Lives of the Luberon

By Stanislas M. Yassukovich

Stanislas Yassukovich is an investment banker who spent some 20 years visiting and living with his family in the Luberon, the region of France made famous by the late Peter Mayle's seminal work, A Year in Provence. In his new book, Yassukovich chronicles his experiences, impressions and adventures in this unique corner of La Belle France, together with reminiscences of the fascinating and cosmopolitan characters who reside there permanently or part time. His anecdotal evocation of the great variety of elements that make this region one of the most sought after, in a country rich in holiday destinations, will entertain both those who know the area and those who don't yet. Malika Moine is a Provençal artist who has published several books of her water colours in Marseille. Her illustrations of the villages of the Luberon make the book, and the region, even more irresistible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528963800

Stanislas M. Yassukovich

Stanislas M. Yassukovich was born in Paris of a Russian émigré father and a French mother. The family went to America in 1940, and Stanislas was educated there at Deerfield Academy and Harvard College. He served in the United States Marine Corps and then moved to England in 1961, where he pursued a distinguished career in the City of London—becoming known as one of the founders of the international capital markets. On retirement, he moved to the Luberon region of Provence in Southern France, and he now lives in the Western Cape, South Africa. For services to the financial industry, Stanislas was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Freeman of the City of London. His previous works, Two Lives: A Social and Financial Memoir, Lives of the Luberon, James Grant, a novel, and Short Stories, a collection, were published by Austin Macauley Publishers in 2016, 2020 and 2021. Stanislas is married to the former Diana Townsend of Lowdale Farm, Mazoe, Zimbabwe, and they have three children: Tatyana, Michael, and Nicholas.

Book preview

IX

About the Author

Stanislas Yassukovich was born in Paris to a Russian émigré father and a French mother. After being educated in the United States, he settled in England, pursued a career in the City and is regarded as one of the founders of the international capital market. He was made a Commander of the British Empire, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Freeman of the City of London. His previous work, Two Lives: A Social and Financial Memoir, was published by Austin Macauley in 2016. He is married to the former Diana Townsend and has three children, Tatyana, Michael and Nicholas.

Malika Moine, the illustrator, was born and brought up in the Luberon and moved to Marseilles after schooling, to study history. She switched to art training in jewellery, sculpture and painting, and then travelled extensively, drawing towns, landscapes and their inhabitants. She has published four books of watercolours of cafés, restaurants and artisan studios of Marseilles: Tournée Générale, Croquis Croquant, Coeurs a L’Ouvrage and Croquis Croquant – La Suite (with chef’s recipes). She publishes annual calendars of Marseilles and recently published one of Rockford.

Dedication

Once again – to Dinnie

Copyright Information ©

Stanislas M. Yassukovich (2020)

The right of Stanislas M. Yassukovich to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528922517 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528922524 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528963800 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

My recollections of a region where we have spent, on and off, over 20 years are highly personal and impressionistic. I have described incidents with a considerable degree of playful latitude and I hope none involved will have taken offence. Words I have attributed to both named and unnamed individuals are unlikely to have been uttered and I have quoted no one verbatim.

I have suffered all my life from name blindness – to the point of sometimes having to pause to remember my wife’s name. This work would not have been possible without considerable help in remembering names, and in this regard, I am indebted to Christopher and Sarah Morgan, Catriona MacColl, Veronica Grange, Frances and Duncan Goodwin, and Eric and Analise Durschmied – plus a few others whose names I cannot remember. I have received valuable editorial assistance from Stephanie Mills and Jenny Jacobs. In my continuing battle with my computer, I have received vital tactical aid from Crispin Duncan of Dial-A-Nerd. Barbara Leotoing has been a source of facts I might have forgotten or misrepresented. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Malika Moine, who agreed to provide illustrations without having even glanced at my manuscript. But most of all, I must thank those readers of my last book, Two Lives: A Social and Financial Memoir, who were kind enough to encourage me to write another.

Introduction

It is a sound principle for an author beginning a new opus to determine in advance within which literary category the work belongs. Publishers are increasingly concerned with categories in their marketing strategies. This is a book about a place, but in a manner and style not easily categorised. The place is in France, a country that abounds in regions and locations of distinct character. This is about one of these. But we are not in the helicopter-plagued fleshpots of the Riviera, or the retro shores of the Côte d’Argent, with its ghosts of the thirties lounging in Biarritz, nor in the Anglicised confines of the Sunday supplement Dordogne. We are not even truly in la France profonde, found more readily in the massif centrale. We lack the white cattle of the Devon-like Charolais country, or the vineyard surrounded châteaux of Bordeaux. Mares and foals do not frolic here as in the moist grass pastures of Normandy, nor do our school children swallow a gulp of Calvados leaving for school, as they are reputed to do in Brittany. We have neither the cowboys nor the mosquitoes of the Camargue.

