A Farmhouse in Provence

Book excerpt: All roads led to Provence after Mary Roblee and her French husband, Paul-Marc Henry, found a forsaken ruin on a hilltop near Avignon. In one afternoon they bought all twelve acres, launching into the pitfalls and pleasures of restoring their pile of stones and gnarled landscape into a farmhouse and a vineyard. Five years passed before they drank a goblet of their own wine, their orchards flowered, and their monastic white-walled rooms were filled with Provençal anitques. In discovering the fun and fascination of local customs, cuisine and history, Mary Henry learned, as an American woman, to glean the secret art of cross-cultural living and above all, to cope with the care and feeding of a Frenchman.