The Benefactress

The Provence village of Bargeme is scented by lavender from the nearby Alpine foothills, and its pastures are dotted with herds of grazing sheep. At the start of the 1960s, it was smaller (pop. 65) and, if anything, more charmingly bucolic than it had been in the Middle Ages. The few visitors to the town, an hour's drive northwest of Cannes, usually came to view its medieval ruins--a chateau, a church, towers and gates that had decayed into an exquisite stone latticework. In 1961, Bargeme found a benefactress--or rather, Madame Germaine De Maria, now 56, found Bargeme. Their relationship has led to more distress than Bargeme has known in several centuries.

Modest Retreat. "I have enjoyed everything a rich woman can have in life," Madame De Maria announced after a visit. "And all I desire now is a modest retreat where I can read and reflect. I'd like to be able to chat with a shepherd in a field at sundown and munch hard-boiled eggs." With that, she asked the town fathers to let her pay for the restoration of Bargeme's ruins and take up residence in the town.

Mayor Armand Isnard and his villagers were only too happy to oblige, and before long Madame, whose first husband made a fortune on a chain of newsreel cinemas, was lavishing her three boundless resources--romantic enthusiasm, energy and hard cash--on medieval restoration. She trained masons to lay a new roof on the chapel and made them do it over four times to suit her. The castle towers, which Mayor Isnard once threatened to tear down before they tumbled, now jut sturdily into the air. Two massive feudal gates again open and close off the town, and once-buried streets have been restored.

Battering Ram. Having beautified old Bargeme, la Patronne became worried about property development around it. To prevent real estate sharks from cashing in on the town's new attractiveness, she persuaded Andre Malraux's Culture Ministry in Paris to classify the town as a historical site, thus forbidding new structures on lots of less than 2 1/2 acres. The decree hit Bargeme like a battering ram: many villagers, it turned out, had hoped to parcel off their own land at premium prices to wealthy Parisian weekenders. Led by fighting-mad Mayor Isnard, a local tanner, Bargeme turned on its benefactress.

"I don't give a hoot about any culture minister," said Isnard. "We are masters in our own village." He told Madame De Maria that her "presence in Bargeme has been a catastrophe for this village." Last week he issued a decree of his own: if Malraux's decision is not reversed, "we will make Bargeme as ugly a village as we know how." As a start, he threatened to paint every building in the village red, blue and green.

Madame De Maria angrily called the mayor "more feudal-minded than the medieval lords of Bargeme." Hundreds of tourists have flocked to the tiny village to see what all the fuss is about, but even they are no solace to the benefactress. Ostracized and vilified by the townsfolk she sought to help, Madame has "95 percent made up my mind to leave Bargeme forever." She admits disconsolately that "the perfume has faded," but also draws a lesson on human nature from the experience. "The sad fact is that disinterested motives seem incomprehensible to people perverted by modern values," she says. "When I die, I'll have them inscribe on my tombstone, 'Ouf!' "

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