Part 1 – The commune of Lorgues
Our month in the beautiful city of Lyon completed, the time to start the main business of our trip had arrived. We were both beginning to feel at ease with the language after two weeks of intensive training at Inflexyon, shopping in French had begun to seem quite natural, and chatting with the locals was becoming much easier. Now we were able to start looking around us and begin that search for the all-elusive perfect nesting place.
Our stop in Lyon had been a great success, having found the city even more delightful than we had expected. However, as many of the people we met there quickly confirmed, it was probably not the ideal location for two people who were hoping to live in a warm(-ish) climate. The September weather we had experienced there was lovely, but the general message was that we might not be quite so appreciative of the winters. To make the point, it was raining heavily as we left Lyon behind us that first day in October, driving our brand new short-term lease car, a well-equipped and very comfortable Peugeot 308 diesel. We headed south through quite murky weather, along the A7 autoroute following the Rhône valley, as we anticipated our next destination, the village of Lorgues, located in the midst of wineries and olive trees in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.
Provence is one of those places that has been written about so often, and is almost revered by many, and yet neither of us had been there for any length of time. It appeared to have a lot of potential, the climate is temperate, the countryside was said to be beautiful, and culture and history abounds. With so many expats having made their homes there over the years, it surely must be worthy of a visit by a couple of European retirees, disappointed by the Californian Dream, and looking for a place to re-connect to their roots. So we had found a rental apartment in Lorgues, which seemed to be fairly centrally located between sea and mountain, the famous Riviera destinations to the east and Roman antiquities to the west. The sun started to appear among the clouds as we arrived in the late afternoon, and, pleased to be out in the countryside once more after a month of city dwelling, we found our new temporary home easily on the edge of the village, in a small gated community of similar apartments in two three-storey buildings. We had to wait half an hour for the cleaning lady to arrive with the key and let us in; but once the car was unloaded, and we’d had our supper of left-over groceries from Lyon, we settled down to our six-week term of Provençal life.
There is a lot to see in Provence, chic holiday resorts, tourist trap casino cities, market towns full of history, ancient small villages perched on hilltops high above green valleys, and acres and acres and acres of vineyards interspersed with olive groves. Lorgues fitted somewhere between the market town and ancient village category, far enough north of the A8, the main east-west autoroute, to be relatively unaffected by traffic speeding towards the Italian border, but far enough south to be easily accessible and out of the more extreme hilly regions to the north. It seemed to be, and indeed proved to be, an ideal location to have all of Provence within a comfortable day’s drive. However our first day in the village was all foot-powered, as we took our first stroll around our neighbourhood, including a stop for our daily baguette at what turned out to be the only boulangerie with Sunday opening hours. Then, getting down immediately to the business in hand, we included some window-shopping at the half dozen agents immobiliers in the main street.
The apartment that we had booked through the FlipKey website was adequate but much smaller than we had expected, which just demonstrated how deceptive descriptions and photographs can be. The view from our balcony at the back of the building was a distinct disappointment, in the shade all day long and looking straight at the back of a very run-down building that housed the local grape and olive crushing plant, which became noisily active several times during our stay. We were also disappointed to discover that our mobile phone signal was too weak to be of any use when downloading e-mails from the internet or making the comforting Skype phone calls to family and friends at home; and the “café with internet facilities just around the corner” had very erratic opening hours, and wasn’t exactly the kind of place we would have wanted to spend a lot of time chatting to the grandkids. This was our own fault, because we were fully aware of the lack of internet in the apartment when we made the booking, but your scribe had rather foolishly chosen to ignore this lack of what has become such a necessary adjunct to the comfort of our modern travelling lives. Still, by late afternoon the next day, a 40 kilometre round trip to the local Orange outlet in Draguignan, our nearest town of any size, had us returning happily connected to the world again with a new mini-SIM in our IPad and a contract that seemed to give us plenty of gigabytes to play with for the next three months, though we were soon to learn how many of the bytes one Skype call consumes!
The local tourist office, very conveniently situated just round the corner from our gateway, was staffed by a couple of very friendly local ladies who gave us lots of good information about the places we should visit in the Draguignan arrondissement of the Var department, and we came away well armed with maps and guides.
