Читать книгу Rambles on the Riviera - M. F. Mansfield - Страница 6

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ST. RÉMY DE PROVENCE is delightful and indescribable in its quiet charm. It’s not so very quiet either—at times—and its great Fête de St. Rémy in October is anything but quiet. On almost any summer Sunday, too, its cafés and terraces, and the numerous tree-bordered squares and places, and its Cours—the inevitable adjunct of all Provençal towns—are as gay with the life of the town and the country round about as any local metropolis in France.

The local merchants call St. Rémy “toujours un pays mort,” but in spite of this they all eke out considerably more than what a full-blooded Burgundian would call a good living. As a matter of fact the population of St. Rémy live on something approaching the abundance of good things of the Côte d’Or itself. There is perhaps nothing remarkable about this, in the midst of a mild and pleasant land like Provence; but it seems wise to state it here, for we know of an Englishman who stayed three days at St. Rémy’s most excellent Grand Hôtel de Provence and complained because he did not get beefsteaks or ham and eggs for a single meal! He got carp from Vaucluse, langouste from St. Louis-de-Rhône, the finest sort of lamb (but not plain boiled, with cauliflower as a side dish), chickens of the real spring variety, or a brace of little wild birds which look like sparrows and taste like quail, but which are neither—with, as like as not, a bottle of Châteauneuf des Papes, grapes, figs, olives, and goat’s milk cheese. Either this, or a variation of it, was his daily menu for breakfast or dinner, and still he pined for beefsteaks! Had our traveller been an American he would perhaps have cried aloud for boiled codfish or pumpkin pie!

The hotel of St. Rémy is to be highly commended in spite of all this, though the writer has only partaken of an occasional meal there. He got nearer the soil, living the greater part of one long bright autumn in the household of an estimable tradesman,—a baker by trade, though considering that he made a great accomplishment of it, it may well be reckoned a profession.

Up at three in the morning, he, with the assistance of a small boy,—some day destined to be his successor,—puts in his artistic touches on the patting and shaping of the various loaves, ultimately sliding them into the great low-ceiled brick oven with a sort of elongated snow-shovel such as bakers use the world over.

It was in his manipulating of things that the art of it all came in. Frenchmen will not all eat bread fashioned in the same form, and the cottage loaf is unknown in France. One may have a preference for a “pain mouffle,” a long sort of a roll; or, if he likes a crusty morsel, nothing but a “pistolet” or a “baton” will do him. Others will eat nothing but a great circular washer of bread—“comme un rond de cuir”—or a “tresse,” which is three plaited strands, also crusty. A favourite with toothless old veterans of the Crimea or beldames who have seen seventy or eighty summers is the “chapeau de gendarme,” a three-cornered sort of an affair with no crust to speak of.

By midday the baker-host had become the merchant of the town and had dressed himself in a garb more or less approaching city fashions, and seated himself in a sort of back parlour to the shop in front, which, however, served as a kitchen and a dining-room as well.

Many and bountiful and excellent were the meals eaten en famille in the room back of the shop, often enough in company with a beau-frère, who came frequently from Cavaillon, and a niece and her husband, who was an attorney, and who lived in a great Renaissance stone house opposite the fountain of Nostradamus, St. Rémy’s chief titular deity.

These were the occasions when eating and drinking was as superlative an expression of the joy of life as one is likely to have experienced in these degenerate days when we are mostly nourished by means of patent foods and automatic buffets.

“My brother has a pretty taste in wine,” says the beau-frère from Cavaillon, as he opens another bottle of the wine of St. Rémy, grown on the hillside just overlooking “les antiquités.” Those relics of the Roman occupation are the pride of the citizen, who never tires of strolling up the road with a stranger, and pointing out the beauties of these really charming historical monuments. Truly M. Farges did have a pretty taste in wine, and he had a cellar as well stocked in quantity and variety as that of a Riviera hotel-keeper.

Not the least of the attractions of M. Farges’s board was the grace with which his Arlesienne wife presided over the good things of the casserole and the spit, that long skewer which, when loaded with a chicken, or a duck, or a dozen small birds, turned slowly by clockwork before a fire of olive-tree roots on the open hearth, or rather, on top of the fourneau, which was only used itself for certain operations. Baked meats and rôti are two vastly different things in France.

“Marcel, he bakes the bread, and I cook for him,” says the jauntily coiffed, buxom little lady, whose partner Marcel had been for some thirty years. In spite of the passing of time, both were still young, or looked it, though they were of that ample girth which betokens good living, and, what is quite as important, good cooking; and madame’s taste in cookery was as “pretty” as her husband’s for bread-making and wine.

Given a casserole half-full of boiling oil (also a product of St. Rémy’s; real olive-oil, with no dilution of cottonseed to flatten out the taste) and anything whatever eatable to drop in it, and Madame Farges will work wonders with her deftness and skill, and, like all good cooks, do it, apparently, by guesswork.

It is a marvel to the writer that some one has not written a book devoted to the little every-day happenings of the French middle classes. Manifestly the trades of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker have the same ends in view in France as elsewhere, but their procedure is so different, so very different.

It strikes the foreigner as strange that your baker here gives you a tally-stick, even to-day, when pass-books and all sorts of automatic calculators are everywhere to be found. It is a fact, however, that your baker does this at St. Rémy; and regulates the length of your credit by the length of the stick, a plan which has many advantages for all concerned over other methods.

You arrange as to what your daily loaf shall be, and for every one delivered a notch is cut in the stick, which you guard as you would your purse; that is, you guard your half of it, for it has been split down the middle, and the worthy baker has a whole battery of these split sticks strung along the dashboard of his cart. The two separate halves are put together when the notch is cut across the joint, and there you have undisputable evidence of delivery. It’s very much simpler than the old backwoods system of keeping accounts on a slate, and wiping off the slate when they were paid, and it’s safer for all concerned. When you pay your baker at St. Rémy, he steps inside your kitchen and puts the two sticks on the fire, and together you see them go up in smoke.