A Year In Provence

forgot about the beauties of nature and wished I had worn steak in my shorts. By the time we reached the village it hurt to breathe.

The woman who runs the Cafe Clerici was standing outside with her hands on her ample hips. She looked at the two red-faced, gasping figures bent over their handlebars. 'Mon Dieu! The Tour de France is early this year.' She brought us beer, and we sat in the comfort of chairs designed for human bottoms. Lacoste now seemed rather far away.

The hill that twists up to the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's chateau was long and steep and agonizing. We were halfway up and flagging when we heard a whirr of derailleur gears, and we were overtaken by another cyclist-a wiry, brown man who looked to be in his mid-sixties. 'Bonjour,' he said brightly, 'bon velo,' and he continued up the hill and out of sight. We labored on, heads low, thighs burning, regretting the beer.

The old man came back down the hill, turned, and cruised along next to us. 'Courage,' he said, not even breathing hard, 'c'est pas loin. Allez!' And he rode with us into Lacoste, his lean old legs, shaved bare in case of falls and grazes, pumping away with the smoothness of pistons.

We collapsed on the terrace of another cafe, which overlooked the valley. At least it would be downhill most of the way home, and I gave up the idea of calling an ambulance. The old man had a peppermint frappe, and told us that he had done thirty kilometers so far, and would do another twenty before lunch. We congratulated him on his fitness. 'It's not what it was. I had to stop doing the Mont Ventoux ride when I turned sixty. Now I just do these little promenades.' Any slight satisfaction we felt at climbing the hill disappeared.

The ride back was easier, but we were still hot and sore when we reached home. We dismounted and walked stiff-legged to the pool, discarding clothes as we went, and dived in. It was like going to heaven. Lying in the sun afterwards with a glass of wine we decided that cycling would be a regular part of our summer lives. It was, however, some time before we could face the saddles without flinching.

THE FIELDS around the house were inhabited every day by figures moving slowly and methodically across the landscape, weeding the vineyards, treating the cherry trees, hoeing the sandy earth. Nothing was hurried. Work stopped at noon for lunch in the shade of a tree, and the only sounds for two hours were snatches of distant conversation that carried hundreds of yards on the still air.

Faustin was spending most of his days on our land, arriving just after seven with his dog and his tractor and usually contriving to organize his work so that it ended near the house-close enough to hear the sound of bottles and glasses. One drink to settle the dust and be sociable was his normal ration but, if the visit stretched to two drinks, it meant business-some new step forward in agricultural cooperation which he had been mulling over during his hours among the vines. He never approached a subject directly, but edged toward it, crabwise and cautious.

'Do you like rabbits?'

I knew him well enough to understand that he wasn't talking about the charms of the rabbit as a domestic pet, and he confirmed this by patting his belly and muttering reverently about civets and pates. But the trouble with rabbits, he said, was their appetites. They ate like holes, kilos and kilos. I nodded, but I was at a loss to know where our interests and those of the hungry rabbit coincided.

Faustin stood up and beckoned me to the door of the courtyard. He pointed at two small terraced fields. ' Lucerne,' he said. 'Rabbits love it. You could get three cuts from those fields between now and autumn.' My knowledge of local plant life was far from complete, and I had thought that the fields were covered in some kind of dense Provencal weed which I had been meaning to clear. It was fortunate I hadn't; Faustin's rabbits would never have forgiven me. It was an unexpected triumph for gardening by neglect. In case I had missed the point, Faustin waved his glass at the fields and said again, 'Rabbits love lucerne.' He made nibbling noises. I told him he could have as much as his rabbits could eat, and he stopped nibbling.

'Bon. If you're sure you won't need it.' Mission accomplished, he stumped off toward his tractor.

Faustin is slow in many ways, but quick with his gratitude. He was back the following evening with an enormous bouquet of asparagus, neatly tied with red, white, and blue ribbon. His wife, Henriette, was behind him carrying a pickax, a ball of string, and a tub filled with young lavender plants. They should have been planted long before, she said, but her cousin had only just brought them down from the Basses-Alpes. They must be planted at once.

Labor was divided rather unfairly, it seemed to us. Faustin was in charge of keeping the string straight and drinking pastis; Henriette swung the pickaxe, each planting hole a pick handle's distance from the next. Offers to help were refused. 'She's used to it,' said Faustin proudly, as Henriette swung and measured and planted in the twilight, and she laughed. 'Eight hours of this and you sleep like a baby.' In half an hour it was done-a bed of fifty plants that would be the size of hedgehogs in six months, knee high in two years, arranged with meticulous symmetry to mark the boundary of the rabbits' lucerne factory.

Whatever had been on the menu for dinner was forgotten, and we prepared the asparagus. There was too much for one meal, more than I could get both hands around, the patriotic tricolor ribbon printed with Faustin's name and address. He told us that it was the law in France for the producer to be identified like this, and we hoped one day to have our own ribbon when our asparagus plants grew up.

The pale shoots were as fat as thumbs, delicately colored and patterned at the tips. We ate them warm, with melted butter. We ate bread that had been baked that afternoon in the old boulangerie at Lumieres. We drank the light red wine from the vineyards in the valley. We supported local industry with every mouthful.

Through the open door we could hear the croaking of our resident frog, and the long, sliding song of a nightingale. We took a final glass of wine outside and looked by the light of the moon at the new lavender bed while the dogs rooted for mice in the lucerne fields. The rabbits would eat well this summer and, Faustin had promised, would taste all the better for it in the winter. We realized we were becoming as obsessive about food as the French, and went back indoors to attend to some unfinished business with a goat's cheese.

BERNARD the pisciniste had brought us a present, and he was assembling it with great enthusiasm. It was a floating armchair for the pool, complete with a drinks compartment. It had come all the way from Miami, Florida, which in Bernard's opinion was the capital of the world for pool accessories. 'The French don't understand these things,' he said disparagingly. 'There are companies making air cushions, but how can you drink on a floating cushion?' He tightened the last wing nut on the frame and stood back to admire the chair in all its Miami dazzle, a vivid block of styrofoam, plastic, and aluminium. 'There. The glass fits here in the armrest. You can repose in great comfort. C'est une merveille.' He launched the chair into the water, careful not to splash his pink shirt and white trousers. 'You must put it away every night,' he said. 'The gypsies will be here soon for the cherry picking. They'll steal anything.'

It was a reminder that we had been intending to get some insurance arranged for the house, but with the builders making holes in the walls I couldn't imagine any insurance company taking the risk. Bernard removed his sunglasses in horror. Didn't we know? There was a higher burglary rate in the Vaucluse than anywhere else in France except Paris. He looked at me as if I had committed an act of terminal lunacy. 'You must be protected immediately. I will send a man this afternoon. Stay en garde until he comes.'

I thought this was perhaps a little dramatic, but Bernard seemed convinced that robber bands were lurking close by, waiting only for us to go to the village butcher before swooping down in a pantechnicon to pick the house bare. Only last week, he told me, he had found his car jacked up outside his own front door with all four wheels removed. These people were salauds.

One reason, apart from idleness, why we had neglected the matter of insurance was that we detested insurance companies, with their weasel words and evasions and extenuating circumstances, and their conditional clauses set in minuscule, illegible type. But Bernard was right. It was stupid to trust to luck. We resigned ourselves to spending the afternoon with a gray man in a suit who would tell us to put a lock on our refrigerator.

It was early evening when the car pulled up in a cloud of dust. The driver had obviously come to the wrong house. He was young and dark and good-looking, resplendent in the costume of a 1950s saxophone