Mushrooms can kill you, the Frenchman told author Peter Mayle, newly transplanted to Provence from England.

"That I could believe," Mayle wrote in A Year in Provence, but it didn't explain the thigh-high rubber boot the Provencal wore on his right leg, or the man's nervous thrusting of a stick around the roots of an old scrub oak tree "in the manner of a fencer expecting a sudden and violent riposte."

"This was a new and worrying aspect of the Luberon," Mayle wrote. "It was, as I already knew, a region full of strange things and even stranger people. But ...

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