Toujours Provence (22 page)

After an hour of music that threatens to dislodge the windows of the houses around the square, the group performs its finale. With an intensity worthy of Piaf on a sad night, the singer gives us
“Comme d’habitude,”
or “My Way,” ending with a sob, her orange head bent over the microphone. The old man nods and bangs his stick on the ground, and the dancers go back to the café to see if there’s any beer left.

Normally, there would have been
feux d’artifice
shooting up from the field behind the war memorial. This year, because of the drought, fireworks are forbidden. But it was a good
fête
. And did you see how the postman danced?

A friend in London who occasionally keeps me informed about subjects of international importance that might not be reported in
Le Provençal
sent me a disturbing newspaper clipping. It was taken from the
Times
, and it revealed an enterprise of unspeakable villainy, a knife thrust deep into the most sensitive part of a Frenchman’s anatomy.

A gang of scoundrels had been importing white truffles (sometimes contemptuously referred to as “industriar” truffles) from Italy and staining them with walnut dye until their complexions were dark enough to pass as black truffles. These, as every gourmet knows, have infinitely more flavor than their white cousins, and cost infinitely more money. The
Times
reporter, I think, had seriously underestimated the prices. He had quoted 400 francs a kilo, which would have caused a stampede at Fauchon in Paris, where I had seen them arranged in the window like jewels at 7000 francs a kilo.

But that wasn’t the point. It was the nature of the crime that mattered. Here were the French, self-appointed world champions of gastronomy, being taken in by counterfeit
delicacies, their taste buds hoodwinked and their wallets plucked clean. Worse still, the fraud didn’t even depend on second-class domestic truffles, but on pallid castoffs from Italy—
Italy
, for God’s sake!

I had once heard a Frenchman express his opinion of Italian food in a single libelous phrase: After the noodle, there is nothing. And yet hundreds, maybe thousands, of dusky Italian impersonators had found their way into knowledgeable French stomachs under the crudest of false pretences. The shame of it was enough to make a man weep all over his
foie gras
.

The story reminded me of Alain, who had offered to take me for a day of truffle hunting below Mont Ventoux, and to demonstrate the skills of his miniature pig. But when I called him, he told me he was having a very thin season, the result of the summer drought.
En plus
, the experiment with the pig had been a failure. She was not suited to the work. Nevertheless, he had a few truffles if we were interested, small but good. We arranged to meet in Apt, where he had to see a man about a dog.

There is one café in Apt that is filled on market day with men who have truffles to sell. While they wait for customers, they pass the time cheating at cards and lying about how much they were able to charge a passing Parisian for 150 grams of mud and fungus. They carry folding scales in their pockets, and ancient wooden-handled Opinel knives, which are used to cut tiny nicks in the surface of a truffle to prove that its blackness is more than skin deep. Mixed in with the café smell of coffee and black tobacco is the earthy, almost putrid scent that comes from the contents of the shabby linen bags on the tables. Early morning glasses of
rosé
are sipped, and conversations are often conducted in secretive mutters.

While I waited for Alain, I watched two men crouched over their drinks, their heads close together, glancing around between sentences. One of them took out a cracked Bic pen and wrote something on the palm of his hand. He showed what he had written to the other man and then spat into his palm and carefully rubbed out the evidence. What could it have been? The new price per kilo? The combination of the vault in the bank next door? Or a warning?
Say nothing. A man with glasses is staring at us
.

Alain arrived, and everyone in the café looked at him, as they had looked at me. I felt as though I was about to do something dangerous and illegal instead of buying ingredients for an omelet.

I had brought with me the clipping from the
Times
, but it was old news to Alain. He had heard about it from a friend in the Périgord, where it was causing a great deal of righteous indignation among honest truffle dealers, and grave suspicions in the minds of their customers.

Alain had come to Apt to begin negotiations for the purchase of a new truffle dog. He knew the owner, but not well, and therefore the business would take some time. The asking price was substantial, 20,000 francs, and nothing could be taken on trust. Tests in the field would have to be arranged. The dog’s age would have to be established, and his stamina and scenting skills demonstrated. One never knew.

I asked about the miniature pig. Alain shrugged, and drew his index finger across his throat. In the end, he said, unless one was prepared to accept the inconvenience of a full-sized pig, a dog was the only solution. But to find the right dog, a dog that would be worth its weight in banknotes, that was not at all straightforward.

There is no such breed as a truffle hound. Most of the
truffle dogs that I had seen were small, nondescript, yappy creatures that looked as though a terrier might have been briefly involved in the bloodline many generations ago. Alain himself had an old Alsatian which, in its day, had worked well. It was all a question of individual instinct and training, and there were no guarantees that a dog who performed for one owner would perform for another. Alain remembered something and smiled. There was a famous story. I refilled his glass, and he told me.

A man from St. Didier once had a dog who could find truffles, so he said, where no other dog had found them before. Throughout the winter, when other hunters were coming back from the hills with a handful, or a dozen, the man from St. Didier would return to the café with his satchel bulging. The dog was a
merveille
, and the owner never stopped boasting about his little Napoléon, so called because his nose was worth gold.

Many men coveted Napoléon, but each time they offered to buy him, the owner refused. Until one day a man came into the café and put four
briques
on the table, four thick wads pinned together, 40,000 francs. This was an extraordinary price and, with a show of reluctance, it was finally accepted. Napoléon went off with his new master.

