The day arrived for what Madame Grégoire described as the rendez-vous d’amour, and we drove up to the spectacular rolling countryside above Saignon where Monsieur Grégoire had converted an old stone stable block into a long, low house overlooking the valley and the village of St. Martin-de-Castillon in the far distance.
Boy had gained weight and a thicker coat, but he was still lacking in social polish. He bounded from the car and lifted his leg on a newly planted sapling, churning up a patch of young lawn with his back paws. Madame found him charming. Monsieur, it seemed, was not so sure; I noticed him looking at Boy with a slightly critical eye. Their bitch ignored him, concentrating instead on a series of ambushes mounted against our other two dogs. Boy climbed a hillock at the end of the house and jumped onto the roof. We went inside for tea and cherries marinated in eau-de-vie.
“He is looking well, Boy,” said Monsieur Gregoire.
“Magnifique,” said Madame.
“Oui, mais …” There was something worrying Monsieur. He got up and fetched a magazine. It was the latest issue of the official organ of the Club Korthals de France, page after page of photographs showing dogs at the pointing position, dogs with birds in their mouths, dogs swimming, dogs sitting obediently by their masters.
“Vous voyez,” said Monsieur, “all these dogs have the classic coat, the poil dur. It is a characteristic of the breed.”
I looked at the pictures. The dogs all had flat, rough coats. I looked at Boy, who was now pressing his great brown nose against the window. His coat had grown after clipping into a mass of grey and brown ringlets that we thought rather distinguished. Not Monsieur Grégoire.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “he has grown to resemble a mouton. From the neck up, he is a Korthals. From the neck down, he is a sheep. I am desolated, but this would be a mésalliance.”
My wife almost choked on her cherries. Madame looked dismayed. Monsieur was apologetic. I was relieved. Two dogs and a sheep would do for the time being.
Boy is still, as far as we know, a bachelor.
Passing 50 Without
Breaking the
Speed Limit
I have never paid any great attention to my birthdays, even those that marked the accomplishment of having tottered through another ten years of life. I was working on the day I turned 30, I was working on the day I turned 40, and I was quite happy at the thought of working on my 50th birthday. But it was not to be. Madame my wife had different ideas.
“You’re going to be half a hundred,” she said. “Considering the amount of wine you drink, that is some kind of achievement. We should celebrate.”
There is no arguing with her when she has a certain set to her chin, and so we talked about how and where the deed should be done. I might have known that my wife had already arranged it; she was listening to my suggestions—a trip to Aix, a déjeuner flottant in the pool, a day by the sea at Cassis—out of politeness. When I ran out of inspiration, she moved in. A picnic in the Lubéron, she said, with a few close friends. That was the way to celebrate a birthday in Provence. She painted lyrical pictures of a sun-dappled glade in the forest. I wouldn’t even have to wear long trousers. I’d love it.
I couldn’t imagine loving a picnic. My picnic experiences, limited as they had been to England, had left memories of rising damp creeping up the spine from permanently moist earth, of ants disputing with me over the food, of tepid white wine, and of scuttling for shelter when the inevitable cloud arrived overhead and burst on top of us. I loathed picnics. Rather ungraciously, I said so.
This one, said my wife, would be different. She had it all worked out. In fact, she was in deep consultation with Maurice, and what she had in mind would be not only civilized but highly picturesque, an occasion to rival Glyndebourne on a dry day.
Maurice, the chef and owner of the Auberge de la Loube in Buoux and a serious horse fancier, had over the years collected and restored two or three 19th-century calèches, or open carriages, and a horse-drawn limousine, a stagecoach, une vraie diligence. He was now offering his more adventurous clients the chance to trot to lunch. I would love it.
I recognize inevitability when it stares me in the face, and it was settled. We invited eight friends and kept our fingers crossed, less tightly than we would have done in England, for fine weather. Although it had only rained once since early April, two months before, June in Provence is unpredictable and sometimes wet.
But when I woke and went out into the courtyard, the seven o’clock sky was a never-ending blue, the color of a Gauloise packet. The flagstones were warm under my bare feet, and our resident lizards had already taken up their sunbathing positions, flattened and motionless against the wall of the house. Just to get up to a morning like this was enough of a birthday present.