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Alain was adamant. “There are only two ways to visit Les Calanques: à pied. . . ,” and he looked down, somewhat dubiously, at my flimsy sandals, “ou par bateau,” and he pointed toward the harbor, where his boat was lurching drunkenly about in the mistral-churned waves. It was my turn to look dubious. Of course, he said, smiling disingenuously, the choice was entirely mine. I took another sip of espresso and looked longingly at his elderly gray Mercedes, parked just behind the café, but Alain had already read my mind. “Non. Absolument pas. There are no roads there.” Now, the idea that just outside the urban sprawl of Marseilles there is a twelve-mile stretch of coastline so wild and inaccessible that you can reach it only by water or foot was, to me, utterly irresistible. But even Alain had to admit that if I were to choose his boat, we’d have to wait for the mistral to calm down a bit.

Ah, le mistral. That wild card. That joker who gets his kicks out of barreling down the Rhône Valley in order to drive everyone in the Midi completely insane. Even though I hadn’t lived in this part of Provence for quite as long as Alain, partly on account of being about ten years younger than he and partly on account of being an American, I still knew a thing or two about the mistral. For example, the local dry cleaner had told me that it had a special penchant for odd numbers, a fact that was confirmed by the man behind the counter at the pharmacie (the same man who informed me, with a perfectly straight face, that there would be no demand for Viagra when it hit the market in October, because Frenchmen had no need of such a pathetic American invention . . . but that, as they say, is une autre histoire). Monsieur Macho, with his humorless eyes, tight little mouth, and neatly pressed white coat, assured me that “he” always blew for three, five, or seven days. Or, presumably, for seventeen, or thirty-three, or any other odd number that took “his” fancy. In addition to having a fondness for certain numbers, the mistral is also the most terrible snob, tormenting only those who have the bad luck and taste to live at the terminally unchic western end of the Mediterranean. Shutters can be blowing off their hinges in Toulon and boats capsizing in Marseilles, while at the very same moment at Cap d’Antibes, the water is as still and blue as the liquid in a bottle of Windex, and the Russians on the terrace of the Eden Roc are gasping for air and happy to part with their last million rubles in exchange for the merest whisper of a breeze. I ordered another espresso, shot a quick look at Alain’s tiny boat bobbing about like a champagne cork, and glanced down at the licorice-thin straps of my sandals. Quel choix. In the end I voted with my inadequate feet: The boat won.

We set off soon after dawn the next morning. Alain had called me before six to say that the wind had died down but that it was absolutely vital we make an early start, because the mistral was not a morning person—he might get up to his old tricks again later that afternoon. The sun had just risen as we bounced, with Alain at the wheel and me holding on for dear life, across the water in the general direction of Marseilles. In the distance I recognized the outline of La Ciotat, until the mid eighties one of France’s most important shipbuilding centers. The abandoned shipyards and cranes stood rotting by the shore, and Alain snorted in disgust at the politicians who pretended that the industry might be revived, refusing to come clean and admit that thousands of jobs had been lost forever.

After La Ciotat, we headed for Cap de l’Aigle, the vast eagle-shaped rock that marks the western end of the bay, and as we passed by, I turned and took one last look at the emaciated, rusting cranes lined up along the edge of the water, bent almost double, as if in pain.

The coastline changed instantly and dramatically as soon as we rounded the cape. Enormous cliffs dropped straight down to the inky blue water, and the wind had tortured the rocks into strange, contorted shapes. Even the sea became wilder and rougher. I looked up and saw what seemed to be the slender pipes of a giant cathedral organ soaring into the cloudless cerulean sky; offshore, an enemy warship lurked, and behind me, a huge concave indentation in the cliff looked like an angry hooded cobra looming overhead. No more sandy beaches, no more holiday villas, no more cozy seaside towns nor even a hint that this was a place inhabited by man. I had not seen another boat since we’d passed La Ciotat. It felt as though we’d left the civilized world behind.

