Lives of the Luberon

M. Yassukovich Stanislas

Description

Stanislas Yassukovich is an investment banker who spent some 20 years visiting and living with his family in the Luberon, the region of France made famous by the late Peter Mayle's seminal work, A Year in Provence. In his new book, Yassukovich chronicles his experiences, impressions and adventures in this unique corner of La Belle France, together with reminiscences of the fascinating and cosmopolitan characters who reside there permanently or part time. His anecdotal evocation of the great variety of elements that make this region one of the most sought after, in a country rich in holiday destinations, will entertain both those who know the area and those who don't yet. Malika Moine is a Provencal artist who has published several books of her water colours in Marseille. Her illustrations of the villages of the Luberon make the book, and the region, even more irresistible.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 28 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528963800
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Lives of the Luberon
Stanislas M. Yassukovich
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-02-28
Lives of the Luberon About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Introduction I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX
About the Author
Stanislas Yassukovich was born in Paris to a Russian émigré father and a French mother. After being educated in the United States, he settled in England, pursued a career in the City and is regarded as one of the founders of the international capital market. He was made a Commander of the British Empire, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Freeman of the City of London. His previous work, Two Lives: A Social and Financial Memoir , was published by Austin Macauley in 2016. He is married to the former Diana Townsend and has three children, Tatyana, Michael and Nicholas.
Malika Moine, the illustrator, was born and brought up in the Luberon and moved to Marseilles after schooling, to study history. She switched to art training in jewellery, sculpture and painting, and then travelled extensively, drawing towns, landscapes and their inhabitants. She has published four books of watercolours of cafés, restaurants and artisan studios of Marseilles: Tournée Générale , Croquis Croquant , Coeurs a L’Ouvrage and Croquis Croquant – La Suite (with chef’s recipes). She publishes annual calendars of Marseilles and recently published one of Rockford.
Dedication
Once again – to Dinnie
Copyright Information ©
Stanislas M. Yassukovich (2020)
The right of Stanislas M. Yassukovich to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528922517 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528922524 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528963800 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ

My recollections of a region where we have spent, on and off, over 20 years are highly personal and impressionistic. I have described incidents with a considerable degree of playful latitude and I hope none involved will have taken offence. Words I have attributed to both named and unnamed individuals are unlikely to have been uttered and I have quoted no one verbatim.
I have suffered all my life from name blindness – to the point of sometimes having to pause to remember my wife’s name. This work would not have been possible without considerable help in remembering names, and in this regard, I am indebted to Christopher and Sarah Morgan, Catriona MacColl, Veronica Grange, Frances and Duncan Goodwin, and Eric and Analise Durschmied – plus a few others whose names I cannot remember. I have received valuable editorial assistance from Stephanie Mills and Jenny Jacobs. In my continuing battle with my computer, I have received vital tactical aid from Crispin Duncan of Dial-A-Nerd. Barbara Leotoing has been a source of facts I might have forgotten or misrepresented. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Malika Moine, who agreed to provide illustrations without having even glanced at my manuscript. But most of all, I must thank those readers of my last book, Two Lives: A Social and Financial Memoir , who were kind enough to encourage me to write another.
Introduction

