Restaurant Patrick Giffon offered a splendid petit déjeuner featuring raspberries and a richly flavored peach jam—F90 for two.

On this clear, hot day the autoroute A9 was crowded, we had a few slowdowns and didn’t have time for a leisurely search for a nice lunch. We stopped at the first restaurant we saw after getting off A9, a place on a circle near the échangeur--interchange--just south of Montpellier. With lots of glass and lawn and palm trees all around, it looked forbiddingly Californian. But we went in anyway.

Ave de la Condamine, St-Jean-de-Védas, Montpellier (04 67 69 01 11).

Outdoor light flooding in through the window walls gave the dining room a bright atmosphere and provided an excellent setting for the visual aspect of the chef’s art.

La salade de la mer: Perfectly fresh octopus, shrimp, langoustine and salad greens, arranged informally but with attention to the harmony of the red, pink, white and green of the chief ingredients.

L’assiette de crudités riches: A colorful and tasty mélange of egg, shrimp, melon and greens with a pink mayonnaise.

Language note: The waitress told us that riches refers to the lavish variety of ingredients, not to their fat content.

We drank a fresh and pleasant Roque Sestière Corbières blanc de blanc 1992.

La feuilletée de saumon et sa riz sauvage: A salmon filet served on lettuce, topped with a puff-pastry in the shape of a whale with currants for eyes, accompanied by a mixture of rice and wild rice and a bundle of green beans.

La caille désossée farcie à la périgordine. The boned quail was served in two pieces, one stuffed with a rich-tasting pink forcemeat. Also with this dish, a baked herbed tomato, a bundle of green beans and gratin Dauphinois.

Sorbet citron and Bavarois à la poire were routinely refreshing desserts.

With coffee, a mocha that was pleasant in a mild way, the total for this unexpectedly delightful lunch at Relais St-Jean was F369.

Just before leaving, we noticed a framed certificate announcing that the chef was a gold medallist at the Foire Européan in 1987, at which time his affiliation was with le Comptoire de l’Économat de l’Armée in Baden Baden. So his background was army cook. But at least he was with the French army.

***

Continuing on our way south, we left A7 for the less crowded Barcelone branch, A9, and then took narrow local roads to arrive in Padern just before 6 pm.

The last part of the drive was pleasant. The heat of the sun had abated and the air suddenly had the quality that gives rise to thoughts of relaxing under shady plane trees, apéritif at hand. 

An apéritif, to be followed perhaps by a crêpe? That idea occurred to us when we noticed the modest Crêperie le Rocher on our left as we entered Padern. 

But first we had to find our lodgings, and we started to wonder—where exactly in the village is our rental gîte? The agency’s directions simply gave the name of the owner, Mr Vive. We needed to ask someone for directions, but the place seemed deserted. To our right lay a shallow river, the Verdouble, and to our left a steep ridge ascended by rows of silent, ancient-looking stone houses. Where were the people of Padern?

The answer, and our first and most lasting impression of the village, lay around a bend in the street: a dozen or so septuagenarians perched amicably side by side on the low stone wall under the plane trees to the right of the road, chattering and laughing like a flock of migratory birds settling to rest after a long flight.

One of them, a rangy, dignified woman whom for future reference I will call Mme Legrand, rose to answer our question. Yes, monsieur-dame, the gîte of Mr Vive is at two hundred meters, on the left…. As she spoke we noticed the villagers exchanging surreptitious glances. Apparently there was something about our gîte not quite as it should be.

Our misgivings were justified.

In our previous experience of rental gîtes in France, the owner or caretaker had been on hand to let us in and to demonstrate just where you have to thump to open the door of the refrigerator. And we had always found the place, no matter how modest, perfectly clean.

But in this case there was nobody about to meet us at this second-story gîte over an old garage—just a scrawled note from Mr Vive inviting us to go in and make ourselves at home—and the place was not only small and dilapidated but dismayingly grimy. Before we could make ourselves at home, we realized, we would have to clean up.

Our spirits sagged momentarily, but bounced back again at the thought of dining in Padern, perhaps at the attractive little crêperie we had noticed. The cleanup could wait. So, after stocking up on groceries for the weekend at a Huit à Huit in nearby Tuchan, we headed for:

Crêperie le Rocher (Luisette Solà)

Padern 04 68 45 00 97

A lissome young woman with a pleasant manner, Mme Luisette Solà explained with a smile that we had to dine outdoors, since the crêperie’s interior dining area was far too small for two people. We could see she was right—the one table was of a size more suitable for a kindergarten than a restaurant—and in any case it was more pleasant to be in the open air. So we followed her suggestion to sit at one of the three full-sized outdoor tables set up on a patch of gravel on the other side of the road. There we sank into the full-sized plastic chairs and looked about, feeling at ease after the activity of the afternoon, enjoying the sensation of cool evening air gently lapping our skin.

There were no cars on the road, just a bicycle sedately propelled by a senior citizen for whom the wheels represented transportation rather than recreation. We looked across the street at the large rock for which the crêperie was named, the shop nestled against one side and the Solà family’s residence against the other. Beyond, our gaze roved up the darkening slopes overlooking the village, and along the ridge capped to our right by some romantic-looking the ruins that we later learned were the remains of the ancient Château de Padern.

In due course Luisette stepped briskly across the road with the first installment of our repast: a pitcher of local red wine, a salade au chèvre chaud consisting of melted local goat cheese on rounds of toast with lettuce, and a salade Niçoise lacking anchovies and a few other standard ingredients, but made with excellent greens.

Later on, for dessert we had crêpes with apricot jam and Grand Marnier, and a bottle of cider labeled cidre doux, containing 2% alcohol.

We forgot to note the amount of the tab at Crêperie le Rocher. But large or (more likely) small, the amount didn’t matter. This was one of those occasions when value measured in money seemed irrelevant.

Of course, we had forgotten all about the cleaning job that awaited us at the gîte.

***

We brought broom and dustpan to bear on the bedroom floor, but to little avail. We scooped up a lot of dirt, but underneath we found more dirt, and so on. The reason, we realized after a while, was that the plaster over the masonry walls had flaked off here and there, and the walls themselves were slowly disintegrating. We gave up the struggle, persuading ourselves that we didn’t care about dirt. Then we fell asleep and fell into bed, in approximately that order. The sheets, at least, were perfectly clean.