Deep France Read online

  My next project was the stylized musical by Francois Ozon, 8 Femmes. I tried to sell this to Margaret, an artist I had met at the French class. Everyone liked Margaret. She was warm, genuine, clever and a conscientious student. I liked her especially because she was about the same height, colouring and age as me, and had the air of someone who might have gone to the Paris Pullman when it was the best art-house in Chelsea. I mentioned that 8 Femmes had had rave reviews and that, with Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Virginie Ledoyen and Danielle Darrieux in the cast, added to an award-winning costume designer, if we didn’t understand every word then at least we’d be able to enjoy the gorgeous frocks. We were on the point of going when her husband had to go into hospital for an operation which immobilized him for some weeks.

  Then the cinema in St-Palais proposed a midsummer night’s dream, a free open-air screening of the comedy Le Dîner de Cons in the municipal stadium, Le Dîner de Cons, a satire on over-sophisticated city living in the spirit of Frasier, was originally a hit on the Paris stage and is probably the funniest film I’ve ever seen. I laughed so much at it when I first saw it that Chloe nearly ordered me out of the cinema because I was embarrassing her with my uncontrolled shrieks of mirth. However, nobody could be persuaded to come to see it in St-Palais, even for free with the added attraction of a non-stop bar.

  With Chloe to amuse, I decided on a final throw. This time Gosford Park was coming to St-Palais. I’d already seen it in London and could vouch for its entertainment value. Persuading my regular companions to venture out was still tricky. I dared not ask Annabel and Gerald, since I suspected the film’s setting, in a grand English country house of the thirties, would look to them like a patronizing American attempt to rewrite their own childhoods. Margaret’s husband had recovered enough to get back to his daily walk in the forest, but had found a pair of abandoned puppies who were occupying all her attention.

  I tried in vain to interest others in the English-speaking community. I began on the wrong tack. ‘It’s a film by Robert Altman,’ I said. Blank stares. ‘You know, the totally brilliant director who made The Player and Short Cuts and Prêt-à-Porter.’ Blank stares. My heart broke a little. Altman is my all-time movie hero. The high spot of my early career as a journalist was going to interview him one day when the Evening Standard’s venerable critic, Alexander Walker, was otherwise engaged. It was one of those thrilling last-second assignments you get the day you come back from holiday, and the only clean thing I had to wear was a dress much like the one awarded to the character of the irritating journalist in Altman’s masterwork, Nashville. I can still remember almost every golden word of the interview.

  ‘It’s an hommage to classic 1930s country house murder mysteries,’ I tried again. Blank stares. Never, ever, use a word like hommage to a non-buff. ‘It’s got everyone in the world in it – Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, Richard E. Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas, Camilla Rutherford, Michael Gambon, Charles Dance, Jeremy Northam . . . just a cast to die for.’ Blank stares. In London, nine out of ten girlfriends would have been queuing at the box office with fibrillating credit cards at the mere words ‘Jeremy Northam’.

  ‘It’s been nominated for eight Oscars,’ I said. No response. ‘I’ve seen it already and it’s really good. And the tickets are only five euros. I thought we could go round the corner for a steak-frites afterwards.’

  Eventually, Andrew, Geoff and les Écossais were persuaded, along with the ex-treasurer of the International Club, his wife, her brother and some house-hunting people from London she had met on the plane.

  ‘Oh! You don’t need the subtitles! You can understand what they’re saying!’ gasped the girl in the box-office, astonished to sell tickets to people speaking VO themselves. The cinema was small, comfortable and almost empty, apart from us. The party liked the film, although the print was so underlit that it seemed to be projected through a bath of plankton, but the evening went downhill fast after the closing titles. There were so few English-speaking people in the region that there was often a lifeboat spirit of camaraderie among them. The need for company often over-rode all kinds of social, cultural or political differences. But no British community can ever leave class-consciousness behind. Gosford Park, with its parallel narratives among masters and servants, sensitized everyone to the things that divided them, and the conversation languished.

