Rustic Soups

As everyone went to work at 4 a.m. in summer, the main activity at other times of day was the game of boules carried on on any path which had been left uncobbled, where the village petered off onto the mountainside.

The mediaeval village lay like a curled snail shell at the foot of a great baou on a pyramid of fertile earth deposited by centuries of erosion of the lion-coloured mountain above, and overlooked an expanse which stretched from the Alpes Maritimes to the mountains of Esterel.