But electronically processed croaking? It was eccentric, certainly, but it lacked the fine untrammelled lunacy of the living toad choir. As for a Common Market anthem, I had serious doubts. If the bureaucrats in Brussels could take years to reach agreement on simple matters like the colour of a passport and the acceptable bacteria count in yogurt, what hope was there of consensus on a tune, let alone a tune sung by toads? What would Mrs Thatcher say?

  In fact, I knew what Mrs Thatcher would say – ‘They must be British toads' – but I didn't want to mingle politics with art, and so I just asked the obvious question.

  Why use toads?

  Monsieur Salques looked at me as though I was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it has never been done.’

  Of course.

  During the months of spring and early summer, I often thought of going back to see how Monsieur Salques and his toads were getting on, but I decided to wait until July, when the concerto bufo would have been recorded. With luck, I might also hear the anthem of the Common Market.

  But when I arrived at the house, there was no Monsieur Salques. A woman with a face like a walnut opened the door, clutching the business end of a vacuum cleaner in her other hand.

  Was Monsieur at home? The woman backed into the house and turned off the vacuum cleaner.

  Non. He has departed for Paris. After a pause, she added: for the celebrations of the Bicentenaire.

  Then he will have taken his music?

  That I cannot say. I am the housekeeper.

  I didn't want to waste the trip entirely, so I asked if I could see the toads.

  Non. They are tired. Monsieur Salques has said they must not be disturbed.

  Thank you, Madame.

  De rien, Monsieur.

  In the days leading up to July 14th, the papers filled with news of the preparations in Paris – the floats, the fireworks, the visiting heads of state, Catherine Deneuve's wardrobe – but nowhere could I find any mention, even in the culture sections, of the singing toads. Bastille Day came and went without a single croak. I knew he should have done it live.

  3

  Boy

  My wife first saw him on the road into Ménerbes. He was walking along beside a man whose neat, clean clothes contrasted sharply with his own disreputable appearance; a filthy rug hung over a framework of bones. And yet, despite the matted coat and burr-encrusted head, it was obvious that this dog was one of a breed peculiar to France, a species of rough-haired pointer known officially as the Griffon Korthals. Beneath that shabby exterior lurked a chien de race.

  One of our dogs was a Korthals, but they are not often seen in Provence, and so my wife stopped the car to talk to a fellow owner. What a coincidence it was, she said, that she had one of the same unusual breed.

  The man looked down at the dog, who had paused to take a dust bath, and stepped backwards to distance himself from the tangle of legs and ears that was squirming in the ditch.

  ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘he accompanies me, but he is not my dog. We met on the road. I don't know who he belongs to.’

  When my wife returned from the village and told me about the dog, I should have seen trouble coming. Dogs are to her what mink coats are to other women; she would like a house full of them. We already had two, and I thought that was quite enough. She agreed, although without conviction, and during the next few days I noticed that she kept looking hopefully down to the road to see if the apparition was still in the neighbourhood.

  It would probably have ended there if a friend hadn't called from the village to tell us that a dog just like one of ours was spending every day outside the épicerie, drawn by the scent of hams and home-made pâtés. Each night he disappeared. Nobody in the village knew his owner. Perhaps he was lost.

  My wife had a crise de chien. She had found out that lost or abandoned dogs are kept by the Société Protectrice des Animaux (the French RSPCA) for less than a week. If unclaimed, they are put down. How could we let this happen to any dog, let alone a nobly-born creature of undoubted pedigree?

  I telephoned the SPA, and drew a blank. My wife began to spend several hours a day in the village on the pretext of buying a loaf of bread, but the dog had vanished. When I said that he had obviously gone back home, my wife looked at me as though I had suggested roasting a baby for dinner. I telephoned the SPA again.

  Two weeks passed without sight of the dog. My wife moped, and the man at the SPA became bored with our daily calls. And then our contact at the épicerie came up with some hard news: the dog was living in the forest outside the house of one of her customers, who was giving him scraps and letting him sleep on the terrace.