The word calanque is derived from calenco, meaning “steep” in Provençal. Which, if you have ever seen the calanques, makes perfect sense. These narrow inlets, similar to fjords, are like long, bony fingers pointing inland, with sandy beaches at their tips and enclosed on both sides by sheer chalky white cliffs. There must be about ten of them punctuating the twelve miles of coast east of Marseilles. The area, designated a protected site by the government in 1975, covers about twelve thousand acres and is, as Alain had delighted in telling me, accessible only by pied ou bateau. People with sturdier footwear—and more energy and guts than I will ever have—can hike, climb, and dangle all over the cliffs and be rewarded by some of the most devastatingly beautiful scenery in all of France. Interestingly, the topography has changed over the centuries, and the stark severity of the landscape is a relatively recent development. Originally, these same cliffs, as well as all the land behind them, were covered in oak forests so dense that Francois I, king of France in the early sixteenth century, used to hunt wild boar there. The wood from these same trees was used to build ships for the Crusades. More and more trees were chopped down over the centuries, the soil eroded, and those trees that were left were regularly destroyed in the forest fires that rage across this part of France every summer. The result of all this devastation was, paradoxically, the savage terrain we admire today. The sea has also changed. It used to be so thick with fish that the calanques were used for the madrague, the Provençal version of the Sicilian mattanza—the ritualistic slaughter of tuna that continues in the southern Mediterranean. The fish were driven from the mouth of the calanques in toward the beach, where, unable to escape, they were killed by men with pikes and knives. When Louis XIII visited Marseilles in the fall of 1622, his host, the Marquis d’Ornano, Seigneur of Mazargues, invited him to Morgiou, where the king was presented with a vermeil trident and soon set about murdering the luckless tuna that had been trapped in the calanque. Although there are enough tuna left around Sicily to keep the tradition of the mattanza going, overfishing and pollution have made madragues a dim, atavistic memory in France. Probably the only madrague that most people can now recall is the house of the same name in St-Tropez, where God—or was it Vadim?—created Bardot.

Cap Canaille, an enormous russet rock that’s striped at an angle, looks like some gigantic multilayered cake slipping slowly into the sea. As it loomed into view, standing guard over the east side of the bay of Cassis, Alain told me, not without a soupçon of Gallic pride, that this was the tallest falaise, or cliff, in France, but then he quickly corrected himself and said “in the whole of Europe.” I imagined that my friend in the pharmacie would have said “in the world,” but, as we say in New York, whatever. It was big. As big as you’d really want a rock to be. A barstool for Godzilla. I looked up at it with appropriate admiration as we skipped straight across the bay and inched our way into Port-Miou. Not the best place to start your journey into the “unspoiled” world of the calanques, it is one enormous parking lot for boats. But things improved as we moved along the coastline: Port Pin, surrounded by pine trees, was next, and after that, we came to the truly spectacular En-Vau. The water here was a mottled mix of emerald, whereas the bottom was sandy, purple, and aquamarine, reminding me of Van Gogh’s description, in a letter to his brother, Theo, of the sea in this part of France: “The Mediterranean has the colors of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has taken on a tinge of rose color or gray.”

At the entrance to Calanque d’En-Vau, a vast stone steeple called the Doigt de Dieu points like an accusatory finger toward heaven, while a man who looked no bigger than a fly, and seemed just as vulnerable, dangled from a thread as he slowly inched his way to the summit. I was tempted by Van Gogh’s mackerel-colored water, but when I put my foot over the side of the boat, I quickly decided that the sun had a bit more work to do in the heating department.

Maybe after lunch? Except that it wasn’t at all clear to me where, when, or how lunch might happen. The coastline was becoming steadily wilder, and each calanque beyond Cassis that we explored was more deserted and pristine than the one before—all of which pleased my heart and eyes but left my stomach a little anxious. Much as I love nature, I have noticed that the words unspoiled and pristine don’t often go with restaurant. It must have been after two when we turned into the calanque of Sormiou. The first thing I saw were some encouraging-looking cabanons scattered along the hillside. Next, I saw that to our right there was a little port, while straight ahead were a few more houses built around a perfect crescent of sand. And there on the left was a terrace with tables shaded by parasols, and beside it, painted on the side of a cement wall in huge letters, were the magical words, “Le Lunch.” A French flag snapped in the breeze, and as we brought the boat into the bay, I couldn’t resist humming under my breath, “Allons enfants de la patrie, l’heure du lunch est arrivée.” We waded ashore, barefoot and bedraggled, and were welcomed by a sad-faced waiter who looked like Fernandel. It took me a while to realize that I had stumbled upon perfection. Actually, the truth is that it took me until the first sip of chilled local Château de Fontcreuse Blanc de Blancs and the first mouthful of daurade (sea bream), grilled over a wood fire and sprinkled with olive oil, lemon, and, of course, sea salt. It was that simple. Marcel Benkemoun, who bought Le Lunch in 1983, explained that since they had no electricity, they were forced to buy all of their food fresh daily—hence the sparkling fish; hence the small but immaculately balanced menu; and hence the utter lack of all pretension. The mayor of Marseilles might have been coming to dinner that night (it turned out that he was) with twenty friends, but he would still have had the same choice of daurade, sardines, baby octopus, loup, or bouillabaisse that we had, and he would have eaten it, listening to the sound of the waves slapping against the rocks. And what of the name? Marcel took me inside and showed me a faded black-and-white photograph, taken in 1894, hanging above the bar. There was the same terrace, the same white house and shutters, and the same snappy, up-to-the-minute, Americanized name painted in outsize letters on the side of the wall. Plus ça change . . . It must have been after four when we got up to leave. Fernandel had taken off his black lace-up shoes and rolled up his trousers and was busy slurping buckets of fresh seawater across the tiled floor in preparation for the mayor’s party. After our meal at Le Lunch, we walked down to the minuscule beach, which must have been about five steps from the terrace, and lay on the sand. The water was having a Van Gogh moment, slyly shifting like a chameleon from turquoise to violet to deep blue, and the tricolore outside the restaurant began to snap a bit too energetically in the breeze. It was time to go. We walked back out to the boat through the shallow water, and as we were leaving I saw a sleek white sailboat sliding up to the beach. A moment later a young woman waded ashore with a bundle in her arms, which turned out to be a baby, who, as soon as they had arranged themselves under a striped parasol, settled down to his lunch at her breast.

