The next day’s copy of Le Provençal carried details of the Roussillon fire. It had destroyed more than a hundred acres of the pine woods around the village before 400 pompiers, 10 aircraft, and the soldats du feu from the army had put it out. There were photographs of horses and a herd of goats being led to safety, and of a solitary pompier silhouetted against a wall of flame. Three smaller fires were reported in the same article. It would probably have made the front page except for the arrival of the Tour de France in Marseille.
We drove across to Roussillon a few days later. What had been pine green and beautiful was now desolate—charred, ugly tree stumps jutting like rotten teeth from the ochre-red earth of the hillsides. Miraculously, some of the houses seemed untouched despite the devastation that surrounded them. We wondered if the owners had stayed inside or run, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to sit in a dark house listening to the fire coming closer and closer, feeling its heat through the walls.
July’s rainfall was five millimeters, but the wise men of the café told us that the storms of August would soak the Lubéron and allow the pompiers to relax. Always, we were told, le quinze août brought a downpour, swilling campers out of their tents, flooding roads, drenching the forest, and, with luck, drowning the pyromaniacs.
Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw nothing but sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before. The luckier peasants who had powerful irrigation systems began to water their vines. Our vines drooped. Faustin, on his tours of inspection in the vineyard, drooped also.
The pool was as warm as soup, but at least it was wet, and one evening the scent of water attracted a tribe of sangliers. Eleven of them came out of the forest and stopped fifty yards from the house. One boar took advantage of the halt and mounted his mate, and Boy, showing uncharacteristic bravado, went dancing toward the happy couple, his bark soprano with excitement. Still joined together like competitors in a wheelbarrow race, they chased him off, and he returned to the door of the courtyard where he could be noisy and brave in safety. The sangliers changed their minds about the pool, and filed away through the vines to eat Jacky’s melons in the field on the other side of the road.
Le quinze août was as dry as the first half of the month had been, and every time the mistral blew we waited for the sound of the sirens and the Canadairs. A pyromaniac had actually telephoned the pompiers, promising another fire as soon as there was enough wind, and there were daily helicopter patrols over the valley.
But they didn’t see him when he did it again, this time near Cabrières. Ashes carried by the wind fell in the courtyard, and the sun was blotted out by smoke. The smell of it spooked the dogs, who paced and whined and barked at gusts of wind. The red and pink evening sky was hidden behind a smear of grey, faintly luminous, somber, and frightening.
A friend who was staying in Cabrières came over to see us that night. Some houses on the edge of the village had been evacuated. She had brought her passport with her, and a spare pair of knickers.
We saw no fires after that, although the pyromaniac had made more phone calls, always threatening the Lubéron. August ended. The rainfall reported for our area was o.o millimeters, compared with the average of 52. When a halfhearted shower came in September, we stood out in it and took great breaths of cool, damp air. For the first time in weeks, the forest smelled fresh.
With the immediate danger of fire behind them, the local inhabitants felt sufficiently relieved to complain about the effects of the drought on their stomachs. With the exception of the year’s wine, which in Châteauneuf was announced as spectacularly good, the gastronomic news was disastrous. The lack of rain in July would mean a miserable truffle crop in the winter, few in number and small in size. Hunters would have to shoot each other for sport; game that had left the parched Lubéron to look for water further north was unlikely to come back. Autumn at the table would not be the same, pas du tout normal.
Our education suffered. Monsieur Menicucci, whose many talents included an ability to detect and identify the wild mushrooms in the forest, had promised to take us on an expedition—kilos of mushrooms, he said, would be there for the taking. He would instruct us, and supervise afterwards in the kitchen, assisted by a bottle of Cairanne.
But October came and the hunt had to be cancelled. For the first time in Menicucci’s memory, the forest was bare. He came to the house one morning, knife, stick, and basket at the ready, snakeproof boots tightly laced, and spent a fruitless hour poking among the trees before giving up. We would have to try again next year. Madame his wife would be disappointed, and so would his friend’s cat, who was a great amateur of wild mushrooms.