The Little French Village of Book Lovers

Marie-Jeanne’s cradle stood under a broad-canopied olive tree some people claimed was over eight hundred years old, something the tree would neither confirm nor deny (at its age, one did not comment on how old one was).

She was giggling at the silvery rustling of the leaves, which were smiling in the gentle Pontias breeze. The wind was a local phenomenon, a last taste of magic in a century seemingly shorn of it. It was the steady breath of the four mountains—Essaillon, Garde Grosse, Saint Jaume, and Vaux—that shielded the town of Nyons like sentinels. The mountains breathed out in the morning, fi lling the valley of the river Eygues with the scent of herbs and the cool air of upland nights, always at the same time of day for precisely half an hour, and inhaled again after sundown every evening. This cool stream of air seemed to rise in the calanques and salty bays of the distant sea. It brought with it fragrances of lavender and mint and drove the searing heat from the day.

From the large kitchen—the main living space in every mazet in the Drôme Provençale, a place for cooking, chatting, staying silent, being born, and waiting for the end to come— Aimée was able to keep an eye on her granddaughter’s cradle as she shuttled back and forth between the woodfi red stove and the table.

Aimée placed sliced potatoes, black Tanche olives, eggplants, and fresh pink garlic in a well-worn fluted baking tin; drizzled the vegetables with silky, hay- green olive oil; and scooped chunks of the local fromagerie’s fresh goat cheese from a clay dish. Last, she rubbed some sprigs of lime-scented wild thyme she’d picked the previous evening between her fingers.

A pan of milk was cooling on the windowsill. It would soon be time. Marie-Jeanne was quite capable of making her feelings known if her grandmother was too slow getting lunch ready.

Every time Aimée turned her face toward her granddaughter,her thousand sharp wrinkles softened into a far younger complexion.

The proud old olive tree went on singing its chanson to the little girl under its boughs. It hummed the secret song of the cicadas—your light makes me sing. It tickled her nose and cheeks with a dappling of shadows and delighted in the tiny fingers clutching at the breeze and in the waves of gurgling, heartfelt laughter issuing from her tummy.

Marie-Jeanne and Aimée. Each meant the world to the other.

It was love.

I watched Aimée Claudel, whom I had last touched many years ago, but she couldn’t see me. Everyone knows me, but none can see me. I’m that thing you call love.

I came to Marie-Jeanne’s grandmother early in her life.

She was barely thirteen at the time. It was summertime then, too—the record-breaking summer of 1911. Life took place outdoors. For weeks on end, this bright land boiled under the sun. After laboring since before sunrise, people whiled away the evening hours in blissful idleness. That summer was sweet and redolent with the melodies and whisperings of the leaves of the olive trees. The grasshoppers chirped their silvery tunes. And oh, the soft fall of the figs at night! The whole summer was like a dazzling fever.

I placed my burden on so many people that summer. How heavily I was to weigh on them only a few years later.

Aimée fell in love with a boy who used to sing as he worked in her father’s milking parlor. First he became a soldier; in the Great War he became a man. He didn’t return for many years and when he did, his boyish nature had retreated deep inside him, along with all his songs and all his colorful cheer. The mountains were so silent, but the roaring inside him was so loud. As his wife, Aimée spent the rest of her life exhuming his buried soul. She sang soft lullabies to him in the night when he screamed, chased the dullness from his eyes with patience, and fed him hot onion soup in the evenings when he drank. In the quiet, endless winter nights she warmed her husband’s body with her bare skin to calm his incessant shivering. Her skin became softer and softer over the years, ever thinner, even as it burst with emotions and energy and cares. With life itself.

Back in the summer of 1911 I touched Aimée’s skin, running my hands down her body from top to toe. She was naked and had just bathed in the Eygues’s shimmering turquoise waters as they fl owed toward the calm and mighty Rhône. She was beautiful, her straight back a symbol of her personality and fortitude, and she had a stout, tightly coiled soul. I poured a great deal of myself into her, maybe too much. Maybe I was in love with her—lovers pay no heed to how much they give, which is usually more than is desired. This was partly why I returned to see her, on the day the events you are going to hear about took place.