Seven days among the shrines and wines of provincial France can still be contentment itself. But keeping to even a generous budget — $500 for two — is no picnic. 

by Alexander Eliot

The season was late spring, a time when strawberries and asparagus are fresh in France and travelers still relatively few. The route we had mapped wiggled widely between Paris and Nice, through the chateau country of the Loire, high Burgundy, the wine-rich Rhone Valley, Provence, the Maritime Alps and finally the Cote d’Azur. By day, we would refresh our eyes with some of France’s most inspiring monuments of history, art and religion. By night, we would sample the very finest food and wine of each locality. The girl I love and I began our journey with high hopes and small worries. We were well heeled, we thought, having set aside $500 for the week ahead. But it was 1972, and prices in France have risen at a forbidding rate over the past few years. We wondered if our ends would surpass our means.

A drawing room in the Chateau de Chenonceaux

Our rented car was a frisky Renault with a sun roof. We had taken out ample insurance and arranged in advance to drop the car at Nice airport. The getaway was painfully slow; the traffic around Paris is horrendous. So for us,

the trip truly began some hours southwest of Paris, when we first glimpsed the heavenly mismatched spires of Chartres. The old town, with its cathedral, crowns a small hill. We parked in the shade of some trees beside a stream and ascended the hill on foot. Our approach was slow and winding, a good thing after a long drive. We stopped at the town’s best restaurant, La Vieille Maison on the Rue au Lait, to reserve a table for lunch. Then, minutes later, we plunged out of the hot sun straight into the cathedral’s vast and shadowy chill. Like birds of paradise in flight through a forest of stone, the stained-glass windows swirled above our heads. At the Chapel of Our Lady of the Pillar, we lit candles together. I used to think that one should view cathedrals as art, as pure aesthetic experience. Now I am no longer too fanatical to pray a little. Everything works together, after all.

La Vieille Maison is an exquisitely managed provincial inn. It holds perhaps a dozen tables and naturally they are filled up as a rule. The motherly lady in charge suggested that we begin with fresh button mushrooms dressed in garlic and parsley and then tackle the fricassee de poulet a l’ancienne (chicken lightly stewed in cream sauce, a specialty of the house). We did so, and were far from sorry.

I do not drink when I drive, and the girl I love happens not to enjoy wine at midday, so we washed down this delightful repast with a well-chilled bottle of Evian. Smile if you like, but we have learned to distinguish and thoroughly enjoy the top half dozen or so table waters of France. To us, they are the clear and purifying wine of the daytime. Our dessert was glace Neluska, fine champagne (ice cream made with cognac and topped with chocolate sauce, another justly famous specialty of La Vieille Maison), accompanied by small cups of strong coffee.

We spent the afternoon jockeying with trailer trucks along the crowded highway, again southwest. Near Tours, we turned off to view the seldom-visited Dolmen of Mettray. The Dolmen, a stone shrine, antedates Chartres by 4,000 years, give or take a century or so. It lies in a dark grove of trees and is reached by a footpath between wheat fields. Roughly twelve feet high by a hundred feet long, the whole structure consists of twelve enormous boulders, nothing more. Who transported the great stones and heaved them into position? How was it done? Nobody knows.

Prehistorians guess that our remote ancestors dedicated this tremendously impressive shrine to Mother Earth and the stars. The Mettray Dolmen crouches in the shade like some weighty, wrinkled, reposeful dragon; it keeps its own counsel.

As we walked around the site, a gang of schoolboys from Mettray village rode in on bicycles. They played cops and robbers over and under the great stones. Their shouts and dartings made a telling contrast to the gyroscopic steadiness of the place. After a time, a pair of young lovers appeared from a fold of the yellow fields to look silently on. The long spring evening had begun.

