Encore Provence (12 page)

If you ever speak of Marseille and fish in the same breath—at least in southern France—be warned. There will be a
bouillabaisse
expert close by, and he or she will not rest until you have been persuaded of the merits and
the undoubted superiority of one particular recipe over another. There is an official guarantee of the correct ingredients, the
Charte de la Bouillabaisse
, which you will see displayed outside serious restaurants all over Marseille. But should you go a few miles down the coast to Toulon, your charter from Marseille will be treated with no more respect than a parking ticket. The problem is the potato.

In Toulon,
bouillabaisse
isn’t
bouillabaisse
without potatoes; in Marseille it would be sacrilege to include potatoes. There is a similar difference of opinion over lobster. Is it in or is it out? It depends where you go. One of these days, all disputes will be settled by the Commission of Human Rights in Brussels, or the Michelin guide, or the Minister of the Interior (whose responsibilities surely include the stomach) in Paris. Until then, the closest we can get to a noncontroversial
bouillabaisse
is one that embraces the following basic methods and ingredients:

First and most important, the fish must be fresh and they must come only from the Mediterranean. (Restaurants in Tokyo, New York, and London that promise
bouillabaisse
on their menus are fibbing.) The types of fish can vary, but there is one essential: the
rascasse
, a creature of truly horrible appearance with a face that only a mother could love, traditionally cooked and served with the hideous head still attached. This is not to give you a nightmare, but to let you extract the flesh of the cheeks, supposedly the tastiest parts. The rest of the
rascasse
is fairly bland, but experts say it somehow brings out the flavor in its companions as they are cooked together on a low boil in a saffron and garlic flavored soup.

The soup and fish come to the table separately, the soup with slices of toast, the fish with
rouille
, a high-voltage,
rust-colored paste made with oil, chili peppers, and yet more garlic. The immediate result is delicious, a pungent mixture of spices and the sea. The longer-term effects of such heroic doses of garlic are undoubtedly antisocial, and we were confident we’d be safe that afternoon from the attentions of any back-alley mugger; one well-directed breath from us, and he’d shrivel, or run a mile.

The back alleys we had decided to explore were those of Le Panier, the oldest quarter in Marseille. A large part of it—home to twenty thousand people—was blown up in World War II by the Nazis when they realized that it was a haven for Jewish refugees and members of the Resistance. What remains is a tangle of steep, narrow streets, some of them paved in a decidedly nonchalant manner, some stepped, and lined on either side with houses of a picturesque seediness. Cars are rare; we saw only two. The first came nosing out of a side alley like a lost dog; its driver saw that it was too narrow to turn either left or right, and had to retreat backwards. The second car stays in my memory because of an impossible feat of parking.

We were passing an extremely thin house, only as wide as a single room, and glanced through the open door. One side of the room was furnished normally, with carpet, table, and chairs. Three members of the family were sitting there watching television. The other half of the room was taken up by a well-polished Citroën. It wasn’t one of the bigger Citroëns, admittedly, but big enough, and somehow it had managed to creep in through the door and park itself without obliterating the furniture. I wondered how long it had been there, and if it was ever allowed out for a run.

Presumably, it had been confined to the living room to keep it safe in what we had been told was an unsafe neighborhood.
But once again, Marseille was failing to live down to its reputation. Children and old ladies were out in force, not visibly in terror of their lives. Many of the houses had their doors and windows wide open, and one or two had been turned into tiny restaurants and
épiceries
. It was more charming than threatening, the only risk of physical injury coming from the occasional flying soccer ball.

As we reached the top end of the Rue du Petit-Puits, we had our first sight of one of Marseille’s most fortunate and elegant survivors, the pale, rosy stone mass of La Vieille Charité, Designed by Pierre Puget and built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the buildings at one time provided a home for Marseille’s homeless, who were probably too relieved at finding shelter to appreciate that they had been installed in some kind of architectural heaven: a vast quadrangle, nearly a hundred yards long by fifty yards wide, surrounded by three stories of arcades which overlook a magnificent chapel topped by an oval dome.

In fact, despite its name, its early history is far from charitable. The residents of seventeenth-century Marseille—or at least those with a roof over their heads and money in their pockets—were alarmed at the number of beggars and vagabonds roaming the streets, who were considered a source of unrest and delinquency. Clearly, the city needed its own squad of riot police, and so a sergeant and ten archers dressed in red were hired to round up and imprison all those without resources who couldn’t prove they were natives of Marseille. These duties were performed with such enthusiasm that in 1695 twelve hundred men and women were crammed into La Charité. They were put to work under the direction of armed supervisors,
but were allowed out from time to time, closely guarded, to make up the numbers in funeral processions.

Came the Revolution, and La Charité became more charitable. Over the centuries, it offered shelter to a long, sad list of temporary tenants: the elderly, the destitute, and the orphans, the families displaced by urban redevelopment, and finally, those evicted by Nazi dynamite. And then, the war over, it was left to rot.

It took more than twenty years of enlightened restoration to bring it up to its present immaculate state. Perhaps because we had arrived through cramped and shadowy streets, the impression of space and light as we stood in the quadrangle was almost overpowering. It was a moment for looking rather than talking. There is something about architecture on the grand scale that tends to subdue human speech, and the thirty or forty people wandering around the arcades never raised their voices above a murmur. Not quite an awed hush, but very close. As it happened, we were told that we had picked a quiet day, a between-season lull in the program of events and exhibitions. Even so, there is a museum of Mediterranean Archeology and an excellent bookshop on the premises, and these can easily take up the rest of your afternoon.

