Rose Cantine

Wondering whether your favorite Provençal village has succumbed to “Quaint Village Plague”? Here are a few signs:

Brocante (flea markets) and expensive antique shops: when rich foreigners move into their bucolic Provence farmhouses, the first thing they do is to dress up their house in the “authentic” style. This is the signal for the locals to sell all of their junk at the local brocante. Nicer junk gets sold at antique shops at atmospheric prices that match the recently purchased residences.

Art galleries with safe, pretty art: decorative art that does not disturb the visitors’ absence of thought, cute little paintings that resemble - preferably one of the well-known artists such as Matisse, Cocteau, Braque, Cezanne and Monet - to emphasize the owner’s “taste”.

An unnaturally large number of restaurants and hotels: if you take a village with 200 residents (excluding the imports) and discover that there are 45 restaurants and 30 hotels, whom do you suppose they are trying to serve?

Fat Americans in little shorts and white running shoes: enough said.

Shops selling chicly packaged produits artisanal (honey, jams, mustards, tapenades, salt, olive oil): the real stuff (sold to the locals) comes in glass jars with a plain label bearing the farmer’s (and his wife’s) names. The stuff they sell to tourists looks like they came from the Comme des Garçons shop in Paris. The price difference is astronomical even though the difference in quality is not significant.

Violin concertos and Bach cantatas: summer in the Provence is a feast (or a pestilence) of classical music concerts targeted at foreign visitors and Parisians who have second homes in the area. Pierre Cardin recently renovated the Marquis de Sade’s ruined castle in Lacoste to stage a very expensive opera series every summer, which, not coincidentally is priced way out of the reach of the locals.

Fancy American schools taking over a village: nothing wrong with an American institution of higher education restoring a hamlet and turning it into a temporary sojourn for wealthy girls to prepare them for a life of art collecting and auction-going. But think about the amenities in the area — will you get able to eat local food for a decent price?

And finally, SUVs in the town square’s parking lot: undaunted by the narrow streets in most of these villages that date back to Roman times, the SUV owners - many of them from places that really need the SUV (i.e. Paris and London) - get their thrills by watching just how closely they can escape scratching the sides of their precious vehicles. Always fun to see unless you are about to be crushed between one of these monsters and a 12th century wall.