Back in the Renault, we crossed the Loire at Tours, gassed up and swung through hilly country on a fast highway for a few minutes before turning left along the gentle valley of the river Cher. Our destination for the night was a renowned roadside inn called the Hotel du Bon Laboreur et du Château, at Chenonceaux. There we settled in and restored our flagging spirits with dry vermouth on the rocks. At about nine o’clock we descended for dinner. Our first course was grillet de Tours, potted pork of the region. Our second was a fish from the Cher called bar, poached in white wine, which seemed unusually fine. With it we drank a half bottle of passable local Vouvray. Then came a strong goat cheese accompanied by a marvelous red wine of the Loire, Gamay de Touraine du Château de Vallagan. We ended with fresh strawberries, plain. There was no time for coffee since dinner had taken longer than we thought. Rising, we hurried across the road into the gardens of Chenonceaux. Our aim: to catch the 11:15 performance of son et lumiere. Many people regard Chenonceaux as the loveliest palace on earth. Its quality is fantastic and feminine at the same time, rather like that of the Alhambra in Spain or the old Imperial Palace at Kyoto. At Chenonceaux, too, the chateau’s architecture blends with so- called landscape architecture to create a seamless unity, a dreamlike mingling of artifice and nature. Chenonceaux’s dominant feature is its flat bridge, thrusting straight from the main part of the chateau to the far bank of the Cher. Diane de Poitiers, the middle-aged amazon who so enthralled King Henry II, built the bridge in order to facilitate her early-morning hunts. Catherine de Medicis, who displaced Diane, crowned the bridge with an elaborate gallery, creating a tall- windowed ballroom over the water. The son et lu- midre presentation made these points and many more. It was instructive, yet surrealistic in its way. Recorded music and voices drifted around us, seeming to emanate from the pale trees and shadowy towers. Meanwhile, shifting floodlights turned the water- pierced palace into a sort of spun-sugar confection afloat on the dark current of the river.

Next morning, after a breakfast of croissants and cafe au lait, we headed west through rolling hills and forests. We kept to secondary roads, threading hamlets that are not shown on the big maps. The day was silvery, sunshine and showers. At each slow curve, songbirds serenaded us. There was no traffic at all, and I would be hard put to recall a time when I more enjoyed the open road. Our only stop was at a hill village where we consumed a small platter of crudites (literally, “raw things”; in this case, grated carrots, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, all of which were fresh from someone’s garden). Toward six o’clock in the evening, we drove up a last sweeping incline to the old Burgundian village of Vezelay. We had reserved a room there at the Hotel de la Poste et du Lion d’Or.

The restaurant there is a grand one, and we dressed for it. Before going in we sipped a pastis on the village square. Pastis is rather like Pernod, but its strong scent of anise and its dusky yellow color make this, from our viewpoint at least, an even more satisfying twilight drink.

Dinner began with fresh cantaloupe halves generously seasoned with sherry. This was a slight mistake, because the cantaloupe was so perfectly ripe that it required no embellishment. Next came a dodine of veal, stuffed with truffled pate and pistachio nuts. To go with that, we indulged ourselves in a half bottle of excellent Chablis. After that came truite farcie (trout, stuffed mainly with herbs). This we accompanied with a half bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse. The main course followed, and it surpassed everything up to that point. It consisted of quails, roasted whole, served with fresh- cooked cherries. We used our fingers, of course, to honor those crisp, light, savory birds. With them, we sipped a wonderful Beaujolais (Moulin a Vent) from wide-lipped glasses.

A long, long walk by moonlight round the battlements of Vezelay completed our profoundly relaxing second day. My last feeling before drifting off into a dreamless sleep was one of near-absolute contentment.

We spent the whole next morning in the glorious basilica of Vezelay, which dates all the way back to the ninth century. There St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade, and Richard Coeur de Lion marshaled his knights for the Holy Land. The Dark Ages were brilliantly illuminated, at least for Vezelay. Ruin came later, and the French Revolution all but finished it What used to be a powerful Benedictine abbey now stands reduced to the basilica alone. The space within is open, lofty, plain. Its clear pattern of Romanesque stone construction is reinforced by the striations of the gray stones themselves. These strike the eye as a sort of vibration, a visual up-welling sound. One feels as if one is standing between the ribs of a breathing mountain.

Chef Guy Thivard of La Pyramide

Old-fashioned art historians tend to dismiss Romanesque sculpture as a crude thing, a barbaric slump between the smooth brilliance of classical art and the austere Gothic. No one who has been to Vezelay can accept such nonsense as that. The capitals of the columns in this church are among the most dramatic and sophisticated ever made. They body forth difficult abstract concepts with all the solidity of a fist. One column, for example, is capped by twin representations of sin: “Lust” as a woman devoured by serpents, and “Despair” as a demon disemboweling itself.

