是时候离开巴黎去消夏了，寻找食肆都越来越难，即使是中国人开的寿司店到了8月也会关门谢客。在人行道上呼啸而过的摩托车也比平时更少。本地人都消失到了法国的乡间，他们总是愿意想象自己实际上来自农村。
每一个富裕国家都有自己独有的休假方式。不过日本和美国除外，日本几乎不存在像样的假期，而在美国假期存在的目的主要是为了孩子。我第一次注意到不同国家的人有不同的癖好时还是个孩子，我先在瑞典生活，后来又搬到荷兰。瑞典人的理想似乎是独自度假，在一个小岛上，最好赤身裸体，再来一瓶伏特加。荷兰人却恰恰相反，他们喜欢聚满荷兰人、吵闹得让人安心的露营地。而在我现在居住的这个国家，度假是最深入民族骨髓的事情。在法国人看来，8月是回归往日乡间生活的时候。
对于多数法国人来说，脱离乡土是一场超过二战，甚至超过1968年社会思潮变革的伟大决裂。脱离乡土在法国发生得很晚，法国人基本上忽略了工业革命，其他欧洲人们都离开农田后，他们还在自己的农场上呆了很久。即使到1945年，仍然有近一半法国人是农民，这种比例今天大概只有在贫穷的非洲国家才能看到。紧接着，嗖的一声，他们就离开了乡间。社会学家昂立•孟德拉斯(Henri Mendras)写道：“仅仅一代人的时间，法国延续千年的文明就消失了。”今天，一个法国人失业的概率，比他是农夫的概率高一倍。
许多移居到城市公寓里的法国农民都梦想着有一天能够回家，接手父辈的农场，然而多数人从来没有做到。毕竟，他们已经变成了颇为成功的资本家。渐渐的，他们的梦想变了，先是接手父辈的农场，后来是买一所相仿的旧房子，最次也要给自己建一座看起来很旧的谷仓，把那里当成自己的休假居所。
因此，购置第二处房产的法国中产阶级比斯堪的纳维亚半岛之外的任何国家都更多。即使自己没有休假居所，只要有个好说话的亲戚有就行。
理想上，你另一处房产地处的那个法国大区，至少能够假言为你出身的故土(terroir)，如果你的祖父少年时曾在此地居住过几年，甚至只是在某一时刻含糊地提过，往往就已经够了。“我来自勃艮第，”我们在巴黎的邻居这样说。她其实一生都住在巴黎。她家在勃艮第另有一处产业，我们说话的这时候，她可能就在那里，装扮自己是个农民。
社会科学家玛蒂娜•佩罗(Martyne Perrot)和马丁•德拉苏迪埃尔(Martin de la Soudière)曾描写过，那些闲宅的主人们开始玩滚球戏(boules)，或是动员起来保护古代遗迹。他们还为了让自己的院落看起来更正宗，重新动手修建，从而恢复了当地消失已久的砌砖习俗。他们也会把自己选择的故土气息，在当地葡萄酒中一饮而尽。最后的农民绝迹之后，留在法国乡间的人们很快就只剩下仿效杰拉尔•德帕尔迪约(Gérard Depardieu)的电影而化装成农民的城市人了。
没有休假居所的法国人经常用“度假村”将就一下。这些度假村的设计，让人想起1853年左右的农村生活，只是有了像样的厕所。例如，在Club Med，度假村经理叫作“chef de village”，即“村长”。晚餐就像《高卢英雄传》(Asterix)故事里的宴席一样，所有宾客共同坐在巨大的餐桌旁。至少要认识25年才能和一个人交谈的巴黎社交法则，在这里被抛诸脑后。
在世界各地，家庭都试图通过假期，来构建共同的幸福回忆。几十年后还能倚仗这些回忆，证明家庭生活中并非只有为微波炉热过的饭菜而争吵的不快。在法国，这种家庭的回忆是在第二处房产里建立的。理想上，孩子们童年时，每年8月都要在闲宅度过，这样他们长大后就会相信那里也是他们的故土。而他们又能把这种幻想灌输给他们的子女。
其他欧洲国家的人们当然也会到法国乡间度假，写完这篇文章后，我自己也会前往乡间。不同的是，我们去那里只是因为客观上，法国的乡间很美好。德国人形容生活好的一个说法是“在法国像上帝一样生活”。然而，法国的乡间对于法国城市人来说，有更多的意义：他们认为自己本应出身于乡间。
到了9月，法国人便返回了城市。
法国人往往以释然的心理迎接这场回归(la rentrée)，因为要和家人关在一起整整一个月，内心不够强大就无福消受。对英国人来说，与家人共度圣诞节就已经难以承受了。法国人刚打开城市里公寓的门锁（他们一生中，每年可能都有11个月要居住在这套公寓里）就开始梦想来年夏天再回家去。
译者/王柯伦
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001040113
“I'm from Burgundy,” says our Parisian neighbour, who has spent her whole life in Paris
It's time to leave Paris for summer. It is getting hard to find anywhere to eat: even the Chinese-run sushi places are closing for August. Fewer motorbikes than usual whiz along the pavements. The locals are disappearing to the French countryside, the place they like to imagine they are really from.
