The whole town looked upwards – waiters, drivers, cushion-carriers and no doubt the maestro himself – as the first few drops landed on dusty streets that had been dry for weeks. Quelle catastrophe! Would he sing under an umbrella? How could the orchestra play with damp instruments, the conductor conduct with a dripping baton? For as long as the shower lasted, you could almost feel thousands of people holding their breath.

  But by nine o'clock, the rain had long since gone and the first stars were coming out above the immense wall of the theatre as we joined the scrum of music-lovers and shuffled past the display of Pavarottiana on sale beside the entrance. Compact discs, tapes, posters, T-shirts – all the products of pop merchandising were there apart from I Love Luciano bumper stickers.

  The line kept stopping, as though there were an obstruction beyond the entrance, and when we came through into the theatre I realized why. You stood still – you had to stand still – for a few seconds to take in the view from the front of the stage, the view that Pavarotti would see.

  Thousands and thousands of faces, pale against the darkness, made row after blurred row of semi-circles which disappeared up into the night. From ground level, there was a feeling of reverse vertigo. The angle of the seating seemed impossibly steep, the spectators perched and precarious, on the brink of losing their balance and toppling down into the pit. The sound they made was uncanny – above a whisper, but below normal speech, a continuous, quiet buzz of conversation that was contained and magnified by the stone walls. I felt as though I had stepped into a human beehive.

  We climbed to our seats, 100 feet or so above the stage, exactly opposite a niche high in the wall where a floodlit statue of Augustus Caesar, in his imperial toga, stood with his arm outstretched to the crowd. In his day, the population of Orange had been about 85,000; it is now fewer than 30,000, and most of them seemed to be trying to find a few spare inches of stone to sit on.

  A woman of operatic girth, blowing hard after scaling the steps, collapsed on her cushion next to me and fanned herself with a programme. She was from Orange, round-faced and jolly, and she had been many times to the theatre before. But she had never seen an audience like this, she said. She surveyed the heads and made her calculations: 13,000 people, she was sure of it. Dieu merci that the rain had stopped.

  There was a sudden crack of applause as the members of the orchestra filed on stage and began to tune up, musical fragments that came sharp and clear through the expectant hum of the crowd. With a closing rumble from the kettle drums, the orchestra stopped, and looked, as everyone in the theatre looked, towards the back of the stage. Directly below the statue of Augustus, the central entrance had been draped with black curtains. The rows of heads around us leant forward in unison, as though they'd been rehearsed, and from behind the black curtain came the black and white figure of the conductor.

  Another explosion of hands, and a shrill, ragged chorus of whistles from the seats far behind and above us. Madame next door tut-tutted. This was not a football match. Épouv-antable behaviour. In fact, it was probably in accordance with tradition, since the whistling was coming from the beggars' and prostitutes' seats, not an area where one would expect to hear genteel applause.

  The orchestra played a Donizetti overture, the music floating and dipping in the night air, undistorted and naturally amplified, bathing the theatre in sound. The acoustics were mercilessly revealing. If there were any false notes tonight, most of Orange would know.

  The conductor bowed and walked back towards the curtain, and there was a moment – hardly more than a second – when 13,000 people were silent. And then, to a roar that must have felt like a physical blow, the man himself appeared, black hair, black beard, white tie and tails, a voluminous white handkerchief floating from his left hand. He spread his arms to the crowd. He put his palms together and bowed his head. Pavarotti was ready to sing.

  Up in the beggars' and prostitutes' section, however, they were not ready to stop whistling – piercing, two fingers in the mouth whistles that could have hailed a taxi on the other side of Orange. Madame next door was scandalized. Opera hooligans, she called them. Shhhh, she went. Shhhh, went thousands of others. Renewed whistling from the beggars and prostitutes. Pavarotti stood waiting, head down,

  arms by his side. The conductor's baton was up. To the accompaniment of a few last defiant whistles, they began.

