Encore Provence Read Free Page B

concerned.
    “
C’est un scandale
,” was his opening remark, followedby a stream of disparaging comments about the pernicious influence of transatlantic imports on the fabric of French rural life. Farigoule is a very small man, almost a miniature, and when agitated tends to bounce up and down on his toes for emphasis, a little ball of outrage. If he were a dog, he’d be a terrier. I asked what had upset him, and found my head going up and down in time with his bouncing.
    “
Alowine
,” he said. “Is this what we need? The country that gave birth to Voltaire and Racine and Molière, the country that gave Louisiana to the Americans. And what do they give us in return?
Alowine
.”
    I had no idea what he was talking about, but from his tone of voice and his tightly clamped, downturned mouth it was a major catastrophe, a disaster to rank with a reappearance of phylloxera among the vines or the arrival of Euro Disney outside Paris.
    “I don’t think I’ve seen it,” I said.
    “How could you not? They are everywhere—
les potirons mutilés
—in Apt, in Cavaillon, everywhere.”
    Mutilated pumpkins could only mean one thing. Like Mickey Mouse and tomato ketchup, Halloween had arrived in France, another nail in the cultural coffin.
    After making my excuses, I went into Apt to see for myself. Farigoule had exaggerated, as he usually does, but it was true that Halloween decorations were displayed in one or two shop windows, the first time I had seen them in Provence. I wondered if the population had been officially informed of this addition to the festive calendar, and if they knew what they were supposed to do about it. A random sample interviewed in the streets of Apt revealed only puzzlement. Pumpkins meant soup.
    Whose idea had it been to bring Halloween to Provence?And would a health warning be issued to any bands of children allowed out at night to go around the farms on trick-or-treat expeditions? The dogs would get them for sure. Fortunately, the occasion passed without any reports of bloodshed in the local papers.
Alowine
, this year at least, seemed to be one of those parties where nobody showed up.
    France, in any case, already has more than enough traditions of its own, which we were rediscovering month by month. There is May, which starts with a public holiday and continues with several more to prepare us for August, when the entire country is
en vacances
. There is a permanent festival of bureaucracy, marked by a snowstorm of paper. Each saint has a saint’s day, each village its annual fête. And each week, by popular demand, there is the feast of the common man, otherwise known as Sunday lunch.
    Sunday is a day apart, a day that feels different even if one hasn’t spent the week in an office. The sounds change. Birdsong and the drone of tractors during the week; the baying of hounds and the pop of distant gunfire on Sunday mornings, when the Provençal hunter likes to exercise his right to defend the countryside from invasion by hostile rabbits and thrushes.
    This year, he faces a more serious challenge than ever, from mutant
sangliers
. Nobody seems to know quite how it happened, but the wild boar population has multiplied with dramatic speed. One current theory is that
sangliers
—which normally produce a single small litter each year—have been mating with their more prolific cousin, the domestic pig, and their offspring are threatening to overrun the vineyards and orchards. You can see their calling cards everywhere: ruts gouged out of the earth in thesearch for food, vegetable gardens trampled, stone walls knocked awry.
    The area around our house was sealed off one Sunday as part of an organized
sanglier
drive. At intervals down the long dirt road, hunters had parked their vans, snout first, in the bushes. Figures in camouflage green—armed, immobile, and sinister—waited while their dogs circled and backtracked, collar bells clinking, their barking hoarse with excitement. I felt as though I had