Toujours Provence (12 page)

As far as I can make out, the Life-style is achieved by transforming a rural community into a kind of sophisticated holiday camp, with as many urban conveniences as possible and, if there’s any spare land, a golf course. If this had been going on in our corner of Provence, I had missed it, and so I asked the agent where I should go to see what he was talking about. Where was the nearest Life-style center?

He looked at me as though I’d been hiding in a time warp. “Haven’t you been to Gordes recently?” he said.

We first saw Gordes 16 years ago, and in a region of beautiful villages it was the most spectacularly beautiful of all. Honey-colored and perched on the top of a hill, with long views across the plain to the Lubéron, it was what estate agents would call a gem, a picture postcard come to life. There was a Renaissance château, narrow streets cobbled in rectangular stone, and the modest facilities of an unspoiled village: a butcher, two bakers, a simple hotel, a seedy café, and a post office run by a man recruited, we were sure, for his unfailing surliness.

The countryside behind the village, permanently green with its covering of scrub oak and pine, was patterned with narrow paths bordered by dry stone walls. You could walk for hours without being aware of any houses except for the rare glimpse of an old tiled roof among the trees. We were told that building was so restricted as to be virtually forbidden.

That was 16 years ago. Today, Gordes is still beautiful—from a distance, at any rate. But as you reach the bottom of the road that leads up to the village, you are greeted by a ladder of signs, each rung advertising an hotel, a restaurant,
a
salon de thé
—every comfort and attraction for the visitor is labeled except the
toilettes publiques
.

At regular intervals along the road are reproduction 19th-century street lamps that look spiky and incongruous against the weathered stone walls and houses. On the bend where the village comes into view, at least one car has always stopped to allow driver and passengers to take photographs. On the final bend before the village, a large area of tarmac has been laid down for car parking. If you choose to ignore this and drive up into the village, you will probably have to come back. The
Place du Château
, now also coated in tarmac, is usually fully booked with cars from all over Europe.

The old hotel is still there, but it has a new hotel as its next-door neighbor. A few meters further on, there is a sign for Sidney Food,
Spécialiste Modules Fast-Food
. Then there is a Souleiado boutique. Then the once-seedy café, now spruced up. In fact, everything has been spruced up, the curmudgeon in the post office has been retired, the
toilettes publiques
enlarged, and the village turned into a place for visitors rather than inhabitants. Official Gordes T-shirts can be bought to prove you’ve been there.

A kilometer or so up the road is another hotel, walled off from public view and equipped with a helicopter landing pad. The building restrictions in the
garrigue
have been relaxed and an enormous sign, subtitled in English, advertises luxury villas with electronic security entrance and fully fitted bathrooms at prices from 2,500,000 francs.

So far there are no signs to indicate where
Vogues
often-famous people have their country homes, so passengers in the procession of huge coaches on their way to the 12th-century Abbaye de Sénanque are left to speculate whose half-hidden
house it is that they’re looking at. One day someone of enterprise and vision will produce a map similar to those Hollywood guides to the houses of the stars, and then we shall feel even closer to California. Meanwhile, Jacuzzis and joggers are no longer sufficiently exotic to attract any attention, and the hills are alive with the thwack of tennis balls and the drowsy hum of the cement mixer.

It has often happened before, in many other parts of the world. 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 should 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
maçons
, 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.

It hasn’t yet affected Ménerbes too much; not, at least, in an obviously visible way. The
Café du Progrès
is still resolutely unchic. The small, smart restaurant that opened two years ago has closed, and apart from a small, smart estate agent’s office, the center of the village looks much the same as it did when we first saw it several years ago.

But change is in the air. Ménerbes has been awarded a sign,
Un des plus beaux villages de France
, and some of the inhabitants seem to have developed a sudden awareness of the media.

My wife came across three venerable ladies sitting in a row on a stone wall, their three dogs sitting in a row in front of
them. It made a nice picture, and my wife asked if she could take a photograph.

The senior old lady looked at her and thought for a moment.

“What’s it for?” she said. Obviously,
Vogue
had been there first.

Like some of our agricultural neighbors in the valley, we subscribe to a service provided by the meteorological station at Carpentras. Twice a week we receive detailed weather forecasts on mimeographed sheets. They predict, usually very accurately, our ration of sun and rain, the likelihood of storms and
mistral
, and the temperature ranges throughout the Vaucluse.

As the early weeks of 1989 went by, the forecasts and statistics began to show ominous signs that the weather was not behaving as it should. There was not enough rain, not nearly enough.

The previous winter had been mild, with so little snow in the mountains that the torrents of spring would be no more than dribbles. Winter had also been dry. January’s rainfall was 9.5 millimeters; normally it is just over 60 millimeters. February’s rainfall was down. The same in March. Summer fire regulations—no burning in the fields—were put into effect early. The traditionally wet Vaucluse spring was only moist, and early summer wasn’t even moist. Cavaillon’s May
rainfall was one millimeter, compared with the average 54.6; seven millimeters in June, compared with the average 44. Wells were going dry, and there was a significant drop in the water level of the Fontaine de Vaucluse.

