As Advertised
in Vogue
Perhaps because he still has memories of his earlier life as a homeless, hungry stray, Boy takes every opportunity to make himself as agreeable as possible around the house. He brings gifts—a fallen bird’s nest, a vine root, a half-masticated espadrille that he has been saving, a mouthful of undergrowth from the forest—and deposits them under the dining table with a messy generosity that he obviously feels will endear him to us. He contributes to the housework by leaving trails of leaves and dusty paw prints on the floor. He assists in the kitchen, acting as a mobile receptacle for any scraps that may fall from above. He is never more than a few feet away, desperately, noisily, clumsily anxious to please.
His efforts to charm are not confined exclusively to us, and he has his own unorthodox but well-meaning style of greeting visitors to the house. Dropping the tennis ball that he normally keeps tucked in one side of his enormous mouth, he buries his equally enormous head in the groin of anyone who comes through the door. It’s his version of a manly handshake, and our friends have come to expect it. They carry on talking, and Boy, his social duties done, retires to collapse on the nearest pair of feet.
The reactions to his welcome reflect, with some accuracy, the change of the seasons. During the winter, when our visitors, are, like us, people who live in the Luberon throughout the year, the head in the groin is either ignored or patted, leaves and twigs are brushed off old corduroy trousers, and the smooth progress of glass to mouth continues without interruption. When this is replaced by starts of surprise, spilt drinks, and flustered attempts to fend off the questing snout from clean white clothes, we know that summer has arrived. And with it, the summer people.
Each year there are more of them, coming down for the sun and the scenery as they always have, and now encouraged by two more recent attractions.
The first is practical: Provence is becoming more accessible every year. There is talk of the TGV high-speed train from Paris cutting half an hour off its already quick four-hour service to Avignon. The tiny airport just outside the town is being extended, and will undoubtedly soon be calling itself Avignon International. A giant green model of the Statue of Liberty has been erected in front of the Marseille airport to announce direct flights twice a week to and from New York.
At the same time, Provence has been “discovered” yet again—and not only Provence in general, but the towns and villages where we shop for food and rummage through the markets. Fashion has descended upon us.
The bible of the Beautiful People, Women’s Wear Daily, which pronounces on the proper length of hem, size of bust, and weight of earrings in New York, ventured last year into Saint-Rémy and the Lubéron. High-profile summer residents were shown squeezing their aubergines, sipping their kirs, admiring their barbered cypress trees, and generally getting away from it all—with each other and an attendant photographer, bien sûr—to revel in the pleasures of the simple country life.
In American Vogue, the world’s most cloyingly pungent magazine, with its impregnated perfume advertisements, an article on the Lubéron was sandwiched between Athena Star-woman’s horoscopes and a Paris Bistro Update. In the introduction to the article, the Lubéron was described as “the secret South of France”—a secret that lasted two lines before it was also described as the country’s most fashionable area. How the two go together is a contradiction that only a plausible subeditor could explain.
The editors of French Vogue, of course, were in on the secret as well. Indeed, they had known about it for some time, as they made clear to the reader in the introduction to their article. In fine world-weary vein, they led off by saying le Lubéron, c’est fini, followed by some disparaging suggestions that it might be snobbish, expensive, and altogether démodé.
Could they really have meant it? No, they couldn’t. Far from being finished, the Lubéron is apparently still attracting Parisians and foreigners who, according to Vogue, are often famous. (How often? Once a week? Twice a week? They didn’t say.) And then we are invited to meet them. Come with us, Vogue says, into their very private world.
Good-bye privacy. For the next twelve pages, we are treated to photographs of the often famous with their children, their dogs, their gardens, their friends, and their swimming pools. There is a map—le who’s who—showing where the chic members of Lubéron society are trying, rather unsuccessfully it seems, to hide themselves. But hiding is out of the question. These poor devils can’t even have a swim or a drink without a photographer darting out of the bushes to capture the moment for the delectation of Vogue’s readers.