  I have rarely seen a woman move so quickly. Within half an hour, my wife was coming back up the drive with a smile visible from fifty yards away. Next to her in the car I could see the enormous shaggy head of her passenger. She got out of the car, still beaming.

  ‘He must be starving,’ she said. ‘He's eaten his seat belt. Isn't he wonderful?’

  The dog was coaxed from his seat and stood there wagging everything. He looked frightful – an unsanitary fur-ball the size of an Alsatian, with a garnish of twigs and leaves entwined in his knotted coat, bones protruding from his body and an immense brown nose poking through the undergrowth of his moustache. He lifted his leg against the side of the car and kicked up the gravel with his paws before lying down on his stomach, back legs stretched out behind him and six inches of pink tongue, speckled with fragments of seat belt, lolling from his mouth.

  ‘Isn't he wonderful?’ my wife said again.

  I held out my hand to him. He got up, took my wrist in his jaws and started to pull me into the courtyard. He had very impressive teeth.

  ‘There you are. He likes you.’

  I asked if we could offer him something else to eat, and retrieved my dented wrist. He emptied a large bowl of dog food in three gulps, drank noisily from a bucket of water and wiped his whiskers by hurling himself on the grass. Our two bitches didn't know what to make of him, and neither did I.

  ‘Poor thing,’ said my wife. ‘We'll have to take him to the vet, and get him clipped.’

  There are moments in every marriage when it is futile to argue. I made an appointment with Madame Hélène, toilettage de chiens, for that afternoon, since no respectable vet would touch him in his current state. Madame Héléne, I hoped, would be used to the grooming problems of country dogs.

  She was very brave about it after her initial shock. Her other client, a miniature apricot-coloured poodle, whimpered and tried to hide in a magazine rack.

  ‘Perhaps it would be best,’ she said, ‘if I attended to him first. He is very highly perfumed, n'est-ce pas? Where has he been?’

  ‘I think in the forest.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Madame Hélène wrinkled her nose, and put on a pair of rubber gloves. ‘Can you come back in an hour?’

  I bought a flea collar, and stopped for a beer in the café at Robion while I tried to come to terms with the prospect of being a three-dog family. There was, of course, always the chance that the previous owner could be found, and then I would have only two dogs and a distraught wife. But in any case, it was not a choice I could make. If there was a canine guardian angel, he would decide. I hoped he was paying attention.

  The dog was tethered to a tree in Madame Hélène's garden when I got back, wriggling with pleasure as I came through the gate. He had been clipped down to stubble, making his head look even bigger and his bones even more

  prominent. The only part of him that had escaped severe pruning was his stumpy tail, which had a whiskery fringe trimmed to a modified pom-pom. He looked mad and extraordinary, like a child's drawing of a stick dog, but at least he smelled clean.

  He was thrilled to be back in the car, and sat bolt upright on the seat, leaning over from time to time for a tentative nibble at my wrist and making small humming noises that I assumed were signs of contentment.

  In fact, they must have been hunger, because he fell on the meal that was waiting for him at home, putting one foot on the empty bowl to keep it still while he tried to lick off the enamel. My wife watched him with the expression most women reserve for well-behaved and intelligent children. I steeled myself, and said that we must start thinking about finding his owner.

  The discussion continued over dinner, with the dog asleep under the table on my wife's feet, snoring loudly. We agreed that he should spend the night in an outbuilding, with the door left open so that he could leave if he wanted to. If he was still there in the morning, we would call the only other man we knew in the region who had a Korthals and ask his advice.

  My wife was up at dawn, and shortly afterwards I was woken by a hairy face thrust into mine; the dog was still with us. It soon became clear that he was determined to stay, and that he knew exactly how he was going to convince us that life without him would be unthinkable. He was a shameless flatterer. One look from us was enough to set his whole bony body quivering with evident delight, and a pat sent him into ecstasy. Two or three days of this and I knew we would be lost. With mixed feelings, I called Monsieur Grégoire, the man we had met one day in Apt with his Korthals.

