From Paris to Provence

When I first moved to France it was to Paris, to a 20m2 studio on the Left Bank, between Place Maubert and Notre Dame on the Seine. As with many good tales, it was a love story. I met the Frenchman who was to become my husband while I was filming in Australia. He was the European producer of a TV mini-series, I was the leading actress. He took me out for dinner in Sydney’s elegant Elizabeth Bay the day after we met and proposed to me even before our first course had been served.

Back in Europe, I was based in London. Michel, recently divorced, in a hotel in Paris. We moved in together into that studio in the heart of the bustling fifth arrondissement. The neighborhood was crammed with fine food shops; there was a fabulous market three mornings a week, and we were steps from the multitude of cinemas along Boulevard Saint Michel and L’Odéon. It became my world: a love story in a few square meters. Thirty-four years old, with a certain award-winning status in my career, I had upped sticks to embark on a new life with a man I barely knew. 

President Mitterand’s private home was two streets from us. Occasionally, I would spot the President himself or his wife, Danielle, in the renowned Laurent Dubois cheese shop in Place Maubert. Laurent Dubois was awarded the MOF, Meilleur Ouvrier de France, the highest honor the French government bestows on an artisan.  

My love affair with cheese began in that fromagerie. 

While Michel spent his days running from meeting to meeting, to editing suites and studios, I began to write. Mornings at a narrow table staring at a blank page and then out a fourth floor window, catching the rising sounds of a city operating at full pelt. My afternoons, I was a flâneuse. I roamed the boulevards, the narrow rues, from one side of the river to the other, walking for miles, losing myself in the tangle of Left Bank cobbled streets, tunneled my way in and out of a zillion musty old bookshops, stood in wonder in art galleries, whiled away hours alone in empty cinemas, idled time on the terraces of cafés, like every wanna-be scribbler, watching the world go by.  

In the evenings we cooked on our two electric rings or went out for dinner. Michel’s world was very social; we were invited to dinner parties frequently. Food and the arts, and love. It was a hopelessly romantic existence, but it was hardly a career. In London, I would have been hustling for work and I did hop off reasonably regularly to play a role in this TV series, film or other. But I was making a transition, not even necessarily consciously. I had ambitions of becoming a published writer. Well, where better than Paris? I was following in the footsteps of the finest. Even if all that Simone de Beauvoir and I had in common was a few hours spent at the Deux Magots brasserie!

The following spring, Michel was attending both the Cannes TV and film festivals. He invited me along.  

I had been dreaming of buying A House by the Sea for more than a decade, had considered settling on a shore somewhere in Australia until I met Michel.  

While Michel talked deals and scripts over long lunches along the bustling Croisette in Cannes, I went window-shopping for a villa. We were as broke as church mice but that did not stop me looking. By the end of the week, I had persuaded a young estate agent to drive us inland and show us what was available for our paltry budget.  

Basically, nothing but a ruin. 

Our Olive Farm, which overlooks the Bay of Cannes, the fourth property we visited, was a jungle to left and right as we motored up its winding driveway on that sunny spring Saturday morning. It had been empty for over a decade, had been squatted, broken into and pretty much left to crumble. There were dozens of swallows circling and diving in and out of the blue-basined swimming pool, empty since a long time, filled with nothing but long tendrils of ivy soaking in dank puddles.  

Beaucoup du travail, muttered the agent. 

Even so, I was enchanted; its views to the sea, its high ceilings, oak-beamed fireplace, echoing spaces and, I had a strong sensation, even on that first sighting, that I had come home. I had found my spot in the world.  

I remember standing by one of the five sets of almost-floor-to-ceiling French windows, looking out across the overgrown terraces and asking myself, Who lived here before us, what stories will they divulge to me? In my imaginings I sensed that there had been love here, happiness, the voices of children running across lawns beneath blossoming trees …

In Paris I was an outsider, an observer. I was not absorbed in the cut and thrust that the city demands if you want to engage in a professional life there. As an actress, my roles would be limited to playing foreigners due to my accent.  

Even so, if we bought this semi-collapsing property, we wouldn’t live here; we would continue to live in Paris – wouldn’t we? – This jungled ruin would be our escape from the hustle and bustle …  

Or so I thought, so we had intended. I could not see the invisible threads that were drawing me in, seducing me: the light, the explosion of colors, the fecundity, the history of the Mediterranean, the sea itself … 

Two years after we had acquired the place, we called in a gardening company to cut the jungle back during our absence. 

I will never forget that first sighting from the lane when we returned in the spring as we gazed up at our land, to see our villa sitting half way up our hillside on a climbing staircase of drystone terraced walls planted with centenarian olive trees. Trees released from a decade of tangled overgrowth. 

The land was a beauty unveiled, disrobed. A new structure. It was as though the house and its grounds had stepped from out of beneath a long shadow and was now stretching in the sunlight. I knew then that I had found an endless source of inspiration. 

Forty years on, we are still here, still dealing with the cracks and leaks and the aches and pains of a century-plus old house. We produce our own, mighty fine, organic extra-virgin olive oil. As well as the original 68 old olive trees, we have planted another 200 or more. I have traveled the Mediterranean from east to west, from north to south, in search of the secrets of the history of the olive tree, its mysteries, cultivation; the tapestry of nations who have over millennia farmed and tended this mythical tree. Together, Michel and I have made television programs about life on this farm and my quest for the history of the Olive Tree. 

And my latest novel, One Summer in Provence, is to be published on 3rd July.

I visit Paris most months, usually for a few days, to hit the cinemas and museums and I will frequently pop in to Laurent Dubois’s fromagerie. We no longer rent that darling little studio on the Left Bank. Instead we have a sprawling stone house east of the capital where Michel has oodles of space to store all his archives and from where he can hurry into town when required. I research my novels – when there is a historical element to them – at the François Mitterand National Library on the Left Bank. The BNF, this monumental site houses two libraries in four buildings on an open plaza. It is open to the public as well as to researchers. It wasn’t even at the concept stage when I first moved to Paris and Mitterand was our President. 

I still love the buzz of the capital, I drink it in greedily when I am there. Paris during the Olympics was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  

I also appreciate the endless expanses of the flat agricultural fields abutting the Champagne region where our stone house stands; the landscape changes colors according to which crops are reaching maturity.  

There are many faces to France. 

Still, our Olive Farm, le Midi, is where my heart is most at peace. The silvery olive trees rising in ranks, moving like Balinese dancers in the breeze. There is a magic here, indefinable, indisputable; it exists. The magic that inspired the geniuses of Picasso, Matisse, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Jean Renoir and so many, many others. Their ghosts stride this coastline with giant steps; humbly, I try to tag along but they are way ahead. I pause, breathless, feet in the sand, to stare out at that hypnotic view of the sea, listening to the gentle pull of the waves while my sight is locked on the horizon, tuning in, towards a million stories still waiting to be told.