Low life | 18 August 2016

I took the only spare chair on the terrace of the Modern bar, one of four bars on this Provençal village square. By repute, it’s the bar where the least snobbish of the villagers meet and drink. Rough, some might say. Old-fashioned ideas of masculinity and femininity are more clearly marked here than at the posher bars up the road. It was market day. Sixty or so locals, plus one Englishman — moi — occupied the steel-framed wicker chairs arranged around the trunk of a plane tree.

At the next table a sweet little girl in a pink kimono embroidered with flowers had a balloon attached to a small bat by a string. She was batting her balloon in a desultory, bored manner. She reacted to my loving smile by scowling and looked away. Six leathery old men were betting noisily on a card game with square plastic counters and swilling back glasses of watered anisette. Beyond them, at an eight-seater table, males and females of three generations of the same family sat in perfect accord. The children sucked their neon-bright drinks through straws with restrained avidity. At a farther table was an emaciated, ladylike alcoholic or perhaps heroin addict, or perhaps both. French pop music — I will never be reconciled to it — blared from a source inside the café. French conversational hubbub whirs faster and at a higher pitch than an English one, and is punctuated with shouts. The café parasols weren’t unfurled yet and the mid-morning sun was burning my neck.

In last year’s regional elections, in the crucial second round of voting, 45 per cent of these villagers voted for Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of the National Front, and 54 per cent for a party called the ‘Union of the Right’.