Provence [antikvár]

The House in the Vineyard It's six o'clock in the evening and the village is still flooded with sunlight. You buy some Provence rosé at a local shop that also sells children's swimming pools, artificial flowers, real peaches, chaises longues, screwdrivers, vegetables, and even a single dress—^just in case. You stroke the cat stretched out on a blue chair near a blue window, or perhaps on the hot stone rim of the fountain, and wind your way back up the hill. On the opposite slope a golden haze envelops the vineyards, obscuring them from view. The house is at the end of a dusty road, lost in the song of the cicadas—who don't sing at all, of course, not even in "ancient Greek" as van Gogh thought: they click. Deep in the Midi one can no longer tell whether it's their clamor that dazzles or the light. Now they go to it with a will, as if trying to slow the fall of night. They're making up for lost time, they're holding fast to their short lives. Three years of larval, subterranean existence for a few weeks of light. All we know of the cicada, this invisible uproar, is the noise of its nuptials. These begin in late June, and toward the end of August the exhausted insect lays its eggs, drops to the foot of its tree, and dies, devoured by neighboring ants. La Fontaine was prone to euphemism: "mating done, utterly sturmed"; in reality, the poor thing was totally digested. The house at the end of the road is drowning in oleanders, geraniums, and mimosas. One could spend hours at a time seated on the warm stone of its little wall, watching the summer vibrate above the vineyards. Beyond the shed with its three cypresses, there's nothing but transparent sky and ocher earth, torpid after the hot day. Everything in this world is so beautiful, everything is so pure, including the mountains behind which the sun is about to disappear, that you envision returning here one day to remain for a thousand years. "Naturally jou love Provence. But which Provence?"—Colette There's more here than the sweetness of things and the exuberance of flowers. There's also rocky, solitary terrain eroded by winter, ice, and hurricanes. And there's Le Ventoux, very well named (vent, "wind"), on whose slopes a small poppy from Greenland flourishes. At the beginning of the century, after publication of the first Tourist Guide to Mount Ventoux, women dressed in bear skins could be seen climbing it to applaud the magic of the rising sun. But most of the time it's the domain of sheep that turn over its rocks in search of a bit of soft grass.