For the remainder of the season, he didn’t find a single truffle. The new owner was
en colère
. He brought Napoléon to the café and demanded his money back. The old owner told him to go away and learn how to hunt properly. Such an
imbécile
didn’t deserve a dog like Napoléon. Other unpleasant words were exchanged, but there was no question of the money being refunded.

The new owner went into Avignon to find a lawyer. The
lawyer said, as lawyers often do, that it was a grey area. There was no precedent to refer to, no case in the long and meticulously documented history of French law that touched on the matter of a dog being derelict in his duty. It was without doubt a dispute that would have to be decided by a learned judge.

Months and many consultations later, the two men were instructed to appear in court. The judge, being a thorough and conscientious man, wanted to be sure that all the principals in the case were present. A gendarme was sent to arrest the dog and bring him to court as a material witness.

Whether or not the dog’s presence in the witness box helped the judge in his deliberations is not known, but he handed down the following verdict: Napoléon was to be returned to his old owner, who would repay half the purchase price, being allowed to keep the other half as compensation for the loss of the dog’s services.

Now reunited, Napoléon and his old owner moved from St. Didier to a village north of Carpentras. Two years later, an identical case was reported, although due to inflation the amount of money had increased. Napoléon and his owner had done it again.

But there was something I didn’t understand. If the dog was such a virtuoso truffle hunter, surely his owner would make more money by working him than selling him, even though he ended up keeping the dog and half the money each time he went to court.

Ah, said Alain, you have assumed, like everyone else, that the truffles in the satchel were found by Napoléon on the days they were brought into the café.

Non?

Non
. They were kept in the
congélateur
and brought out once or twice a week. That dog couldn’t find a pork chop in a
charcuterie
. He had a nose of wood.

Alain finished his wine. “You must never buy a dog in a café. Only when you have seen him work.” He looked at his watch. “I have time for another glass. And you?”

Always, I said. Did he have another story?

“This you will like, being a writer,” he said. “It happened many years ago, but I am told it is true.”

A peasant owned a patch of land some distance from his house. It was not a big patch, less than two
hectares
, but it was crowded with ancient oaks, and each winter there were many truffles, enough to allow the peasant to live in comfortable idleness for the rest of the year. His pig barely needed to search. Year after year, truffles grew more or less where they had grown before. It was like finding money under the trees. God was good, and a prosperous old age was assured.

One can imagine the peasant’s irritation the first morning he noticed freshly displaced earth under the trees. Something had been on his land during the night, possibly a dog or even a stray pig. A little further on, he noticed a cigarette end crushed into the earth—a modern, filter-tipped cigarette, not of the kind he smoked. And certainly not dropped by a stray pig. This was extremely alarming.

As he went from tree to tree, so his alarm increased. More earth had been disturbed, and he saw fresh grazes on some rocks that could only have been made by a truffle pick.

It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, one of his neighbors. He had known them all since childhood. It must have been a foreigner, someone who didn’t know that this precious patch was his.

Since he was a reasonable man, he had to admit that there
was no way a foreigner could tell if the land was privately owned or not. Fences and signs were expensive, and he had never seen the need for them. His land was his land; everyone knew that. Clearly, times had changed and strangers were finding their way into the hills. He drove to the nearest town that afternoon and bought an armful of signs:
PROPRIETE PRIVEE, DEFENSE D’ENTRER
, and, for good measure, three or four that read
CHIEN MÉCHANT
. He and his wife worked until dark nailing them up around the perimeter of the land.

A few days went by without any further signs of the trespasser with the truffle pick, and the peasant allowed himself to relax. It had been an innocent mistake, although he did wonder why an innocent man would hunt truffles at night.

And then it happened again. The signs had been ignored, the land violated, and who knows how many fat black nuggets taken from the earth under cover of darkness. It could no longer be excused as the mistake of an ignorant enthusiast. This was a
braconnier
, a poacher, a thief in the night who hoped to profit from an old man’s only source of income.

The peasant and his wife discussed the problem that night as they sat in the kitchen and ate their
soupe
. They could, of course, call in the police. But since the truffles—or at least, the money made from selling the truffles—did not officially exist, it might not be prudent to involve the authorities. Questions would be asked about the value of what had been stolen, and private information such as this was best kept private. Besides, the official penalty for truffle poaching, even if it were a spell in jail, would not replace the thousands of francs that were even now stuffed in the poacher’s deep and dishonest pockets.

And so the couple decided to seek tougher but more satisfactory justice, and the peasant went to see two of his
neighbors, men who would understand what needed to be done.

They agreed to help him, and for several long, cold nights the three of them waited with their shotguns among the truffle oaks, coming home each dawn slightly tipsy from the
marc
that they had been obliged to drink to keep out the chill. At last, one night when the clouds scudded across the face of the moon and the
mistral
bit into the faces of the three men, they saw the headlights of a car. It stopped at the end of a dirt track, two hundred meters down the hill.

The engine stopped, lights were extinguished, doors were opened and quietly closed. There were voices, and then the glow of a flashlight, which came slowly up the hill toward them.

First into the trees was a dog. He stopped, picked up the scent of the men, and barked—a high, nervous bark, followed at once by
ssssst
! as the poacher hissed him quiet. The men flexed their numb fingers for a better grip on their guns, and the peasant took aim with the flashlight he had brought especially for the ambush.