We've Always Had Paris... and Provence: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France by Patricia Wells, Walter Wells

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Americans Patricia and Walter Wells have achieved what for most other expatriates could only be a dream: They have been accepted as locals by the French. Cookbook author Patricia is the only American and, indeed, the only women to serve as a restaurant critic for a major French publication (L'Express). Husband Walter, the longtime executive editor at the International Herald Tribune, is one of the few non-French citizens to be awarded the Legion of Honor. In this charming joint memoir, they reminisce about their three decades in Paris and Provence, offering graceful tributes to their adopted country's culture, customs, and, of course, cuisines.

From the Publisher

"With charm and insightful anecdotes about the Parisan and Provencal food-driven life, cookbook author [Patricia] Wells and her husband, Walter, artfully re-create their quarter-century-long courtship with flavorful France. ...This thoroughly enjoyable narrative describes the lavish, flavorful rewards of a life spent abroad." —Publishers Weekly

For more than a quarter century, Patricia Wells, who has long been recognized as the leading American authority on French food, and her husband, Walter, have lived the life in France that many of us have often fantasized about. In this delightful memoir they share in two voices their experience—the good, the bad, and the funny—offering a charming and evocative account of their beloved home and some of the wonderful people they have met along the way.

"Entertaining....Intimate and revealing....The passionate rapport and mutual respect between the spouses shines through every chapter." —San Francisco Chronicle

Publishers Weekly

With charm and insightful anecdotes about the Parisian and Provençal food-driven life, cookbook author Wells and her husband, Walter, artfully recreate their quarter-century-long courtship with flavorful France. Their two distinct voices-complemented by black-and-white photos and more than 30 simple recipes for couscous salad, salmon tartare, and scrambled eggs with truffles-detail the couple's forays into "going native." As they endeavor to adapt to the fashions and lifestyle of the French capital, Patricia takes on the task of researching a city's worth of tastes, textures and smells, visiting tea salons, pastry shops, boulangeriesand chocolate makers for her Food Lover's Guide to Paris, while Walter settles into a new position as editor at the International Herald Tribune. Their Parisian interlude soon turns into a permanent French sojourn when they are seduced by the parasol pines and terraced vineyard belonging to an 18th-century farmhouse called Chanteduc. With their purchase of this northern Provençal abode, the remains of urban life fall to the wayside. This thoroughly enjoyable narrative describes the lavish, flavorful rewards of a life spent abroad. (May)

Rosemarie Lewis - Library Journal

The Wellses have lived an enviable life in France for over 30 years. Patricia is one of the most widely recognized American writers on French food, a former food critic for the International Herald Tribune, and the author of ten books, including the classic Bistro Cooking. Her husband spent 25 years at the International Herald Tribune, working his way up to executive editor. Their latest effort is a joint affair, offering alternating reminiscences about their decision to move to France and chronicling the adventures life has thrown at them since. Although food features heavily through the book, and most sections are capped with a recipe-there are over 30 scattered throughout, including Almond Macaroon and Fresh Berry Cake and Fish Cheeks with Polenta and Parmesan Crust-the book is about their lives, with food-not food, with a little life thrown in. Photographs from their private collection enhance the personal nature of the memoir. An optional purchase for most libraries. (Index not seen.) [See Prepub Alert, LJ3/1/08.]

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

We've Always Had Paris...and Provence
A Scrapbook of Our Life in France

Chapter One

Ah, Paris!

Walter:

Like any fantasy, it was supposed to be ephemeral. It was also supposed to be transcendent. But here I was, stuck in airport traffic and the only question in my head on that dismal January morning was "What have I gotten Patricia and me into?" The taxi was nudging its way into the bumper-locked queue of cars snaking toward Paris, snuffed or so it seemed by the smoky pea soup that often passes as wintertime air, and my abs and glutes knotted in involuntary acknowledgment that our gamble of moving to Paris could be a really bad bet.

