Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

We went into the office to pick up the squat, two liter jugs that the manager had packed in a carton for us, and he presented each of us with bars of olive-oil soap.

"There is nothing better for the skin," he said, and he patted his cheeks with dainty fingertips. "And, as for the oil, it is a masterpiece. You'll see."

Before dinner that night, we tested it, dripping it onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes. It was like eating sunshine.

THE GUESTS continued to come, dressed for high summer and hoping for swimming weather, convinced that Provence enjoyed a Mediterranean climate and dismayed to find us in sweaters, lighting fires in the evening, drinking winter wines, and eating winter food.

Is it always as cold as this in November? Isn't it hot all the year round? They would look dejected when we told them about snowdrifts and subzero nights and bitter winds, as though we had lured them to the North Pole under false tropical pretenses.

Provence has been accurately described as a cold country with a high rate of sunshine, and the last days of November were as bright and as blue as May, clean and exhilarating and, as far as Faustin was concerned, profoundly ominous. He was predicting a savage winter, with temperatures so low that olive trees would die of cold as they had in 1976. He speculated with grim enjoyment about chickens being frozen stiff and old people turning blue in their beds. He said there would undoubtedly be extended power cuts, and warned me to have the chimney swept.

"You'll be burning wood night and day," he said, "and that's when chimneys catch fire. And when the pompiers come to put out the fire they'll charge you a fortune unless you have a certificate from the chimney sweep."

And it could be much worse than that. If the house burned down as the result of a chimney fire, the insurance company wouldn't pay out unless one could produce a certificate. Faustin looked at me, nodding gravely as I absorbed the thoughts of being cold, homeless, and bankrupt, and all because of an unswept chimney.

But what would happen, I asked him, if the certificate had been burned with the house? He hadn't thought of that, and I think he was grateful to me for suggesting another disastrous possibility. A connoisseur of woe needs fresh worries from time to time, or he will become complacent.

I arranged for Cavaillon's premier chimney sweep, Monsieur Beltramo, to come up to the house with his brushes and suction cleaners. A tall man with a courtly manner and an aquiline, sooty profile, he had been a chimney sweep for twenty years. Not once, he told me, had a chimney cleaned by him ever caught fire. When he was finished, he made out the certificat de ramonage, complete with smudged fingerprints, and wished me a pleasant winter. "It won't be a cold one this year," he said. "We've had three cold winters in a row. The fourth is always mild."

I asked him if he was going to clean Faustin's chimney, and exchange weather forecasts.

"No. I never go there. His wife sweeps the chimney."

THE POSTMAN drove at high speed up to the parking area behind the house and reversed with great elan into the garage wall, crushing a set of rear lights. He didn't appear to have noticed the damage as he came into the courtyard, smiling broadly and waving a large envelope. He went straight to the bar, planted his elbow, and looked expectant.

"Bonjour, jeune homme!"

I hadn't been called young man for years, and it wasn't the postman's normal habit to bring the mail into the house. Slightly puzzled, I offered him the drink that he was waiting for.

He winked. "A little pastis," he said. "Why not?"

Was it his birthday? Was he retiring? Had he won the big prize in the Loterie Nationale? I waited for him to explain the reason for his high spirits, but he was too busy telling me about the sanglier that his friend had shot the previous weekend. Did I know how to prepare these creatures for the pot? He took me through the whole gory process, from disembowelment to hanging, quartering, and cooking. The pastis disappeared-it wasn't, I realized, his first of the morning-and a refill accepted. Then he got down to business.

"I have brought you the official post office calendar," said the postman. "It shows all the saints' days, and there are some agreeable pictures of young ladies."

He took the calendar from its envelope and leafed through the pages until he found a photograph of a girl wearing a pair of coconut shells.

"Voilà!"

I told him that he was most kind to think of us, and thanked him.

"It's free," he said. "Or you can buy it if you want to."

He winked again, and I finally understood the purpose of the visit. He was collecting his Christmas tip, but since it would be undignified simply to arrive at the front door with an outstretched hand, we had to observe the ritual of the calendar.

He took his money and finished his drink and roared off to his next call, leaving the remnants of his rear light on the drive.

My wife was looking at the calendar when I came back into the house.

"Do you realize," she said, "that it's only three weeks until Christmas, and there's still no sign of the builders?"

And then she had an idea that only a woman could have had. It was obvious, she thought, that the birthday of Jesus Christ was not a sufficiently important deadline for the completion of work on the house. Somehow or other, Christmas would come and go and it would be February by the time everyone recovered from their New Year hangovers and holidays. What we should do was to invite the builders to a party to celebrate the end of the job. But not just the builders; their wives must come too.

The intuitive cunning of this suggestion was based on two assumptions. First, that the wives, who never saw the work that their husbands did in other people's houses, would be so curious that they would find the invitation irresistible. And second, that no wife would want her husband to be the one not to have finished his part of the work. This would cause loss of face among the other wives and public embarrassment, followed by some ugly recriminations in the car on the way home.

It was an inspiration. We fixed a date for the last Sunday before Christmas and sent out the invitations: champagne from 11 o'clock onward.

Within two days, the cement mixer was back in front of the house. Didier and his assistants, cheerful and noisy, resumed where they had left off as though there had never been a three-month hiatus. No excuses were made, and no direct explanation given for the sudden return to work. The closest Didier came to it was when he mentioned casually that he wanted to have everything finished before he went skiing. He and his wife, he said, would be delighted to accept our invitation.

We had worked out that if everyone came there would be twenty-two people, all with good Provençal appetites. And, as it was so close to Christmas, they would be looking for something a little more festive than a bowlful of olives and a few slices of saucisson. My wife started making lists of provisions, and terse footnotes and reminders were scattered throughout the house: Rabbit terrine! Gambas and mayonnaise! Individual pizzas! Mushroom tart! Olive bread! How many quiches?-the scraps of paper were everywhere, making my one-word list-champagne-look sparse and inadequate.

The gastronomic highlight was delivered one cold morning by a friend who had relatives in Périgord. It was an entire foie gras-raw, and therefore a fraction of the price of the prepared product. All we had to do was cook it and add some slivers of black truffle.