Provençal Sun
Marseille and the Ventoux
Giles MacDonogh
Mar 16
The winter’s been too long, too damp and too cold. I was sore and creaky in my fingers, hips and knees. I needed heat. The last time I had crossed the Channel was in October, and then only for a few hours, while I snatched some documents from my mother’s flat before her pictures and remaining trifles fell to the French state. It was sunny then, and really quite warm as the familiar bus took me from the top of the rue de Rennes to the Gare du Nord, possibly for the last time.
In the final week of February, I flew to Marseille. Normally I’d immediately go north to the Ventoux, but this time I planned to explore Marseille a bit, staying with kind friends who have gone into Brexit exile in the city. As I waited for the bus to the Gare Saint-Charles, the tall North African man who stowed suitcases in the hold asked me why I was going to Marseille. He seemed incredulous. He felt the city had little to offer, unlike Barcelona. Barcelona had great architecture, not Marseille.
The truth is that I have always avoided Marseille, and got out as quickly as I could. The only night I had ever spent ‘in Marseille’ was actually in an airport hotel before heading for Bandol for a week of wine tasting. Once or twice, I have had a beer in a bar between connecting trains or buses, but I have never been to the ‘Can o’ Beer’ (la Canebière – Marseille’s most famous boulevard) let alone the port.
The driver set off, shouting streams of profanities at the other drivers all the way to the Gare Saint-Charles.
My first task was to get my return tickets to Carpentras as I had made a mess of it online. I found the office of the local ‘Zou’ train and a polite, well-spoken woman (no southern twang) who could somehow spot my bungled attempts to buy a ticket. She was so nice that I asked her for directions to my friends’ flat.
It was in the First Arrondissement, just south of the station. The streets had mostly Napoleonic names – rue des Abeilles, Grande-Armée, des Héroes. The houses looked as if they had been built in the Second Empire, so that would fit. My friends lived near the former Picon factory, which makes a bitters that you add to beer – another acquired taste I have yet to acquire.
We ate that night at the Pizzeria Chez Noel on the Can o’ Beer with other friends and exiles. Provence is pizza, and Marseille all the more so given that so many of its inhabitants are Italian au fond. There is traditional Provencal food like the Friday staple, brandade de morue (a garlicky emulsion of dried cod with extras), mutton tripe etc, but it can be hard to track down. The swanky fish restaurants in the port and on the coast are another matter, but then, they chiefly serve holiday-makers and foreign tourists.
The next day my host and I went shopping for dinner. That meant visiting his local places. Le Marché was not really a market, but a large space selling high quality meat, fish, cheese, bread, cakes and wine. The prices were Parisian and the shop might just as well have been in Paris. We bought squid, cheese and wine. Again, the cashier had no accent, which could have meant that he came from elsewhere, or simply more evidence that young people speak the French they hear on the television, and that a Marseillais twang would mark them down as being provincial and lacking Parisian sophistication. We also went to an excellent artisan baker and a greengrocer selling the sort of zingingly fresh fruit and veg that you would expect in the south of France. Artichokes were in season.
We also visited the bookshop Maupetit, as I was anxious to find a useful history of Marseille, but everything was either too banal or too specific. A few days later I laid my hands on MFK Fisher’s book on the city, which I found discarded on a shelf outside the little library in Blauvac in the Ventoux.
That afternoon we ventured further down the Can o’ Beer looking for a bookshop that might have had that history book. I wondered whether Marseilles had a mediaeval core. I found a nice rococo town palace, and a lot of streets off the Can o’ Beer commemorated religious orders (Capucins, Feuillants, Recollets), but most of the centre was full-blooded Haussmann. Next time I shall try to get to the remains of the original Marseille cathedral of La Major, and the Abbaye de Saint Victor in the port. Our search took us to the big market around Les Capucins. Here were the shops and stalls where cheap food was to be had, largely manned by North Africans and selling to other North Africans: Halal butchers, fishmongers presiding over heaps of Mediterranean poissons de roche, fresh fruit and vegetables and bakers with displays of exotic bread. We looked in vain for a certain bookshop. I asked a pharmacist, who pointed to a place selling tatty clothes, and finally a charcutier (charcutiers – pork butchers – have become almost extinct in France over the past thirty years) complete with sonorous twang, who explained there had been an Islamic bookshop there, but it had closed down. He had been running his shop some fifty years, long enough to have known MFK Fisher, and he was now become an incongruous figure selling porky things in a largely Arabic market. The good bookshop, he told me, was near the Bourse. The owner was a customer of his.
