Le boulanger

In four weeks we will have left this country of wonderful bread to return to the land of Wonder bread. I know I will have to bake when I return, and I know that nothing will compare to the baguettes we pick up at the artisanal boulangerie at the Ilette, across from Salis Beach in Antibes. We make two or three trips a day, the first before the boys leave for school, another before lunch, for who would want to eat baguettes already cool and four hours old. There is last run just before dinner, and on rare occasions, a boy is sent out to grab another loaf before the meal is over. It is convenient that the trip back and forth takes not more than ten minutes, but the lines are getting longer because of those tourists now infesting the city and the bakery as well.

Caroline, a recent graduate from a professional lycée where she baked cakes and pies, stood behind the counter until last week. She is pretty in an innocent and unconscious way, and has only recently started to wear a little make-up. Both Jeroen and I have grown very fond of her. She found a similar job closer to her home in Nice. I can’t blame her for wanting to skip the hour’s commute, but I know that her departure will make it easier for us to leave France. I made her a present of a scalloped blue seed-bead necklace with crystal, I’d combined different shades of blue to reflect the water off the coast.

I am in a relationship with the owner of the bakery. No, I don’t know his name, but that means nothing, I think of him as Jacques. One is free in France to fill in these lapses of  knowledge by using one’s imagination. I was hoping to establish a friendship which would allow me to go into the kitchen and watch the bread at every stage of the process: the measuring out and the checking of temperatures, the preheating to the kneading and the multiple rises, the final shaping and slashing, the steaming of the oven to the  finished product. When I enquired two months ago, I was told to ask again in September after the high season when there would be room to breathe. I was a little hurt, I will admit, and in my younger days when I was more impulsive, I might have gone so far as to boycott this bakery and grant my custom to a competitor. I did consider this course of action but a quick investigation revealed the absence of competition. In the old town of Antibes there are patisseries but no real boulangerie, nothing quite so compelling.

Over time, the proprietor and I have become friends of a sort. He winks at me deliberately and I am grateful for it. As I get older I am winked at even less than I was in my heyday. Sometimes he blows kisses in my direction and says “Bisous, bisous,” or kiss, kiss, which is charming indeed. My children see this as an act of kindness to a middle-aged woman. Jeroen is aware, and as usual, unfazed; he tells me not to worry, that I am not having an affair. I am duly reassured.