“How was the Ricard?” asked Michel. I said that the Ricard was fine, but perhaps I had absorbed enough education for one night.
For days afterward, I kept scribbling down questions that I wanted to ask Michel. I found it curious, for instance, that the word was so well known and had such strong associations, and yet its origins seemed as cloudy as the drink itself. Who had invented pastis before Pernod had taken it over? Why was it so firmly rooted in Provence, rather than Burgundy or the Loire? I went back to the professor.
Whenever I have asked a Provençal about Provence—whether about climate, food, history, the habits of animals, or the oddities of humans—I have never been short of answers. The Provençal loves to instruct, usually with a great deal of personal embroidery, and preferably around a table. And so it was this time. Michel arranged a lunch, on the one day of the week when his restaurant is normally closed, with a few friends he described as “hommes responsables” who would be happy to lead me down the path of knowledge.
Eighteen of us gathered under the big white canvas umbrella in Michel’s courtyard, and I was introduced to a blur of faces and names and descriptions: a government official from Avignon, a wine grower from Carpentras, two executives from Ricard, some stalwarts from Cabrières. There was even a man wearing a tie, but he slipped it off after five minutes and hung it in a noose over the drinks trolley. That was the beginning and the end of any formality.
Most of the men shared Michel’s passion for boules, and the wine grower from Carpentras had brought with him a few cases of his special cuvée, with labels showing a game in progress. While the rosé was being chilled and the red uncorked, there was a generous dispensation of the sporting drink and the boules player’s standby, le vrai pastis de Marseille, le pastis Ricard.
Born in 1909 and, according to one of his executives, still looking for trouble, Paul Ricard’s success is a classic case of energetic and intelligent exploitation. His father was a wine merchant, and young Paul’s work took him into the bars and bistrots of Marseille. In those days the laws of concoction were not stringent, and many bars made their own pastis. Ricard decided to make his, but he added an ingredient that the others lacked, which was a genius for promotion. Le vrai pastis de Marseille may not have been very different from the others, but it was good, and made better by Ricard’s talent for marketing. It was not long before his pastis was the most popular pastis, at least in Marseille.
Ricard was ready to expand, and he made a decision that probably accelerated his success by several years. The area around Marseille was a competitive market; pastis was everywhere, a commonplace drink. And Marseille itself didn’t enjoy the best of reputations among its neighbors. (Even today, a Marseillais is regarded as a blagueur, an exaggerator, a man who will describe a sardine as a whale, not entirely to be believed.)
Further north, however, pastis could be sold as something exotic, and distance lent improvement to Marseille’s reputation. It could be invested with the charm of the south—a slightly raffish, relaxed, sunny charm that would appeal to a northerner used to freezing winters and grey skies. So Ricard went north, first to Lyon and then to Paris, and the formula worked. Today it would be unusual to find a bar anywhere in France without its bottle of le vrai pastis de Marseille.
The man from Ricard who was telling me this talked about his patron with genuine liking. Monsieur Paul, he said, was un original, someone who looked for a challenge every day. When I asked if he was involved, like many powerful businessmen, in politics, there was a snort of laughter. “Politicians? He vomits on them all.” I had some sympathy for the sentiment, but in a way I thought it was a pity. The idea of a pastis baron as President of France appealed to me, and he would probably have been elected on his advertising slogan: Un Ricard, sinon rien.
But Ricard hadn’t invented pastis. Like Pernod, he had bottled and marketed something that had been there before. Where had it come from? Who had first mixed the anis, the licorice, the sugar, and the alcohol? Was there a monk (monks, for some reason, have an affinity for alcoholic invention, from champagne to Benedictine) who had made the discovery one blessed day in the monastery kitchens?
Nobody around the table knew exactly how the first glass of pastis had come into a thirsty world, but lack of precise knowledge never inhibits a Provençal from expressing an opinion as fact, or a legend as reliable history. The least plausible, and therefore favorite, explanation was the hermit theory—hermits, of course, being almost up to monk standard when it comes to the invention of unusual apéritifs.