“Trottez!” Maurice flicked the horse’s rump with the whip and we changed into second gear. “She’s lazy, this one,” he said, “and greedy. She goes more quickly on the way back, when she knows she will eat.” A long scarlet field, dense with poppies, unrolled slowly in the valley below us, and in the sky a buzzard wheeled and dipped, wings outstretched and still, balancing on air. As I watched it, a cloud covered the sun for a few moments and I could see the rays coming out behind it in dark, almost black spokes.
We turned off the road and followed a narrow track that twisted through the trees, and the sound of the horse’s hooves was muffled by ragged, fragrant carpets of wild thyme. I asked Maurice how he found his picnic spots, and he told me that every week, on his day off, he had been exploring on horseback, sometimes riding for hours without meeting anyone. “We’re only twenty minutes from Apt,” he said, “but nobody comes up here. Just me and the rabbits.”
The forest became thicker and the track narrower, barely wide enough for the carriage. Then we turned past an outcrop of rock, ducked through a tunnel of branches, and there it was, spread out before us. Lunch.
“Voilà!” said Maurice. “Le restaurant est ouvert.”
At the end of a flat, grassy clearing, a table for ten had been set in the shade of a sprawling scrub oak—a table with a crisp white cloth, with ice buckets, with starched cotton napkins, with bowls of fresh flowers, with proper cutlery and proper chairs. Behind the table, a long-empty dry stone borie, originally a shepherd’s hut, had been turned into a rustic bar, and I heard the pop of corks and clink of glasses. All my misgivings about picnics vanished. This was as far away from a damp bottom and ant sandwiches as one could possibly imagine.
Maurice roped off an area of the clearing and unhitched the horses, who rolled on their backs in the grass with the relief of two elderly ladies released from their corsets. The blinds of the diligence were drawn, and the youngest guest retired for a nap while the rest of us had a restorative glass of chilled peach champagne in the tiny open courtyard of the borie.
There is nothing like a comfortable adventure to put people in a good humor, and Maurice could hardly have hoped for a more appreciative audience. He deserved it. He had thought of everything, from an abundance of ice to toothpicks, and, as he had said, there was no danger of us going hungry. He called us to sit down and gave us a guided tour of the first course: melon, quails’ eggs, creamy brandade of cod, game pâté, stuffed tomatoes, marinated mushrooms—on and on it went, stretching from one end of the table to the other, looking, under the filtered sunlight, like an implausibly perfect still life from the pages of one of those art cookbooks that never sees the kitchen.
There was a short pause while I was presented with the heaviest and most accurate birthday card I had ever received—a round metal road sign, two feet in diameter, with a blunt reminder of the passing years in large black numerals: 50. Bon anniversaire and bon appétit.
We ate and drank like heroes, getting up in between courses, glasses in hand, to take recuperative strolls before coming back to the table for more. Lunch lasted nearly four hours, and by the time coffee and the birthday gâteau were served we had reached that state of contented inertia where even conversation is conducted in slow motion. The world was a rosy place. Fifty was a wonderful age.
The horses must have noticed the increased weight of their loads as they pulled out of the clearing toward the road that led back to Buoux, but they seemed more frisky than they had been in the morning, tossing their heads and testing the air through twitching nostrils. Sudden gusts of wind plucked at straw hats, and there was a growl of thunder. Within minutes, the blue sky turned black.
We had just reached the road when the hail started—pea-sized and painful, stinging the tops of our heads in the open calèche and bouncing off the broad wet back of the horse. She needed no encouragement from the whip. She was going full tilt, head down, body steaming. The brim of Maurice’s straw hat had collapsed into bedraggled ears, and his red waistcoat was bleeding onto his trousers. He laughed, and shouted into the wind, “Oh là là, le piquenique Anglais!”
My wife and I made a tent out of a travel blanket, and looked back to see how the diligence was dealing with the downpour. The top was obviously less weatherproof than it looked. Hands appeared from the side, tipping hatfuls of water overboard.
We came down into Buoux with Maurice braced, stiff-legged, hauling the reins tight against the headlong enthusiasm of the horse. She had scented home and food. To hell with humans and their picnics.