He shook his head, and I could tell he was going to give me the benefit of his pessimism. Faustin is on close terms with every kind of natural disaster, and he is happy to share this extensive knowledge with anyone foolish enough to hope for the best. To cheer him up, I told him about the gold Napoleons.

  He squatted at the side of the trench and pushed his cap, stained blue with anti-mildew spray, on to the back of his head so that he could give the news his full attention.

  ‘Normalement,’ he said, ‘where there are one or two Napoleons, it signifies that there are others. But this is not a good place to hide them.’ He waved his large brown paw in the direction of the house. ‘The well would be more safe. Or behind a cheminée.’

  I said that they might have been hidden in a hurry. Faustin shook his head again, and I realized that hurry was not an intellectual concept that he accepted, particularly when it came to hiding sacks of gold. ‘A peasant is never as pressé as that. Not with the Napoleons. It is just bad luck that they dropped here.’

  I said it was good luck for me, and with that depressing thought he went off to look for catastrophe in the vineyard.

  The days passed. The blisters flourished. The trench grew longer and deeper. The tally of Napoleons remained at two. And yet it didn't make sense. No peasant would go out to work in the fields with gold coins in his pocket. A cache was there somewhere, I was sure of it, within feet of where I was standing.

  I decided to seek more advice from the self-appointed expert of the valley, the man from whom Provence held no secrets, the wise, venal and congenitally crafty Massot. If anyone could guess, merely by sniffing the wind and spitting on the ground, where a sly old peasant had hidden his life savings, it was Massot.

  I walked through the forest to his house, and heard his dogs baying with frustrated blood lust as they picked up my scent. One day, I knew, they would break their chains and maul every living thing in the valley; I hoped that he would sell his house before they did.

  Massot ambled across what he liked to call his front garden, an expanse of bare, trodden earth decorated with dog droppings and clumps of determined weeds. He looked up at me, squinting against the sun and the smoke from his fat yellow cigarette, and grunted.

  ‘On se promène?’

  No, I said. Today I had come to ask his advice. He grunted again and kicked his dogs into silence. We stood on either side of the rusty chain that separated his property from the forest path, close enough for me to catch his gamey smell of garlic and black tobacco. I told him about the two coins, and he unstuck the cigarette from his lower lip, inspecting the damp stub while his dogs padded back and forth on their chains, growling under their breath.

  He found a home for his cigarette under one end of his stained moustache, and leant towards me.

  ‘Who have you told about this?’ He looked over my shoulder, as if making sure that we were alone.

  ‘My wife. And Faustin. That's all.’

  ‘Tell nobody else,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose with a grimy finger. ‘It is possible that there are more coins. This must be kept entre nous.’

  We walked back along the path so that Massot could see where the two coins had been found, and he gave me his explanation of the national passion for gold. Politicians, he said, were the cause of it, starting with the Revolution. After that, there were emperors, wars, countless presidents – most of them cretins, he said, and spat for emphasis – and devaluations which could turn 100 francs into 100 centimes overnight. No wonder the simple peasant didn't trust scraps of paper printed by those salauds in Paris. But gold – Massot held his hands in front of him and wriggled his fingers in an imaginary pile of Napoleons – gold was always good, and in times of trouble it was even better. And the best gold of all was dead man's gold, because dead men don't argue. How fortunate we are, you and I, said Massot, to come across such an uncomplicated opportunity. It seemed that I had a partner.

  We stood in the trench, Massot tugging on his moustache while he looked around him. The ground was flat, some of it planted with lavender, some covered in grass. There was no obvious spot for a hiding place, which Massot took to be an encouraging sign; an obvious place would have been discovered fifty years ago, and ‘our’ gold removed. He climbed out of the trench, and paced off the distance to the well, then perched on the stone wall.

