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LOURMARIN, France -- Cue to a balmy autumn morning in the heart of Peter Mayle's Provence. Village bells peal. Pigeons murmur. Well-heeled weekenders, cradling Shanghai Art Museum tote bags and just-baked baguettes, amble down an improbably immaculate cobblestone street.
They pass ivy-covered limestone walls. Shutters painted in a dulcet shade of blue coveted by the likes of Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn. And a sidewalk table at the Cafe Gaby -- where Mayle, the British expat whose literary valentines have helped popularize this Hollywood back-lot-worthy setting, sips a glass of local rose and muses about the consequences of fame.
A Year in Provence, Mayle's best-selling 1989 memoir about renovating a 200-year-old farmhouse in southeastern France's Luberon region of Provence, made the former advertising executive so synonymous with the area that starry-eyed acolytes showed up, unannounced and uninvited, at his front door (and, in one memorable instance, inside his sitting room). More than 5 million copies, 30 translations and a BBC miniseries later, his affection for lavender fields and languid lunches continues unabated -- and so does his influence.
This week marks the launch of Mayle's 11th book set in his adopted homeland. Provence A-Z (Knopf, $25) is an anecdotal encyclopedia covering everything from aioli, a garlic-infused "mayonnaise with guts," to zingue-zingue-zoun, a Provencal word that describes the sound of a violin.
And Nov. 10, the author's pal and part-time neighbor Ridley Scott hits theaters with A Good Year, a film based on the 2004 Mayle novel about a London trader (played by Russell Crowe) who winds up inheriting his estranged uncle's Luberon chateau and vineyard.
Just as some jaded travelers accuse Mayle of mining familiar ground and turning Provence into an over-hyped caricature of brightly glazed ceramic pitchers and lavender sachets, critics have skewered the celluloid version of A Good Year for sticky nostalgia and a surfeit of cultural stereotypes. ("Remember," a saucy cafe owner tells Crowe's character, "in France, the customer is always wrong.")
But odds are good that the new book and movie will be like calissons (a Provencal almond-paste sweet) for Mayle's legions of fans.
They'll salivate over his ode to banon, a creamy Provencal goat cheese that "is usually -- and accurately -- described as unctuous." They'll swoon over scenes of sun-dappled grapes near the medieval hilltop villages of Bonnieux and Lacoste, and sigh at the "scratchy, instantly evocative" chorus of cicadas on a warm September afternoon. They'll wish they were the tourists sitting at a linen-draped table near the central fountain in Gordes, where the century-old Renaissance cafe, a former haunt of painter Marc Chagall, stands in for the one owned by Crowe's love interest.
And if some disgruntled locals worry that another round of pilgrimages will translate to steeper real estate prices and more jabbing elbows at the weekly markets, 67-year-old Mayle is not among them.
After all, he points out, outsiders have been drawn to the sun and scenery of Provence for 2,000 years -- and he's just one in a long line of artists and writers who have been besotted by the area's charms, from Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Vincent Van Gogh to Albert Camus (who is buried in Lourmarin), Virginia Woolf and novelist Marcel Pagnol (Jean de Florette). The northern part of the Luberon, named for the low mountain range that extends about 35 miles east of Avignon, was dubbed "Saint-Germain Sud" for its appeal to rich Left Bank intellectuals (Paris' Boulevard Saint-Germain has a thriving cafe society) long before Mayle discovered it.
"People have been complaining about tourism in Provence for at least 50 years, and my view is that the tourist is a very maligned creature," says Mayle, casually dapper in sockless Gucci loafers and white Ralph Lauren shirt that shows off a tan earned by tending the olive groves on his nearby estate.
As he admits in Provence A-Z, "the postcard villages do have souvenir shops, and in season the streets and markets are crowded." That season now extends well past the traditional July and August, thanks in part to an influx of second-home owners who whisk down from Paris on the high-speed TGV train and stay in touch by Wi-Fi in their 19th-century pieds-a-terre.
