Friends in Provence

Salernernes (Var): one side of the town square

Salernes is a sizeable village in the middle of the Var about fifteen miles west of Draguignan, perhaps fifty miles above St.-Tropez on the coast and twenty-five or so south of the Regional Park of Verdon, with its gorges and waterways.  It is a pleasant, active village, but by no means remarkable or “touristy”.  It was there that Joan and I spent our cloudless week away from Princeton.  We were staying at the country house of our friend Andrew, who has been in our lives since the late 1950s, when we were all at Oxford together.  We were a party of eight.  Andrew’s friend Lee, like Andrew himself recently widowed, was both an old work colleague and long-time family friend.  She is a witty lady of considerable professional accomplishment, with a house on the Riviera in nearby Grasse.  Getting to know her a bit more deeply was one of the pleasures of the week.  There were two other couples.  The husbands had been my classmates at Jesus College, though I had really known only one of them at the time.  I remember him as a brilliant mathematician, though I now learned he actually took his degree in physics.  His wife, Leslie, we had met on a previous occasion; in her professional life in England, she has been deeply involved with issues of domestic violence, and was a mine of information and informed opinion about the social challenges in today’s Britain,

sun-drenched breakfast, with our host on the right

Andrew’s French house I would describe as magnificent but not grand.  Beginning as a rather modest farmer’s cottage a couple of hundred years back, it has been expanded, widened, and heightened by succeeding generations into a sprawling elegance of bedrooms adequate for a large family and many friends..  To my eye it is beautifully proportioned and architecturally unified.  There is a great old farm kitchen, and a newer large “living room”, rarely used, with a huge hearth.  There are splendid amenities for the young and the active: a swimming pool and a tennis court.  But given the superb early autumn weather of Provence, we practically lived al fresco on the paved patio that runs along the whole house front, and looks down on an ever-changing view of a steep drop-off, with near and less near hills behind it.  You are on the edge of the village, but the experience is of deep and usually silent country.  There were three main communal activities: talking, reading, and eating.  Meals required a minimum of two hours each.  Breakfasts were pure indulgence: buttery croissants still warm from the baker’s, and tartines made from crispy fresh baguettes and sinful French preserves.  The major meals: abundant fresh vegetables, a variety of transgressive patés, high quality cuts of meat and fish.  Any cheese you could think of, all accompanied, if you wished, by the fine but apparently “unpretentious” local wines.  I would describe these days as “blissful,” were it not for the fact that the medical difficulties I brought with me from America, though ameliorated, did not vanish and in fact considerably constrained my activities.

view from the breakfast table

Conversation was incessant, and ranged in style from the old college bull session to the discontinuous dialog of a Chekov play aspiring to be Plato’s Symposium.  While politics was by no means  our only topic, it inevitably loomed large during that particular week.  It was a huge relief to me, as an American, that among this group of Brits the peculiarities of Trump ran a distant second to the trials and tribulations of the British Parliament and the new Prime Minister.  But the idea that the British intelligentsia are uniformly appalled by the results of their Referendum—theological bedrock in the American liberal press—was knocked in the head by this group, who held diverse opinions with (I believe) a majority of Leavers.  There was, however, nearly perfect transatlantic agreement on the inadequacy of our elected legislators.

'This lime-tree bower, my prison'

Andrew has a well-stocked summer-house library—mainly modern history and thousand-page biographies, but also some classic fiction.  He himself was marching rapidly through Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.  His collection of Antony Beevor’s splendid military histories seems nearly complete, and I grazed happily on the one I had not yet read—The Ardennes.  It was there that my Uncle Wayne had had a tank blown out from under him.  But I had brought reading of my own—more of the Roman history and historical fiction discussed in a recent post.  I am still hot on the trail of Cicero—the “historical” Cicero and the imagined Cicero, to the degree there is any difference between the two.

There are friendships, and then there are friendships.  How many of them date back six decades, sometimes dormant for years at a time yet continuing to mature across vast distances of space and experience, of long marriage, of professional striving, of the intense demands and vicissitudes of raising a family?  The answer to that is: precious few. Boosting my morale was not our host’s only motive in setting up this house party, but it was manifestly a principal one.  That was a humbling realization.  And with it I suddenly realized the relevance of my accidental reading program to the meditation on friendship that occupied so many of my thoughts during the week.  For Cicero wrote a famous philosophical dialogue on the question of friendship (Lælius, 706/44 BC) shortly before his death.  It is in fact the only work of Cicero I have studied carefully or written about in the scholarly press.   In the twelfth century is was given a brilliant Christian “update” by one of my gurus, Ælred of Rievaulx, a beautiful soul and a master of Latin hardly less formidable than Cicero himself.  This revision—stressing spiritual friendship—was in turn translated into French by Jean de Meun, who also used its ideas with great subtlety in the Roman de la Rose.  I had written about all this years before.

Cicero defines friendship as “nothing else than perfect mental accord concerning all things divine and human, shared in benevolence and tenderness.”*  He regarded it as the second greatest gift of the divine powers—wisdom alone holding a higher place.  I had lots of time to think about all this on the flight home.  We have happily entered the phase of self-coddling and had booked business-class flights.  One really could stretch out and relax, provided only that you could first figure out the obscure hieroglyphic symbols of the control panel of the lounge beds—no mean feat.  Perhaps classical wisdom will continue to elude me.  But classical friendship I have indeed known.

*Est autem amicitia nihil aliud, nisi omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate summa consensio.