Read Encore Provence for Free Online Page A

door.
    He used both barrels, jammed up tight against thebutcher’s chest, and didn’t wait to see him fall. By the time lights started to go on in the neighboring houses, he was in the fields below the village, stumbling through the vines on his way home.
    Sometime before dawn, the first gendarme arrived, roused from his bed by a call from one of the few telephones in the village. Half a dozen people were already standing in the pool of light spilling from the butcher’s shop, horrified, fascinated, unable to keep their eyes away from the bloody carcass that lay just inside the door. Within an hour, a squad from Avignon was there to clear them away, remove the corpse, and set up an office in the
mairie
to begin the lengthy process of questioning the entire village.
    It was a difficult time for the five husbands, a test of solidarity and friendship. They spent another Sunday morning in the forest, reminding each other that silence, total silence, was their only protection. Keep it behind the teeth, as one of them said, and nobody will ever know. The police will think it was an enemy from the butcher’s previous life in another place, settling an old score. They passed the comforting bottle around and swore to say nothing.
    Days passed, and then weeks—weeks without a confession, weeks without even a clue. Nobody admitted to knowing anything. And besides, there was a certain reluctance to discuss village affairs with outsiders in uniform. All the police were able to establish was the approximate time of death and, of course, the fact that the murderer had used a hunting rifle. Every man who held a
permis de chasse
was questioned, every rifle was carefully inspected. But unlike bullets, buckshot leaves no identifiable traces. The fatal shots could have come from any one of dozens ofguns. The investigation eventually faltered, then stopped altogether, to become simply another dossier in the files. The village went back to work harvesting the grapes, which everyone agreed were exceptionally concentrated that year after a dry, warm autumn.
    In time there was another butcher, an older, family man from the Ardèche who was happy to take over premises that were so well equipped, even down to the knives. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself welcomed with unusual friendliness by the men of the village.
    “And that was the end of it,” said Marius. “It must be nearly forty years ago now.”
    I asked him if the identity of the murderer had ever been established. There were, after all, at least five people who knew, and as he himself had said, keeping secrets in a village was like trying to hold water in your hand. But he just smiled and shook his head.
    “I’ll tell you this, though,” he said, “everyone turned out the day they buried the butcher. They all had their reasons.” He finished his wine, and stretched back in his chair. “
Beh oui
. It was a popular funeral.”

New York Times Restaurant Critic Makes Astonishing Discovery: Provence Never Existed

    The letter came from Gerald Simpson, a gentleman living in New York. He was puzzled by a piece he’d seen in the newspaper, which he had enclosed, and the article made sad reading. It condemned Provence as a region of clever peasants and bad food, and here was the source of Simpson’s puzzlement. I don’t remember it being like that at all, he wrote, when I was there on vacation. It’s not like that in your books. What’s happened? Can it have changed so much in the last few years?
    I read the article a second time, and it did indeed make Provence sound unattractive and poorly served by its restaurants and food suppliers. I’ve been sent similarpieces before, written by journalists in search of what they like to think is a different angle. They are anxious to find what they call “the reality” that lurks behind the postcards of sunny lavender fields and smiling faces. Give them a disenchanted visitor, a surly shopkeeper, or a bad meal, and they go home