It was coming up to seven o’clock, and the first housewives were starting to investigate, with prods and squeezes, what they would be cooking that night. The market opens at 5:30, and the first half-hour is officially reserved for the commerçants and restaurant owners, but I couldn’t see anyone being courageous enough to stand in the way of a determined Avignon matron who wanted to get her errands done before six. Shop early for the best, we had often been told, and wait until just before the market closes for the cheapest.
But who could wait that long, surrounded by temptation like this? In one short stretch, I had eaten mentally a dozen times. A bowl of brown free-range eggs turned into a piperade, with Bayonne ham from the stall next door and peppers from a few feet further on. That kept me going until I reached the smoked salmon and caviar. But there were the cheeses, the saucissons, the rabbit and hare and pork pâtés, the great pale scoops of rillettes, the confits de canard—it would be madness not to try them all.
I very nearly stopped my research to have a picnic in the car park. Everything I needed—including bread from one stall, wine from another—was within 20 yards, fresh and beautifully presented. What could have been a better way to start the day? I realized that my appetite had adjusted to the environment, leapfrogging several hours. My watch said 7:30. My stomach whispered lunch, and to hell with the time. I went to look for the liquid moral support of more coffee.
There are three bars in Les Halles—Jacky and Isabelle, Cyrille and Evelyne, and, the most dangerous of the three, Chez Kiki, where they start serving champagne long before most people get up. I saw two burly men toasting each other, their flûtes of champagne held delicately between thick fingers, earth under their fingernails, earth on their heavy boots. Obviously they had sold their lettuces well that morning.
The passageways and stalls were now crowded with members of the public, shopping with the intent, slightly suspicious expressions of people who were determined to find the most tender, the juiciest, the best. A woman put on her reading glasses to inspect a row of cauliflowers that, to me, looked identical. She picked one up, hefted it in her hand, peered at its tight white head, sniffed it, put it down. Three times she did this before making her choice, and then she watched the stallholder over the top of her glasses to make sure he didn’t try to substitute it for a less perfect specimen in the back row. I remembered being told not to handle the vegetables in a London greengrocer’s. There would have been outrage here if the same miserable ruling were introduced. No fruits or vegetables are bought without going through trial by touch, and any stallholder who tried to discourage the habit would be pelted out of the market.
Avignon has had its Halles since 1910, although the site under the car park has been in operation only since 1973. That was as much information as the girl in the office could give me. When I asked about the amount of food sold in a day or a week, she just shrugged and told me beaucoup.
And beaucoup there certainly was, being stuffed and piled into every kind of receptacle from battered suitcases to handbags seemingly capable of infinite expansion. An elderly, bandy-legged man in shorts and a crash helmet wheeled his mobylette up to the entrance and came in to collect his morning’s shopping—a plastic cageot of melons and peaches, two enormous baskets straining to contain their contents, a cotton sack with a dozen baguettes. He distributed the weight carefully around his machine. The crate of fruit was secured with elastic straps to the rack behind the saddle, the baskets hung on the handlebars, the bread sack slung across his back. As he wheeled his load—enough food for a week—away from the market, he shouted at one of the stallholders, “A demain!” I watched him as he joined the traffic in the Place Pie, the tiny engine of his bike spluttering with effort, his head bent forward over the handlebars and the baguettes sticking up like a quiver of fat golden arrows. It was 11:00, and the café opposite the market had tables on the pavement set for lunch.
Postcards from
Summer
It has taken us three years to accept the fact that we live in the same house, but in two different places.
What we think of as normal life starts in September. Apart from market days in the towns, there are no crowds. Traffic on the back roads is sparse during the day—a tractor, a few vans—and virtually nonexistent at night. There is always a table in every restaurant, except perhaps for Sunday lunch. Social life is intermittent and uncomplicated. The baker has bread, the plumber has time for a chat, the postman has time for a drink. After the first deafening weekend of the hunting season, the forest is quiet. Each field has a stooped, reflective figure working among the vines, very slowly up one line, very slowly down the next. The hours between noon and two are dead.