At one o’clock or thereabouts we drove off to the village of Sauvigny-le-Bois, which has a pleasant restaurant called Le Relais Fleuri. We stopped for a platter of fresh asparagus with vinegar and mousseline and a cold bottle of Perrier water.

Then, all at once, we were on the main autoroute through France, zipping southward at 80 or more miles per hour. We stopped only for gas. At Vienne in the late afternoon, we turned off along a tree-shaded boulevard. A small hotel called La Residence de la Pyramide was our goal. Tonight we were to dine at one of the most famed restaurants on earth: La Pyramide.

This restaurant may well continue to deserve the reputation it has gained. It may even be justified in charging fairly astronomical prices. The food is delicious, no doubt of that, and the wine list is formidable, if a bit misleading. After due consultation with La Pyramide’s sommelier, I ordered a dry white Hermitage 1964, to be followed by a red Cote-Rotie of the same year. When the Hermitage reached our table, however, it proved to be a 1968. I expressed slight shock. The sommelier seemed to feel that his honor was at stake. He explained that 1968 was a good year for this particular wine. Then he insisted upon opening the bottle for me to try. I sipped obediently. The stuff was potable but no better than that, so I waved it away.

Who can say whether the person telephoning or the one who answers the call is more put out by a wrong number?

With a wrong wine, the situation is similar. In order to ease the sommelier’s feelings, 1 asked him to decide on a substitute white. He brought a splendid Chateau Grillet.

La Pyramide’s pate maison, sea- ood mousse, poularde de Bresse en vessie (small chicken from Bresse encased in a pig’s bladder and steamed), cheeses, pastries and giant strawberries were beyond cavil. So too, needless to say, was the Cote-

Sommelier Louis and maître d’hôtel Vincent of La Pyramide

Rotie ’64. After coffee we took a strong liqueur, a specialty of the house, poured from a bottle that contained a whole, rosy and enormous pear. How did the pear get inside the bottle? The answer stood ready at hand in the restaurant’s garden. There we were shown a pear tree with bottles tied to its twigs and with its fruits merrily growing inside the bottles. La Pyramide maintains an entire orchard of this kind, it seems, not far from Vienne.

The souffle au citron

Next morning, on awakening at La Residence, we still felt fully fed—and slightly queasy to boot. Hangover would be too strong a word for what we were suffering. Still, there was little doubt in either of our minds that the pear liqueur had been too much of a good thing. My waistline had expanded visibly; my wallet was slimmer. Even so, toying with continental breakfast in bed, we laughed at ourselves a little. How many self-indulgent couples before us must have had, in this very bed, the same mild regrets!

The morning being sunny, we stepped out to enjoy and explore the streets of Vienne. It was not long before we came upon the Church of St. Pierre, parts of which date from the fourth century. This church is now a museum for locally unearthed carvings and mosaics. “Admission: 3 Francs,” said the sign, but the gatekeeper gruffly assured us that we were students, entitled to enter at half price. Feeling flattered, we wandered into St. Pierre’s chill, beautiful dimness. Dusty nude gods and goddesses of old surrounded us, together with occasional flocks of schoolchildren. Simply by listening in on what they were being taught, we learned a good deal. Did you know, for instance, that the goddess Cybele used to ride a lion and guide it by means of small taps on her tambourine?

Instead of having lunch, we settled our stomachs with a citron presse and Perrier water at an outdoor cafe. Then we were back on the autoroute, racing southward along the Rhone. We stopped for gas and coffee from a machine before making our exit below Avignon, Soon we were turning into the driveway of an exceedingly luxurious country inn, the Auberge de Noves. This is a mansion set on a secluded hill, with 22 guest rooms. Trying to name the fragrances that wafted through the windows of our room, we agreed on roses, lavender, rosemary, lemon and peach. There were more than that, doubtless, for the mansion is surrounded by its own extensive gardens and orchards.

The Auberge de Noves

By dinnertime the impossible had occurred: we were hungry again. While studying the menu, we sipped a delicious aperitif, a specialty of the house. Our host, M. Lalleman, kindly gave us his recipe for this: three-fifths reasonably dry white wine; one-fifth black currant juice; one-fifth grappa. Try it some time.