To find your way around in France, and to understand a bit about the local politics, it is helpful to have an understanding of how the administration of the country is divided up. There are twelve mainland régions, each region levying its own taxes, and having direct responsibilities for high school education and discretionary powers over infrastructural spending such as public transport, universities and assistance to local businesses. Regions are then subdivided into the ninety-seven main administrative divisions of France, the départements. The departmental seats of government for each department, the préfectures, are usually in a town reasonably centrally placed, historically nominally accessible to all corners of the department within twenty-four hours on horseback. However, slightly surprisingly, the coastal port city of Toulon is the prefecture for the Var department. Further subdivisions of the departments are the arondissements, such as Draguignan, the town of that name also being the seat of the sous-préfecture of the arondissement. Each arondissement is then further subdivided into cantons, the chief purpose of which are to serve as constituencies for the election of members of the General Councils of each department. Within cantons there may be several communes, France’s fourth administrative level. Lorgues is one of fifty-eight communes in the arondissement of Draguignan, and one of five communes in the canton of Vidauban. Communes are roughly the equivalent of civil townships and incorporated municipalities in the United States, and resemble urban districts and rural parishes in the United Kingdom. Each commune has a maire (mayor), a conseil municipal (town council), and a mairie or town hall. Amazingly, a legacy from the French Revolution means that all 36,552 communes, with the exception of the commune of Paris, have more or less the same legislative powers over such things as the local police force and emergency services, even though the population of communes can vary from two million – Paris – to towns of ten thousand, to a hamlet of just10 persons. However, as one might expect, the maximum allowable pay for mayors and deputy mayors, and other financial items such as municipal campaign limits, do vary according to the population echelon into which each commune falls! Lorgues, though, was a larger than average commune of nearly nine thousand people.
The original small fortified town around which this community has grown, dates back to the 11th and 12th centuries, and is still entered through one of the several old “portes”, or gates. The old town is a small maze of medieval streets uphill from the present day main street, Boulevard Georges Clemenceau, and Cours de la Republique. As one approaches the village the most prominent feature is the 18th century collegial St-Martin church. Locals told us it had a very impressive interior, but this we never saw as the building was closed to the public during our stay, due to construction work. Every Tuesday there is a large market all along the main street and extending into Rue de l’Église and down Avenue de Toulon. Selling pretty well every type of household accessory, a wide selection of clothing and lots of meat, cheese and fruit and vegetables, one might never need to shop anywhere else if one was not too choosy! A Casino Supermarché, an Intermarché Super and a small Bio store completed the basic grocery shopping options; for the more selective gourmand there was a half dozen boulangeries and pâtisseries. The main street was mostly cafés and restaurants and the aforementioned agents immobiliers, all very much oriented towards the expat and tourist community, of which we were part of course. The local expats came out in force on market days and Saturdays, when one heard as much English as French being spoken.
In line with our intent to live like locals as much as possible, we rarely dined out in the village. Our first experience was a wonderful meal with friends on a damp wet Friday evening, at Chez Vincent (sadly, I see, now under new owners and renamed Chez Flo.) Superbly cooked confit de canard together with delicious starters, yummy desserts and a very nice Chateau les Crostes rouge earned it a well deserved five-star review on Trip Advisor. Then on our last evening in the village we treated ourselves to another very tasty meal in the quaint ambience of the interior of an old olive mill. La Table du Moulin had received mixed reviews, but the unique venue and the warmth of the Maître D and the Chef when, out of hours, we popped our heads inside as we passed by one afternoon, tempted us to find out for ourselves, and we were far from disappointed; it turned out to be an enjoyable parting song to our stay in Lorgues. Of course, we did enjoy the café culture more often, finding the temptations of mille feuilles and tartes aux pommes irresistible more times than we would like to admit, stopping by to rest your scribe’s weary knees on our regular walks to the Bio store and our favourite boulangeries.
Five days after our arrival and we realized we had explored our commune pretty thoroughly and the time had come to start discovering what our département, Var, had to offer. . . .
Street markets are of course an integral part of every French community, but so are boulangeries and patisseries and again Lyon was no slouch in this latter regard, tempting us with delicious custard filled Royals, or millefeuilles, and my favourite tartes aux pommes, seemingly at every turn in the street, and ensuring the ever-ready availability of slightly warm, yeasty-smelling fresh bread, of many more types than just the quintessential baguette.
The street markets of Lyon are much more than simply food, household wares, bric-à-brac and old books, as we discovered a couple of times when visiting the square outside St Jean Cathedral. Our first surprise there one Sunday morning was the Tapinieres du Vieux Lyon, a fair celebrating the ceramic arts. Every imaginable kind
ved with but many we were glad to be living without! However, we did end up with beautiful crafted, matching, surrealist fish pendant and earrings as our memoire of the day. Another visit to the same location a couple of weeks later, revealed a thriving marché des antiquités et brocante, an ideal place to browse if looking to furnish and decorate a small apartment on a budget.