With a place name in the title and a series of geographical references in the introduction, it might be suspected that this is a travel book. But it definitely is not. I think of travel books as containing saccharine descriptions of exotic locales by a travel writer who hopes these will not actually be visited by readers as they might then discover the horrors lurking behind the touristic facade. When I was old enough to visit a movie theatre in the neighbouring town of Glen Cove, Long Island, a few ‘shorts’ always preceded the feature film after the Movietone news. One such was a travelogue from a popular series narrated by the producer, whose sing-song tones were designed to inculcate the homebody audience with a burning desire to visit the subject location. The film always ended the same way: And so…as the sun sinks slowly in the West, would intone the narrator, we leave the lovely island of Ohahu and its friendly natives… And the camera would provide a long shot of waving indigènes, fading in the distance, over a swirling wake from the stern of the ship. Even in these early years of movie going, I considered these films hopelessly banal and downright phony.

I will admit that, like any bored reader of the Sunday press, after a hopeless search for hard news, I am tempted to read a travel ‘special’ in the supplement. The formula never varies, and the writer, often a minor celebrity – whose contribution has been ghost written, leads one through the sites and hostelries of the target region, as though, light footed as a cricket, he, or she, has suffered none of the well-known discomforts of modern travel, but skipped effortlessly from place to place, and now extols their well promoted virtues – leaving out the mosquitoes, bed bugs and undercooked regional specialities. Even worse are those exposés of places deemed ‘discovered’. One thinks of the hapless residents of these areas whose hitherto peaceful lives are now interrupted by braying tourists and holiday home hunters, seeking immediate, post discovery bargains.

If this is no travel book, is it just about people and their ‘lives’? Usually missing from the travel writer’s sketchbook are allusions to the living – apart from references to mine host and hostess at some favourite chambre d’hôtes. There is hardly time to get to know residents in these whirlwind tours, and certainly not in travel articles written to deadline. I intend to populate this piece, not just with humans, but with all things living – including flora, of course, but also with my own definition of the non-plant living: anything that moves and makes a noise, from cicadas to tractors. My wife, who was brought up on a farm in Africa, has always insisted on living in a place where one can get stuck behind a tractor. Such was the case during our many years in Gloucestershire. Now, we get stuck behind the smaller tractors that ply the vineyards in Provence and thoroughly enjoy it, whilst the odd impatient French driver honks behind us.

Naturally, this tractor obsession is symptomatic of an attachment to life in an agricultural environment. And it is intensive agriculture that distinguishes our part of Provence from the hideously overdeveloped Côte d’Azur. In the several mini valleys that lie between the north face of the Luberon ridge and the slopes of the Mt Ventoux, can be found an astonishing variety of ‘lives’. Not just the olive, cherry, plum, greengage, apricot, almond, apple, pear, loquat, fig trees and their protective pines, firs, cedars, Mediterranean oaks, willows, poplars, or the multitudinous flora which constitutes the bush – or the garrigue, as it’s named here, but, also the vines, wheat, barley, sunflower, lavender crops, plus endless vegetables that stock the village markets, and of course, the sheep, goats, horses, interspersed with the undomesticated: the wild boar, fox, roe deer, hares, rabbits and game birds such as pheasants and partridge and, sadly, thrush, from which the shooters make a paté, but also song birds, swallows and martins, tits, bee eaters and other various… All this should be enough life for anyone. But we also have people. Apart from the truly indigenous, varied themselves, we have an extraordinary collection of semi and permanently resident expatriates with backgrounds in diplomacy, politics, finance, industry, commerce, theatre, music, literature, science, journalism, photography, cinematic arts, medicine, academia, architecture, interior décor, landscaping and the art of doing nothing but socialising. If they were to wear little flags, like Olympic athletes, they would be British, American, Canadian, South African, Australian, Belgian, Dutch, Swiss, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and other flag-less foreigners, such as Parisians. We have been spared the new class of so-called Russian oligarchs which has drowned the Riviera in a sea of vulgarity and which is in any case comprised mostly of Georgians and Ukrainians, rather than real Russians. We have no casinos, discos or call girls, a ‘must’ for the amusement of this class.

