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.
