High on Provence

Driving down a narrow road in the wilds of southern France on the way to dinner one night, I got caught in a traffic jam, just as I often do in Paris. But it wasn’t exactly the same. A thousand sheep ambled by, following a raggedy shepherd who looked as if he hadn’t changed clothes since the 17th century.

This, I decided, happily counting sheep, was the heart of Provence.

Depending on your map, or your historical prejudices, Provence can stretch all the way from Nice to Nmes, west from the Italian border halfway to Spain. It can run from the Camargue marshlands on the Mediterranean to high up into the Alps.

What is Provence? In fact, it is simple enough.

Never mind official geography. When the scent of lavender wafts through your car window, boule balls click in town squares and people add a G to words that ought to end in N, you’re in Provence.

The posh part is around St. Remy-de-Provence, with its stonework mansions and lush fields, where each weekend expensive German coach-work jams the country lanes behind clattering Citroen 2 C.V.s. Then there is the Lubern near Aix-en-Provence, heavily peopled with Japanese tourists seeking the long-gone author Peter Mayle (he moved to Long Island). For Roman remains, there is Arles at one end, Frejus at the other. The Provence in Marcel Pagnol’s classic stories might still be found in a beguiling patchwork that has escaped urban sprawl from Marseille to Aubagne.

But I like the Haut Var, a region of the high country strung with little villages perched among oaks and olives. This is honey and truffle country, where farm families cling to a disappearing way of life by hauling their green beans, goat cheese and fresh eggs down to weekly markets.

I’m not, of course, a neutral source. My decade in the Haut Var started in 1987 after a visit to a friend’s retreat here. By the second day, I was scouring the hills for real estate. Now the restored ruins of my house, which sits among the 200 ancient olive trees that willed themselves back to life, color my objectivity. I know what I like.

The Haut Var takes in the loosely defined highlands of the Var, a French departement (state) that spreads north from the Mediterranean port of Toulon and the coast around St.-Tropez. From Cotignac to Bargemon, via the old Roman crossroads at Aups, narrow roads snake through flower-splashed stone towns. The high Var runs south from the Gorges du Verdon, France’s bite-sized version of the Grand Canyon, with its breath-catching vistas and swimmable lakes. It drops down to the little city of Draguignan, midway between Toulon and Nice, and due north of St.-Tropez. Along the way are towns with unfamiliar names: Tourtour, Seillans, Mons, Lorgues, Salernes, Ampus.

In the ancient style, many of these villages were built atop steep hills, so narrow streets wind upward from thick walls toward an imposing church. Stone spires doubled as belfries and watchtowers. Other towns were positioned halfway up the hill, straddling a river or a Roman road. Each had fountains, public squares, marketplaces, mills and stone laveries for washing clothes. Centuries back, French kings ordered trees planted along roads and plazas.

Outside the villages, settlements grew up around bastides, the main houses of terraced olive groves and farms. Simple shelters, cabanons, expanded with each generation to become rambling grand manors, with barns, watering pools and monster fruit trees. In town, or deep in the woods, people invariably built with ochre-tinted natural stone, oaken beams and curved red roof tiles.

Some modern outrages notwithstanding, the result is a picturesque tableau of times long gone. Beauty lies in the details: iron fancywork, louvered shutters, cornerstones, lintels, roof lines. Killer geraniums rise from tiny patches of dirt between stone walls. The royal trees now tower majestically, shading the old men who clunk boules to raucous laughter until the afternoon light fades.

Hardcore sightseers can find the odd Roman bridge, all but forgotten down a rutted road, spanning high above a wild mountain stream. But this corner of France attracts outsiders less interested in landmarks than in people living the way their great-grandparents did, all within an hour or so of the flashy discos on the French Riviera.

Guidebooks seldom mention this micro-region, and only detailed maps take note of it. It has a reputation for mediocre wines and so-so cuisine. A hearty band of devotees, who know better, prefer it that way.

