M.F.K.

Fisher's Provence

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 Plate one — La Rotunde, Cours Mirabeau

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 M . F. K . F i s h e r’ s

Provence
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wi t h 61 color Photogr aPhs by

Aileen Ah-Tye

For e w o r d by
LuKe Barr

Coun t er P oin t • Ber K el e y, C a l iFor ni a

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 Copyright © 2015 Aileen Ah-Tye

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior design by Gopa & Ted2. Inc.

isbn 978-1-61902-594-3

Counterpoint Press
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-594-3

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 For John Davidson

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 Contents
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Foreword • viii

My Map • 11

Aix-en-Provence • 12

Artful Pleasures • 14

Main Street • 20

Rose-Yellow Façades • 54

In the Country • 64

Sound of the Place • 72

Marseille • 84

Food of Artemis • 98

Afterword • 114

Acknowledgments • 117

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 Foreword:

Sımple Pleasures
in Aix-en-Provence
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W e shoPPed morning, noon,

and night in Provence—we
shopped for croissants, ba-
guettes, newspapers, and cigarettes, for
tomatoes, peaches, string beans, straw-
French village. Sometimes they played
pétanque.
I never did figure out which bakery
had the best croissants, and it didn’t mat-
ter, they were all good. We bought them
berries, eggplants, mushrooms, and let- eight or ten at a time: not too big, buttery
tuce. We shopped for legs of lamb and but not overly rich, satisfyingly crunchy
chickens, for cubes of beef for stew, and but still tender and elastic inside. At the
for pork sausages. We shopped for butter newsstand we’d pick up the Interna-
and milk and cheese, and for honey and tional Herald Tribune and L’Équipe, the
cases of wine and Badoit mineral water. sports tabloid. We got to know the mom,
We shopped for breakfast, lunch, and pop, and son who ran the supermarket
dinner, and then we started over again. and who did their best to help find what
For basic provisions, we went into the we needed, with mixed success (dried
village—our house was in tiny Puyricard, red-pepper flakes? “. . . Non,” came the
on the outskirts of Aix. The town had an reply, heads shaking sadly). The butcher
old stone church next to the post office, was hip and friendly, in his thirties but
three bakeries, a little Casino supermar- his close-cropped hair already going gray.
ket, a butcher, and a café with vaguely His lamb chops were incredible.
unfriendly, pastis-drinking middle-aged And so it was that we developed a rou-
men, the kind that can be found in every tine, a rhythm, a kind of easygoing daily

{ viii }

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 schedule, loosely correlated to hunger and about this epic trip, and an earlier one in
appetite. The main event was the farmers’ 1954—from my father and uncles, mostly,
market in downtown Aix. On the Place about the boat ride from California down
Richelme, under the shade of a canopy of through the Panama Canal and across the
tall plane trees, this was a farmers’ mar- Atlantic; about learning French in school
ket to end all farmers’ markets. Not that in Switzerland and then moving to France
it was very big, or particularly fancy, but for the other half of the year, attending
it was idyllic; the market was busy from the same lycée Paul Cézanne had.
early morning until just after lunch, full M.F. by this point was a well-
of sturdy matrons pulling two-wheeled established writer, and she recorded the
carts and parents pushing strollers, the trip in subsequent years—in 1964 in Map
hustle and flow of commerce. The veg- of Another Town, for example, a book
etables were beautiful—densely colored about Aix. She described the “green
peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes, fresh light” that filtered through the plane trees
garlic, yellow string beans—and the fruits above the market at Place Richelme in an
were even more beautiful—small, sweet essay for The New Yorker in 1966: “Per-
strawberries, baskets of red currants, figs, haps some fortunate fish have known it,
and apricots, all sorts of peaches, nectar- but for human beings it is rare to float at
ines, plums, and melons. One man sold the bottom of the deeps and yet breathe
goat cheeses, aged to different vintages, with rapture the smells of all the living
and honey; another had hams and salami, things spread out to sell in the pure, fil-
including a heavy and rectangular aged tered, moving air.”
lonzo from Corsica. We sliced our pieces Rereading her today, it’s often striking
thin, so it would last longer. how little has changed. Fifty years later,
I have every reason to love the market the market is precisely as she described
in the Place Richelme: I inherited a love it, minus the “ducklings bright-eyed in
for it, indeed, for Aix itself. My father their crates” and other livestock. Then
lived here when he was a kid in 1959: again, in many other ways Aix has also
my grandmother Norah Barr brought changed completely—and so what if
her three sons and rented a house not it has? I’m not going to pretend to be
far from her sister, M.F.K. Fisher, who nostalgic about 1959—hell, I was born in
had rented a place just outside Aix with 1968. But on this trip I was accompanied
her two daughters. I grew up hearing by my father and my grandmother, and

