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named Giovanni Bellini, which made it all the more exotic. The chapel had only one painting. That was enough for me, then.
    Maurice’s voice swearing an oath as he ground the gears brought me out of my reverie. Just below a hill town topped by a castle and a church, he set the brake.
    “Roussillon?”
    “Gordes,” he corrected. “I have to make a delivery here.”
    I looked around inside the bus. “What do you have to deliver?”
    “Pastis. From the glass to my throat. It is the first apéritif hour. Come. I will initiate you, madame.”
    We picked our way up a long, uneven stone stairway to a café in the square. Maurice greeted the people he knew with more adieus and ordered a pastis for each of us. The tall slim glasses held only a couple of centimeters of clear liquid, a disappointment until Maurice poured water into his glass, which turned the pastis cloudy.
    André prepared my drink along with his. “Ah,” he murmured. “One of the pleasures of the south. I’ve been waiting for this.”
    “Santé.” Maurice held up his glass and took a drink, then carefully wiped his trimmed mustache and the short whiskers of his white goatee, which, oddly, didn’t match his bushy black eyebrows.
    “I like the aroma.” I took a sip, then another, then a gulp.
    “It pleases you?” He raised his eyebrows. “The mix of anise and other herbs?”
    “Very nice.”
    “Beware, Lise,” André said. “It creeps up on you. Pour in more water if you feel …” He swiveled his hand in a circle.
    “To suit yourself and the weather,” Maurice said. “A true Provençal drink.”
    “And you are a true Provençal chevalier, monsieur. But please, tell me your surname.”
    “Chevet, madame.” He put his hand out palm down about a meter above the floor. “Un petit chevalier,” he said, chuckling at his own joke.
    As we descended the long stretch of stone steps to the bus, I felt pleasantly dizzy.
    “Hold on to her, André. The steps can be treacherous.”
    “I am. I will never let her go.”
    “Your grandfather Pascal, he will be furious with me if I deliver her to Roussillon with a sprained ankle. When my friends learnthat I have brought a Parisienne to live in Roussillon— oh là là !—they will be so proud. But I wonder. Can a Parisienne ever become a Roussillonnaise ?”
    Would any Parisienne ever want to?
    “Depends on how much we love her,” André said as we boarded the bus.
    “Me, I love her already!” Maurice declared.
    “You are too kind, monsieur. Is this town of yours nearby?” I asked.
    “Just down and up. Look for a sickle stuck in a fence post.”
    We had bounced along for a kilometer or so when I noticed a curious-looking group of stone huts in the shape of beehives. “I hope that’ s not Roussillon.” I giggled. “Is it?”
    “No, madame. They are only bories. They’re scattered all over the Vaucluse. Some say the older ones were built a thousand years before Christ. Others say two. Because these are more intact than ruins elsewhere, we think they are more recent.”
    Eventually I saw the sickle protruding out of a post like a giant comma. “What is it doing there?”
    “Waiting for its owner, who left it there a few years ago.”
    “A very patient sickle. More patient than I am.”
    That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t impatience I felt. It was dismay. All I might be able to see would be folk artists who carved ducks at country fairs. I turned to André. “How are we going to survive in a town without a gallery?”
    “I can do other work.”
    “I didn’t mean survive that way.”
    “But, Lise, you’ll be living in a gallery. Pascal’s seven paintings.”
    I had never seen them. Pascal had left Paris and had moved back to Roussillon before I met André. All I had heard was stories. Would these paintings be enough to compensate for the pleasure of working in a Paris gallery someday? I could feel that dream shrinking to a crevice of a shop in this village: LISETTE ’ S DUCK