  ‘Quanto è cara, quanto è bella,’ sang Pavarotti. It sounded so easy, the size of his voice reducing the theatre to the size of a room. He stood very still, his weight on his right leg, the heel of his left foot raised slightly from the ground, handkerchief rippling in the breeze – a relaxed, perfectly controlled performance.

  He finished with a ritual that he would repeat throughout the evening: an upward flick of the head at the end of the final note, a vast grin, arms spread wide before bringing his palms together and bowing his head, a handshake with the conductor while the applause thundered down to crash against the back wall.

  He sang again, and before the applause had died away he was escorted by the conductor to the curtained entrance and disappeared. I imagined he had gone to rest his vocal chords and have a restorative spoonful of honey. But Madame next door had a different explanation, and it intrigued me for the next two hours.

  ‘À mon avis,’ she said, ‘he is taking a light dinner between arias.’

  ‘Surely not, Madame,’ I said.

  ‘Shhh. Here is the flautist.’

  At the end of the piece, Madame returned to her theory. Pavarotti, she said, was a big man and a famous gourmet. The performance was long. To sing as he sang, comme un ange, was hard, demanding work. It was altogether logical that he should sustain himself during the periods when he was not on stage. If I were to study the programme, I would see that it might have been constructed to allow for a well-spaced six-course snack to be consumed while the orchestra diverted the audience. Voilà!

  I looked at the programme, and I had to admit that Madame had a point. It was entirely possible, and reading between the arias, a menu appeared:

  DONIZETTI

  (Insalata di carciofi)

  CILEA

  (Zuppa di fagioli alla Toscana)

  ENTRACTE

  (Sogliole alla Veneziana)

  PUCCINI

  (Tonnelini con funghi e piselli)

  VERDI

  (Formaggi)

  MASSENET

  (Granita di limone)

  ENCORE

  (Caffè e grappa)

  There was another, more visible sign that the singing supper might not be just a figment of Madame's imagination. Like everyone else, I had assumed that the white square draped elegantly through the fingers of Pavarotti's left hand was a handkerchief. But it was larger than a handkerchief, much larger. I mentioned it to Madame, and she nodded.

  ‘Évidemment,’ she said, ‘c'est une serviette.’ Having proved her case, she settled back to enjoy the rest of the concert.

  Pavarotti was unforgettable, not only for his singing but for the way in which he played to the audience, risking the occasional vocal departure from the score, patting the conductor on the cheek when it came off, making his exits and entrances with faultless timing. After one of his periods behind the curtain, he returned wearing a long blue scarf wrapped round his neck and reaching to his waist – against the cool night air, or so I thought.

  Madame, of course, knew better. He has had a small accident with some sauce, she said, and the scarf is there to conceal the spots on his white waistcoat. Isn't he divine?

  The official programme ended, but the orchestra lingered on. From the beggars' and prostitutes' section came an insistent chant – Ver-di! Ver-di! Ver-di! – and this time it spread through the crowd until Pavarotti emerged to give us a second helping of encores: Nessun Dorma,O Sole Mio, rapture in the audience, bows from the orchestra, one last salute from the star and then it was over.

  It took us half an hour to clear the exit, and as we came out we saw two enormous Mercedes pulling away from the theatre. ‘I bet that's him,’ said Christopher. ‘I wonder where he's going to have dinner.’ He wasn't to know, because he hadn't been sitting next to Madame, what had been going on behind the black curtain. Thirteen thousand people had been to dinner with Pavarotti without realizing it. I hope he comes to Orange again, and I hope that next time they print the menu in the programme.

  15

  A Pastis Lesson

  Tin tables and scuffed wicker chairs are set out under the shade of massive plane trees. It is close to noon, and the motes of dust kicked up by an old man's canvas boots as he shuffles across the square hang for a long moment in the air, sharply defined in the glare of the sun. The café waiter looks up from his copy of L'Équipe and saunters out to take your order.

  He comes back with a small glass, maybe a quarter full if he's been generous, and a beaded carafe of water. The glass turns cloudy as you fill it up, a colour somewhere between yellow and misty grey, and there is the sharp, sweet smell of aniseed.