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 I did want to see the city through their rosemary bushes all over—the lavender
eyes—however momentarily, in whatever positively thrumming with bees—white
glancing, refracted way, to have a visceral and dark pink laurel, grapevines, and
sense of a past that lives on embedded in potted lemon trees; a pétanque court, a
the present. But the strange thing is that’s ping-pong table, a fabulous and over-
not what happened at all. Or at least not grown herb garden—dry, fragrant thyme
the only thing. and sage, basil, lemon verbena, and three
varieties of rosemary—a pristine pool and
The house we rented came with a a pool house with a chimneyed charcoal
rabbit, and of course the kids loved him. grill and a large dining table.
He was plump and brown, and lived in Some combination of the dry heat
a rather elegant wood-and-stone-framed and the easy back-and-forth from inside
cage underneath the fig tree. We fed him to outside—the screenless doors and
carrots, and joked about eating him for windows were always open, with warm
dinner. breezes, children, and the occasional
Our bedrooms were on the second grasshopper making their way in and out
floor of the 300-year-old mas, a solidly of the house—reminded me of Califor-
constructed stone building covered in nia. My grandmother’s house in Sonoma,
vines and with terra-cotta-tiled floors. the house I grew up loving, had a sim-
The kitchen was simple and spare, and ilarly overgrown and carelessly beauti-
had a long, zinc-topped table at its cen- ful garden, a row of tall poplar trees, a
ter and a door that opened out onto the scruffy lawn, and flower and vegetable
graveled courtyard. In the morning I plantings overlooking the Russian River
would walk out, say hello to the rabbit, and the Pacific Ocean. Inside were cats
and sit on one of the rickety chairs at the and a dog, threadbare Oriental carpets, a
rickety wood-slat table, or on a creaking large kitchen, and endless evening bridge
canvas lounge chair under the enormous games. M.F.’s house in Glen Ellen was a
plane tree, and drink my coffee. Who little more formal, a thick-walled palazzo
was driving into town, and how many set back from the road overlooking a field
baguettes did we need? of grapevines, but both of them epito-
The grounds were magnificent— mized for me a sort of genteel, unpre-
sprawling lawns; olive, apple, plum, fig, tentious, and yet highly sophisticated
and unruly cypress trees; lavender and California style.

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 I always knew, of course, that our Cal- a man-made miracle, perhaps indescrib-
ifornia life had a Provençal flavor, in the able, compounded of stone and water
dishes my grandmother and great-aunt and trees, and to the fortunate it is one
cooked, in the art hung on their walls. of the world’s chosen spots for their own
But it wasn’t until I arrived that I really sentient growth.” I’m not sure I experi-
understood how much of my family’s enced “sentient growth,” but I whole-
aesthetic and cultural DNA had its roots heartedly agree.
right here, in Aix.
Aix is a university town and former We ate dinner at Les Deux Garçons, the
provincial capital, built around Roman famous (and these days quite touristy)
baths and numerous churches. It has café on the Cours, a place M.F. spent
narrow cobblestoned streets leading hours watching the comings and goings,
through various plazas, and it’s built on a and never a place one came for the food,
slope. And so the town seems to carry you but rather for the ambience, as my grand-
gently but persuasively down the hill and mother pointed out.
toward its center, at least when you enter, Not far away, on a quiet street just off
as we did, from the north side, which was the Cours, we paid a visit—we paid our
where the road from Puyricard deposited respects, I want to say—to the fountain
us. The streets were lined with clothing of the Four Dolphins. This fountain was
stores, cafés, gift shops, and patisseries. my grandmother and M.F.’s favorite, my
One day my wife and I stopped to buy father and his brothers and cousins’ favor-
some Provençal dishes to replace the ite: our family favorite, in other words.
ones my grandmother bought back in the As advertised, the fountain consisted of
50’s and 60’s and which I still used (they four stone dolphins, smiling and cheerful
ended up in my kitchen a few years back), but each with a slightly different expres-
even though they were chipped and quite sion, spouting thin streams of water into
possibly full of lead, i.e., poisonous. the basin below. “This fountain is great,”
As I say, the town pulls you toward said my father definitively, expressing
its heart, its grand central street, the neither a strictly aesthetic judgment nor
Cours Mirabeau. With two tall rows of simple, unbridled enthusiasm, but rather
plane trees and a series of fountains and something more transcendent, a seri-
cafés, it makes you slow down and exhale. ous claim of affection, and one that he
M.F. described the Cours this way: “It is wanted us to share. (And which we did.)

