A Year in Provence Read Online Free PDF Page B

degrees, the roads are perilous, and I am fifty-eight years old. I am staying at home.” He paused, then added, “I shall play the clarinet.” This he did every day to keep his fingers nimble and to take his mind off the hurly-burly of plumbing, and it was with some difficulty that I managed to steer the conversation away from his thoughts on the baroque composers and toward the mundane subject of our cold house. Eventually, we agreed that I should pay him a visit as soon as the roads had cleared. He had all kinds of installations at his house, he said—gas, oil, electricity, and, his latest acquisition, a revolving solar-heating panel. He would show them all to me and I could also meet Madame his wife, who was an accomplished soprano. I was obviously going to have a musical time among the radiators and stopcocks.
    The prospect of being warm made us think of summer, and we started to make plans for turning the enclosed courtyard atthe back of the house into an open-air living room. There was already a barbecue and a bar at one end, but what it lacked was a large, solid, permanent table. As we stood in six inches of snow, we tried to picture lunchtime in mid-August, and traced on the flagstones a five-foot square, large enough to seat eight bronzed and barefooted people and with plenty of room in the middle for giant bowls of salad, pâtés and cheese, cold roasted peppers, olive bread, and chilled bottles of wine. The Mistral gusted through the courtyard and obliterated the shape in the snow, but by then we had decided: the table would be square and the top a single slab of stone.
    Like most people who come to the Lubéron, we had been impressed by the variety and versatility of the local stone. It can be
pierre froide
from the quarry at Tavel, a smooth, close-grained pale beige; it can be
pierre chaude
from Lacoste, a rougher, softer off-white, or it can be any one of twenty shades and textures in between. There is a stone for fireplaces, for swimming pools, for staircases, for walls and floors, for garden benches and kitchen sinks. It can be rough or polished, hard-edged or rolled, cut square or in voluptuous curves. It is used where, in Britain or America, a builder might use wood or iron or plastic. Its only disadvantage, as we were finding out, is that it is cold in winter.
    What came as a real surprise was the price. Meter for meter, stone was cheaper than linoleum, and we were so delighted by this rather misleading discovery—having conveniently overlooked the cost of laying stone—that we decided to risk the elements and go to the quarry without waiting for spring. Friends had suggested a man called Pierrot at Lacoste, whose work was good and whose prices were correct. He was described to us as
un original
, a character, and a rendezvous was made with him for 8:30 in the morning, while the quarry would still be quiet.
    We followed a signpost off the side road out of Lacoste and along a track through the scrub oak toward the open countryside. It didn’t look like a light industrial zone, and we were just about to turn back when we nearly fell into it—a huge hole bitten outof the ground, littered with blocks of stone. Some were raw, some worked into tombstones, memorials, giant garden urns, winged angels with intimidating blind stares, small triumphal arches, or stocky round columns. Tucked away in a corner was a hut, its windows opaque with years of quarry dust.
    We knocked and went in, and there was Pierrot. He was shaggy, with a wild black beard and formidable eyebrows. A piratical man. He made us welcome, beating the top layer of dust from two chairs with a battered trilby hat which he then placed carefully over the telephone on the table.
    “English, eh?”
    We nodded, and he leaned toward us with a confidential air.
    “I have an English car, a vintage Aston Martin.
Magnifique.
”
    He kissed the tips of his fingers, speckling his beard with white, and poked among the papers on his table, raising puffs