LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 50

Ralph Lauren. “There are quartiers where most Parisians can't afford to live anymore,” said
Maud'hui.
In the French countryside some villages are nearly ghost towns in the winter when the
second homes are boarded up and their wealthy owners return to their lives in another
country. Local shopkeepers disappear and the village is without the boulangerie , the café
or the grocery store.
“In France, too, tourism can be an illness, a malady,” said Falcone, of the Agriculture
Ministry. “You have the big problem of second homes that raises the prices for all homes.
It becomes more and more difficult for locals to buy, and they move. This undermines
your village life and soon your rural life.”
The trade-offs are difficult. In the seventies and into the nineties, foreigners played the
opposite role, buying decrepit buildings for a song, restoring them and bringing life back
to many isolated villages. Peter Mayle, a British writer, made a small fortune writing about
his life in Provence beginning with his trials while redoing a two-hundred-year-old farm-
house in A Year in Provence and then living the dream of the French “vie en rose” in Tou-
jours Provence. Those days are over, and now the French fear they might be reaching the
point of no return.
France may suffer from too many fans. Despite its reputation as overpriced, France is
consistently rated as one of the best countries for retirement, for “luxury on a budget.”
Forbes magazine called it especially friendly for American retirees because of its high-
quality, low-cost health care system. Europeans have voted it one of their favorite retire-
ment spots because, in the words of the London Daily Mail , France is “sheets ahead of its
European counterparts for quality of life.”
That indescribable charm and joie de vivre was uppermost in the mind of Ambassador
Frances Cook when she bought a second home in France. Retired from the U.S. Foreign
Service, she is now chair of an international consulting firm based in Washington and
traveling often. Her roots in France are deep, beginning with a junior year abroad in Aix-
en-Provence and continuing with official assignments in Paris. She wanted to live in the
south, in Provence, in an apartment with character. When canvassing the region to look
for such a gem, she had one stipulation. She would only buy in a village with a thriving
primary school. “I didn't want to buy into a dying town or a town that was all foreigners,
and the best gauge is the school,” she said.
She found her ideal apartment in a restored convent in Bargemon, a village in the foot-
hills not far from Saint-Tropez. When in Bargemon her days are spent with the French vil-
lagers and doing the rounds at the cafés, restaurants, greengrocers, hairdresser, boulanger-
ie and boucherie. The village boasts two pharmacies, two medical clinics, ten art galleries
and studios, a garage, a bank, a plumber, three electricians, a mason and several general
contractors. The caliber of the musical concerts at the village church is astonishing and
religious feasts are celebrated with the sincerity of earlier eras.