  He and his wife came over the next day to inspect our lodger. Monsieur Grégoire looked inside his ears to see if he had been tattooed with the number that identifies pedigree dogs in case they should stray. All serious owners, he said, do this. The numbers are stored in a computer in Paris, and if you find a tattooed dog the central office will put you in touch with the owner.

  Monsieur Grégoire shook his head. No number. ‘Alors,’ he said, ‘he has not been tatoué, and he has not been fed correctly. I think he is abandoned – probably a Christmas present that grew too big. It happens often. He will be better living with you.’ The dog flapped his ears and wagged himself vigorously. He wasn't about to argue.

  ‘Comme il est beau,’ said Madame Grégoire, and then made a suggestion which might easily have increased the dog population in our house to double figures. What did we think, she asked, about a marriage between the foundling and their young bitch?

  I knew what one of us thought, but by then the two women were planning the whole romantic episode.

  ‘You must come up to our house,’ said Madame Grégoire, ‘and we can drink champagne while the two of them are…’ she searched for a sufficiently delicate word ‘…outside.’

  Fortunately, her husband was made of more practical stuff. ‘First,’ he said, ‘we must see if they are sympathetic. Then, perhaps…’ He looked at the dog with the appraising eye of a prospective father-in-law. The dog put a meaty paw on his knee. Madame cooed. If ever I had seen a fait accompli, this was it.

  ‘But we have forgotten something,’ said Madame after another bout of cooing. ‘What is his name? Something heroic would be suitable, no? With that head.’ She patted the dog's skull, and he rolled his eyes at her. ‘Something like Victor, or Achille.’

  The dog sprawled on his back with his legs in the air. By no stretch of the imagination could he be described as heroic, but he was conspicuously masculine, and there and then we decided on his name.

  ‘We thought we'd call him Boy. Ça veut dire garcon en Anglais.’

  ‘Boy? Oui, c'est génial,’ said Madame. So Boy he was.

  We arranged to take him up to meet his fiancée, as Madame called her, in two or three weeks, after he'd been inoculated, tattooed, fed decently and generally made into as presentable a suitor as possible. In between his trips to the vet and his enormous meals, he spent his time insinuating himself into the household. Every morning he would be waiting outside the courtyard door, squeaking with excitement at the thought of the day ahead, and grabbing the first wrist that came within range. Within a week, he was promoted from a blanket in the outbuilding to a basket in the courtyard. Within ten days, he was sleeping in the house, under the dining table. Our two bitches deferred to him. My wife bought him tennis balls to play with, which he ate. He chased lizards, and discovered the cooling delights of sitting on the steps leading down into the swimming pool. He was in dog heaven.

  The day arrived for what Madame Grégoire described as the rendezvous d‘amour, and we drove up to the spectacular rolling countryside above Saignon where Monsieur Grégoire had converted an old stone stable block into a long, low house overlooking the valley and the village of St Martin-de-Castillon in the far distance.

  Boy had gained weight and a thicker coat, but was still lacking in social polish. He bounded from the car and lifted his leg on a newly-planted sapling, churning up a patch of young lawn with his back paws. Madame found him charming. Monsieur, it seemed, was not so sure; I noticed him looking at Boy with a slightly critical eye. Their bitch ignored him, concentrating instead on a series of ambushes mounted against our other two dogs. Boy climbed a hillock at the end of the house and jumped on to the roof. We went inside for tea and cherries marinated in eau-de-vie.

  ‘He is looking well, Boy,’ said Monsieur Grégoire.

  ‘Magnifique,’ said Madame.

  ‘Oui, mais…’ There was something worrying Monsieur. He got up and fetched a magazine. It was the latest issue of the official organ of the Club Korthals de France, page after page of photographs showing dogs at the pointing position, dogs with birds in their mouths, dogs swimming, dogs sitting obediently by their masters.

  ‘Vous voyez,’ said Monsieur, ‘all these dogs have the classic coat, the poil dur. It is a characteristic of the breed.’

