From ‘Toujours Provence’ by Peter Mayle

 

 

The doctor began to scribble like a poet on heat…….he passed over a wad of hieroglyphics

 

…….. The Anglo-Saxon custom of the orderly queue has no place in French life.

 

……… why French drains behave and smell the way they do, which I found to be a topic of common curiosity among English expatriates. Isn't it strange, they said, that the French are so good at sophisticated technology like high-speed trains and electronic telephone systems and Concorde, and yet revert to the eighteenth century in their bathrooms. Only the other day, an elderly lady informed me, she had flushed her lavatory and the remains of a mixed salad had surfaced in the bowl. Really, it was too bad. That sort of thing would never happen in Cheltenham.

 

He ordered a glass of champagne and showed us some baby melons, no bigger than apples, that he had just bought in the market. They were to be scooped clean, dosed with ratafia of grape juice and Brandy and left for twenty-four hours in the refrigerator. They would taste, so Regis assured us, like a young girl's lips. I had never thought of melons in quite that way before, but I put that down to the shortcomings of my English education.

 

I remembered being turned away from restaurant with airs and graces in Somerset because I wasn't wearing a tie, something that has never happened to me in France.

 

He was unused to speaking into a microphone and, being a Provencal, he was unable to keep his hands still. Thus his explanation came and went in intermittent snatches as he pointed the microphone hopefully at various parts of the field while his words disappeared into the breeze.

 

People are attracted to an area because of its beauty and its promise of peace, and then they transform it into a high-rent suburb complete with cocktail parties, burglar alarm systems, four-wheel-drive recreational vehicles and other essential trappings of la vie rustique.

I don't think the locals mind. Why would they? Barren patches of land that couldn't support a herd of goats are suddenly worth millions of francs. Shops and restaurants and hotels prosper. The macons, the carpenters, the landscape gardeners and the tennis court builders have bulging order books and everyone benefits from le boum. Cultivating tourists is much more rewarding than growing grapes.

 

Sooner or later, as we now expected, every conversation in Provence seems to turn to food or drink.

 

Every time it rains we are delighted, which Faustin takes as a promising sign that we are becoming less English.

 

The time that elapses in Provence between planning a rendezvous and keeping it can often stretch into months, and sometimes years…..

 

‘Tomorrow morning at eleven,’ he said. ‘In the caves at Chateauneuf. Eat plenty of bread at breakfast.’

I had done what he suggested and, as an extra precaution, taking a soup-spoonful of neat olive oil, which one of the local gourmets had told me was an excellent way to coat the stomach and cushion the system against repeated assault by young and powerful wines. In any case………. I wouldn't be swallowing much. I would do as the experts do, rinse and spit.

 

…..Frenchman with an empty stomach drives twice as fast as a Frenchman with a full stomach (which is already too fast for sanity and speed limits)

 

There is something about lunch in France that never fails to overcome any small reserves of will-power that I possess. I can sit down, resolved to be moderate, determined to eat and drink lightly, and be there three hours later, nursing my wine and still open to temptation. I don't think it's greed. I think it's the atmosphere generated by a roomful of people who are totally intent on eating and drinking. And while they do it, they talk about it; not about politics or sport or business, but about what is on the plate and in the glass. Sauces are compared, recipes argued over, past meals remembered and future meals planned. The world and its problems can be dealt with later on, la bouffe takes priority and contentment hangs in the air. I find it irresistible.

 

….. Marseille itself didn't enjoy the best of reputations among its neighbors. (even today, a Marsellais is regarded as a blaguer, an exaggerator, a man who will describe a sardine as a whale,  not entirely to be believed.)

 

….. monks, for some reason, I have an affinity for alcoholic invention, from champagne to Benedictine……..

 

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 fruit 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.

 

I had once heard a Frenchman express his opinion of Italian food in a single libelous phrase: after the noodle, there is nothing.

 

It is impossible to live in France for any length of time and stay immune to the national enthusiasm for food…….

 

………. to bewilder foreigners. Where is the logic, for instance, in the genders given to proper names and nouns? Why is the Rhone masculine and the Durance feminine? They are both rivers, and if they must have a sex, why can't it be the same one? ………. he went on to the masculine ocean, the feminine sea, the masculine lake and the feminine puddle. Even the water must get confused.

……. genders are there for no other reason than to make life difficult. They have been allocated in a whimsical and arbitrary fashion, sometimes with a cavalier disregard for the anatomical niceties. The French for vagina is vagin. Le vagin. Masculine. How can the puzzled student hope to apply logic to a language in which the vagina is masculine?

 

It is perhaps because of these perplexing twists and turns that French was for centuries the language of diplomacy, and occupation in which simplicity and clarity are not regarded as being necessary, or even desirable. Indeed, the guarded statement, made fuzzy by formality and open to several different interpretations, is much less likely to land an ambassador in the soup then plain words which mean what they say. A diplomat, according to Alex Dreier, is ‘anyone who thinks twice before saying nothing’.