It’s dangerous living in Provence.
You’re assaulted every day by the locals.
They wait for you to glance their way as you walk down the street and then pounce.
They stake out shops, and grab you when all you entered for is a baguette for dinner. Or lunch. They have no respect for the time of day.
Here are the most dangerous.
You really need to watch out for these!
Tartelette aux peches
Tart Framboise
Tropezienne
Almond Navette
Oppede-le-Vieux. It’s the old town of Oppede, about four kilometres from Menerbes on a back road where cars coming from opposite directions are so close they just scrape past. Unless you drive a white worker’s van. Then you can do anything – you’re invincible!
Oppede-le-Vieux is layers of history that unravel as you climb the hill to the ruined medieval castle that dominates the village.
At the base there’s a cafe under a shade tree, a bistro, tourist accommodation and a smattering of locals who have resisted the move in the nineteenth century to the new and much more amenable Oppede on the plains. The base of the village seems to exist solely for the tourists.
Dog ordering at cafe’s kitchen window
I go under the renaissance arch into the old village behind the walls. Here the tiny cobblestone paths wind past houses which are inhabited and beautifully restored, but also past ruins .
As I walk along a path I hear what sounds like the beating of a rug above me. I look up. An old lady at an gorgeous arched window is emptying a vacuum cleaner bag down on top of me.
Do not stand under this window
There’s only one way to go – UP!
The higher you go the less restored the buildings and you find yourself in the medieval part of the town. Saplings and shrubs have taken root in the living rooms and bedrooms. Vines curl the wrong way through empty windows. When I look through them into the houses I can see the sky. Here families slept, children played in the lanes, the mothers called from the windows, they huddled behind barred gates while marauders razed their fields.
There’s not much left of the medieval houses near the castle. They’re now facades with windows and doors blocked with stone, or just stone walls. The paths become narrower and the steps steeper.
Then you come out on top and I can see across the plains of vines to Menerbes and Gordes on neighbouring hills, and Mont Ventoux in the distance. The old inhabitants of Oppede-le-Vieux left the heights to escape the sunless winters – it’s built on the north side of the hill – and the need to haul water up to their homes every day.
The chapel at the top has been painstakingly restored but it’s locked. I sneak a look through the keyhole.
The castle is undergoing restoration and is also closed. Signs warn of falling rocks and looking at the supported wall it’s a real possibility.
Needless to say I go straight to my notebook when I get home. Some places touch you deeply. Oppede-le-Vieux is one of those places for me.
Valaurie
On the other side of the hill, behind these ruined walls, is Valaurie, a vibrant village of artists. The tiny cobbled laneways are winding passages and stone steps bordered by lavender, roses, flowering shrubs and artificial sunflowers. The houses, many of them also artists’ studios, are built of exposed stone. But this isn’t a village living in the past.
Valaurie sponsors residencies for artists in architect Luc Boulant’s The Cube, a contemporary construction of metal, wood and glass built exclusively for that purpose.
And the exhibitions Valaurie holds in the contemporary art gallery, Maison de la Tour, deceptively housed in a tower of the medieval walls, are state-of-the-art.
The day we visited the Maison de la Tour they were exhibiting Lynn Pook’s sound installation – A Fleur de Peau: sound installation for one body.
Ross agreed to be the ‘body.’ He stood in an area separated by white fabric hung from the ceiling. Then he was attached to sixteen contact loudspeakers. Contact loudspeakers are used because they are barely audible and vibrate clearly. He then inserted earplugs so he couldn’t hear the surrounding sounds. He looked like he was incarcerated in a high tech torture laboratory.
The computer was activated and for the ten minute composition I heard whirrs and bops and buzzes, speeding up, slowing down, attacking like machine gun fire.
From his side he felt vibrations wandering all around his body… “like erratic raindrops hitting me where-ever the sensors were attached to my body, but weirdly I was hearing them inside my head. It was amazing!”
View from outside the installation
For more details about Lynn Pook’s sound installation click on the link to her website.
A walk around the village may be less futuristic but there are little creative surprises all through it.
