THORPE ADAM - NOTES FROM THE CEVENNES: half a lifetime in provincial france

A marvellously astute, wry and affectionate account of France and the French mercifully free of whimsy and, moreover, written in pitch-perfect English prose. A delight.

William Boyd

Thorpes memoir is not part of any herd. Nor does it belong in the fast-and-loose category of potboilers about swapping English life for continental idylls It is erudite, firmly embedded in its own soil and yet evasive Affectionate, appreciative and perceptive

Observer

Thorpe has dizzying range as well as style

Daily Mail

Powerful Adam has all the gifts of novelist, correspondent, historian and poet

Colin Greenwood

In an altogether different class Beautifully written, full of wisdom about the balance struck by humanity and the natural world between ephemerality and permanence

The Tablet

Erudite and beguiling

The Times

A marvellous evocation of the forgotten Languedoc

Sigrid Rausing

Deeply engaging He has, in short, lived a life to which he was not born but which he has taken up and made his own, something many people dream about but few are able to emulate

TLS

Gleaming with polished insights, this sensitive book is both a warning, plea and salutary reminder that even the tiniest action affects the universal. France profonde, indeed.

Spectator

Beautifully written and produced, a pure pleasure: learned and attentive and rich in description and full of humour that is genuinely affectionate without being remotely patronising

Irish Times

[An] absorbing, tender book

Country Life

Written in prose as bright and bracing as the waters of the rivers in which Thorpe loves to swim

Literary Review

Thorpe allows a sense of folk magic to permeate, and his characters feel rustic in a timeless way because he transmits a real appreciation of the wild and how humans justify our interactions with other beasts A gentle homage to rural life.

New Statesman

Thorpe continues ... quietly wonderful. Though (and perhaps because) Thorpe lives in France, he is alert to every English linguistic twitch, every slippery folk-meme. Hes a writers writer.

Hilary Mantel on Missing Fay

NOTES FROM
THE CVENNES

In memory of my parents, who granted me a love of two countries

ALSO BY ADAM THORPE

FICTION

Ulverton

Still

Pieces of Light

Shifts

Nineteen Twenty-One

No Telling

The Rules of Perspective

Is This The Way You Said?

Between Each Breath

The Standing Pool

Hodd

Flight

Missing Fay

POETRY

Mornings in the Baltic

Meeting Montaigne

From the Neanderthal

Nine Lessons from the Dark

Birds with a Broken Wing

Voluntary

Words from the Wall

TRANSLATION

Madame Bovary

Thrse Raquin

NON-FICTION

On Silbury Hill

CONTENTS

We had been renting full-time in France for three years when we bought our house on the lower slopes of the Cvennes mountains: the last thrust of the Massif Central before the southern plain and the sea. An authors limited budget (one of the reasons for moving to France in the first place) meant that our reverie of an isolated mas or farmhouse with land around it soon dwindled to a rambling village house set against a hill, with a modest, unattached garden behind, sloping up in a series of terraces. At least the kids can walk to school, we told ourselves. Their route was a few minutes down a couple of rocky paths between drystone walls: we had read somewhere, in an article on human evolution, that unevenness underfoot stimulates the synapses, and with the lower path being particularly bouldery, we joked that this would turn them into geniuses.

Your great-grandmother, I told them, walked four miles a day to and from school in cold and rainy Derbyshire. This was warm and relatively dry Languedoc. When it stormed, however, water from the sloping vineyard gushed furiously through a wall on the last stretch, adding to the challenge. Twenty-five years on, the way has recently been paved with shallow steps and cemented flat slabs, doing nothing for the neurones.

Our house is above the village proper. A cluster of largely medieval buildings on the side of a great dome-shaped hill thick with wild boars, our quartier feels like a separate hamlet, with its own name, threaded by rough-cobbled, sloping paths calades, from the Occitan calada (Occitan being la langue dOc, giving rise to the regions name, Languedoc). The main calade passes right by our back door on its way up to the hamlets green or placette the beguiling suffix indicating its size, as a cigarette is a little cigare. This was dominated until a few years ago by the ruin of a medieval building, known as lHpital. Not a hospital, but a refuge for the poorest or the insane. The lower village was destroyed in 1703 (exterminated, in the no-nonsense words of the official command) by Louis XIVs dreaded dragoons of the green tunics, long black boots and five-foot sabres during the guerres des religions, as locals call them. Those that did the burning and demolishing were lodged in our sector, which is why it feels, in parts, like a medieval relic. Theres still a warren of passageways where the old common well can be found, the bucket squeaking into a far-down splash.

Up until some 40 or 50 years ago, the wild limestone hill behind would have resembled the stepped tea or rice plantations of India or Vietnam, rising amphitheatrically with cultivated terraces called bancls in Occitan, put to vegetables like onions, potatoes or leeks, planted with rows of vines, mulberries or olive trees (we are at the very limit of the latters zone). The drystone support walls had to be continually repaired or the heavy rains of autumn and spring would eventually sweep the earth to the bottom, leaving only bare rock. Many bancls have now vanished under bushes or secondary forest. You can see the evidence in the old photographs: a corrugation of thin terraces laboured over with mattock and two-pronged fork for all that the poor soil can give, helped by sheep manure carried in shoulder-yoked baskets up innumerable steps. There is a striking absence of mature trees in these vintage glimpses. The Cvennes were stripped of their timber in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be happily and heavily replanted in the twentieth with government aid.

The original walls are now half-tumbled among garrigue scrub, or lingering in stretches between pines, chestnut and spruce on the granitic part of our commune a couple of kilometres further north. Where the terraces are better preserved, in areas of the region where more springs bubble up in the aridity, back-to-earthers as well as locals have made beautiful gardens of them, green diadems draped on countless steep shelves. An old Berkshire saying, Neer come home wiout stick or stone, has its Cvenol version in an enormous