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 He remembered the Four Dolphins so austere about Provençal gravel—it has
well from when he was 13, and here it a calm, cooling effect, setting off the
was, 50 years later, and still wonderful. wild and abundant vegetation and the
But of course, some things do not hot sun. At the restaurant Chez Thomé,
survive—some things become unrecog- tables were placed on gravel underneath
nizable. A few blocks away was the Hôtel the shade of the trees. This casual coun-
Roi René, where we now thought we’d try place is another family favorite, up
go for an after-dinner drink before head- there with the Four Dolphins. We walked
ing back to the house. The Roi René was across the gravel to our table as cicadas
once the hotel in Aix, the epitome of ele- chirped in the nearby fields.
gance and so forth, the place where M.F. When my grandmother and great-
had stayed for weeks at a time in the early aunt lived here in ’59, they both rented
50’s, where she and my grandmother and houses a few miles from Aix, M.F. along
the kids would check in every so often the Route du Tholonet, a winding road
for a weekend in the late 50’s, to take hot heading east out of town toward Le Tho-
baths and order room service, and where lonet, a small village in the shadow of
my father remembers a sprawling suite Mont Sainte-Victoire. On the drive here,
with a balcony overlooking the Boule- we’d tried in vain to spot the driveway to
vard du Roi René, and watching the Tour L’Harmas, the farmhouse she’d rented.
de France whiz by below. It didn’t matter—the road offered its
As we walked in we were confronted own stunning dramas, curving through
with a beige-and-pink color scheme and a dry green hills and thickets of trees,
collection of hyperbanal corporate furni- Sainte-Victoire intimidating and stern in
ture. The place had none of the glamour the distance. This is what’s known as the
my dad and grandmother remembered— Route Cézanne (he painted these scenes
not an iota. in the 1890’s), and it still looks that way,
like a painting.
I loved the gravel in Provence: the Coming into the center of town, we
sound of it under the wheels of the car passed by the imposing Château du Tho-
in the potholed driveway, the expanse of lonet, where M.F. had rented an apart-
it around our house, on the paths to the ment above the stables in the mid 50’s,
guest cottage and herb garden and swim- and my grandmother and her sons had
ming pool. There’s something pleasantly visited. Describing her mealtime rou-

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 tines, M.F. wrote: “There was always that I must say that it was a perfect lunch—
little rich decadent tin of lark pâté in the perfect. Sitting under the trees in this
cupboard if I grew bored, or we could unspeakably beautiful courtyard, at an
stroll down past the great ponds under informal table with my family and friends,
the plane trees to the deft, friendly wel- I felt a connection to this place, and to
come of the Restaurant Thomé and eat a Aix, that went beyond my own immedi-
grilled pullet or a trout meunière, and an ate experiences. I had come to find Aix,
orange baked à la norvégienne.” and found it was already in me, or to
As for us, we ordered beautiful green quote M.F. describing her arrival here all
salads with red currants, a bit of foie gras, those years ago, “I was once more in my
warm cheese with a red pepper-and-gar- own place, an invader of what was already
lic rémoulade, rabbit with a dried-fruit mine.”
reduction, and risotto aux fruits de mer. Luke Barr
I hesitate to write so hyperbolically, but

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 Plate two — Olive Trees, by Les Baux

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 Plate three — Red-Tiled Roofs, outside Aix-en-Provence

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