  I looked at the pictures. The dogs all had flat, rough coats. I looked at Boy, who was now pressing his great brown nose against the window. His coat had grown after clipping into a mass of grey and brown ringlets which we thought rather distinguished. Not Monsieur Grégoire.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘he has grown to resemble a mouton. From the neck up, he is a Korthals. From the neck down, he is a sheep. I am desolated, but this would be a mésalliance.’

  My wife almost choked on her cherries. Madame looked dismayed. Monsieur was apologetic. I was relieved. Two dogs and a sheep would do for the time being.

  Boy is still, as far as we know, a bachelor.

  4

  Napoleons at the Bottom of the Garden

  At one end of the swimming pool, arranged in a long, low pile, our builders had left an assortment of souvenirs of their work on the house. Rubble and cracked flagstones, old light switches and chewed wiring, beer bottles and broken tiles. It was understood that one day Didier and Claude would come back with an empty truck and take the debris away. The strip of land would be impeccable, and we could plant the alley of rose bushes we had planned.

  But somehow the truck was never empty, or Claude had broken a toe, or Didier was busy knocking down some distant ruin in the Basses Alpes, and the souvenir pile remained at the end of the pool. In time, it began to look quite pretty, an informal rockery softened by a healthy covering of weeds and splashed with poppies. I told my wife that it had a certain unplanned charm. She wasn't convinced. Roses, she said, were generally considered more attractive than rubble and beer bottles. I started to clear the pile.

  In fact, I enjoy manual labour, the rhythm of it and the satisfaction of seeing order emerge from a neglected mess. After a couple of weeks, I reached bare earth and retired in triumph with my blisters. My wife was very pleased. Now, she said, all we need are two deep trenches and fifty kilos of manure, and then we can plant. She got to work with the rose catalogues and I patched up my blisters and bought a pickaxe.

  I had loosened about three yards of hard-packed earth when I saw a gleam of dirty yellow among the weed roots. Some long-dead farmer had obviously thrown away a pastis bottle one hot afternoon many years ago. But when I cleared away the earth, it wasn't a vintage bottle cap; it was a coin. I rinsed it under the hose, and it shone gold in the sun, the drops of water sliding down a bearded profile.

  It was a 20-franc piece, dated 1857. On one side was the head of Napoleon III with his neat goatee and his position in society – Empereur – stamped in heroic type opposite his name. On the reverse, a laurel wreath, crowned with more heroic type proclaiming the Empire Français. Around the rim of the coin was the comforting statement that every Frenchman knows is true: Dieu protège la France.

  My wife was as excited as I was. ‘There might be more of them,’ she said. ‘Keep digging.’

  Ten minutes later, I found a second coin, another 20-franc piece. This one was dated 1869, and the passing years had left no mark on Napoleon's profile except that he had sprouted a wreath on his head. I stood in the hole that I'd made and did some rough calculations. There were twenty more yards of trench to dig. At the current rate of one gold coin every yard, we could end up with a pocket full of

  Napoleons and might even be able to afford lunch at the Beaumanière at Les Baux. I swung the pickaxe until my hands were raw, going deeper and deeper into the ground, watching through the beads of sweat for another wink from Napoleon.

  I ended the day no richer, but with a hole deep enough to plant a fully grown tree, and the conviction that tomorrow would produce more treasure. Nobody would bury two miserable coins; these had obviously spilled out of the bulging sack that was still lying within pickaxe range, a fortune for the energetic gardener.

  To help us estimate the size of the fortune, we consulted the financial section of Le Provençal. In a country which traditionally keeps its savings in gold and under the mattress, there was bound to be a listing of current values. And there it was, in between the i-kilo gold ingot and the Mexican 50-peso piece: Napoleon's 20 francs were now worth 396 francs, and maybe more if the old boy's profile was in mint condition.

  Never has a pickaxe been taken up with more enthusiasm, and it inevitably attracted Faustin's attention. He stopped on his way to do battle with the mildew that he was convinced was about to attack the vines, and asked what I was doing. Planting roses, I said.

  ‘Ah bon? They must be large roses to need such an important hole. Rose trees, perhaps? From England? It is difficult here for roses. Tache noire is everywhere.’