I don’t think Cassis had been part of our original plan. And it certainly wasn’t part of Alain’s now, but what was to prevent his just dropping me off there on his way back home? Nothing at all, as it turned out. When we got within sight of Godzilla’s barstool, we chugged into the harbor, and he left me at the edge of the quay. I wished him bon voyage, and he wished me bonne chance and then kissed me good-bye on both cheeks. Cassis was originally a settlement that first appeared as Carsicis Portus in a Roman account of the ports between Rome and Arles, and it developed over the centuries into a small fishing village. It has something of the look of Portofino or St-Tropez, with its tall, narrow houses and terra-cotta roofs arranged around the horseshoe-shaped harbor, but it is completely lacking in all the glitz and spectacle of those international meccas. I don’t think I heard anything but French spoken the entire time I was there, and even though fiberglass motorboats have replaced the old wooden fishing boats, and tourists have taken the place of fish, it still, quite miraculously, manages to feel like the old Provençal village it once was.

I walked slowly along the edge of the port, and the first person I ran into was an elderly fisherman who looked as though he’d escaped from central casting. He had Auden’s wrinkles and Cary Grant’s tan, and he wore the classic Gauloise-blue shirt and trousers of all French working men born before the war. A cigarette dangled precariously from the side of his mouth as he unloaded his catch onto the quay. Slippery squid, tiny bony rascasse, red scaly rougets, evil-looking eels, and some mysterious, still-living sea snails that tried, pathetically, to crawl away from their fate were all arranged in precise piles on top of a wooden crate. He told me, with a mixture of pride and sadness, that he was one of only four fishermen left in Cassis. When he was young, about fifty years ago, there had been almost two hundred. But now, all these boats made of plastique polluted the water with their gasoline fumes and their trash dumped overboard, which meant that there were hardly any fish at all left in the summertime. “But the fish come back in the winter, so I suppose they have just been en vacances in Corsica or someplace like that.” And he smiled at the thought of fish going off to a Club Med for their holidays. I admired his boat and asked when he’d gotten it, and he told me that it had been made in 1907 by his uncle. “It’s even older than I am,” he added, laughing, amazed that there should be anything still standing, or floating, that had been around longer than he had. “All the old boats were made of pine. The trees were cut down in the last week of January, when the sap was rising, and then the wood was soaked in seawater—never fresh—and this is the result,” he said, pointing at the simple but utterly pleasing red-and-white boat that reminded me of the boats Van Gogh had once painted on the beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue. His white fiberglass neighbors suddenly looked even tackier in comparison with the real thing. Sensing my interest in Cassis’s past, my new friend introduced me to his friend, Raymond Stabille, who “knows everything.” Stabille turned out to be a kind of unofficial historian of Cassis who also busied himself in the business of the harbor (doing precisely what, I never discovered). His great passion in life was Mistral—as in Frédéric Mistral, the nineteenth-century Romantic and propagandist of all things Provençal, and no relation at all to the terrible snob and lover of odd numbers who roars down the Rhône. M. Stabille took me by the arm and told me that he was going to introduce me to a jeune et beau pêcheur. The fishermen I’d seen so far, all three of them, may have been beau, but they were scarcely jeune, so I was full of curiosity and allowed myself to be propelled along to the end of the quay to meet this Adonis. “Et voilà!” he exclaimed, pointing at a staggeringly beautiful young man, bare-chested, barefoot, with an old-fashioned Hollywood leading man profile and square-set jaw. “Je vous présente Calendal.” The statue refused to meet my gaze and just continued staring into the distance, a muscular arm raised to shade his eyes from the glare. My guide explained. Frédéric Mistral had lived in Cassis in the early 1860s, and while he was there he wrote a long and epic poem named “Calendal” after its eponymous hero. The poem turned out to be a huge success (Bizet wanted to write the music for an opera inspired by Mistral’s words), and the “simple fisherman of anchovies” became a mythic figure in Cassis. M. Stabille told me that the statue I’d just seen was actually a maquette for the original, which had stood at the edge of the harbor, looking out to sea, until the Germans blew him up when they occupied Cassis during the war. Holding my arm tightly, he then began declaiming verses from the poem as we walked briskly toward the lighthouse, where his attention was suddenly deflected onto the subject of . . . stone. “Ah, la pierre de Cassis.” He sighed, and his eyes seemed to close as he conjured up exotic memories of all the places in the world where he’d recognized la pierre de Cassis. As a member of the French navy, he had seen his homegrown stone used in the construction of harbors from Aden to Zanzibar, and he assured me that the stone of Cassis was, mais bien sûr, the best in the world. It was also the hardest, because, he said improbably, it was from the Jurassic period, which made it more than 140 million years old. And when the new statue of Calendal was unveiled next year, it would stand next to the lighthouse, a few yards from where we were now, and would be sculpted from . . . what else, la pierre de Cassis. “Look,” he said, pulling me down to the edge of the quay, where I admired a white block of stone with a beautiful shell outlined on its side. I traced my fingers across the surface and swore that I could feel the contours of this once-living and now fossilized creature that was almost as old as time.