The saddle of lamb

Our dinner began with specialities jardinieres served on a gigantic platter. We sampled literally dozens of different delicacies: a baby artichoke, a single asparagus tip, a dab of nut pate, a pickled spring onion, a  spoonful of spiced rice. But we were dawdling, pacing ourselves while our main course grilled slowly over an open wood fire. Finally it came: saddle of baby lamb seasoned with rosemary, garlic, basil and thyme. Cut next to the bone, it was crispy on the outside, pink within and meat of rare quality withal. We drank a wonderful white Chateauneuf-du-Pape: Chateau Raya Premier Cru, 1966.

Dessert was a light-as-air souffle au citron that had required 45 minutes to prepare. M. Lalleman insisted that we taste a few miniature pastries as well; they were fine indeed. His tiny hotel, he proudly informed us, employs two full-time pastry cooks. A half bottle of the house champagne supplied precisely the right accompaniment to this dividend of our feast. Black coffee in the garden, as the moon rose, completed what both of us felt had been the most memorable meal of our excursion.

Having been made to feel like guests, not tourists, we were happy to stay on at the auberge for a light lunch next day. Our total bill took more than half the funds remaining to us, but we begrudged not one penny. Our trip was planned to close on a comparatively modest note; we thought we should scrape through all right.

Street scene: St. Paul de Vence

An autoroute now under construction will soon make the run between Avignon and Nice a mere nothing. For the nonce, however, that particular stretch of highway remains one of the most exasperating in existence. There are a few broad patches of toll road en route. Between those come dusty detours and pedestrian-crammed towns. Oil trucks, high-powered sports cars, caravans and steamrollers compete for the highway. Under these conditions, tempers flare. Perhaps one in 50 drivers turns vicious; it is dangerous. We passed a number of fresh wrecks. Screaming ambulances overtook us now and again. We were glad to reach Cagnes at last and turn up into the hills toward St. Paul de Vence.

St. Paul de Vence and Miro sculpture

Our goal was Les Oliviers, an unpretentious roadside restaurant a few thousand yards below St. Paul’s medieval battlements. We had telephoned ahead, naturally. The proprietors, man and wife, emerged from the kitchen to say they were expecting us. They led us through olive and orange groves at the back of the restaurant to a small guest house, where a cool, airy suite had been made ready. Dusk was coming on. We gazed back down the lilac-shadowed valley to the sea. Homer called the Mediterranean “wine-dark,” and so it seemed on this particular evening.

After a quick shower and change, we returned to the restaurant terrace. Americano cocktails preceded our first course: a cascade of hors d’oeuvres fresh from the garden and the sea in extraordinary variety. I remember in particular the marinated green corn and the cold onions that had been soaked in olive oil and dusted with confectioner’s sugar before roasting. Also the moules marinieres and the tiny shrimps that could be devoured shell and all. With this immense introductory course, we consumed an entire bottle of St. Paul rose, the mild, fresh local wine. If this rose were to travel well, it might achieve international fame. Being so light and yet not sharp at all, it makes an excellent friend to a heavy meal. Finally we reached the piece de resistance. It was a specialty of the house: loup au fenouil  (asort of sea bass stuffed with fennel and baked). This tasty and substantial dish deserved, we decided a second bottle of well-chilled rose. Fresh pears made a suitably light dessert after all that. We were feeling no pain, as I recall, when we rose from the table at about eleven o’clock.

The next morning we breakfasted on our balcony in the bright sunshine. Our bill, calculated on a demi-pension basis, was reasonable, to say the least; After bidding farewell to our host and hostess, we drove on up the mountain slope to visit a recently established museum of modern art: the Maeght Foundation. This is something worth seeing once at least. It offers a fairly comprehensive view of Alexander Calder’s abstract, free-swinging wrought-iron works, of Giacometti’s solitary, air-pocked, stick-figure pedestrians, and of Joan Miro’s less often seen ceramic monuments to humorous demons. Among the Maeght’s most recent acquisitions is a totally green abstract canvas by Tal Coat. This painting seemed to bathe our spirits in shadows of ice and sun and pine needles; so much so that I found myself moved to write “Bravo Tal Coat!” in the museum guest book.

Cars are parked outside St. Paul’s ancient gate, and you enter the hilltop village on foot. We window-shopped along the cobbled streets (St. Paul boasts a few highly imaginative boutiques) and then dropped in at Les Remparts, an excellent restaurant right on the battlements, for a late lunch: an omelet and a bottle of Vichy. By three o’clock or thereabouts we were on our way again.