It is a sound principle for an author beginning a new opus to determine in advance within which literary category the work belongs. Publishers are increasingly concerned with categories in their marketing strategies. This is a book about a place, but in a manner and style not easily categorised. The place is in France, a country that abounds in regions and locations of distinct character. This is about one of these. But we are not in the helicopter-plagued fleshpots of the Riviera, or the retro shores of the Côte d’Argent, with its ghosts of the thirties lounging in Biarritz, nor in the Anglicised confines of the Sunday supplement Dordogne. We are not even truly in la France profonde, found more readily in the massif centrale . We lack the white cattle of the Devon-like Charolais country, or the vineyard surrounded châteaux of Bordeaux. Mares and foals do not frolic here as in the moist grass pastures of Normandy, nor do our school children swallow a gulp of Calvados leaving for school, as they are reputed to do in Brittany. We have neither the cowboys nor the mosquitoes of the Camargue.
With a place name in the title and a series of geographical references in the introduction, it might be suspected that this is a travel book. But it definitely is not. I think of travel books as containing saccharine descriptions of exotic locales by a travel writer who hopes these will not actually be visited by readers as they might then discover the horrors lurking behind the touristic facade. When I was old enough to visit a movie theatre in the neighbouring town of Glen Cove, Long Island, a few ‘shorts’ always preceded the feature film after the Movietone news. One such was a travelogue from a popular series narrated by the producer, whose sing-song tones were designed to inculcate the homebody audience with a burning desire to visit the subject location. The film always ended the same way: “And so…as the sun sinks slowly in the West,” would intone the narrator, “we leave the lovely island of Ohahu and its friendly natives…” And the camera would provide a long shot of waving indigènes, fading in the distance, over a swirling wake from the stern of the ship. Even in these early years of movie going, I considered these films hopelessly banal and downright phony.
I will admit that, like any bored reader of the Sunday press, after a hopeless search for hard news, I am tempted to read a travel ‘special’ in the supplement. The formula never varies, and the writer, often a minor celebrity – whose contribution has been ghost written, leads one through the sites and hostelries of the target region, as though, light footed as a cricket, he, or she, has suffered none of the well-known discomforts of modern travel, but skipped effortlessly from place to place, and now extols their well promoted virtues – leaving out the mosquitoes, bed bugs and undercooked regional specialities. Even worse are those exposés of places deemed ‘discovered’. One thinks of the hapless residents of these areas whose hitherto peaceful lives are now interrupted by braying tourists and holiday home hunters, seeking immediate, post discovery bargains.
If this is no travel book, is it just about people and their ‘lives’? Usually missing from the travel writer’s sketchbook are allusions to the living – apart from references to mine host and hostess at some favourite chambre d’hôtes. There is hardly time to get to know residents in these whirlwind tours, and certainly not in travel articles written to deadline. I intend to populate this piece, not just with humans, but with all things living – including flora , of course, but also with my own definition of the non-plant living: anything that moves and makes a noise, from cicadas to tractors. My wife, who was brought up on a farm in Africa, has always insisted on living in a place where one can get stuck behind a tractor. Such was the case during our many years in Gloucestershire. Now, we get stuck behind the smaller tractors that ply the vineyards in Provence and thoroughly enjoy it, whilst the odd impatient French driver honks behind us.
Naturally, this tractor obsession is symptomatic of an attachment to life in an agricultural environment. And it is intensive agriculture that distinguishes our part of Provence from the hideously overdeveloped Côte d’Azur. In the several mini valleys that lie between the north face of the Luberon ridge and the slopes of the Mt Ventoux, can be found an astonishing variety of ‘lives’. Not just the olive, cherry, plum, greengage, apricot, almond, apple, pear, loquat, fig trees and their protective pines, firs, cedars, Mediterranean oaks, willows, poplars, or the multitudinous flora which constitutes the bush – or the garrigue, as it’s named here, but, also the vines, wheat, barley, sunflower, lavender crops, plus endless vegetables that stock the village markets, and of course, the sheep, goats, horses, interspersed with the undomesticated: the wild boar, fox, roe deer, hares, rabbits and game birds such as pheasants and partridge and, sadly, thrush, from which the shooters make a paté, but also song birds, swallows and martins, tits, bee eaters and other various… All this should be enough life for anyone. But we also have people. Apart from the truly indigenous, varied themselves, we have an extraordinary collection of semi and permanently resident expatriates with backgrounds in diplomacy, politics, finance, industry, commerce, theatre, music, literature, science, journalism, photography, cinematic arts, medicine, academia, architecture, interior décor, landscaping and the art of doing nothing but socialising. If they were to wear little flags, like Olympic athletes, they would be British, American, Canadian, South African, Australian, Belgian, Dutch, Swiss, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and other flag-less foreigners, such as Parisians. We have been spared the new class of so-called Russian oligarchs which has drowned the Riviera in a sea of vulgarity and which is in any case comprised mostly of Georgians and Ukrainians, rather than real Russians. We have no casinos, discos or call girls, a ‘must’ for the amusement of this class.
Although it is possible to live quie