“They’ve built another one of those damned roundabouts,” Nicholas Mailaender is apt to mutter if you stop near Aups for any of the jillion varieties of fresh fruit jams his wife and daughters make in copper tubs atop an old iron stove. Traffic engineers seem determined to stamp out simple crossroads on the two-lane blacktops that thread among the hills, and it infuriates a lot of locals.

Others, comfortable in their bit of paradise, don’t mind sharing the secrets.

Anita Rieu-Sicart, a Londoner who came to Lorgues nine years ago with her husband, George, a retired New York cop, now edits a newsletter she calls the Var Village Voice. It exudes enthusiasm, offering tips on eating, shopping and buying everything from a string of purple garlic to a 16th century chateau. Her little paper goes to a few thousand subscribers, including a Studio City couple.

“It’s the olives and the wine, the climate, the attitude toward life,” Rieu-Sicart says. “People are warmer, slower paced. They just don’t take things too seriously. I’m going down to the market pretty soon, even though I don’t really need anything. That’s just where everyone meets.”

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Back in the 1930s, Eudora Welty came through the region and pronounced it the place that for her most symbolized life’s pleasures.

“She was absolutely right,” observed my friend Phil Cousineau, a world-wandering author from San Francisco, who visited recently. “This is much more than seeing some famous castle or ruins. Here, you’re following the legend of the French art of living. It’s been in the Western imagination for years that there is one place left in the world where you can still learn the art of slowing down and appreciating the joys of life. This is it.”

At any season, every month, life in the Haut Var has its pleasant peculiarities. January’s big event is the Aups Truffle Fair, a Sunday celebration of the wrinkly black fungus worth its weight in bearer bonds. All winter, dogs sniff out truffles left undetected by wild boars left undetected by hunters. In late January and February, truffles are at their best, firm but ripe. In old country kitchens, the breakfast delicacy is truffles in scrambled eggs, with toasted bread soaked in the season’s new olive oil.

In March, the hills turn green with fresh growth, ablaze with the deep pinks of cherry and plum blossoms. In April, breakfast changes a bit: The eggs are scrambled with wild asparagus. By then, the wildflowers are out, and so are the cafe tables and the boule players. Markets are suddenly more alive. Tillers and brush cutters make a happy racket. At night, there is still a nip in the air. By day, people dress in bright spring colors.

May brings wide sweeps of golden-yellow petals on the genets, the evergreen broom that grows wherever no one stops it. Fields are carpeted in rich red Monet poppies. Young lamb is cooked with tender new vegetables. Cicadas hum in the trees. All summer, except perhaps for the wasps that divebomb terrace lunch tables, it is pretty much the Promised Land.

Summer is also terrific, far more peaceful than the crazed coastline down the hill. By fall, the summer holiday people have left, and warm but crisp breezes carry late-season scents. Farmers are hustling to bring in their crops. Grapes are ripe enough for picking. Pungent rosemary still perfumes the air. The olives are fuming their first shades of purple.

For me, though, the best time is winter, when only the lifers and die-hards are around. As Christmas approaches, markets take on a festive air. Fresh foie gras, plucked fowl and holiday pates join the usual offerings. Villages put on pageants in their churches. A proper Provenal Noel lasts 40 days, until Candlemas on Feb. 2, with special cakes and delicacies. Even the grumpy old men seem to be in a better mood.

These hills are their most lively in mid-December, when it is time to pick the olives. The ritual has hardly changed since Roman times: Families pack a lunch and head for the groves. The olives are hauled off to the old mill, where characters out of Victor Hugo crush them with granite stones and press them into oil. As the liquid gold oozes down the woven mats, millers pass around toasted bread and red wine for the ceremonial tasting. After two or three seasons, you risk lifetime addiction.

The only thing that changes each year is the weather. We harvested our olives in shirt sleeves last December, stopping for lunch under obstinate roses on the terrace. The year before, with snow on the ground and a nasty northern wind, we hurried inside every 20 minutes to thaw our fingers by the fireplace.

