Menus for the Summer Season—Butter and Cream Taste of Mountain Flowers

“This valley is so tightly enclosed by the mountains,” I said, “it must be a veritable sun trap. Does a savage sun beat down here in summer?”

“When I go shopping in Grenoble on a midsummer day,” said Mademoiselle Vivette, “it seems as if the sky above the city is bleached by the immense and unbearable heat. Then I come back to our valley, and at once I am in a cool vault of lacy green under the trees. Here one never senses a sultry stillness of high noon heat. This earth always seems to be humming and trembling with its inner secret life. One knows it is noon, during the peak of the summer, because, almost every day, a single thick white cloud drifts slowly across the clear blue sky. Almost exactly at noon. When it has passed, the breezes return and the day begins to cool.”