  Santé. You are drinking pastis, the milk of Provence.

  For me, the most powerful ingredient in pastis is not aniseed or alcohol, but ambiance, and that dictates how and where it should be drunk. I cannot imagine drinking it in a hurry. I cannot imagine drinking it in a pub in Fulham, a bar in New York, or anywhere that requires its customers to wear socks. It wouldn't taste the same. There has to be heat and sunlight and the illusion that the clock has stopped. I have to be in Provence.

  Before moving here, I had always thought of pastis as a commodity, a French national asset made by two giant institutions. There was Pernod, there was Ricard, and that was it.

  Then I started to come across others – Casanis, Janot, Granier – and I wondered how many different marques there were. I counted five in one bar, seven in another. Every Provencal I asked was, of course, an expert. Each of them gave me a different, emphatic and probably inaccurate answer, complete with disparaging remarks about the brands that he personally wouldn't give to his mother-in-law.

  It was only by chance that I found a professor of pastis, and since he also happens to be a very good chef, attending class was no hardship.

  Michel Bosc was born near Avignon and emigrated to Cabrières, a few miles away. For twelve years now, he has run a restaurant in the village, Le Bistrot à Michel, and each year he has put his profits back into the business. He has added a large terrace, expanded the kitchens, put in four bedrooms for over-tired or over-indulged customers, and generally turned chez Michel into a comfortable, bustling place.

  But despite all the improvements, and the occasional outbreaks of rampant chic among the summer clientele, one thing hasn't changed. The bar at the front of the restaurant is still the village bar. Every evening there will be half a dozen men with burnt faces and work clothes who have dropped in, not to eat, but to argue about boules over a couple of drinks. And the drinks are invariably pastis.

  We arrived one evening to find Michel behind the bar, presiding over an informal dégustation. Seven or eight different brands were being put through their paces by the local enthusiasts, some of them brands I had never seen.

  A pastis tasting is not the hushed, almost religious ritual that you might find in the cellars of Bordeaux or Burgundy, and Michel had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the smacking of lips and the banging of glasses on the bar.

  ‘Try this,’ he said. ‘It's just like mother used to make. It comes from Forcalquier.’ He slid a glass across the bar and topped it up from a sweating metal jug rattling with ice cubes.

  I sipped. This is what mother used to make? Two or three of these and I'd be lucky to make it upstairs to one of the bedrooms on my hands and knees. I said it seemed strong, and Michel showed me the bottle: 45 degrees of alcohol, stronger than brandy, but not above the legal limit for pastis, and positively mild in comparison with one that Michel had once been given. Two of those, he said, would make a man fall straight backwards with a smile on his face, plof! But it was something special, that one, and I gathered from Michel's half-wink that it was not altogether legal.

  He left the bar suddenly, as if he'd remembered a soufflé in the oven, and came back with some objects that he put in front of me on the bar.

  ‘Do you know what those are?’

  There was a tall, spiral-patterned glass on a short, thick stem; a smaller, chunky glass, as narrow as a thimble and twice as high; and what looked like a flattened tin spoon decorated with symmetrical rows of perforations. On the stem just behind the flat head was U-shaped kink.

  ‘This place used to be a café long before I took it over,’ said Michel. ‘I found these when we were knocking through a wall. You've never seen them before?’

  I had no idea what they were.

  ‘In the old days, all the cafés had them. They're for absinthe.’ He curled an index finger round the end of his nose and twisted, the gesture for drunkenness. He picked up the smaller of the two glasses. ‘This is the dosette, the old measure for absinthe.’ It was solid and tactile, and felt as heavy as a slug of lead when he passed it to me. He took the other glass and balanced the spoon on top of it, the kink in the stem fitting snugly over the rim.

  ‘Bon. On here' – he tapped the blade of the spoon – ‘you put sugar. Then you pour water over the sugar and it drips through the holes and into the absinthe. At the end of the last century, this was a drink very much à la mode.’