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Touring the high Var, you just have to keep in mind that you’re not looking for anything in particular. This is no place for the sort of traveler who wants orientation seminars, sophisticated comforts and no surprises.

Take Draguignan. The largest city in this ill-defined sector of Provence, it is often kissed off in guidebooks as not worth a visit. True, it is hardly a tourist mecca. Its small, stone medieval heart is marbled with shops selling vacuum cleaner bags, lightbulbs and animal-innard delicacies. Draguignan is a working town, with hairdressers, druggists and notary publics. That is, real life.

But the Saturday market is memorable, as is a leisurely shopping spree among downtown merchants of varying humors. Ask, say, for Robert le boucher, just south of the market. He is a butcher with a bedside manner, whose little shop is habitually jammed with gray, stooped ladies spending their pension checks on cotes de veau, and gold-dipped fancy ladies on holiday. It is always noisy, whether with laughter or grumbling about the latest political outrage from Paris.

For sheer amusement, there is The Yeller, who wears shorts in winter and sells cut-rate fruits and vegetables at the top of his lungs. You can’t miss him. Just listen for someone bellowing, “Belles tomates, vingt francs les deux kilos!” (“Beautiful tomatoes, 20 francs for two kilos!”) Each Saturday, I tell him that I heard him from someplace farther away than the last time. We’re up to Miami, I think. If you see him, try Pasadena.

There are plenty of classical tourist pursuits within reach. The Abbaye du Thoronet, near Lorgues, has been around for 800 years, headquarters for Cistercian monks fond of Gregorian chants and red wine. The abbey remains intact, with austere cloisters, libraries, grape and olive presses, all connected by stone walkways polished to a sheen by centuries of shuffling sandals. Sunday Mass in its main chapel, with eerily perfect acoustics, is not soon forgotten.

At the nearby Chateau de Berne, a private medieval castle, music is more likely to be by, say, the touring Gypsy Kings, performing on a stage-cum-helipad built in the center of a swimming pool. Vineyards sweeping away in all directions produce respectable Provenal roses, reds and whites.

The region around Lorgues is a good place to base oneself for wider sweeps of Provence and the coast. It is just off the A8 auto route from Aix to Nice, and well-positioned for side trips to the water. Off season, St.-Tropez is an easy hour along the shore. (In summer, the road over the mountain through La Garde-Freinet will avoid the beach-disco traffic rush hour, which runs roughly from 6 a.m. to 3 the following morning.) And there is Bruno, the truffle king.

Bruno, a great bear of a man with a booming laugh and a checkered past, owns a large, rambling restaurant at the edge of Lorgues, named after himself (Chez Bruno) and built in his image. He offers sumptuous fare, from light appetizers to elaborate main courses, all featuring truffles. Each season his imagination broadens; one of these days, I expect to find myself patting down my chin with a truffle-flavored napkin.

To the east, toward Fayence, life begins to get fancier. You can ride a glider on gentle winds over the sprawling valleys. Or you can poke into shops and cafes in the perfectly restored hilltop towns of Seillans and Mons. At Grasse, perfume design classes teach the basics of scent, and you can create your own formula to be shipped off whenever you need more. Some of France’s finest eating is around here, not only at the celebrated Moulin de Mougins, but also at humbler tables, with or without Michelin stars.

From Grasse, it is only a short hop to Cannes, and a left turn up the coast through Antibes to Nice. The casinos and palaces of Monte Carlo lie just beyond that in the symbolically independent principality of Monaco.

All of this is the Riviera--the Cote d’Azur to the French--which qualifies as Provence if you push it. Until the last century, the region around Nice belonged to Italian thrones. Writers of the ‘30s and ‘40s who rhapsodized about Provence spent more time around the old capitals of Tarascon or Aix. Over two millenniums, however, borders and rulers changed too many times to track. All of what is now southern France began as the Provincia Romana, outlying regions to the emperors’ heartland.

