunger eventually forced us out one night when we discovered that what we had planned to have for dinner had acquired a thick coating of grit from the day’s drilling. We decided to go to a simple restaurant in Goult, a small village with an invisible population and no tourist attractions of any kind. It would be like eating at home, but cleaner. We beat a layer of dust from our clothes and left the dogs to guard the holes in the walls.
It had been a still, oppressively hot day, and the village smelled of heat, of baked tarmac and dried-out rosemary and warm gravel. And people. We had chosen the night of the annual fěte.
We should have known, because every village celebrated August in one way or another—with a boules tournament or a donkey race or a barbecue or a fair, with colored lights strung in the plane trees and dance floors made from wooden planks laid across scaffolding, with gypsies and accordion players and souvenir sellers and rock groups from as far away as Avignon. They were noisy, enjoyable occasions unless, like us, you were suffering from the mild concussion brought on by spending the day in a construction site. But we were there and we wanted the dinner that we had already mentally ordered. What were a few extra people compared to the delights of a salad made with warm mussels and bacon, chicken tickled with ginger, and the chef’s clinging and delicious chocolate cake?
At any other time of the year, the sight of more than a dozen people in the village streets would indicate an event of unusual interest—a funeral, perhaps, or a price-cutting war between the two butchers who had adjacent shops a few yards from the café. But this was an exceptional night; Goult was playing host to the world, and the world was obviously as hungry as we were. The restaurant was full. The terrace outside the restaurant was full. Hopeful couples lurked in the shadows under the trees, waiting for a free table. The waiters looked harassed. The proprietor, Patrick, looked tired but satisfied, a man with a temporary gold mine. “You should have called,” he said. “Come back at ten and I’ll see what I can do.”
Even the café, which was large enough to hold the entire population of Goult, could offer standing room only. We took our drinks across the road, where stalls had been set up in a hollow square around the monument honoring the men of the village who had fought and died in the wars, fallen for the glory of France. Like most war memorials we had seen, it was respectfully well kept, with a cluster of three new tricolore flags sharp and clean against the gray stone.
The windows in the houses around the square were open and the occupants leaned out, their flickering television sets forgotten behind them as they watched the slow-moving confusion below. It was more of a market than anything else, local artisans with their carved wood and pottery, wine growers and honey makers, a few antique dealers and artists. The heat of the day could be felt in the stone walls and seen in the way that the lazy, drifting crowd was walking, weight back on the heels, stomachs out, shoulders relaxed in a holiday slouch.
Most of the stands were trestle tables, with artifacts displayed on print tablecloths, often with a notice propped up saying that the owner could be found in the café if there was any risk of a sale. One stand, larger and more elaborate than the others, looked like an outdoor sitting room, furnished with tables and chairs and chaises longues and decorated with potted palms. A dark, stocky man in shorts and sandals sat at one of the tables with a bottle of wine and an order book. It was Monsieur Aude, the artist ferronnier of Saint-Pantaléon, who had done some work on the house. He beckoned us to sit down with him.
The ferronnier is a man who works with iron and steel, and in rural France he is kept busy making bars and gates and shutters and grilles to keep out the burglars who are assumed to be behind every bush. Monsieur Aude had progressed beyond these simple security devices, and had discovered that there was a market for replicas of classical eighteenth-and nineteenth-century steel furniture. He had a book of photographs and designs, and if you wanted a park bench or a baker’s grill or a folding campaign bed such as Napoleon might have used, he would make it for you, then season it, being a superb judge of rust, to the required state of antiquity. He worked with his brother-in-law and a small beagle bitch and he could be relied upon to quote a delivery time of two weeks for anything, and to arrive with it three months later. We asked him if business was good.