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FEATHER PILLOWS AND PÂTÉ . Meanwhile, Monsieur Laforgue would train someoneelse as an assistant while I would be stuck here taking care of an old man I didn’t even know.
    André grew quiet and restless. I placed my hand on his thigh.
    “Pascal made a train for me when I was a very little boy,” André murmured. “Out of wood, it was. I learned to count with that train. As he made each new wagon, he taught me a new number. He carved the numbers on the wagons. He’ll remember that. He has an incredible memory.”
    “That’s a lovely story.”
    After a period of silence, he said, “I just hope he hasn’t lost his spirit.”
    I reached for his hand. “I do too, dear.”
    Soon I saw in the distance what André had described—a village of yellow-ochre, coral, rose, and salmon perched atop a mountain and skirted by deep green pine forest, houses all in harmonious warm colors stepping up to the summit like a pyramid of blocks, as if inhabited by fairy godmothers, tale-telling godfathers, and elfin children. Below it, in the same colors, rutted cliffs and warty-fingered pinnacles gave it support, altogether like some fantasy kingdom from a child’s folk legend, altogether dazzling.
    “Voilà, madame!” Maurice announced. “There you see it—the village of Roussillon, queen of the commune de Roussillon, canton de Gordes, arrondissement d’Apt, département du Vaucluse, région de Provence, nation de France ”—all of this delivered with the pride of a patriot. I felt his spirit beguiling me.
    I chuckled. “Pascal certainly chose a hard place to get to.”
    “Three hundred meters up,” Maurice said. “He didn’t choose it. He was born here. Just like me. Who would have guessed when we took up our fathers’ pickaxes and went to work in the ochre mine that he would become un amateur d’art , a devoted lover of paintings, and would bring home a collection. From Paris, no less.” He shook his head in amazement. “That Pascal. But no matter all the great things he’s seen in Paris, I can still make him bite the dust at boules. ”
    André laughed. “He says the same about you.”
    As for a list of what I would like in Roussillon, I was sure of only two items so far: Maurice and pastis.
    “Ah, yes, dear madame. I suppose there is one more truth beyond les quatre vérités . Love. We struggle, we complain, we grumble, but we love, more fiercely than the mistral blows. You’ll see.”

CHAPTER TWO
    THIS VILLAGE, THIS MAN
1937
    M AURICE PARKED THE BUS IN THE LOWER PART OF R OUSSILLON , in a tree-shaded square he called place du Pasquier, at the edge of a cliff. He insisted that we stroll through the village for my first glimpse of it, saying he would deliver the crates later.
    I had to squint in the brightness that bounced off the buildings as we walked up the incline of the main street—or was it the only street?—and passed a humble post office, a boulangerie sending out the homey aroma of fresh bread, a small épicerie offering a smattering of groceries, and a boucherie , where a lamb rump covered with flies and a spread-eagled calf with a red rose planted impishly in its anus hung in the window. A blacksmith clanged away at his anvil, his open-air shop tucked tightly between houses. I held my breath until we passed, hoping that André wouldn’t say that one of those houses was Pascal’s.
    An upper square bore a sign identifying it as place de la Mairie, and indeed, a mildly imposing stone-and-stucco building looking very much like a town hall did have the word MAIRIE carved in its lintel. Next to it, people sat outside a café. Beyond that, grâce à Dieu , a hair salon. Opposite it a water faucet dripped into a largeshell-shaped stone bowl attached to a building. Was that where the hairdresser washed hair? Farther up the street, a belfry stood alongside an impressive Gothic arch of honey-colored stone.
    An upper and a lower road continued onward from the arch into a residential area. What we had passed