Although it is possible to live quietly, as the obituaries describe the later lives of famous people, it must be admitted that some excess of socialising is a price paid for this cornucopia of interesting people. And dinner parties can easily succumb to that deadliest of social diseases – political discussion. Early on I discovered an interjection that pulls up the malefactor.

Does anyone know the real reason behind the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? I will suddenly ask.

Surely it’s eating from the forbidden apple tree, as the Bible says, someone will reply, breaking off from their analysis of the latest regional election results.

Yes… it’s the ultimate metaphor, illustrating the need for social discipline, will add another, who read Sociology at Bristol University.

No! I bark… The real reason is that God caught the couple discussing politics – and as we are here in a place as close to the Garden of Eden as possible, I would urge you all to leave politics alone, rather than risk a bolt of lightning and waking up in an industrial suburb of Lille, or some such place.

It’s amazing how quickly the conversation will turn to the discovery of a new, minor and excellent vintage of rosé.

Viniculturally, our region, unlike the Garden of Eden, comprises two Appellations Controllées or ‘AOCs’ as they are colloquially known: Côtes du Luberon and Côtes du Ventoux. These designations of vintage areas – Appellations d’Origine Controllées – to give them their formal name, are the invention of a winemaker at Chateauneuf du Pape, an area not very far from us, who, in 1935, succeeded in having a law passed, establishing the system for the entire French wine industry. The line between our two AOCs does not run down the exact middle of our region, but follows roughly the D900 – N100 that was between Cavaillon at the west end of the Luberon and Manosque at the eastern extremity. Curiously, the expatriate community is also somewhat divided like the wines, between the Luberon and the Mt Ventoux, a distance of some 30 kilometres. I do not speak of the crowd around St Remy and the Alpilles west of us, which is heavily infiltrated with Parisians, who wear neckties at dinner parties in the summer.

I am often asked, Do you ever meet any French people? A fair, but still curious question, as I am a bit more than half French, fully on my mother’s side and a bit on my father’s side, my Russian great grandfather having married a French lady – and I was born in France. But sixty years of residence in England, and a half- Anglo-Irish, half-English wife, has labelled us as ‘Brits’ in this part of the world. The answer to the question is certainly ‘yes’ but with the qualification that the French we mix with are inevitably cosmopolitan, having usually worked and lived abroad for long periods. The truly local population is peppered with Italian names, as there was an important immigration from the Piedmont region of Italy in the 17th and 16th centuries. So it is not easy to find someone who is absolutely 100% of Frankish descent – and in any case, are we truly in France? The region was, for centuries, partly the very independent County of Provence, and partly a Papal State. The red and yellow flag of Provence flies on most town halls, beside the Tricolour and the circle of stars of the EU – rather like the Confederate flag one used to see in southern American towns before political correctness lowered them.

Although I am still short of a category, it is obvious that this account will be geographically focussed on the area below the north face of the Luberon, as it is here that we lived and, for reasons to be made clear, it is the zone favoured by estate agents, those great arbiters of fashion. I intend an anecdotal evocation, of the sights, sounds and smells of its environment, enhanced by the personal histories, which, together with contemporary eccentricities, characterise our human population. We know that life is circular, like everything else in the universe. We retain an adhesive attachment to the environment in which we grew up, hardly loosened by the decades we might have spent in an entirely different one. In my case, the locale of my formative years happens to be the north shore of Long Island, in New York State, and the long gap between those years and my dotage was spent in England. As the circle of life closes, we regress to childhood, often rather distressingly for those around us. But we find a new environmental attachment emerges, similar in many ways to that of our childhood, and we dream of ‘then’ and ‘now’ with equal clarity. It is not, I fear, a category – but this is the story of that new, but equally entrancing, ‘now’.

I

Those who write history are incapable of recounting the present. – Anon

There is something about stones, in houses and walls "les vielles pierres", as my father always intoned, that demands a historical deviation in any account of the present. Areas characterised by wooden houses, often steeped in historical lore, don’t cry out in quite the same way, even though they may be of great antiquity. Our children remarked that we had moved from one region characterised by stone houses and walls – the Cotswold’s, to another, in the Vaucluse region of Provence, stucco houses being rather more common on the Côte d’Azure. There is the slight difference in climate, of course. Certainly, the old stones of the Cotswolds triggered strong historical reveries in me during our some thirty years sojourn there. I was fascinated by the region’s role in the medieval wool trade, recalled by the Italianate names of our villages: Norlecchio for Northleach, and Buriforte for Burford, as cited in the tales of Florentine textile tycoons. We lived near the old Bibury Race course, situated between that town and Burford. In its palmy days, the Prince Regent attended there for the Bibury Stakes meeting, first run in 1801 and his courtiers slept on floors in surrounding village cottages. The dry stone walls of our countryside seemed to sing of famous runs by the local packs of hounds and the manor houses, several per village, seemed to ring with the laughter of the fat and happy wool merchants’ families.