Drought in the Lubéron hangs over the farmers like an overdue debt. Conversations in the fields and in the village streets are gloomy as the crops bake and the earth turns brittle and crusty. And there is always the risk of fire, terrible to think about but impossible to forget.

All it takes is a spark in the forest—a carelessly dropped cigarette end, a smouldering match—and the
mistral
will do the rest, turning a flicker into a fire, and then into an explosion of flame that rips through the trees faster than a running man. We had heard about a young
pompier
who died in the spring, near Murs. He had been facing the flames when a flying spark, maybe from a pine cone that had burst into red-hot fragments, had landed in the trees behind him, cutting him off. It had happened in seconds.

That is tragic enough when the cause of the fire is accidental, but sickening when it is deliberate. Sadly, it often is. Droughts attract pyromaniacs, and they could hardly have asked for better conditions than the summer of 1989. One man had been caught in the spring setting fire to the
garrigue
. He was young, and he wanted to be a
pompier
, but the fire service had turned him down. He was taking his revenge with a box of matches.

Our first sight of smoke was on the hot, windy evening of the 14th of July. Overhead was cloudless, the clean, burnished blue sky that the
mistral
often brings, and it accentuated the black stain that was spreading above the village of Roussillon, a few miles away across the valley. As we watched it from the path above the house, we heard the drone of
engines, and a formation of Canadair planes flew low over the Lubéron, ponderous with their cargoes of water. Then helicopters, the
bombardiers d’eau
. From Bonnieux came the insistent, panicky blare of a fire siren, and we both looked nervously behind us. Less than a hundred yards separates our house from the tree line, and a hundred yards is nothing to a well-stoked fire with a gale-force wind at its back.

That evening, as the Canadairs, heavy-bellied and slow, ferried between the fire and the sea, we had to face the possibility that the next stretch of forest to go up in flames might be closer to home. The
pompiers
who had come with their calendars at Christmas had told us what we were supposed to do: cut off the electricity, close the wooden shutters, hose them down, stay in the house. We had joked about taking refuge in the wine cellar with a couple of glasses and a corkscrew—better to be roasted drunk than sober. It no longer seemed funny.

The wind dropped as night came, and the glow over Roussillon might have been no more than floodlights on the village
boules
court. We checked on the weather forecast before going to bed. It was not good;
beau temps très chaud et ensoleillé, mistral fort
.

The next day’s copy of
Le Provençal
carried details of the Roussillon fire. It had destroyed more than a hundred acres of the pine woods around the village before 400
pompiers
, 10 aircraft, and the
soldats du feu
from the army had put it out. There were photographs of horses and a herd of goats being led to safety, and of a solitary
pompier
silhouetted against a wall of flame. Three smaller fires were reported in the same article. It would probably have made the front page except for the arrival of the
Tour de France
in Marseille.

We drove across to Roussillon a few days later. What had
been pine green and beautiful was now desolate—charred, ugly tree stumps jutting like rotten teeth from the ochre-red earth of the hillsides. Miraculously, some of the houses seemed untouched despite the devastation that surrounded them. We wondered if the owners had stayed inside or run, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to sit in a dark house listening to the fire coming closer and closer, feeling its heat through the walls.

July’s rainfall was five millimeters, but the wise men of the café told us that the storms of August would soak the Lubéron and allow the
pompiers
to relax. Always, we were told,
le quinze août
brought a downpour, swilling campers out of their tents, flooding roads, drenching the forest, and, with luck, drowning the pyromaniacs.

Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw nothing but sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before. The luckier peasants who had powerful irrigation systems began to water their vines. Our vines drooped. Faustin, on his tours of inspection in the vineyard, drooped also.

The pool was as warm as soup, but at least it was wet, and one evening the scent of water attracted a tribe of
sangliers
. Eleven of them came out of the forest and stopped fifty yards from the house. One boar took advantage of the halt and mounted his mate, and Boy, showing uncharacteristic bravado, went dancing toward the happy couple, his bark soprano with excitement. Still joined together like competitors in a wheelbarrow race, they chased him off, and he
returned to the door of the courtyard where he could be noisy and brave in safety. The
sangliers
changed their minds about the pool, and filed away through the vines to eat Jacky’s melons in the field on the other side of the road.

Le quinze août
was as dry as the first half of the month had been, and every time the
mistral
blew we waited for the sound of the sirens and the Canadairs. A pyromaniac had actually telephoned the
pompiers
, promising another fire as soon as there was enough wind, and there were daily helicopter patrols over the valley.

But they didn’t see him when he did it again, this time near Cabrières. Ashes carried by the wind fell in the courtyard, and the sun was blotted out by smoke. The smell of it spooked the dogs, who paced and whined and barked at gusts of wind. The red and pink evening sky was hidden behind a smear of grey, faintly luminous, somber, and frightening.

A friend who was staying in Cabrières came over to see us that night. Some houses on the edge of the village had been evacuated. She had brought her passport with her, and a spare pair of knickers.