Up to the north, at the base of the Alps, there is the Grand Canyon of Verdon, one of Europe’s most thrilling natural sights. Again, there is some quibbling here. Strictly speaking, the Gorge du Verdon reaches beyond the Var, and the gateway town of Moustiers-Ste.-Marie is officially in another French state, the Alpes-de-Haute Provence.

But that’s a technicality; the mood is the same. Breakfast is a leisurely coffee before strolling, hiking or cruising with the top down. Afternoon ends with an unhurried glass of pastis, the ubiquitous liquid licorice, in time for a slowly arriving dinner.

Moustiers, known for its blue and white faience pottery, is just north of the gorge and spills down the steep hillside on both sides of a dramatic waterfall. The main waterfall is high above the town, topped by a star put up long ago by a soldier who kept a promise to God after surviving some forgotten war. Alongside the rushing cascades, outdoor tables serve fine food among flowering gardens. Just outside town, a small luxury inn and restaurant, La Bastide, offers daube a la Provenal, a rich ragout of wine-marinated beef, olive oil, bacon, local herbs, tomatoes, garlic, onions, carrots and orange peel, delicately seasoned and cooked all day. Homemade aperitifs are flavored with raspberry, orange and hazelnut.

The Verdon gorge, 13 miles long and in some places no more than 18 feet wide, plunges into clefts that defied exploration until this century. Hiking trails skirt its edges. By car from Aiguines you can follow the Corniche Sublime, a harrowing road built in 1947 that has stunning overlooks. Castellane is an old Roman river port, with some original stones still in place, by a looming rock where ancient inhabitants fled from invaders.

Off at the western edge of the Haut Var, Cotignac is a year-round blend of workaday Provence lifestyle and tourist chic. Just as in Bargemon, far to the east, English will get you nearly as far as French. Britons have flocked to both towns.

Rolling into Cotignac immerses you quickly into the atmosphere. A splendid cours runs through the center of town. This Provenal specialty is a double-wide boulevard, usually shaded by towering plane trees with a boule court or benches in the center and cafe tables on either side. Cotignac’s cours is all this, lined by elaborate houses dating from the 16th century. One side street leads to the old honey factory, with a front room of beautifully painted ceramic jars full of a dozen kinds of honey, from lavender and rosemary to mountain pine (beeswax candles still light homes when storms cut the power).

Surely and steadily, the celebrity set is finding its way to Cotignac. Last summer, while the late Princess Diana and Dodi were boating to the south, Prince Charles and Camilla were rumored to be hiding out in the Cotignac countryside.

Bargemon can also be a crowded scene. Long a favorite for English holiday homes, it now attracts visitors from across the European Union. It is easy to see why. Broken ramparts surround the ruins of a castle, and 12th century fortified gateways lead to twisting, cobbled streets and gurgling fountains. Puffy-bloom mimosas and fragrant orange trees line wide, shaded town squares.

Moustiers, Cotignac, Lorgues and Bargemon mark a rough square around this part of Provence. For those with the time and inclination to take it slow, there is much more in between. Just rent a car and point in any direction; nine different roads lead out of Aups alone, and one is as good as another.

If you head for Salernes, a town built on red clay, you’ll find Alain Vagh. His wife, Jacotte, inherited an ancient tile works in this town, famed for its ceramics. Together, they fused tradition into art. Just for the hell of it, Vagh tiled a jeep. Everything but the glass and rubber is covered in rich, color-baked tiles, perfectly shaped and cut to fit. He has also done a grand piano, a dentist’s chair, a cowboy hat, the deck of a barge and my bathtub.

Look for a stand of towering pink-tile poles in the Vaghs’ front yard. These, Vagh will explain, symbolize his crusade against ugly utility poles that, more and more, deface his beloved Var hillsides.

Another good base for exploring the high Var, Tourtour (where the seasonal residents are more German than English), is a charming town with a hilltop square from which you can see forever. On Bastille Day, July 14, the town’s kids carry candles in paper bags up to the church, where the immediate world gathers for dazzling fireworks.

Down different roads, Villecroze, Chateaudouble and Ampus are au naturel, with little compromise to seasonal hordes. And there are dozens of others.