A colleague who had also recently left the Times had spent months making his decision, with neat lists of pros and cons and extensive conversations with various newsroom counselors. Far less methodical than he—also younger, with no children and more blitheness of spirit—I had done none of that. My lists were all in my head and consisted mostly of people in New York I would miss and things in Paris I wouldn't have to miss anymore. My colleague was looking for a career opportunity and my interest was mostly in a little adventure—a couple of years at the International Herald Tribune. My friend ended up staying away from the Times for about two years, then he went back. I never did.

Slumped in a battered taxi that was barely moving and blind in the fog, I had just begun learning Paris's best kept secret: its gray, damp weather. January's short, sunless days are especially depressing. All Frenchmen who can afford it (and they save up so they can) seek a sunny antidoteto winter's depths either on an Alpine ski slope or on some Club Med beach. Not me. I was headed in the other direction, swept along by what I counted on being adventure and what I now feared might just be naïveté.

Ironically, the fog reinforced one bit of clarity. I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn't appreciated what that really meant. My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel-good time at sidewalk cafés or strolls in the long summer twilight. Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris.

And now fog or not, traffic jam or not, I was about to become a Parisian. And in two weeks, when Patricia had closed up the New York apartment, she would join me. The magic of that idea was powerful. Paris was the ultimate destination in my map of the universe. Even more than New York, Paris offered glamour and excitement as a place to be. And it was exotic. After eight years in New York—and still considering it my true home—I wanted an overseas adventure.

Exoticism aside, the immediate requirement, shelter, had been temporarily solved by Lydie and Wayne Marshall, New York friends who were generously lending us their apartment for several weeks in exchange for fitting some of their furniture into the small shipping container that Patricia had stayed behind to fill with clothes and other basic needs. We left everything else behind to be there when we returned. The Marshalls' little apartment, on the Rue des Entrepreneurs in the 15th arrondissement, provided a place to sleep plus the experience of a quiet working-class neighborhood. When I had described the neighborhood to a colleague at the Times, I had called it "not very interesting." "There is no such thing as an uninteresting quartier in Paris," he corrected me. Maybe not, but it did seem remote from Paris's chic, mythic center.

And so did my next stop, the Herald Tribune offices. After the taxi finally crawled to the 15th and I dropped off my bags, I got onto the Métro and headed for Neuilly. The paper had moved several years earlier from Rue de Berry off the Champs-Elysées. Its new offices, in a plush suburb on the western edge of Paris, are only four Métro stops beyond the Arc de Triomphe, so it wasn't geography that made it feel remote.

I had visited the Trib for the first time four months earlier and had left the job interview feeling very dubious about giving up my staff job at the New York Times for this. Patricia and I were also in love with the idea of being New Yorkers. When I was growing up in the Carolina Piedmont, television had just begun the great cultural leveling that over time washed away a lot of America's regionalism. The excitement and sophistication flowing down the coaxial cable all emanated from New York. I had wanted to be at the wellspring for a long time before I got there.

Another Southerner, Willie Morris, wrote a book in those years called North Toward Home, and the title described a path that had beaconed to me since third grade. Miss Frances Love, our teacher at the little school in McConnells, South Carolina, talked to her unwashed, barefoot charges about her trips to Manhattan. One day she got so excited as she talked of that place far, far from our Faulknerian hamlet that she turned to her blackboard and sketched the three most noteworthy skyscrapers of our day. Her chalk drawings did little credit to the Old World angles of the Flatiron Building, or the elegant symmetry of the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building's Art Deco frou-frou. But the crude chalkboard images stuck in at least one young mind eager for impressions from the outside, and I recalled my early teacher's drawings when I moved to New York and began directly sharing her enthusiasm for the city.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Ah, Paris!

Walter:

Like any fantasy, it was supposed to be ephemeral. It was also supposed to be transcendent. But here I was, stuck in airport traffic and the only question in my head on that dismal January morning was "What have I gotten Patricia and me into?" The taxi was nudging its way into the bumper-locked queue of cars snaking toward Paris, snuffed or so it seemed by the smoky pea soup that often passes as wintertime air, and my abs and glutes knotted in involuntary acknowledgment that our gamble of moving to Paris could be a really bad bet.