  ‘It could be anywhere here,’ he said, and waved his arm over fifty square yards of ground. ‘Évidemment, that is too much for you to dig’. Our partnership clearly didn't extend to a sharing of physical labour. ‘What we need is a machin for detecting metal.’ He turned his arm into a metal detector and passed it in sweeps over the grass, making clicking sounds. ‘Beh oui. That will find it.’

  ‘Alors, qu'est-ce qu'on fait?’ Massot made the universal money gesture, rubbing his fingers and thumb together. It was time for a business meeting.

  We agreed that I would finish digging the trench, and that Massot would take care of the high technology by renting a metal detector. All that remained to be decided was the financial participation of the partners. I suggested that 10 per cent would be a reasonable price to pay for some undemanding work with a metal detector; Massot, however, said he would be more comfortable with 50 per cent. There was the drive into Cavaillon to pick up the metal detector, the digging involved when we struck gold and, most important, the confidence I could feel in having a completely trustworthy partner who would not broadcast the details of our new wealth throughout the neighbourhood. Everything, said Massot, must be kept behind the teeth.

  I looked at him as he smiled and nodded, and thought that it would be difficult to imagine a more untrustworthy old rogue this side of the bars of Marseille prison. Twenty per cent, I said. He winced, sighed, accused me of being a grippe-sou and settled for 25 per cent. We shook hands on it, and he spat in the trench for luck as he left.

  That was the last I saw of him for several days. I finished the trench, laced it with manure and ordered the roses. The man who delivered them told me that I'd dug far too deep, and asked me why, but I kept the reason behind my teeth.

  There is a widespread aversion in Provence to anything that resembles social planning. The Provençal prefers to drop in and surprise you rather than call first to make sure you're free. When he arrives, he expects you to have time for the pleasantries of a drink and a roundabout conversation before getting down to the purpose of the visit, and if you tell him you have to go out he is puzzled. Why rush? Half an hour is nothing. You'll only be late, and that's normal.

  It was almost twilight, the time of day entre chien et loup, when we heard a van rattle to a stop outside the house. We were going over to see some friends for dinner in Goult, and so I went out to head off the visitor before he reached the bar and became impossible to dislodge.

  The van had its back doors wide open, and was rocking from side to side. There was a thud as something hit the floor, followed by a curse. Putaing! It was my business partner, wrestling with a pickaxe that was stuck in the metal grille of the dog guard behind the driver's seat. With a final convulsion the pickaxe was wrenched free and Massot emerged backwards, slightly faster than he'd intended.

  He was wearing camouflage trousers and a dun sweater and a jungle-green army surplus hat, all well past their youth. He looked like a badly paid mercenary as he unloaded his equipment and laid it on the ground – the pickaxe, a long-handled mason's shovel and an object wrapped in old sacking. Glancing round to see if anyone was watching, he removed the sacking and held up the metal detector.

  ‘Voilà! This is haut de gamme, top of the range. It is efficacious to a depth of three metres.’

  He switched it on, and waved it over his tools. Sure enough, it detected a shovel and a pickaxe, chattering away like a set of agitated false teeth. Massot was delighted. ‘Vous voyez? When he finds metal, he talks. Better than digging, eh?’

  I said that it was very impressive, and that I'd keep it safely locked up in the house until tomorrow.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ said Massot. ‘But we must start now.’

  I said it would be dark in half an hour, and Massot nodded patiently, as though I had finally grasped a very complex theory.

  ‘Exactly!’ He put down the metal detector and took hold of my arm. ‘We don't want the world watching us, do we? This kind of work is best done at night. It is more discret. Allez! You bring the tools.’

  There is another difficulty, I said. My wife and I are going out.

  Massot stopped dead and stared at me, his eyebrows drawing themselves up to their full height in astonishment.

  ‘Out? Tonight? Now?’

  My wife called from the house. We were already late. Massot shrugged at the curious hours we kept, but insisted that tonight was the night. He would have to do it all, he said plaintively, himself. Could I lend him a torch? I showed him how to switch on the spotlight behind the well, which he adjusted so that it lit the area by the rose bed, muttering in irritation at being left tout seul.