It is usually a mistake to revisit perfection. But not always. On my last day in Cassis, I rented a boat and went back to my favorite calanque. The fossilized shell had reminded me of a story I’d heard about a prehistoric cave that had been discovered by a diver near Cassis a few years before. The diver’s name was Cosquer, and he had stumbled—if you can stumble underwater—across a narrow passageway that led him up into a vast, hundred-foot-high cave dripping with stalactites and stalagmites and covered in paintings and sculptures scratched upon the stone by the first Europeans. Although the entrance lay beneath the sea now, because of a massive geologic shift that must have occurred sometime after the paintings were created, the cave itself was not submerged, and Cosquer had been able to swim into an extraordinary prehistoric art gallery. There was a horse with a fat, paunchy stomach (maybe she was pregnant?); there were creatures that had become extinct in the Ice Age; and there were silhouettes of human hands, some in strange “negative” exposures, as if some Gallic precursor of Ansel Adams had been developing his photographs in this subterranean dark room eighteen thousand years ago. I asked about the cave in the local bookstore and was told that it was at Sormiou. Which was all the excuse I needed. The sea was Windex clear (the mistral must have taken a much-needed day off) as we turned into the bay. Marcel Benkemoun was standing on his terrace beside the flag, as though he were expecting me, and waved as I waded ashore. Fernandel showed me to my table, and since I was the only guest there that day, Marcel sat down and ordered le lunch for me. It could not have been simpler: oursins that he’d gotten from a local fisherman, split open, with their delicately perfumed coral flesh displayed within a crown of ink-black thorns, and a glass of vin blanc de Cassis. I sat down, my feet still salty from the sea, said a private grace to the god of France and food, and asked Marcel to tell me about the cave. He had a book that we opened on the table, and he pointed to a spot at the eastern edge of the calanque, a few hundred feet offshore, where the sea had turned a strange violet color, and I tried to imagine what lay beneath the water. They had been obliged to close the cave forever, to preserve the pictures and also to prevent other divers from risking their lives (three had already died trying to follow Cosquer into the cave), but here were the images, before my eyes, as clear as the day they were painted. There were hands just like my own, outlined with charcoal, the index finger longer than the others, pointing upward, and wild animals with massive antlers etched upon the stone. But most moving of all, Cosquer had found a mound of ashes from a fire still heaped in a pile in a corner of the cave. Just like the warm ashes that glowed in Marcel’s grill, waiting to cook the loup de mer which he’d caught just outside the cave that morning, for our lunch.