A Year in Provence (Provence, #1)

by Peter Mayle

The language spoken was French, but it was not the French we had studied in textbooks and heard on cassettes; it was a rich, soupy patois, emanating from somewhere at the back of the throat and passing through a scrambling process in the nasal passages before coming out as speech.

I always smile when I remember our problems with the language. When buying our first car in France, a 2CV, we were initiated in the rigours of the French bureaucracy and returned home tail between our legs because we didn’t have the correct paperwork - could it have been our parents’ birth certificates? It was wild anyway. Finally an introduction to the car and another first encounter ‘the frange oh man’- the hand-brake of course. One early encounter with Faustin I remember all too well. I went to see him in the vines where he was working with his tractor and having passed the time of day, me pretending to understand everything, he asked me for some water. With some relief, knowing I was on safe ground with water, I returned with a nice Perrier glass, some ice and a bottle of Contrex. I can still picture the look on his face. The water was for his tractor and not for him.