Cloudy day reading

Cloudy days can come as a surprise in Provence. Cerulean blue is the usual outlook, despite the knowledge that winters can be harsh. But when the vineyard down the hill takes on these soft grey tones, it means a perfect afternoon for reading.

There’s nothing I like more than a book trail, where one leads on to another, linked in some way. Recently I’ve read three books about the Cévennes, that isolated and  mountainous region on the other side of the stately Rhone to the north-west of Avignon. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) is Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic account of a 120-mile walking trip he made alone with the obdurate donkey Modestine. It’s one of his earliest works, and its enduring popularity is surely to do with his wonderful descriptions of the landscape:

 It was already warm. I tied my jacket on the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat.  Modestine herself was in high spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first time in my experience, into a jolting trot that set the oats swashing in the pocket of my coat. The view, back upon the northern Gévaudan, extended with every step; scarce a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon the fields of wild hill that ran north, east, and west, all blue and gold in the haze and sunlight of the morning. A multitude of little birds kept sweeping and twittering about my path (…), translucent flickering wings between the sun and me.

The other two books are much more recent. Both are novels in which descriptive writing about the countryside is equally lyrical and accomplished.

Trespass by Rose Tremain is a tale as brooding as the peaks and dark valleys she describes. It’s a novel about the outsiders who arrive in the Cévennes, searching for a paradise that exists partly in their own imaginations, and in collusion with each other. A British brother and sister, Anthony and Veronica Verey, begin a search for his perfect new life close to where she lives with her partner, Kitty. They are mirrored by the French owners of the property they fix on, Aramon Lumel and his sister Audrun, whose relationship is as fissured as the large crack in the old family farmhouse he makes a bodged attempt to hide. The dreamy, tragic air of the novel fuses perfectly the contrast between illusion and reality, until it acquires the quality of a fable from La France profonde.

The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton is also beautifully written, building a sensuous picture of the Cévennes, from the dampness of granite flagstones, to the “layer upon layer of blue mountain silhouettes, fading into bluer skies”. Again, it concerns the search for a rural idyll, but Catherine Parkstone, although not so very much younger than Tremain’s Veronica Verey, seems a more contemporary and believable heroine, as she sets about overcoming the nasty surprises and setbacks inherent in beginning a new life abroad - and perhaps even a new relationship. Catherine is a properly-rounded and sympathetic character, who easily engages our affection. Though less of a novel of ideas than Trespass, it is in some ways the more enjoyable for it.

Red rocks at Cassis



Anyone for an infusion of sunshine while all is rain and gloom? Here is Cassis on a summer’s evening: pastel stucco buildings along the waterfront; boats lined up in the marina. Dominating the eastern side of the bay, a medieval chateau-fort sprawls across the towering rock of Cap Canaille, which surrounds the town like a huge protective arm. As the sun sets over the sweetly curving harbor, the castle catches flame from the west, and burns blood-gold for up to an hour each evening.

                                                                                      

This classic old fishing village on the Provençal coast has a rather different feel from the internationally fashionable resorts like St Tropez further to the east. It’s much more relaxed and less crowded, though you’ll need to get up at dawn to park in August. The atmosphere is arty-bohemian, though leavened by the sailing crowds and families. This has always been a resort where the French themselves come on holiday.

It’s also a place for anyone who enjoys a good book trail, because among the foreign visitors down the years, there are plenty of stellar literary associations.

Virginia Woolf travelled here to be with her sister Vanessa Bell, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell and her lover Duncan Grant in 1925, and wrote after spending her days wandering on flower-edged footpaths through the woods and tiny beaches amid red rocks: ‘No-one shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness.” For the next few years it became a veritable Bloomsbury-sur-Mer.

It’s a wild, rocky coastline here, a far cry from the white marble and manicured lawns of the palaces near Nice, where we picture F Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham. This is closer both geographically and in spirit, to tough, earthy Marseille.

In the 1920s a desperately-ill D H Lawrence came to try to calm his tuberculosis at Bandol, yet another stop among so many increasingly frantic attempts to find a climate kind to his failing health. Katherine Mansfield came for the same reason. Aldous Huxley lived at Sanary-sur-Mer, another small seaside town – very pretty but not over-glitzed even now. Sanary would become the chosen place of exile for a group of German writers fleeing Hitler’s fatherland during the Second World War, most notably Thomas Mann.

A little further round the coast is Hyères, once home to Robert Louis Stevenson, and where Edith Wharton had a house for many years and wrote several novels, including The Age of Innocence. She also wrote the lovely lyrical poem In Provence, which begins:

Roofed in with creaking pines we lie
And see the waters burn and whiten,
The wild seas race the racing sky,
The tossing landscape gloom and lighten.

With emerald streak and silver blotch
The white wind paints the purple sea.