Toujours Provence(41)

Robert paused to gauge my reaction to this hideous novelty, and smiled across at Isabelle, who was peering over her sunglasses at her nails. They were a perfect hot-pink match for her dress.

“Ça va, chou-chou?”

She twitched a honey-colored shoulder at him, and it was with a visible effort that he turned his thoughts back to howling houses.

Alors, it was all done with electronic beams, which protected every door, every window, every orifice larger than a chink. And so if a determined and light-footed burglar managed to scale the steel gates and tiptoe through the floodlights, the merest touch of his finger on window or door would set the house screaming. One could also, bien sûr, enhance the effect by installing an amplifier on the roof so that the screams could be heard for several kilometers.

But that wasn’t the end of it. At the same time, a partner of Robert’s near Gordes, whose house was linked to the system, would drive over instantly with his loaded pistolet and his large Alsatian. Secure behind this multilayered protection, I would be perfectly tranquille.

It sounded anything but tranquille. I immediately thought of Faustin in his tractor, pounding on the steel gates at six in the morning to get to the vines; of the floodlights going on all through the night as foxes or sangliers or the cat next door crossed the drive; of setting off the howling mechanism by accident, and having to apologize fast to an irritated man with a gun before his dog ripped me to pieces. Life in Fort Knox would be a permanent, dangerous hell. Even as a barricade against the August invasion, it simply wouldn’t be worth the nervous wear and tear.

Luckily, Robert was distracted from pressing for a sale. Isabelle, now satisfied with the state of her nails, the positioning of her sunglasses, and the overall adhesion of her tubelet, was ready to go. She cooed across the courtyard at him. “Bobo, j’at faim.”

“Oui, oui, chérie. Deux secondes.” He turned to me and tried to revert to business, but his howling mechanism had been activated and our domestic security was not the pressing priority of the moment.

I asked him where he was going to have lunch.

“La Bastide,” he said. “Do you know it? It used to be the gendarmerie. Once a flic, always a flic, eh?”

I said I’d heard that it was also a hotel, and he winked. He was a very expressive winker. This was a wink of the purest lubricity.

“I know,” he said.





Mouthful for Mouthful

with the Athlete

Gourmet


We heard about Régis from some friends. They had invited him to dinner at their house, and during the morning he had called to ask what he would be given to eat. Even in France, that shows a greater interest than normal in the menu, and his hostess was curious. Why was he asking? There were cold stuffed moules, there was pork with truffle gravy, there were cheeses, there were homemade sorbets. Were any of these a problem? Had he developed allergies? Become a vegetarian? Gone, God forbid, on a diet?

Certainly not, said Régis. It all sounded delicious. But there was un petit inconvénient, and it was this: He was suffering from a sharp attack of piles, and found it impossible to sit through an entire dinner. A single course was all that he could manage without discomfort, and he wanted to pick the course that tempted him most. He was sure that his hostess would sympathize with his predicament.

As it was Régis, she did. Régis, so she told us later, was a man whose life was dedicated to the table—knowledgeably, almost obsessively concerned with eating and drinking. But not as a glutton. No, Regis was a gourmet who happened to have a huge and extremely well-informed appetite. Also, she said, he was amusing about his passion, and he had some views that we might find interesting about the English attitude toward food. Perhaps we would like to meet him once he had recovered from his crise postérieure.

And, one evening a few weeks later, we did.

He arrived in haste, nursing a cold bottle of Krug champagne, not quite cold enough, and spent the first five minutes fussing with an ice bucket to bring the bottle to the correct drinking temperature, which he said had to be between 37 and 45 degrees. While he rotated the bottle gently in the bucket, he told us of a dinner party he had been to the previous week that had been a gastronomic disaster. His only enjoyable moment, he said, had come at the end, when one of the female guests was saying good-bye to her hostess.

“What an unusual evening,” she had said. “Everything was cold except the champagne.”

Régis quivered with laughter and eased the cork out so carefully that there was nothing but a quiet, effervescent sigh to mark the opening.

He was a large man, dark and fleshy, with the deep blue eyes that are sometimes found, rather surprisingly, in swarthy Provençal faces. Unlike the rest of us in our conventional clothes, he was dressed in a tracksuit—pale grey, trimmed in red, with Le Coq Sportif embroidered on the chest. His shoes were equally athletic—complicated creations with multicolored layers of rubber sole, more suitable for a marathon than an evening under the dinner table. He saw me looking at them.