We walked back to the port and a more recent local monument, Le New-York, a brasserie with a west-facing terrace and a view of the spectacular Marseille sunset. The day had been too short, and there was too much we hadn’t seen: the Château d’If, due to the weather (which remained perfect throughout the day); the many museums; the dozens of fine old buildings hidden among the high-rises; the cathedrals (one of them supported by 444 marble columns); the Bar de la Marine, where the characters in Pagnol’s
Marius
played cards; the Château du
Pharo, built by Napoléon III for his wife; and Marseille’s stomach, the Marché des Capucins.

But although a day in a city is no more than a sip from a barrel, it had been enough to make us want to come back for more. Marseille may be a rough old girl with a dubious reputation, but she has considerable charm, and there are patches of great beauty among the modern ugliness. Also, I happen to like Marseille’s independent, slightly overblown personality, and I particularly admire the cheek with which it has appropriated both the French national anthem and the most popular aperitif in Provence.

“La Marseillaise,” that stirring call to children of the motherland, was actually composed in Strasbourg as the battle song of the army of the Rhine. It was taken up and sung by five hundred volunteers from Marseille who were marching to Paris, and when they reached the capital it became, of course, “
la chanson marseillaise
” that they were singing. (In fairness, it does sound a great deal better than “La Strasbourgeoise” as the title of France’s number one song.)

More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille’s most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon—he once took fifteen hundred of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope—decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn’t an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addictive absinthe was banned in 1915. But Pernod didn’t invent pastis either; according to legend, a hermit did. As you would expect from an ambitious, gregarious hermit, he took his invention and opened a bar—in Marseille, naturally. But it was Ricard, with his genius for publicity and marketing, who gave the drink its Mediterranean pedigree. He, and he alone, made what he
called
le vrai pastis de Marseille
. He promoted the phrase as if it were a guarantee of the genuine article. And it worked. Something over fifty million bottles a year are sold now.

A final story that illustrates Marseille’s independence of spirit: After years of cocking a snook at central authority, which in those days was Louis XIV, the city was taught a lesson. The walls were breached and the cannons of the fort protecting Marseille from attack by sea were turned around and aimed at the inhabitants, who were considered more of a threat than any invaders.

I don’t know exactly why, but it gives me pleasure to think that the Marseillais are still here, as rebellious as ever, while the kings are long since gone.

Drive north from Apt, and within an hour you will be in Haute Provence. This was the setting for Jean Giono’s novels, and a place he sometimes saw with a dark and unforgiving eye. Here is one of his less inviting descriptions: “The houses are half caved in. In the streets overgrown with nettles, the wind roars, bellows, bawls out its music through the holes of shutterless windows and open doors.”

It might be that in the interests of literature he was taking an extreme view, but it’s one that reflects the nature of the place—wild, empty, and hard. Coming from the cultivated prettiness of the Luberon, with its postcard villages, carefully restored houses, cherry orchards, and row after orderly row of vines, Haute Provence feels like another world, great stretches of it deserted and virtually untouched. Villages are separated by miles of countryside, sometimes jagged and bleak, sometimes rolling and beautiful. The sky is vast. If you stop your car to listen to the
scenery, you might hear the distant, hollow clank of goat bells coming from an invisible herd. Otherwise, there is the wind.

Drive on, past l’Observatoire de Haute Provence, where they say you can breathe the clearest, purest air in France, and head for the foothills of the Montagne de Lure. There, set in a bowl of lavender fields, you will find Lardiers, a village of perhaps a hundred inhabitants. Their houses are bunched around the Mairie and the Café de la Lavande—the kind of restaurant one always hopes to find at the end of a day’s drive: good food, good wine, and charm in equal doses.

Lardiers is an unlikely place to find a journalist, let alone dozens of them. But on a sunny day in June, with the lavender just turning from gray-green to purple, the press had turned out in force and come to the village for the opening of an educational institution which, as far as I know, is unique.

The idea started in Manosque, Giono’s hometown and the headquarters of one of the few genuinely Provençal companies to have an international reputation. L’Occitane made its name by word of nose. Its soaps, its oils and essences, its shampoos and creams, are made in Provence, many of them with ingredients grown in the local fields. Not only the lavender that you would expect, but sage, rosemary, fresh herbs, honey, peaches, and almonds.

Depending on your inclination, you can have a peach-scented bath, a rubdown with oil of thyme, or a shave that tingles with rosemary. And not long ago another ingredient was introduced, simple and obvious in hindsight, as many good ideas are: Labels were printed in two languages, the second being Braille. This made it possible for the contents
of a jar or a bottle on the bathroom shelf to be read by the fingertips as well as by the eye. From here, another idea evolved, based on the adjustments that nature makes to the human body when one of its primary functions is affected—in this case, the ability to see.

To make up in some way for the loss of sight, the other senses compensate by becoming more acute, particularly the sense of smell. A company whose business is fragrance is always interested in finding sensitive and educated noses. Perfumes are never accidents, but recipes, usually very complex recipes—a balance between sweet and sharp, a cocktail of essences. Choosing, mixing, and judging these is a great art, and great artists are as rare in the perfume world as they are anywhere else. For a start, they need to be born with a natural aptitude for the work, and the most important requirement is an unusually receptive nose—a nose in a million. Over the years, with the proper training, this can be developed until it is capable of identifying even the ghost of a fragrance—the crucial drop that lifts a perfume from the ordinary to the unforgettable. But first, you have to find those talented nostrils.