So rent the small car, book it early, take the back roads slowly, and fill up on Saturday. Provence opens itself to people who are willing to drive to it, and closes, quietly and completely, to those who aren't.

There is a reason the walls of the world's great museums are so full of this small corner of France. The painters came to Provence for the light, and the light is still here, unchanged and available for the price of standing still and looking. You do not need to know a thing about art history to feel it.

We arrived one September morning in Gordes when the light was doing something specific and irreplaceable to the limestone walls, a warm, low, honeyed clarity that seemed to come from the stone as much as from the sky. The summer crowds had gone. The lavender, we quickly learned, had been cut weeks before.

The Luberon has a reputation for having the most beautiful villages in France, and the awkward truth is that the reputation is deserved, which makes choosing between them a genuine problem. They are close together, they are all lovely, and the great mistake is to try to tick off six of them between breakfast and dinner.

Let's begin with the thing almost nobody tells you until you've already booked the flights. If you are coming to Provence for the lavender, the great purple corduroy fields that launched a million screensavers, you have to come at a very particular and rather narrow moment.

The lavender blooms roughly from the last week of June through July, with the best of it in the first half of July. By September it is gone entirely. We have watched more than one visitor arrive in early September with a very specific picture in their head and a slowly dawning look of betrayal on their face.