Lawrence Durrell [Lawrence Durrell] - Caesar’s Vast Ghost

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of a Nemausus bronze coin (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

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A travers le ct Tartarin et le ct Daumier du pays si drle, o les bonnes gens ont laccent que tu sais, il y a tant de grec dj, et il y a la Vnus dArles comme celle de Lesbos et on sent encore cette jeunesse-l malgr tout. Je nen doute pas le moins du monde quun jour toi aussi tu connatras le Midi.

Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo,
Arles, September 1888

translation on page 209

To thank Mary J. Byrne for her collaboration

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My own version of Provence is necessarily partial and personal, for, like everyone else, I came here to fall in and out of love long ago, entering old Provence by the winding roads, the only ones, the old Routes Nationales, down the interminable corridors of cool planes in leaf, at the turn of the harvest moon Memory has kept such versions astonishingly fresh in their warmth and candour. She was waiting there, another writer in travail, waiting at the old Htel dEurope in Avignon with her unfinished manuscript on the Troubadours.

Swerving down those long dusty roads among the olive groves, down the shivering galleries of green leaf I came, diving from penumbra to penumbra of shadow, feeling that icy contrast of sunblaze and darkness under the ruffling planes, plunging like a river trout in rapids from one pool of shadows to the next, the shadows almost icy in comparison with the outer sunshine and hard metalled blue sky. So to come at last upon Valence where the shift of accent begins: the cuisine veers from cream to olive oil and spices in the more austere dietary of the south, with the first olives and mulberries and the tragic splash of flowering Judas, the brilliant violet brush-stroke of unique Judas. Here, like the signature at the end of a score, the steady orchestral drizzle of cicadas: such strange sybilline music and such an exceptional biography, so scant of living-time, with so long underground in the dark earth before rising into the light! Anisette (pastis) everywhere declared itself as the ideal accompaniment for the evening meditations of the players of boules; no village square in summer was without the clickety-click of the little steel balls, no shady village without its boulistes steeped in the Socratic austerity of the silence between throws. The holy silence of the bouliste is pregnant with futurity, his convulsions and contortions when things go wrong are pure early cinema; the immortality of Pagnol is based upon a careful study of the graphic originals available to him in a long lifetime of attending tournaments in town and hamlet alike.

When I first set foot in Provence one could buy a mazet very cheaply happily for us, for we were broke, the common history of writers. A mazet is usually the dependancy of a mas (the word itself is the diminutive of mas, which means farm or domaine). The tiny mazet we bought a few kilometres outside Nmes afforded us little more than an elementary shelter from the elements. But with industry and hard thinking we transformed it rapidly into a comfortable, indeed snug cottage. I encircled it with dry-stone walls, using the simple garrigue stone which flakes and trims into convenient soup-plate sizes, ideal for walls and balconies. I set this off with a small patio, the girdles of stone showing up the venerable almond trees to perfection. Here we lounged away the golden afternoons and evenings like Chinese philosophers, debating endlessly the hypothetical book which we knew would never be written the book which contained the essential insights about the place. A compendium of poetic inklings all that the Ideal Traveller should know!