Matthew Fraser

The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and summer crowds. I have been spending time in the south of France since the early 1990s. Provence was fashionable in those days. Peter Mayle’s massively successful book, A Year in Provence, inspired thousands to pull up stakes and move to southern France to emulate his idyllic life in the Luberon hills. Some settled farther west in the Dordogne, famously called ‘Dordogneshire’ for its concentration of British expats. Mayle became a one-man publishing industry, following up with sequels including Toujours Provence and Encore Provence.

A strange literary coincidence occurred in Paris exactly 40 years ago, on 14 April, 1986.  In the small hours of the morning, Jean Genet, enfant terrible of French literature, tripped on a step leading to the toilet in his tiny Left Bank hotel room. He fell forward and fatally smashed his head on the tile floor. Several hours later, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir expired in a Paris hospital only a few blocks away. Two French literary legends were dead. They had died within hours of each other in the same district of Paris.  Jean Genet and Simone de Beauvoir were bonded by more than the dramatic unity of their final act. They had been close friends for more than four decades. Their connection was Jean-Paul Sartre.