A colleague who had also recently left the Times had spent months making his decision, with neat lists of pros and cons and extensive conversations with various newsroom counselors. Far less methodical than he—also younger, with no children and more blitheness of spirit—I had done none of that. My lists were all in my head and consisted mostly of people in New York I would miss and things in Paris I wouldn't have to miss anymore. My colleague was looking for a career opportunity and my interest was mostly in a little adventure—a couple of years at the International Herald Tribune. My friend ended up staying away from the Times for about two years, then he went back. I never did.

Slumped in a battered taxi that wasbarely moving and blind in the fog, I had just begun learning Paris's best kept secret: its gray, damp weather. January's short, sunless days are especially depressing. All Frenchmen who can afford it (and they save up so they can) seek a sunny antidote to winter's depths either on an Alpine ski slope or on some Club Med beach. Not me. I was headed in the other direction, swept along by what I counted on being adventure and what I now feared might just be naïveté.

Ironically, the fog reinforced one bit of clarity. I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn't appreciated what that really meant. My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel-good time at sidewalk cafés or strolls in the long summer twilight. Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris.

And now fog or not, traffic jam or not, I was about to become a Parisian. And in two weeks, when Patricia had closed up the New York apartment, she would join me. The magic of that idea was powerful. Paris was the ultimate destination in my map of the universe. Even more than New York, Paris offered glamour and excitement as a place to be. And it was exotic. After eight years in New York—and still considering it my true home—I wanted an overseas adventure.

Exoticism aside, the immediate requirement, shelter, had been temporarily solved by Lydie and Wayne Marshall, New York friends who were generously lending us their apartment for several weeks in exchange for fitting some of their furniture into the small shipping container that Patricia had stayed behind to fill with clothes and other basic needs. We left everything else behind to be there when we returned. The Marshalls' little apartment, on the Rue des Entrepreneurs in the 15th arrondissement, provided a place to sleep plus the experience of a quiet working-class neighborhood. When I had described the neighborhood to a colleague at the Times, I had called it "not very interesting." "There is no such thing as an uninteresting quartier in Paris," he corrected me. Maybe not, but it did seem remote from Paris's chic, mythic center.

And so did my next stop, the Herald Tribune offices. After the taxi finally crawled to the 15th and I dropped off my bags, I got onto the Métro and headed for Neuilly. The paper had moved several years earlier from Rue de Berry off the Champs-Elysées. Its new offices, in a plush suburb on the western edge of Paris, are only four Métro stops beyond the Arc de Triomphe, so it wasn't geography that made it feel remote.

I had visited the Trib for the first time four months earlier and had left the job interview feeling very dubious about giving up my staff job at the New York Times for this. Patricia and I were also in love with the idea of being New Yorkers. When I was growing up in the Carolina Piedmont, television had just begun the great cultural leveling that over time washed away a lot of America's regionalism. The excitement and sophistication flowing down the coaxial cable all emanated from New York. I had wanted to be at the wellspring for a long time before I got there.

Another Southerner, Willie Morris, wrote a book in those years called North Toward Home, and the title described a path that had beaconed to me since third grade. Miss Frances Love, our teacher at the little school in McConnells, South Carolina, talked to her unwashed, barefoot charges about her trips to Manhattan. One day she got so excited as she talked of that place far, far from our Faulknerian hamlet that she turned to her blackboard and sketched the three most noteworthy skyscrapers of our day. Her chalk drawings did little credit to the Old World angles of the Flatiron Building, or the elegant symmetry of the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building's Art Deco frou-frou. But the crude chalkboard images stuck in at least one young mind eager for impressions from the outside, and I recalled my early teacher's drawings when I moved to New York and began directly sharing her enthusiasm for the city.

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