We've Always Had Paris--and Provence

by Wells, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780060898618
• ISBN10: 0060898615
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-16
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Patricia Wells, long recognized as the leading American authority on French food, and her husband, Walter, live the life in France that many of us have often fantasized about. After more than a quarter century, they are as close to being accepted as "French" as any non-natives can be. In this delightful memoir they share in two voices their experiences-the good, the bad, and the funny-offering a charming and evocative account of their beloved home and some of the wonderful people they have met along the way. Full of the flavor and color of the couple's adopted country, this tandem memoir reflects on the life that France has made possible for them and explores how living abroad has shaped their relationship. Written in lyrical, sensuous prose and filled with anecdotes, insights, and endearing snapshots of Walter and Patricia over the years, We've Always Had Paris . . . and Provence beautifully conveys the nuances of the French and their culture as only a practiced observer can. Literally a moveable feast to be savored and shared, including more than thirty recipes that will delight readers and cooks alike, the couple's valentine to France and to each other is delicious in every way.

Table of Contents

List of Recipes	p. xiii
Preface: Go for It!	p. 1
Setting Out to Live a Fantasy
Ah, Paris!	p. 15
Learning More Than French	p. 23
Seeing Things	p. 35
Rules, Rules, and More Rules	p. 39
Reality Strikes	p. 49
Making Yourself Up	p. 57
Put Yourself on Vacation	p. 65
LaVie en Rose	p. 77
Going Native
Almost Parisian ("Have You Ever Thought of Wearing Makeup?")	p. 87
Dangerous De-Liaisons	p. 95
A Small Inn Near Avignon	p. 101
Nouvelle Cuisine, Critique Nouvelle	p. 109
You Paid to Learn to Drive Like That?	p. 121
Two for the Road	p. 129
The L'Express Years	p. 135
Mr. Patricia Wells	p. 147
Weighty Matters	p. 157
Our Private Universe
A Farmhouse in Provence	p. 169
Making a House a Home	p. 181
Chantier-Duc	p. 191
Grow, Garden, Grow	p. 201
All About Yves	p. 215
Vineyard Tales	p. 225
World Enough
Right Bank, Left Bank	p. 237
Fame but Not Fortune	p. 251
Clients Fideles	p. 261
Life Lessons from Julia and Joel	p. 269
Another Kind of Interlude	p. 283
Mrs. Walter Wells	p. 289
It's Not About the Marathon	p. 295
You and Me, Babe	p. 307
Captions for Endpapers	p. 315
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

We've Always Had Paris...and Provence
A Scrapbook of Our Life in France

Chapter One

Ah, Paris!

Walter:

Like any fantasy, it was supposed to be ephemeral. It was also supposed to be transcendent. But here I was, stuck in airport traffic and the only question in my head on that dismal January morning was "What have I gotten Patricia and me into?" The taxi was nudging its way into the bumper-locked queue of cars snaking toward Paris, snuffed or so it seemed by the smoky pea soup that often passes as wintertime air, and my abs and glutes knotted in involuntary acknowledgment that our gamble of moving to Paris could be a really bad bet.

A colleague who had also recently left the Times had spent months making his decision, with neat lists of pros and cons and extensive conversations with various newsroom counselors. Far less methodical than he—also younger, with no children and more blitheness of spirit—I had done none of that. My lists were all in my head and consisted mostly of people in New York I would miss and things in Paris I wouldn't have to miss anymore. My colleague was looking for a career opportunity and my interest was mostly in a little adventure—a couple of years at the International Herald Tribune. My friend ended up staying away from the Times for about two years, then he went back. I never did.

Slumped in a battered taxi that was barely moving and blind in the fog, I had just begun learning Paris's best kept secret: its gray, damp weather. January's short, sunless days are especially depressing. All Frenchmen who can afford it (and they save up so they can) seek a sunny antidote to winter's depths either on an Alpine ski slope or on some Club Med beach. Not me. I was headed in the other direction, swept along by what I counted on being adventure and what I now feared might just be naïveté.

Ironically, the fog reinforced one bit of clarity. I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn't appreciated what that really meant. My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel-good time at sidewalk cafés or strolls in the long summer twilight. Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris.

And now fog or not, traffic jam or not, I was about to become a Parisian. And in two weeks, when Patricia had closed up the New York apartment, she would join me. The magic of that idea was powerful. Paris was the ultimate destination in my map of the universe. Even more than New York, Paris offered glamour and excitement as a place to be. And it was exotic. After eight years in New York—and still considering it my true home—I wanted an overseas adventure.

Exoticism aside, the immediate requirement, shelter, had been temporarily solved by Lydie and Wayne Marshall, New York friends who were generously lending us their apartment for several weeks in exchange for fitting some of their furniture into the small shipping container that Patricia had stayed behind to fill with clothes and other basic needs. We left everything else behind to be there when we returned. The Marshalls' little apartment, on the Rue des Entrepreneurs in the 15th arrondissement, provided a place to sleep plus the experience of a quiet working-class neighborhood. When I had described the neighborhood to a colleague at the Times, I had called it "not very interesting." "There is no such thing as an uninteresting quartier in Paris," he corrected me. Maybe not, but it did seem remote from Paris's chic, mythic center.

And so did my next stop, the Herald Tribune offices. After the taxi finally crawled to the 15th and I dropped off my bags, I got onto the Métro and headed for Neuilly. The paper had moved several years earlier from Rue de Berry off the Champs-Elysées. Its new offices, in a plush suburb on the western edge of Paris, are only four Métro stops beyond the Arc de Triomphe, so it wasn't geography that made it feel remote.

I had visited the Trib for the first time four months earlier and had left the job interview feeling very dubious about giving up my staff job at the New York Times for this. Patricia and I were also in love with the idea of being New Yorkers. When I was growing up in the Carolina Piedmont, television had just begun the great cultural leveling that over time washed away a lot of America's regionalism. The excitement and sophistication flowing down the coaxial cable all emanated from New York. I had wanted to be at the wellspring for a long time before I got there.

Another Southerner, Willie Morris, wrote a book in those years called North Toward Home, and the title described a path that had beaconed to me since third grade. Miss Frances Love, our teacher at the little school in McConnells, South Carolina, talked to her unwashed, barefoot charges about her trips to Manhattan. One day she got so excited as she talked of that place far, far from our Faulknerian hamlet that she turned to her blackboard and sketched the three most noteworthy skyscrapers of our day. Her chalk drawings did little credit to the Old World angles of the Flatiron Building, or the elegant symmetry of the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building's Art Deco frou-frou. But the crude chalkboard images stuck in at least one young mind eager for impressions from the outside, and I recalled my early teacher's drawings when I moved to New York and began directly sharing her enthusiasm for the city.

We've Always Had Paris...and Provence
A Scrapbook of Our Life in France. Copyright © by Patricia Wells. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from We've Always Had Paris... and Provence: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France by Patricia Wells, Walter Wells
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