Valaurie in the Drome is well worth a visit. Not just to see how the ancient and the modern meld together harmoniously, but to appreciate what can be achieved by one small village that values art and the people who create it.
On the side of the main road that passes Menerbes there’s a neolithic burial chamber. No one would even know it was there unless they were looking for it. It’s below ground level. We drove past twice before we saw the sign. If you’re game to stand on the road and play dodge the trucks you can see it. The roof of the dolman is a huge flat rock about two metres square that is supported by walls of uneven stones. I had to bend slightly to go inside. It’s dim and smells of damp earth.
Most days we see the ruins of castles, cathedrals and fortresses. Grand edifices that were once believed to be impregnable, unassailable, indestructible. They’re sad testaments to the immortality of the lords and saints they honoured.
It’s hard to express how seeing these ruins makes me feel. But that’s what great writing does. It puts into words the things we don’t have the words for.
That’s why I’m passing you over to the words of the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He says it so much better than I ever could.
Ozymandias.
I met a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the dessert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
A Room of One’s Own at the Other End of the Kitchen
Virginia Woolf believed a woman needed “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” While she got the money bit right – one has to eat – I’d give up the room of my own for a cook or someone who’ll take responsibility for changing the empty toilet roll.
Woolf’s essay was about a lot more than the literal meaning of this quote. She was examining the position of women in her society and how this affected them as writers. She was concerned about the lack of social and financial freedom women writers had in comparison to their male counterparts.
We have come a long way since those days as far as women’s access to education – Woolf could only dream of doing my post-graduate degree – and building a history of women’s writing – the Stella Prize comes to mind.
But as I settle down into my time in Menerbes I start to appreciate that maybe one of the freedoms we women writers desperately need is the freedom from being responsible for the minutiae of day-to-day living.
Woolfe didn’t say much about that. Maybe her mind was on more worthy things. But she and Leonard had no children and they had a daily housekeeper and cook. I think that might explain why she’s mum on that subject.
Which brings me back to my three weeks in France. For the first time in my life I have no demands being made on me. I don’t even cook, although we have an oven here that would comfortably roast a sucking pig.
Tip for writers: never go on a writing retreat without someone who loves being in the kitchen. Woolf does discuss that in A Room of One’s Own,
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, [write well] if one has not dined well.”
My stomach and I heartily stand by my bracketed inclusion.
Travel is one of the few times in our lives women can be legitimately selfish. We are just not physically available for the claims our normal lives would make on us if we were at home. And that includes the things we want to do – help with the care of a dear friend who is recovering from a medical emergency. Or what we feel we should do – fix the leaking tap in the bathroom. Or what we dread doing – critiquing as a favour the 250,000 word vampire novel by your friend’s nephew’s babysitter.
I know many women writers who struggle to satisfactorily balance writing time with the curve balls every-day life throws at them. It’s still women who carry the bulk of that day-to-day stuff.
In Menerbes the responsibility for a fully-functioning life does not fall on my shoulders. I don’t have to organise anyone or anything, or take the responsibility of making sure things happen when they should. I don’t have to remember the birthday, buy the present, take it to the party so Little Susie can give it to the birthday girl.
I’m living the life of one of Woolf’s untouchable male fiction writers, albeit one who is very conscious of the privilege. I’m channelling Igor Stravinsky: lunch is when there is a break in my writing, and no one talks to me unless I speak first.
Igor Stravinsky
What is a room of one’s own compared to splashing around in the pleasure of unfettered selfishness?
Well, for another two weeks anyway.
I wake up shamefully late in Menerbes. But this morning it’s the sun who snuggles down into a white feather doona like the one on my bed and refuses to come out until noon.
Hoping he’ll sleep for some time I grab my camera and hurry up the hill into the oldest part of the village. Not for the view – the cloud is so thick you can’t see over the ramparts – but for the narrow laneways, stone wall houses, the 12th century church and cemetery. In this misty light the medieval village looks ominous and moody.
Photography is all about light. I like the way the fog hides things. It reflects and diffuses. Fog and mist don’t usually create shadows. They hide things with light.
This paradoxical thought comes to me as I’m photographing the cross in front of the church. The very church the Catholics battled to regain in the Wars of Religion.
