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Toujours Provence(59)



The more I thought about it, the more I realized that we must have changed. I wouldn’t have called it going native, but there are dozens of differences between our old life and our new life, and we have had to adjust to them. It hasn’t been difficult. Most of the changes have taken place gradually, pleasantly, almost imperceptibly. All of them, I think, are changes for the better.

We no longer watch television. It wasn’t a self-righteous decision to give us time for more intellectual pursuits; it simply happened. In the summer, watching television can’t begin to compare with watching the evening sky. In the winter, it can’t compete with dinner. The television set has now been relegated to a cupboard to make space for more books.

We eat better than we used to, and probably more cheaply. It is impossible to live in France for any length of time and stay immune to the national enthusiasm for food, and who would want to? Why not make a daily pleasure out of a daily necessity? We have slipped into the gastronomic rhythm of Provence, taking advantage of the special offers provided by nature all through the year: asparagus, tiny haricots verts barely thicker than matchsticks, fat fèves, cherries, aubergines, courgettes, peppers, peaches and apricots and melons and grapes, blettes, wild mushrooms, olives, truffles—every season brings its own treat. With the expensive exception of the truffle, nothing costs more than a few francs a kilo.

Meat is a different matter, and butchers’ prices can make the visitor wince. Provence is not cattle country, and so the Englishman in search of his roast beef on Sunday had better take his checkbook and be prepared for disappointment, because the beef is neither cheap nor tender. But lamb, above all from the area around Sisteron where the sheep season themselves with herbs, has a taste that would be a crime to disguise with mint sauce. And every part of the pig is good.

Even so, we now eat less meat. An occasional appellation contrôlée chicken from Bresse, the wild rabbits that Henriette brings in the winter, a cassoulet when the temperature drops and the mistral howls around the house—meat from time to time is wonderful. Meat every day is a habit of the past. There is so much else: fish from the Mediterranean, fresh pasta, limitless recipes for all those vegetables, dozens of breads, hundreds of cheeses.

It may be the change in our diet and the way it is cooked, always in olive oil, but we have both lost weight. Only a little, but enough to cause some surprise to friends who expect us to have developed the ballooning embonpoint—the stomach on stilts—that sometimes grows on people with good appetites who have the luck to eat in France.

Through no deliberate intention of our own, we also take more exercise. Not the grim contortions promoted by gaunt women in leotards, but the exercise that comes naturally from living in a climate that allows you to spend eight or nine months of the year outdoors. Discipline has nothing to do with it, apart from the small disciplines of country life—bringing logs in for the fire, keeping the weeds down and the ditches clear, planting, pruning, bending, and lifting. And, every day in every kind of weather, walking.

We have had people to stay who refuse to believe that walking can be hard exercise. It’s not dramatic effort, not immediately punishing, not fast, not violent. Everybody walks, they say. You can’t call that exercise. Eventually, if they insist, we take them out for a stroll with the dogs.

For the first 10 minutes the going is flat, along the footpath at the bottom of the mountain, easy and undemanding. Pleasant to get a little fresh air and a view of Mont Ventoux in the distance. But exercise? They’re not even short of breath.

Then we turn and go up the track leading to the cedar forest that grows along the spine of the Lubéron. The surface changes from sandy soil cushioned with pine needles to rocks and patches of scree, and we begin to climb. After five minutes, there are no more condescending remarks about walking being an old man’s exercise. After 10 minutes, there are no remarks at all, only the sound of increasingly heavy breathing, punctuated by coughing. The track twists around boulders and under branches so low you have to bend double. There is no encouraging glimpse of the top; the view is limited to a hundred yards or so of narrow, stony, steeply inclined track before it disappears around the next outcrop of rock. If there is any breath to spare, there might be a curse as an ankle turns on the shifting scree. Legs and lungs are burning.

The dogs pad on ahead, with the rest of us strung out behind them at irregular intervals, the least fit stumbling along with their backs bent and their hands on their thighs. Pride usually prevents them from stopping, and they wheeze away stubbornly, heads down, feeling sick. They will never again dismiss walking as nonexercise.