So it was with the stone houses, walls and villages of the Luberon on first acquaintance. Here must be history in abundance, I thought – a place in which I could immerse myself and indulge my pernicious vice of nostalgia. Many years later, I am still discovering hidden caches of historical treasure. Oddly, I don’t find quite the same interest in local history, or any history, amongst my neighbours. Sadly, history is a much neglected school subject everywhere. Although the Arab population in southern France is a topic of general concern, I was amazed to discover that our beloved daily help (who is actually Breton) had never heard of Charles Martel’s defeat of the invading Arab armies in a field between Tours and Poitiers in AD 732. When I mention historical incidents less ancient and much closer to home, my listener’s eyes tend to glaze over.

I must begin with some etymology. I shall be adding the ‘n’ later in dealing with the creepy-crawlies of our area. Incidentally, I knew a man at Harvard who was dead keen to study the origin of words. He thought he had signed up for the appropriate course, but found himself listening to lectures on insects. In Provençal, the language of the great poet Frederick Mistral, the word for our mountain range is Lébéron, as written on old maps, and some experts in that tongue claim it means lièvre couché or ‘reclining hare’, as hare is lébé. Seen from the right angle, it does look a bit like a hare with ears laid back lying on its tummy. But an older origin comes from the Greek geographer Strabos, in the reign of Augustus, who refers to the area as Lourenious. Later commentators use the word Louerion, and the etymologist Charles Roustaing cites the root Lup, meaning height, followed by a double suffix -air-one as one finds in other names of mountain ranges. It is unlikely that the presence for centuries of a large population of wolves (loups) is connected. The name has changed gender as well as spelling. As recently as the 1920s it was marked on maps as la Luberon, where it is now universally le. More importantly, the pronunciation is seen as a guide to one’s regional legitimacy. Say Luberon, pronouncing the first ‘e’ as in ‘air’, and you will be identified as Parisian. No worse fate can be suffered. Say Luberon, pronouncing the ‘e’ as in oeuf, and you will be considered a proper local.

Call it how you will, the Luberon is a range of high hills, or low mountains, stretching almost exactly east to west for some 50 kilometres. At its widest it is about 5 km. Its highest point, at 1,125 metres, is known as Le Mourre Négre, with other summits ranging between 280 and 976 metres. Maps and tradition divide the range in two: Le Petit Luberon, at the western end and Le Grand Luberon, somewhat longer at the eastern end, the river l’Aigebrun running across in between. The interior is wild, a haven originally for wolves and now, wild boar. It has always constituted an ideal hiding place for heretics, bandits and latterly, resistance fighters. A French lady friend was convinced that the bandits were still extant and she used to cringe, shaking in the back, when we drove home to Bonnieux along the one, twisty road which crosses at the Aigebrun, after dining in Lourmarin on the south side. Le Petit Luberon, west of Apt, is the more fashionable locale and the houses more expensive. Until recently, the main site for the French force de frappe, i.e. nuclear missiles, was located just north east of Apt in the Grand Luberon and this was said to lower prices of properties in that area, presumably for fear of a ‘fat finger’ mistake on the part of a missile firing controller. The base has now been moved – but the prices haven’t. Still located nearby is the main metropolitan base of the Légion Etrangère and one often sees Legionnaires in their white képis at the Apt post office sending part of their salary home to Mum in Bulgaria or the Baltic countries, where the Légion recruits. I once ran into the OC of the base, a charming French Lt Colonel, who noticed the USMC sticker on my car. "On étaient presque dans la salle de bain de Saddam Hussein!" (We were almost in Saddam Hussein’s bathroom), he told me."Et votre President nous a rappeler" (and your President called us back). It is true that the Legion served with distinction in the first Gulf war and were in the forefront of the advance on Damascus, when President Bush decided ‘regime change’ was not an objective, leaving Saddam in power – and leading inevitably to the second Gulf war. Unfortunately, for my friend the Lt Colonel, the French decided to pass on Gulf War phase