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In this part of Provence, what counts is a feeling you can’t miss. It is in the colors and the aromas and the sounds. Van Gogh and Renoir each wrote in their diaries that trying to paint the changing shades and shapes of olives trees was driving them mad. “Their shadows are often mauve,” Renoir noted. “They are always moving, luminous, full of gaiety and life.”

Writers since Petrarch in the 1300s have tried to capture the mood. Robert Louis Stevenson, while ensconced near the water at the foot of the Haut Var, wrote, “I live in a most sweet corner of the universe, sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain; and at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins.” Stevenson liked the day. “But at night and when the moon is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial hillock, the plumed blue gum trees that hang trembling, become the very skirts of Paradise.”

And for all the modern incursion, the overall atmosphere is still there. Last Christmas, as I was driving around some California visitors, I surreptitiously slipped into the cassette player a tape I’d made months earlier in L.A. It was a popular jazz station, commercials, surf reports and all. My passengers took in the familiar sounds without noticing the incongruity at first. Then, one by one, each did a double take.

In the crisp, clear air, with olive branches hanging low with ripe fruit and the road ahead occupied only by a tractor that survived the last world war, we were several light years away from pileups on the 405.

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Guidebook: Preparing for Provence

Telephone numbers and prices: France’s country code is 33. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 6.1 francs to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Dinner prices are approximate for two people, food only.

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Getting there: Air France and AOM French airlines fly nonstop from Los Angeles to Paris. From Paris, both airlines have continuing flights to Nice, Toulon and Marseille. Delta has direct service to Nice via New York. A fast TGV train from Paris stops at Les Arcs. Cars can be rented in any of these towns, all good jumping-off points.

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Where to stay: Tourtour is a good place to base yourself while visiting the Haut Var area. La Bastide de Tourtour, telephone 4-9470-5730, fax 4-9470-5490, has tennis courts, pool and restaurant in pleasant surroundings. Closed Nov. 15 to Dec. 15. Rates: $110 to $230. La Petite Auberge, tel. 4-9470-5716, fax 4-9470-5452, is a charming family-owned place on a quiet hillside of olive trees and lavender five minutes from Tourtour. There is a pool and dining on a terrace overlooking an incredible valley panorama. Some rooms have balconies. Closed Nov. 15 to Dec. 15. Rates: $78 to $115. A young, inventive chef makes the meals worth sampling; good selection of local wines. Dinner: $60.

In Cotignac, Hotel Lou Calen, tel. 4-9404-6040, fax 4-9404-7664, has a lovely garden terrace and pool. Rates: $45 to $100. In Les Arcs, Logis du Guetteur, tel. 4-9473-3082, fax 4-9473-3995, has 10 rooms and a good restaurant nestled on a picturesque hillside inside the walls of a medieval village. Rate: $78 to $85. Dinner: $26 to $55.

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Where to eat: In Tourtour, Les Girondales, tel. 4-9470-5429, fax 4-9470-5954, is in an ancient stone building. Mireille Altea, one of the few women chefs around, specializes in local produce and game, cooked with traditional Provenal recipes. Enjoy the cozy, romantic rock-hewn dining room upstairs or the outdoor terrace in summer; $40. Les Chenes Verts, tel. 4-9470-5506, fax 4-9470-5935, is a more elegant restaurant with a well-known chef (Paul Bajade) that’s about a five-minute drive from town; $100 to $150. In Les Arcs, La Maison des Vins, tel. 4-9499-5020, fax 4-9499-5029, on highway N7 not far from the train station, is the showcase restaurant for the Cotes de Provence wine makers, with a tasting room next door; $95.

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Expertise: Hazel Young, a British woman who’s lived in France for more than 30 years and knows everything about the area, runs Living in Provence, a company that will customize tours and provide local information; tel. 3-8029-1961, fax 3-8039-2504, e-mail luxe.cd@planetb.fr.

For more information: French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills, Calif. 90212-2967; (310) 271-6665, fax (310) 276-2835.