And right there I have my own writing epiphany. Connections are made. Religion and The Light. Dark as the absence of light, yet light is not the absence of dark. Evil hidden in the open. These connections resonate with the writing I’ve been doing in powerful and illuminating ways I’m only starting to unravel. You’ll forgive me for not being more specific. It’s going to take me the writing of a whole novel to understand them.
A wet Sunday. The streets in our little village are empty. Like me everyone is probably curled up in front of the fire. No, not everyone. At the top of our house I hear the Australian anthem playing in the Rugby World Cup on a TV.
Our house, like most of the other houses in Menerbes, is right on the street. When I’m in the lounge room I can hear anyone walk by. The bottom panes of our front windows are covered in opaque adhesive paper for privacy. There are also shutters we can close on the inside.
I went for a walk around the streets just now. All the windows and doors are snugly shuttered. I’m intensely aware that people are within arms reach just on the other side.
Old map makers used to draw griffins and dragons at the sides of their charts to denote the unexplored territory, the feared unknown. I don’t suspect those mythical creatures of lurking behind the closed windows and door I pass but there is something exciting and mysterious about not knowing what I’d find if I peeked through the door or flicked back a curtain. Anything is a possibility.
Writing is like that.
Menerbes
Today we followed a fire trail along the foothills of the Luberon Mountains. It wasn’t exactly to suss out Peter Mayle’s old house but it we came across it, well . . .
About a kilometre from Menerbes I turned to look back. I was forcefully struck by how serious the fortress was. Not only was the old village on top of sheer cliffs on all sides, but the walls built on top of them were formidable. Other than some vague picture of marauding tribes it hadn’t occurred to me to find out what had actually happened here to warrant such security.
So I did some research.
Menerbes has been occupied since Neolithic times, and by the Gallo-romans from 200 to 100 BC. The religious hermit Castor, Menerbes’ Patron Saint, was believed to have founded a monastery on the site.
In the Middle Ages Menerbes’ story gets more interesting. The village by that time was accessed by two gates and thought to be impenetrable. At the beginning of the Wars of Religion, which started in 1562, Pope Pius V rewarded it for its loyalty to Catholicism.
But in 1573 the Protestants decided to intentionally antagonise the Pope by establishing a stronghold in Menerbes with 150 soldiers. Thus began the Siege of Menerbes.
For five years two months and eight days the Catholics bombarded the village. The citadel was hit with more than 900 cannonball, 14 tons of lead bullet and barraged by weapons that destroyed its towers.
The Protestants were wildly outnumbered. The Catholic force against them consisted of 1,200 horsemen, 800 sappers and 12 cannons. And if that wasn’t enough 12,000 soldiers later joined them. It was the longest siege in the Wars of Religion and cost the Pope a fortune.
On 9th December 1578 the Protestants came out of the citadel with flags flying, drums beating, and declared themselves undefeated. Don’t you love the attitude! It’s said they ran out of drinking water. The Catholics then reestablished themselves in Menerbes.
Castle entrance
The longer we stay in Menerbes the more it reveals itself. All that history is still visible in the village. For the past week I’ve been walking around and although I’ve been looking hard I haven’t really seen it. I haven’t understood the meaning of what I’ve been looking at. The towers hadn’t just crumbled from age. Menerbes hadn’t always been Catholic.
The story is so much more layered than we can possibly see at first glance. Like writing. The more you explore, write and dream about a story the more you uncover. I’m certainly experiencing that first hand in my writing here.
But I still haven’t uncovered Peter Mayle’ house. I checked on google maps when we got home. We were on the wrong fire trail.
When the normal life you’ve made for yourself is on hold, when its day to day living can’t intrude, distract or make demands, or if it does you can’t do anything anyway, writing is easy.
Time is what I’m giving myself here in Menerbes. Not just time to write, but time to do nothing. Time to observe this ancient place, its history, culture and the people who live here, but also time to observe my reactions to it. The time to watch this car patiently hold back for ten minutes while the old lady on the stick walked to the top of the hill. 