  We stopped half-way down the drive and looked back at Massot's elongated shadow moving through the trees, which were bathed in the glow of the spotlight. The ticking of the metal detector carried clearly on the evening air, and I had misgivings about the secrecy of the enterprise. We might as well have put up a sign at the end of the drive saying MAN LOOKING FOR GOLD.

  We told our friends over dinner about the treasure hunt which was going on more or less under the cover of darkness. The husband, who had been born and raised in the Lubéron, was not optimistic. He told us that when metal detectors had first become available they were more popular with the peasants than hunting dogs. It was true that some gold had been found. But now, he said, the area had been combed so thoroughly that Massot would be lucky to find an old horseshoe.

  Even so, he couldn't deny the existence of our two Napoleons. There they were, on the table in front of him. He picked them up and chinked them in his hand. Who knows? Maybe we'd be lucky. Or maybe Massot would be lucky and we'd never hear about it. Was he someone who could be trusted? My wife and I looked at each other and decided it was time to go.

  It was just after midnight when we got home, and Massot's van had gone. The spotlight had been switched off, but there was enough of a moon for us to see large mounds of earth scattered haphazardly across what we were trying to turn into a lawn. We decided to face the full extent of the damage in the morning.

  It was as if a giant mole, maddened by claustrophobia, had been coming up for air and spitting out mouthfuls of metal. There were nails, fragments of a cartwheel rim, an ancient screwdriver, half a sickle, a dungeon-sized key, a brass rifle shell, bolts, bottle tops, the crumbling remains of a hoe, knife blades, the bottom of a sieve, birds' nests of baling wire, unidentifiable blobs of pure rust. But no gold.

  Most of the newly planted rose bushes had survived, and the lavender bed was intact. Massot must have run out of enthusiasm.

  I left him to sleep until the afternoon before going over to hear his account of the night's work. Long before I reached his house, I could hear the metal detector, and I had to shout twice to get him to look up from the bramble-covered hillock that he was sweeping. He bared his dreadful teeth in welcome. I was surprised to see him so cheerful. Maybe he had found something after all.

  ‘Salut!’ He shouldered the metal detector like a gun and waded towards me through the undergrowth, still smiling. I said he looked like a man who had been lucky.

  Not yet, he said. He had been obliged to stop the previous night because my neighbours had shouted at him, complaining about the noise. I didn't understand. Their house is 250 yards away from where he had been working. What had he been doing to keep them awake?

  ‘Pas moi,’ he said. ‘Lui,’ and he tapped the metal detector. ‘Wherever I went, he found something – tak tak tak tak tak.’

  But no gold, I said.

  Massot leaned so close that for one awful moment I thought he was going to kiss me. His nose twitched, and his voice dropped to a wheezing whisper. ‘I know where it is.’ He drew back and took a deep breath. ‘Beh oui. I know where it is.’

  Although we were standing in the forest, with the nearest human being at least a kilometre away, Massot's fear of being overheard was contagious, and I found myself whispering too.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘At the end of the piscine.’

  ‘Under the roses?’

  ‘Under the dallage.’

  ‘Under the dallage?’

  ‘Oui. C'est certaing. On my grandmother's head.’

  This was not the straightforward good news that Massot obviously thought it was. The dallage round the pool was made up of flagstones that were nearly three inches thick. They had been laid on a bed of reinforced concrete, as deep as the flagstones were, thick. It would be a demolition job just to get down to the earth. Massot sensed what I was thinking, and put the metal detector down so that he could talk with both hands.

  ‘In Cavaillon,’ he said, ‘you can rent a marteau-piqueur. It will go through anything. Paf!’

  He was quite right. A miniature jack-hammer would go through the flagstones, the reinforced concrete, the pipes feeding the pool and the electric cables leading from the filtration pump in no time at all. Paf! And maybe even Boum! And when the dust had settled, we might very easily find nothing more than another sickle blade to add to our collection. I said no. With infinite regret, but no.

