Toujours Provence(29)

Despite these and a hundred other snags, properties continue to sell at prices that would have been inconceivable 10 years ago. I recently heard Provence being enthusiastically promoted by an agent as “the California of Europe,” not only because of the climate, but also because of something indefinable and yet irresistible that was originally invented in California: the Life-style.

As far as I can make out, the Life-style is achieved by transforming a rural community into a kind of sophisticated holiday camp, with as many urban conveniences as possible and, if there’s any spare land, a golf course. If this had been going on in our corner of Provence, I had missed it, and so I asked the agent where I should go to see what he was talking about. Where was the nearest Life-style center?

He looked at me as though I’d been hiding in a time warp. “Haven’t you been to Gordes recently?” he said.

We first saw Gordes 16 years ago, and in a region of beautiful villages it was the most spectacularly beautiful of all. Honey-colored and perched on the top of a hill, with long views across the plain to the Lubéron, it was what estate agents would call a gem, a picture postcard come to life. There was a Renaissance château, narrow streets cobbled in rectangular stone, and the modest facilities of an unspoiled village: a butcher, two bakers, a simple hotel, a seedy café, and a post office run by a man recruited, we were sure, for his unfailing surliness.

The countryside behind the village, permanently green with its covering of scrub oak and pine, was patterned with narrow paths bordered by dry stone walls. You could walk for hours without being aware of any houses except for the rare glimpse of an old tiled roof among the trees. We were told that building was so restricted as to be virtually forbidden.

That was 16 years ago. Today, Gordes is still beautiful—from a distance, at any rate. But as you reach the bottom of the road that leads up to the village, you are greeted by a ladder of signs, each rung advertising an hotel, a restaurant, a salon de thé—every comfort and attraction for the visitor is labeled except the toilettes publiques.

At regular intervals along the road are reproduction 19th-century street lamps that look spiky and incongruous against the weathered stone walls and houses. On the bend where the village comes into view, at least one car has always stopped to allow driver and passengers to take photographs. On the final bend before the village, a large area of tarmac has been laid down for car parking. If you choose to ignore this and drive up into the village, you will probably have to come back. The Place du Château, now also coated in tarmac, is usually fully booked with cars from all over Europe.

The old hotel is still there, but it has a new hotel as its next-door neighbor. A few meters further on, there is a sign for Sidney Food, Spécialiste Modules Fast-Food. Then there is a Souleiado boutique. Then the once-seedy café, now spruced up. In fact, everything has been spruced up, the curmudgeon in the post office has been retired, the toilettes publiques enlarged, and the village turned into a place for visitors rather than inhabitants. Official Gordes T-shirts can be bought to prove you’ve been there.

A kilometer or so up the road is another hotel, walled off from public view and equipped with a helicopter landing pad. The building restrictions in the garrigue have been relaxed and an enormous sign, subtitled in English, advertises luxury villas with electronic security entrance and fully fitted bathrooms at prices from 2,500,000 francs.

So far there are no signs to indicate where Vogues often-famous people have their country homes, so passengers in the procession of huge coaches on their way to the 12th-century Abbaye de Sénanque are left to speculate whose half-hidden house it is that they’re looking at. One day someone of enterprise and vision will produce a map similar to those Hollywood guides to the houses of the stars, and then we shall feel even closer to California. Meanwhile, Jacuzzis and joggers are no longer sufficiently exotic to attract any attention, and the hills are alive with the thwack of tennis balls and the drowsy hum of the cement mixer.

It has often happened before, in many other parts of the world. People are attracted to an area because of its beauty and its promise of peace, and then they transform it into a high-rent suburb complete with cocktail parties, burglar-alarm systems, four-wheel-drive recreational vehicles, and other essential trappings of la vie rustique.

I don’t think the locals mind. Why should they? Barren patches of land that couldn’t support a herd of goats are suddenly worth millions of francs. Shops and restaurants and hotels prosper. The maçons, the carpenters, the landscape gardeners, and the tennis court builders have bulging order books, and everyone benefits from le boum. Cultivating tourists is much more rewarding than growing grapes.