  Absinthe, so Michel told me, was a green liqueur originally distilled from wine and the wormwood plant. Very bitter, stimulating and hallucinogenic, addictive and dangerous. It was nearly 70 degrees of alcohol, and could cause blindness, epilepsy and insanity. Under its influence, Van Gogh is said to have cut off his own ear, and Verlaine to have shot Rimbaud. It gave its name to a particular disease – absinthisme – and the addict would quite often ‘casser sa pipe' and die. For this reason, it was made illegal in 1915.

  One man who would not have been pleased to see it go

  was Jules Pernod, who had an absinthe factory at Montfavet, near Avignon. But he adapted to the times by changing his production over to a drink based on the legally authorized anis. It was an immediate success, with the considerable advantage that customers would live to come back for more.

  ‘So you see,’ said Michel, ‘commercial pastis was born in Avignon, like me. Try another one.’

  He took a bottle of Granier from the shelf, and I was able to say that I had the same brand at home. Granier, ‘Mon pastis' as it says on the label, is made in Cavaillon. It has a more gentle colour than Pernod's rather fierce greenish tinge, and I find it a softer drink. Also, I'm inclined to support local endeavours whenever they taste good.

  The Granier went down and I was still standing up. To continue my first lesson, Michel said, it was necessary to try another, a grande marque, so that I could make a considered judgement across a range of slight variations in taste and colour. He gave me a Ricard.

  By this time, it was becoming rather difficult to maintain a detached and scholarly attitude to the comparison of one pastis against another. I liked them all – clean-tasting, smooth and insidious. One might have had a drop more licorice than the rest, but the palate develops a certain numbness after a few highly flavoured and highly alcoholic shots. It's a pleasant numbness, and it stimulates a roaring appetite, but any traces of critical appraisal I might have started with had vanished somewhere between the second and third glasses. As a pastis connoisseur, I was hopeless. Happy and hungry, but hopeless.

  ‘How was the Ricard?’ asked Michel. I said that the Ricard was fine, but perhaps I had absorbed enough education for one night.

  For days afterwards, I kept scribbling down questions that I wanted to ask Michel. I found it curious, for instance, that the word was so well known and had such strong associations, and yet its origins seemed as cloudy as the drink itself. Who had invented pastis before Pernod had taken it over? Why was it so firmly rooted in Provence, rather than Burgundy or the Loire? I went back to the professor.

  Whenever I have asked a Provencal about Provence – whether about climate, food, history, the habits of animals or the oddities of humans – I have never been short of answers. The Provencal loves to instruct, usually with a great deal of personal embroidery, and preferably around a table. And so it was this time. Michel arranged a lunch, on the one day of the week when his restaurant is normally closed, with a few friends he described as ‘hommes responsables’ who would be happy to lead me down the path of knowledge.

  Eighteen of us gathered under the big white canvas umbrella in Michel's courtyard, and I was introduced to a blur of faces and names and descriptions: a government official from Avignon, a wine grower from Carpentras, two executives from Ricard, some stalwarts from Cabrières. There was even a man wearing a tie, but he slipped it off after five minutes and hung it in a noose over a drinks trolley. That was the beginning and the end of any formality.

  Most of the men shared Michel's passion for boules, and the wine grower from Carpentras had brought with him a few cases of his special cuvée, with labels showing a game in progress. While the rosé was being chilled and the red uncorked, there was a generous dispensation of the sporting drink and the boules-player's standby, le vrai pastis de Marseille, le pastis Ricard.

  Born in 1909 and, according to one of his executives, still looking for trouble, Paul Ricard's success is a classic case of energetic and intelligent exploitation. His father was a wine merchant, and young Paul's work took him into the bars and bistrots of Marseille. In those days, the laws of concoction were not stringent, and many bars made their own pastis. Ricard decided to make his, but he added an ingredient that the others lacked, which was a genius for promotion. Le vrai pastis de Marseille may not have been very different from the others, but it was good, and made better by Ricard's talent for marketing. It was not long before his pastis was the most popular pastis, at least in Marseille.