  Massot took the decision well, and was pleased with the bottle of pastis I gave him for his trouble. But I see him from time to time standing on the path at the back of the house, looking down at the swimming pool, sucking thoughtfully at his moustache. God knows what he might do one drunken night if someone ever gave him a marteau-piqueur for Christmas.

  5

  Les Invalides

  I had been to a pharmacy in Apt for toothpaste and suntan oil, two innocent and perfectly healthy purchases. When I arrived home and took them out of the bag, I found that the girl who served me had included an instructive but puzzling gift. It was an expensively printed leaflet in full colour. On the front was a picture of a snail sitting on the lavatory. He looked doleful, as if he'd been there for some time without achieving anything worthwhile. His horns drooped. His eyes were lack-lustre. Above this sad picture was printed La Constipation.

  What had I done to deserve this? Did I look constipated? Or was the fact that I bought toothpaste and suntan oil somehow significant to the expert pharmacist's eye – a hint that all was not well in my digestive system? Maybe the girl knew something I didn't know. I started to read the leaflet.

  ‘Nothing,’ it said, ‘is more banal and more frequent than constipation.’ About 20 per cent of the French population, so the writer claimed, suffered from the horrors of ballonnement and gêne abdominale. And yet, to a casual observer, like myself, there were no obvious signs of discomfort among the people on the streets, in the bars and cafés, or even in the restaurants – where presumably 20 per cent of the clientele tucking into two substantial meals a day were doing so in spite of their ballonnements. What fortitude in the face of adversity!

  I had always thought of Provence as one of the healthier places in the world. The air is clean, the climate is dry, fresh fruit and vegetables are abundantly available, cooking is done with olive oil, stress doesn't seem to exist – there could hardly be a more wholesome set of circumstances. And everybody looks very well. But if 20 per cent of those ruddy faces and hearty appetites were concealing the suffering caused by a traffic jam in the transit intestinal, what else might they be concealing? I decided to pay closer attention to Provencal complaints and remedies, and gradually became aware that there is indeed a local affliction, which I think extends to the entire country. It is hypochondria.

  A Frenchman never feels out of sorts; he has a crise. The most popular of these is a crise de foie, when the liver finally rebels against the punishment inflicted by pastis, five-course meals, tots of marc and the vin d’honneur served at everything from the opening of a car showroom to the annual meeting of the village Communist party. The simple cure is no alcohol and plenty of mineral water, but a much more satisfactory solution – because it supports the idea of illness rather than admitting self-indulgence – is a trip to the pharmacy and a consultation with the sympathetic white-coated lady behind the counter.

  I used to wonder why most pharmacies have chairs arranged between the surgical trusses and the cellulite treatment kits, and now I know. It is so that one can wait more comfortably while Monsieur Machin explains, in great whispered detail and with considerable massaging of the engorged throat, the tender kidney, the reluctant intestine or whatever else ails him, how he came to this painful state. The pharmacist, who is trained in patience and diagnosis, listens carefully, asks a few questions and then proposes a number of possible solutions. Packets and pots and ampoules are produced. More discussion. A choice is finally made, and Monsieur Machin carefully folds up the vital pieces of paper which will enable him to claim back most of the cost of his medication from Social Security. Fifteen or twenty minutes have passed, and everyone moves up a chair.

  These trips to the pharmacy are only for the more robust invalids. For serious illness, or imaginary serious illness, there is, even in relatively remote country areas like ours, a network of first aid specialists which amazes visitors from cities where you need to be a millionaire before you can be sick in comfort. All the towns, and many of the villages, have their own ambulance services, on call twenty-four hours a day. Registered nurses will come to the house. Doctors will come to the house, a practice which I'm told is almost extinct in London.

  We had a brief but intense experience of the French medical system early last summer. The guinea pig was Benson, a young American visitor on his first trip to Europe. When I picked him up at Avignon station, he croaked hello, coughed, and clapped a handkerchief to his mouth. I asked him what was the matter.