A Year In Provence

would be delighted to accept our invitation.

We had worked out that if everyone came there would be twenty-two people, all with good Provencal 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 Perigord. 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.

We unwrapped it. The previous owner must have been a bird the size of a small aircraft, because the liver was enormous -a rich, dark yellow mass that filled both my hands when I lifted it onto the chopping board. Following our friend's instructions, I cut it up and compressed it into glass preserving jars, inserting pieces of truffle with nervous fingers. This was like cooking money.

The jars were sealed, and placed in a huge saucepan of boiling water for precisely ninety minutes. After cooling off, they were refrigerated, then laid to rest in the cave. My wife crossed foie gras off her list.

It felt strange to be coming to the end of the year under blue skies, and without the frenzy that characterizes the weeks before an English Christmas. The only hint of festive preparations in our valley was the strange noise coming from the house of Monsieur Poncet, about a mile away from us. On two successive mornings as I walked past, I heard terrible squawks-not cries of fear or pain, but of outrage. I didn't think they were human, but I wasn't sure. I asked Faustin if he had noticed them.

'Oh, that,' he said. 'Poncet is grooming his ass.'

On Christmas Eve, there was to be a living creche in the church in Menerbes, and the ass of Monsieur Poncet had an important supporting role. Naturally, he had to look his best, but he had an aversion to being brushed and combed, and he was not the kind of ass to suffer grooming quietly. Doubtless he would be presentable on the night, said Faustin, but one would be wise to stay well away from his hind legs, as he was reputed to have an impressive kick.

Up in the village, casting was in progress for the Infant Jesus. Babies of a suitable age and disposition were required to present themselves, and temperament-the ability to rise to the big occasion-would be all-important, as the proceedings did not start until midnight.

Apart from that, and the cards that the postman stuffed in the mailbox, Christmas might have been months away. We did not have a television, and so we were spared the sight of those stupefyingly jolly commercials. There were no carol singers, no office parties, no strident countdowns of the remaining shopping days. I loved it. My wife was not so sure; something was missing. Where was my Christmas spirit? Where was the mistletoe? Where was the Christmas tree? We decided to go into Cavaillon to find them.

We were rewarded at once by the sight of Santa Claus. Dressed in baggy red boucle trousers, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, red fur-trimmed pixie hat, and false beard, he came weaving toward us as we walked down the Cours Gambetta. It looked from a distance as though his beard was on fire, but as he came closer we saw the stub of a Gauloise among the whiskers. He lurched past in a cloud of Calvados fumes, attracting considerable attention from a group of small children. Their mothers would have some explaining to do.

The streets were strung with lights. Music came through the open doorways of bars and shops. Christmas trees were stacked in clumps on the pavement. A man with a throat microphone was selling bed linen from a stall in an alley. 'Take a look at that, Madame. Pure Dralon! I'll give you five thousand francs if you can find a fault in it!' An old peasant woman began a millimeter-by-millimeter inspection, and the man snatched it away.

We turned the corner and nearly collided with the carcass of a deer, hanging outside the door of a butcher's shop, gazing blindly at the carcass of a sanglier hanging next to it. In the window, a line of tiny nude birds, their necks broken and their heads neatly arranged on their breastbones, were offered as a special pre-Christmas promotion, seven for the price of six. The butcher had closed their beaks and set them in a garnish of evergreen leaves and red ribbon. We shuddered, and moved on.

There was no doubt about the most important ingredient in a Provencal Christmas. Judging by the window displays, the queues, and the money changing hands, clothes and toys and stereo equipment and baubles were of incidental importance; the main event of Christmas was food. Oysters and crayfish and pheasant and hare, pates and cheeses, hams and capons, gateaux and pink champagne-after a morning spent looking at it all we were suffering from visual indigestion. With our tree and our mistletoe and our dose of Christmas spirit, we came home.

Two uniformed men were waiting for us, parked outside the house in an unmarked car. The sight of them made me feel guilty, of what, I didn't know, but uniformed men have that effect on me. I tried to think what crimes I had committed recently against the Fifth Republic, and then the two men got out of the car and saluted. I relaxed. Even in France, where bureaucratic formality approaches the level of art, they don't salute before they arrest you.

In fact, they weren't policemen, but firemen, pompiers from Cavaillon. They asked if they could come into the house, and I wondered where we had put our chimney sweep's certificate. This was obviously a spot check designed to catch any householder with a soiled flue.

We sat around the dining room table. One of the men opened an attache case. 'We have brought the official calendar of the Pompiers de Vaucluse.' He laid it on the table.

'As you will see, it shows all the saints' days.'

And so it did, just like our post office calendar. But, instead of photographs of girls wearing coconut-shell brassieres, this calendar was illustrated with pictures of firemen scaling tall buildings, administering first aid to accident victims, rescuing mountaineers in distress, and manning loaded fire hoses. The pompiers in rural France provide an overall emergency service, and they will retrieve your dog from a pothole in the mountains or take you to a hospital, as well as fight your fires. They are in every way an admirable and deserving body of men.

I asked if a contribution would be acceptable.

'Bien sur.'

We were given a receipt which also entitled us to call ourselves Friends of the Cavaillon Fire Department. After more salutes, the two pompiers left to try their luck farther up the valley, and we hoped that their training had prepared them for attacks by vicious dogs. Getting a contribution out of Massot would be only marginally less hazardous than putting out a fire. I could imagine him, squinting out from behind his curtains, shotgun at the ready, watching his Alsatians hurl themselves at the intruders. I had once seen the dogs attack the front wheel of a car for want of anything human, ripping away at the tire as though it were a hunk of raw beef, slavering and spitting out shreds of rubber while the terrified driver endeavored to reverse out of range, and Massot looked on, smoking and smiling.

We were now a two-calendar family, and as the days before Christmas slipped by we anticipated the delivery of a third, which would be worth a substantial contribution. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for the past twelve months, the heroes of the sanitation department had stopped at the end of our drive to pick up shamefully large piles of empty bottles, the evil-smelling remains of bouillabaisse suppers, dog-food cans, broken glasses, sacks of rubble, chicken bones, and domestic fallout of every size and description. Nothing defeated them. No heap, however huge and ripe, was too much for the man who clung to the back of the truck, dropping off at each stop to toss the garbage into an open, greasy hold. In the summer, he must have come close to asphyxiation and, in the winter, close to tears with the cold.

He and his partner eventually turned up in a Peugeot which looked as if it was enjoying its final outing before going to the scrapyard-two cheerful, scruffy men with hard handshakes and pastis breath. On the backseat, I could see a brace of rabbits and some bottles of champagne, and I said that it was good to see them picking up some full bottles for a change.

'It's not the empty bottles we mind,' said one of them. 'But you should see what some people leave for us.' He wrinkled his face and held his nose, little finger extended elegantly in the air. 'Degeulasse.'