The Man with the Baguette:
Wanderings in Paris and Provence
by John Blattner
Illustrated. 158 pp. (paperback), 106 pp. (ebook)
© John Blattner (2019)
During a brief visit to Paris many years ago, John Blattner and his wife Peggy were leaving their Metro station one evening when a man scurrying past them in the crowd caught John’s attention. He was wearing a small backpack and holding a sack with a baguette in it. John fancied that he was an honest-to-goodness Parisien, not a tourist, headed home at the end of the day with bread for the dinner table. What would it be like, John wondered, to be the man with the baguette? To experience life in France, even for a short time, the way les Français do?
Part memoir and part visual journey, this book tells what happened when that question was answered. It’s a day-by-day account, in words and pictures, of a month spent wandering in Paris and Provence. It describes not just the people, places, restaurants, and wines John and Peggy discovered, but also what they learned from—and how they were changed by—their experiences.
An excerpt from The Man with the Baguette:
At roughly 6,300 feet (1919 meters), Mont Ventoux is the highest point in the region. For reference, Pike’s Peak is 14,000 feet. But for this part of the world, Mont Ventoux is a beast. The ascent of Mont Ventoux is the most difficult and most famous leg of the annual Tour de France, making it catnip for serious cyclists everywhere, who flock to it in droves (as do many casual riders). We hadn’t planned on driving it, but there it was, so…
Route D-974 is one of those not-quite-two-lane roads that snakes and switchbacks its way up the western face of the mountain. Every inch of it is on a razor’s edge. There are no shoulders on either side, nor any guardrails, so the outboard side of the road simply drops off into the ever-deepening abyss. They tell me there are spectacular views on this drive. I wouldn’t know because, by sheer force of will, I never looked at them. “Never” as in not once, even for a moment. My phobia of exposed heights is slightly ameliorated by being enclosed in a vehicle, but only very slightly. I was honestly afraid that if I so much as peeked, I might go woozy or even pass out.
Every so often, of course, we would encounter a vehicle coming down the mountain, requiring a delicate pas-de-deux by both drivers, neither of whom had much margin for error. To make matters still worse, the entire route was crawling with packs of the aforementioned cyclists. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that there were more than a thousand of them on the mountain that morning. Needless to say, there was no such thing as a “bike lane,” which meant that in order to get around the cyclists, vehicles ascending the mountain had to borrow some of the real estate belonging to the vehicles descending the mountain. Imagine making that maneuver as you approach a switchback with no way of knowing whether you might be about to encounter a vehicle coming the other way.
I was a nervous wreck the whole way. Peggy was in the even more unnerving position of being powerless to affect anything that was happening. I could tell she was using all her strength not to show her concern lest it distract me from my driving. I freely admit that I would have gladly turned back at any point along the way but for the fact that there was never a single reasonable opportunity to do so.
We were a lovely pair of basket cases when we finally reached the summit—where we discovered that there was not a single square inch of space to even stop the car, let alone get out and enjoy the presumably spectacular vistas we had won at such cost. Nothing to be done but to immediately head down the southern face of the mountain on D-974. This second leg of the trip was only slightly less terrifying than the first, because the ascending cyclists were now someone else’s problem.