The next day I took the stopping train to Avignon and another to Carpentras. In Marseille there had been a little mistral and some rain, but the wind had dropped, and it was sunny and a very nice 16 or 17 degrees. Already the painful swellings in my fingers were beginning to abate. We drove to the Domaine des Anges above Mormoiron.
For the past three years my host has allowed a local shepherdess to bring up her sheep at the end of February. Around two hundred pregnant ewes, together with a few goats, go from vineyard to vineyard, eating the weeds and dropping manure to the delight of vignerons. My days were far from busy, and the shepherdess and her flock was a pleasant distraction, not least for the soothing tinkling of the bells the ewes wore round their necks and the spasmodic antics of her five dogs: a little black and white, collie-like beast, who did most of the work; a big, fluffy, café-au-lait coloured dog; another the hue of a wholemeal loaf who was generally bedded down at the centre of the flock barking furiously; a large black poodle called ‘Loki;’ and a wolf, or so it seemed to us, whom we gave the widest of berths. We learned that the shepherdess lived in a hut in a wood and her ewes were bred for wool, not meat. When she was away with her sheep she lived in a campervan.
One night there was a crisis, however: a ewe had died and another looked as if it would soon follow suit. The shepherdess came to us in desperation: she needed someone to help her drag the sheep up to her trailer so she could get it to the vet. I volunteered, and we went down to the ailing ewe who was lying in a dropping-filled former cherry orchard, weighed fully 100 kg and was heavily pregnant. We took a trotter each, but made very little progress, and there was a steep incline before you reached the road. We gave up. The wholemeal dog was placed by her and she was left there until the morning when Florent the winemaker was able to pull her out with the forklift. When I last saw her, she was already looking a lot perkier.
he upshot of my short and unsuccessful role as an assistant shepherd was that we had broken the ice, and the shepherdess became quite friendly. She introduced us to her dogs, including the wolf, who was indeed a wolf, or rather, half a wolf. She explained he was a ‘Czech wolf-dog’, the product of a 1950s experiment aiming to cross-breed a wolf with a German shepherd. As she pointed out, he was by far the friendliest of her dogs, and he was soon nuzzling me with his unmistakably lupine nose.
The weather had been cold before my arrival, and the sudden appearance of the warm sun had made the Provençaux friendly and effusive. Generally speaking, they are not famous for being outgoing or welcoming. At the Sunday antiques market in Carpentras, the traders were all smiles and the quality and price of their wares was striking. Seventeenth century devotional paintings were to be had for a song, as well as antique glass, porcelain and local ceramics. If you were to move to the region, you could furnish your house from top to bottom from the market in Carpentras. Much of this bric-a-brac was thrown out when the French sold up and moved into the towns in the post-war years. Their houses were bought up by Britons. Unless those Britons had acquired settled status before 2000, however, they will have had to sell up in their turn. The only people still in the market are the Dutch and Belgians, and a smattering of Germans and Scandinavians.
The next day was Monday, and the food market was in Bédoin under Mount Ventoux. I was with a friend who had had a cycle business in the village, and who was well-known as a result, that meant a lot of hand-shaking. She showed me places that had sold recently and at bargain prices. The spice woman was positively garrulous, while the honey woman gave me a pot of greengage jam. One old boy told us about a huge Provencal mas with 1000 square metres of garden which was apparently for sale. Later, when we went to the car, we spotted it. It was ravishing and remarkably cheap.
It was a quiet time for all that. At the beginning of March, the tourists have yet to appear and much is still closed. L’Ardoise, the good little restaurant in Mazan was open, but was strangely empty on a Friday night when we went for a seasonal truffle risotto. On Sunday night we dined at Clovis et Basina in Crillon-le-Brave, and had rather more avant-garde food. For the rest I read, went for walks and felt my joints express their gratitude for the warm sun