Not far from St. Paul de Vence, but a good deal higher up the mountain, lies Vence. This town is a surprising amalgam of medieval and modern. Vence does considerable trade in olive oil and has a small art colony as well. The first thing that we did on reaching Vence was to stop in at M. de la Salle’s gallery on the Place Godeau. He had just opened an exhibition of the works of a brilliantly inventive colorist named Girodon. The artist was on hand and spoke with us about his work. Girodon treats painting, it seems, as a serious sort of game: a shuttlecock played visually with rods, cones, spheres and squares of color. His prices, by the way, are modest in the extreme. It is still possible to collect fine art, even on a limited budget, if one concentrates on the young and not yet known.

For our final night in France, we had reserved the room in which Auguste Renoir used to paint his great impressionist canvases at the Auberge des Seigneurs. This room is one of ten only, for the inn is tiny. Its tall windows overlook the plantain trees of a beautiful square. That is one attraction. The other is that the Auberge des Seigneurs is blessed with the most miraculous kitchen in all Vence.

Miro fountain; above, exterior of the Maeght Foundation Museum

This last evening began slowly and sweetly, with pastis on the square. For an hour or more we sipped, meanwhile enjoying the small dramas of the passing scene. Finally the casement windows of the dining room were thrown open as a signal for us to enter and feast. Our wine, once again, was St. Paul rose. Dinner began with an astonishing succession of pates, cold cuts, stuffed vegetables and cheese pastries. Although they amounted to a small feast in themselves, we tasted every tidbit. A great wood fire had been lit especially for us, and now a chicken was slowly turning on a spit before the flames. The mass-produced, rubbery-chubby unfortunates that glut modern supermarkets have been brought up in close captivity. This creature, on the other hand, had been lovingly reared in a Vence back yard. It possessed its own history and character. Moreover, it had been tenderly marinated in garlic, bay leaves and pebre d’ase (“donkey’s pepper,” meaning rosemary) before being roasted. When the bird at last came to the table it was crisped almost black on the outside, yet still white and juicy within. It had not died in vain.

Following that climactic entree, we still somehow found room for another specialty of the house: sherbet made from the local marc, or grape liqueur.

It was the perfect farewell kiss for such a fine banquet.

Next morning, as I was settling our modest bill with the innkeeper’s lovely daughter, she darted off into the kitchen. Returning after a few moments, she pressed into my hands a large plastic bag stuffed with fresh bay leaves and rosemary. It was a present, she explained, inspired by our obvious interest in cooking. That bag seemed more than a simple gift, somehow; it was like a blessing on our trip as a whole. It hangs now on the wall of our kitchen, where its fragrant contents are being dispensed from day to day.

For most of that last morning, the girl I love and I moved within a masterpiece: the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, which Henri Matisse designed in his extreme old age. I had visited the chapel three times previously, and on each visit it meant more. Yet I was hardly prepared for what occurred this time, a nearly overwhelming experience of joy. 1 had been privileged to interview the artist shortly before he died, and now his parting words came back to me: “Good-bye, my friend, I am packing my bags for the next world.”

The sunlight streamed through the lemon-yellow, cactus-green and ultramarine windows of the chapel. Matisse’s black line drawings on the white tile walls gleamed with shifting caresses of reflected color. The Virgin Mary seemed to be swaying like a flower as her son leapt from her lap. He had his arms outstretched like the wings of a plane or the arms of a cross. The nuns, meanwhile, were preparing the altar for Mass. Their gowns were pebble gray, and their motions quiet and sure, in sober contrast to the exuberance of the chapel as a whole. After a while, they invited us into the vestry. They showed us the airy sacerdotal robes that Matisse had designed. The nuns themselves had sewn the yellow sunbursts and magenta crosses and white silken petals of those garments.

By one o’clock we were winding down the mountainside toward Nice airport. I had dropped all our loose change into the chapel contribution box; my pockets were empty. Our gas gauge registered very nearly empty, too, so we coasted most of the way down. Lunch, as we knew, would be served on the plane. Not that we needed lunch.

Alexander Eliot, formerly art editor of Time and author of several books, including the Horizon Concise History of Greece (1972), now lives in Sussex, England. His article is the first of several that will describe vacations for two costing $500 or less, excluding initial transportation.