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LA CARTE POSTALE DE FRANCE: Mane
In Mane, I had dinner with the mayor. The village is small — about fourteen hundred people — and sits three kilometres from Forcalquier on the old Via Domitia, the Roman road that crossed southern Gaul long before there was a France to map it across. The Romans set up a provincial market on this exact spot called Forum Neronis; the name Mane itself is older still, traced to the Roman goddess Mana Genita — the good mother. Mane is built on a butte of soft local stone, la pierre de Mane — a honey-coloured molasse quarried right here, which gives the village its architectural unity: ramparts, old houses, fountains, the cobbled calades running between them, all in the same warm tone. At the top of the butte stands the twelfth-century citadel, the only intact feudal fortification left in Haute Provence.
Out past the village walls, two things are worth a half-day each. The Prieuré de Salagon, a twelfth-century Romanesque priory built on the foundations of a Gallo-Roman villa, now houses the departmental museum of ethnology and six hectares of ethnobotanical gardens — medicinal, scented, medieval, each one its own quiet argument for what people did with plants here across two thousand years. And the Château de Sauvan, two kilometres south, an eighteenth-century classical château known locally as the Petit Trianon de Provence — built in 1719 for the marquis de Forbin-Janson, whose marquise was a friend of Marie-Antoinette, and where the original furniture and tapestries still sit in the rooms.
The mayor told me not to miss the planetarium at Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire down the road, where the light pollution is so low that on clear nights they open the doors of the dome and let anyone who wants to look, look. The country market is on Sunday mornings, eight to one. The Couvent des Minimes — the 1613 convent where I stayed, now a Relais & Châteaux on the edge of the village — sits a short walk from the citadel. You can see most of what matters in a long, slow afternoon. You will want longer.