But, he continues, a 10-minute drive from well-trammeled hamlets leads to cedar forests where local families spend weekend afternoons hunting for mushrooms, and open countryside still unsullied by the "huge hotels, spas and golf courses" that have become monuments to mass tourism.
Case in point: The road that corkscrews north through the Luberon hills from Lourmarin to Bonnieux branches off to a secluded 19th-century manor house that has been transformed into one of Mayle's favorite restaurants. At Auberge de l'Aiguebrun, the welcoming committee includes a pet sanglier (wild boar) on the front lawn and a purring black cat who appears to have taken up permanent residence atop the front desk.
"It's so frustrating," adds Mayle. "People say, 'Oh, you're ruining Provence.' And I say, 'Where am I ruining it, how am I ruining it, and who am I ruining it for?' And then their argument dries up, because they don't know."
Mayle lent a bit of weight to that argument when he and his wife fled their Menerbes farmhouse to take up temporary residence in New York's Hamptons. They'd been rattled by overly eager fans who found their home through its description in A Year in Provence, and by a ubiquitous posse of British reporters who carped that Mayle "couldn't leave the house because I was so detested by the French." (For the record, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor a few years ago.)
But after four years away from the Luberon, Mayle missed what he describes in 2000's Encore Provence as the "moments that make up the daily texture of life" -- market stalls "shaded by ancient plane trees or tucked up against even older stone walls," streets "clogged with examples of imaginative and illegal parking," and an "atmosphere of good humor, despite considerable social difficulties, high unemployment and the financial guillotine of French income tax."
He returned to resume his role as "permanent tourist," with more circumspection (he refers to his second home as "somewhere between Avignon and Aix") and a new appreciation for those who have followed him to the South of France.
"Without tourism, I think you'd see a lot less care in the maintenance of buildings, churches and chateaux. And most important, I don't think you'd see people bothering to open businesses down here," says Mayle. "The good that tourists do and bring far outweighs the bad."
Muriel Pillods and husband Didier Andreis, the Luberon builder whom Mayle immortalized in A Year in Provence as "half man, half forklift truck," can attest to that.
The Menerbes couple opened their three-room guesthouse, Les Pereilles, nine years after Mayle published his first memoir. But nearly every morning that first year or so, Pillods would find a well-thumbed copy by the side of her guests' beds. "It was almost like a passport," she marvels.
It still is at Roussillon's La Maison Tacchella bookstore, housed in a 200-year-old building in a town whose nearby ocher deposits have been prized since Roman times. The bookstore's four floors are crammed with a wide range of titles in four languages, but proprietor Nicole de Ferrare says Mayle's classic remains the most requested, accounting for a dozen or more sales a week.
That cachet had been a deterrent rather than a draw for Portsmouth, N.H.-based Francophile Towny Manfull. He and his wife, Susan, prided themselves on seeking out offbeat places, and resisted joining the Mayle addicts flocking to Provence "like a stampede of sangliers." They caved nearly a decade ago, returning so often that they now live part time in Lourmarin, a few steps from the Cafe Gaby.
"The joy of Provence is that, despite being so well known, there isn't a pandering to tourism," says Manfull. "It gets under your skin. We were reluctant travelers, but not reluctant lovers."
Meanwhile, the ad man whose own retreat from the rat race inspired millions of others cherishes the enduring fact that, as he wrote in A Good Year, there is "nowhere else in the world where one can keep busy doing so little, yet enjoy it so much."
"We've moved around quite a bit in our lives, and I can't imagine a better place to do what I do," Mayle says.
"The romantic feelings have been replaced by a love based on experience. I don't see any need to discover Siberia. There's a lot left to discover here, and one has the extra advantage of eating well."
And with that, Mayle drains his glass and checks his watch: It's time for lunch.
E-mail lbly@usatoday.com
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