Although it was 12 degrees celsius again today and the wind was chilly from the north, the sun still carried heat. Our terrace faces south and was like a little piece of Australian winter.
Terrace & back of maison
This afternoon I ran out of pages in my notebook. Ten minutes later my new pen ran out of ink. I sat out in the sun drowsing and mused on the idea of ‘lack.’ Lack of pen and notebook. Which led to cold being the lack of heat, but how heat is not the lack of cold. Or that indifference is the lack of emotion – love or hate – but love isn’t a lack of indifference. And in this musing about nothing a story that was forming in my mind over the past week took on the shape that looked suspiciously like a novel.
I laughed at myself because I am a short story writer. I’m not a novelist.
In a new notebook and with another new pen I started writing. A girl emerged from behind the old stone walls, turning a corner in the cobblestone street, in the half shuttered windows. I only glimpsed her. I know if I keep writing about the place, about the things I see and feel and think, she will come out of hiding bit by bit.
I’ve been in Menerbes a week now. Suddenly the next two weeks seem like not enough time at all. I’ve still got so much more nothing to do.
Rabbit Stew
Today we took the D3 to Bonnieux, a pretty back road that runs through the vineyards, lavender and cherry orchards. It just happens to go along the base of the mountains and there are a few fire trails that intersect it. I didn’t exactly go looking for Peter Mayle’s house, although I read that its driveway comes off the D3 two kilometres from Menerbes.
But that’s not what I want to tell you. As I peered up every driveway and across the fields I saw a man in a high-vis orange vest standing among the newly cut lavender with a rifle. Then another. On the opposite side of the road a man crouched in lavender with his rifle butt against his shoulder, stiff and alert, something in his sights.
We were at the 1.8 kilometres mark from Menerbes. Surely these wouldn’t be snipers to keep potential stalkers away from Peter Mayle’s old house?
Then I remembered the loud cracks we heard every morning, and their echo off the mountain. They would start after the sluggish sun rose about eight o’clock, and continue spasmodically until around midday. Then for two hours the only sounds we heard would be the birds, the wind in the oaks in next door’s yard, and the persistent bees that were as bothersome as Australian flies. Then the shots would start again.
So these were hunters. If I HAD decided to walk down the fire trails to see which farm had a pool at the back, it wouldn’t be a very sensible time to do it.
Bonnieux
On the way back from Bonnieux, just after midday, we spotted a whole posse of men in orange high-vis vests. They were sitting in a circle on fold-up chairs in the sun. In the middle was a large pan on a gas burner. As we came closer a hunter opened the back of his little white van, pulled out a hefty black and white hound, wrapped his arms around its stomach and, with its legs squirming, carried the hound safely away from the road.
Even through closed windows we could hear the men’s laughter and booming voices. My guess is they had a successful morning.
By the time I remembered to look for Peter Mayle’s old house we were already driving up the hill into our village.
Waiting for us at home was the left-over rabbit stew we made last night. We’d found a man selling chickens and rabbits at the St-Remy-de-Provence market yesterday. He was a wiry Frenchmen with a long sallow face and white apron.
I’d never cooked rabbit before.
‘Pas de probleme, Madame!’ he cried, and leaned across the glass counter, his forearms supporting his hands as they enacted his words in case I didn’t understand French.
‘Rub the rabbit with mustard’, his hands wrung themselves eagerly.
‘Slice tomatoes’, one hand held the imaginary tomato and the index finger of the other sliced through it.
He poured white wine into a casserole dish on top of the chicken and tomatoes, threw in onions, some parsley. Stirred the pot and put it in the oven for 50 minutes.
He put his fingertips together and kissed them.
St-Remy-de-Provence market
Of course we followed his recipe. If you decide to cook it too, and you have a big rabbit, add another 10 minutes to the cooking time at 180 degrees Celsius.
We didn’t have parsley at home but there was some rosemary growing in a pot in the main square in Menerbes. An old lady caught me stealing a few sprigs and half smiled to herself.
We ate the left-over rabbit stew in the sun on the terrace. Somewhere below us the men who could well have caught our rabbit were cooking their lunch by the roadside – probably opposite Peter Mayle’s house.
The Writers' Life 