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I am sitting in a restaurant in the place aux Herbes in Uzès watching a pig rooting for truffles in much the same way as a British house-hunter looks for old stone buildings. Today is the annual truffle fair and the whole town has gone truffle mad. People are either eating them (every restaurant is serving a truffle menu), drinking them (truffle wine, it’s surprisingly good) or buying them (at an average price of €1000 a kilo). Some diehards are doing all three.
There is an atmosphere of carnival in the air. My best French friend Alexandra, normally rather restrained, orders champagne with lunch. Truffles have a reputation for inspiring unusual behaviour. The gastronome Brillat-Savarin describes the truffle as “the diamond of the kitchen” and tells a story in his book The Physiology of Taste about a woman struggling to remain faithful after dining on truffles. I am finding fidelity difficult too. The minute we arrived I have been looking in estate agent’s windows, wondering if the time has finally come to ditch Pézenas and cast a roving eye on Uzès.
As you would imagine in a beautiful medieval town situated between Avignon and Nîmes, I am not the first. Felicity and John Rae-Smith came here four years ago. They were looking for a property to buy as an investment. “We started in Provence and then discovered Uzès,” says Felicity, enjoying a coffee in the mid-morning sunshine. “We just fell in love with it. The wonderful thing is it’s as lovely in January as it is July.”
The Rae-Smiths put in offer for a house in Collias, a village ten minutes away from town, but it fell through. The agent they were dealing with suggested they buy a plot of land instead. They paid €45,000 for a 100 square metre plot on which they built a four-bedroom house and pool. They spend four of five months a year there.
“In total we spent around €300,000,” says John. “But the plot we built on would cost three times that now.”
House prices in Uzès and the surrounding villages have gone up by fifty per cent in the last five years according to estate agent Robert Dumas whom I sneak in to see when my husband’s not looking. He tells me the rise in prices is in part due to all the foreign buyers, as well as the TGV and what he calls “showbiz”. Apparently lots of French stars have moved into the region. He reels off about seven names but I can’t say I recognise any of them.
I tell him I would be interested in a property in the centre of town and he shows me one five minutes from the main square, with a swimming pool. It has four bedrooms and a total of 215 metres living space. It is a charming old stone house with pale pink rendered walls. The asking price is €860,000. Dumas also has a three-bedroom apartment two minute’s walk from the place aux Herbes on his books for €477,000. He says both places are the kinds Brits come to buy. He has so many Brits visiting the details are in both languages. Why is Uzès so popular with Brits I ask him? “They just love us,” he says.
Tim and Pippa Forster moved to Lussan 15 minutes from Uzès five years ago from Hampshire and run a luxury gîte business there. “The area is wonderful,” says Pippa. “It is un-crowded, unspoilt but with excellent communications. We can be in Paris in just over two and a half hours.”
Mark Butterworth has been living in France for seven years, ever since he met his girlfriend Laurence Nugues whilst trekking in Nepal. They lived in the Ardèche for three years but moved to Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, five minutes drive from Uzès, four years ago. “It was wonderful in the Ardèche but we were so isolated. We felt we wanted to be somewhere where we didn’t have to drive for twenty minutes to see another person,” says Mark who runs his own property management company. Mark and Laurence paid €185,000 for a four-bedroom village house with a large terrace and cellar. They chose the region around Uzès because they wanted to be further south and close to a town with a population of at least 10,000. “The village has everything,” says Mark, “but having been so isolated before it’s nice to be so close to Uzès, as well as places like Nîmes and Avignon.”
After our truffle lunch we drive home. As we turn into Pézenas the memory of the pink stone fades, the effect of the truffles wears off and I am longing to get back home. I decide to stay faithful after all. As is so often the case with infidelity; the fantasy is better than the reality.
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