“The Sweet South"
By MARGHANITA LASKI
EVERY year, at about the end of February. I find myself consumed with an intolerable yearning to go to the south again. Of course, I dutifully remind myself, it's still much too early to go, still a month to wait before the spray begins to spring. I should like to beguile the month of waiting by deepening my longing with remembered poetry, but un- graciously the English poets seem to have travelled only to yearn for England—Rupert Brooke in Berlin, Flecker in Brumana, Tennyson dourly noting every shower in Italy and the intolerable Browning. Only Christina Rossetti. in one of the most moving poems she wrote, wept in the north for the Italian voices and "the sweet south."
But the month passes with the maps on the floor and the rich hieroglyphic language of the Michelin Guide, the lyric prose of the Club-des-Sans-Club—" Dans an cadre exquise, vous trouverez an accueil empresse, tine table soigneusentent familiale—." And at last it's time to go— —To go to Provence. The car at Calais and down the windy roads of the north, past the red-and-white brick, the Burgundian stone, the grey slate roofs and the brown tiles, driving from cold cloudy skies to see, perhaps at the end of the second day, the clouds end sharply just beyond the horizon ahead and then the blue sky.
We know we are in Provence when we see the first olive-trees, the faded pink pantiles on the shabby houses, the long dark rows of the cypress windbreaks. The countryside is sprinkled with puffs of purple peach-blossom, and sometimes we see the sky through the purple judas-flowers along their dark branches. When we stop the car on a hillside we hear the grasshoppers shrilling and smell the rich aromatic unforgettable smell of Provence—I can't describe it, but Daudet could. We drive again, the car-cushions hot with the sun, until in the evening we come to the inn with the thorny mountains of the Luberon behind it, the waterfall beside it, and in front of the house a rickety trellised veranda roofed with sweet-smelling purple wistaria where we sit and wait for our dinner and look south down the valley of the Durance, past the village clinging round its hilltop to the further hills beyond ; and south of these distant hills is the Mediterranean.
The food isn't up to much ; it seldom is in Provence. There is bread to dip in olive-oil and then in coarse rock-salt, tough mutton, goat cheese, and with these the local viii rosé that good King Rene introduced into Provence from his other kingdom in Anjou. History is continuous, is almost simultaneous, in Provence. King Rene with his two dearly-loved wives, his unfailing good-temper, his infinite capacities, lived only yesterday in a province where children are still named Marius in gratitude to the Roman general who saved the Provencaux from the barbarians in 102 B.C. They still stage plays in the Roman theatres of Provence, and once a gipsy woman, telling me the story of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, began, "One day, when it was all sea right up to Les Baux, our gipsy saint Sara was wandering on the hills —." I know a castle near the inn where we stay that has been lived in by the same family since the eighth century of our era. The count's shot-gun is stacked in the gun-room with others that go back to the first guns ever made, and in the kitchen there is a-mediaeval stove and a nineteenth- century range and an electric cooker. On the Roll of Honour in the chapel the last name is that of the countess's brother who died in the last war ; he was called Jean de Vallombrosa.
If friends come to visit us, we will naturally make an effort to entertain them. We will drive them along a lane and round a corner, and then they will see ahead of them, infinitely far away. the high white Alps. Or. we will take them to Avignon and Les Baux, to the beautifully named Vaison-la-Romaine, to Carpentras to see the fourteenth century synagogue, to Orange and Nimes and Arles and the Pont du Gard. On Sunday we will take them up the path lined with little booths to see the river Sorgue gushing out of the rock at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse below the castle where Petrarch lived and where, I always like to think. Chaucer might have come for that meeting with Petrarch that we don't know ever took place.
But if we have only ourselves to please, we will go nowhere. We will climb to the terrace of the deserted house above the inn and there we will sit all day, not reading, not writing, hardly even thinking, just sitting in the sun in Provence, the most beautiful province in the world.
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