Every rich country has its own way of holidaying (except Japan, where proper holidays barely exist, and the US, where they exist chiefly for children). I first noticed the different national quirks as a child, living in Sweden and later in the Netherlands. The Swedish ideal seemed to be to holiday alone, on an island, preferably naked, with a bottle of vodka. The Dutch, by contrast, preferred reassuringly noisy campsites populated by lots of other Dutch people. But I now live in the country where holidays go deepest into the national psyche. For the French, August is the return to their rural past.
The great rupture for most French people, more than the second world war or even the revolution in attitudes of 1968, was the flight from the land. It happened very late here. The French had largely ignored the industrial revolution, instead staying on their farms long after other Europeans. Even in 1945, about half of them were still villagers. It's the sort of proportion you would find in a poor African country today. Then, in a whoosh, they left their farms. “In one generation, France saw a millenarian civilisation disappear,” wrote the sociologist Henri Mendras. Today a French person is about twice as likely to be unemployed as he is to be a farmer.
Many displaced French peasants in urban apartments dreamed of going home one day and taking over their parents' farm, but most never did. After all, they had become pretty successful capitalists. Gradually, the fantasy shifted: you would take over the parental farm, or some old house that resembled it, or at worst build yourself an old-looking barn, and you'd make it your holiday home.
And so the French middle classes acquired second homes in greater abundance than anywhere else outside Scandinavia. Even if you didn't have a holiday home yourself, all you needed was an impressionable relative with one.
Ideally, your second home would be in a French region that you could at least pretend was your native land, or terroir. If your grandfather had spent a couple of years there as a young man, or even vaguely mentioned it at some point, that was often enough. “I'm from Burgundy,” says our Parisian neighbour, who has spent her whole life in Paris. Her family has a second home in Burgundy. She's probably there pretending to be a peasant as we speak.
The social scientists Martyne Perrot and Martin de la Soudiere describe second-home owners who in their adopted regions take up boules, mobilise in defence of ancient monuments, and revive long-dead local bricklaying customs as they rework their second homes to look more authentic. They also drink their chosen terroir in the form of wine. As the last actual peasants die out, soon the only people left in French villages will be city-dwellers masquerading as peasants from a Gerard Depardieu film.
Those French people without holiday homes often make do with “holiday villages”. These are designed to evoke peasant life circa 1853, only with proper toilets. At Club Med, for instance, the resort manager is called the “chef de village”, or in English, “village chief”. Dinner is like a feast in the Asterix stories, with all the guests sharing large tables, and where the Parisian law prohibiting conversation with anyone you have not known for at least 25 years is ditched.
All over the world, families use holidays to try to build happy communal memories that they can wield decades later as proof that family life wasn't all mutual sniping over microwaved dinners. In France, these family memories are built at the second home. Ideally the children will go there every August of their childhoods, so that they can grow up believing that it is their terroir too. Then they can feed the delusion to their own children.
Of course other Europeans holiday in the French countryside too. I'm off there myself as soon as I finish writing this. The difference is that we go only because the French countryside is objectively excellent. “Living like God in France” is the German expression for living well. However, the French countryside means something more to French city-dwellers: it's the place they should have been from.
In September the French head back to town.
The return, la rentree, is often greeted with relief, because spending an entire month closeted with your family is not for the faint of heart. (For Britons, a couple of days over Christmas is often too much.) The French unlock the urban apartments where they might spend 11 months a year for their whole lives, and begin dreaming of going home again next summer.
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