The mysterious ways of the French

These new tablets that will save or at least prolong my life have unpredictable side effects which only now, a month after starting to take them, are making themselves felt. Breasts, round and wobbling that I can cup in my palms and jiggle up and down; breasts, moreover, with painfully sensitive nipples. Fatigue: it is almost impossible to be both immobile and awake. By early evening, trapped upright in a chair drawn up to a crowded restaurant table, I’m longing for sleep or even death. And wind, which is perhaps the least expected and most disastrous side effect. Quelling the Boxer Rebellion is the only thing keeping me awake. In restaurants, the old colonial political expedient of permitting moderate voices while savagely suppressing strident ones is effective sometimes as a safety valve, I’m finding.

To reach the rocky path leading up to our cave house in the cliff, one passes through a cavernous and ancient quartier which at night is lit by widely spaced street lanterns. At midnight and alone, and reaching a point in the street where the enveloping darkness was almost total, I allowed to escape what I’d hoped was a modest, inarticulate objection to colonial rule, which spoke, however, with the exquisite articulacy and force of a Frantz Fanon or a Ngugi wa Thiong’o. From somewhere in the blackness above came an unsurprised but indignant woman’s voice. ‘Charmant!’ it said.

August here in this clos of the south of France is a sociable month. The second homes are fully reoccupied, the permanent expat residents host continuous house parties, the village restaurants and bars are going full blast. (Conspicuous among the vacationing nationalities of all classes — and totally unlike anyone else — are public school-educated Englishmen in pink trousers and Crew polo shirts with the collar turned up.