  We united, briefly, in an attempt to persuade the house-hunting couple to buy a holiday home in the more elegant Gers, where sophisticated Kensington types would be far happier than in the ramshackle Béarn, but the evening was nothing like the jolly gatherings over pizza that I had enjoyed in London.

  Gosford Park turned out to be the only VO film in English to play all summer, just as Mulholland Drive had been the English-language choice in the winter. Andrew and Geoff soon felt confident enough of the French cinema to see it twice more, in Salies, and I saw it for the third time with Annabel and Gerald, who loved it. Chloe was so inspired she agreed to come to see Spiderman, dubbed into in French, the following week; Tobey McGuire seemed to do for her generation what Jeremy Northam did for mine.

  Spiderman, when dubbed, became only Speederman, which she found disappointing because she’d been expecting him to be translated, hobbit-style into something like Arain’homme. However, behind us in the tiny auditorium sat Lesley from Dublin, now the new owner of Sandy-and-Annie’s house, who led us confidently to a bar des sports (rugby, rugby and rugby, of course) that didn’t close until 2 a.m. I had no idea that St-Palais possessed such a treasure. Life started to look up. Lesley seemed to be my kind of girl. She’d already been to Spain to watch the World Cup in the bosom of a really great soccer nation, and she was going rafting on the Gave the following Friday.

  ‘They say they’ll take anyone from four to seventy,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come?’ It sounded good to us.

  Trial by Ordeal

  The stories of the three good eggs tells you a lot about what it took for a woman to earn herself a place in history hereabouts. Queen Jeanne, always known as Jeanne d’Albret, is much appreciated. A Parisian couturier once named a fragrance after her. In the Béarn streets, squares, restaurants and hotels are named after her and in Saliès the building which is now the Crédit Agricole proudly bears a plaque claiming that she once stayed there. All this acclaim she earned by being a ruthless, pig-headed dogmatist. The atrocities which she sanctioned in converting her kingdom to the Protestant faith would put her on trial for genocide nowadays. In 1571 she torched the town of Tarbes – perhaps not completely beyond comprehension to those who know it today as an ugly grey sprawl with pretensions to becoming a conurbation – and slaughtered over a thousand people who refused to abandon the Catholic faith. Giving birth to Henri IV was the only good thing Jeanne ever did. Her father, according to legend, made her sing a Béarnais song while she was in labour to make her baby brave and strong.

  Corisande was of the next generation, which was destined to suffer years of religious war. She was a princess who loved reading the chivalric romances that were the chick-lit of the sixteenth century, full of questing knights, languishing troubadours and beautiful princesses just like her. Her real name was Diane d’Andouins, Comtesse de Guiche, but she called herself Corisande because it sounded more romantic. Her father was the royal seneschal of the Béarn, and at court in Paris her good looks made her popular with the sinister Queen Mother, Catherine de Medicis, who tried to add her to her ‘flying battalion’ of seductive girls employed to persuade important noblemen to support her devious schemes.

  Corisande loathed the idea, and all the excesses of the court. She rebelled, and, after her husband was killed in the Wars of Religion, retreated to the safety of her castle at Bidache, which is now an imposing ruin.

  Henri of Navarre, at that time raising support for his campaign to become King of France, couldn’t resist the challenge of a beautiful, wealthy and powerful widow spurning all suitors in her impregnabl
e castle. He came to Bidache and fell passionately in love with her, as his letters and poetry still witness. Corisande became his lover and ally, and backed his campaign for the throne. She also gets the credit for teaching the rough and ready Gascon warrior some manners and grooming. However, for being clever, honest and adored, Countess Corisande gets no streets named after her.

  Nor does Queen Sancie; her story is the legend attached to the Pont de la Légende, the half-ruined medieval bridge at Sauveterre, the same over which the town squabbled for so long that they lost the pilgrim trade, but it does not reflect much honour on the town either. Sancie was the widow of Gaston V, the Viscount of the Béarn, and she lived in one of the most stable and contented periods of the region’s history. The Béarn had enjoyed a century of peace and independence as a self-governing province. It was ruled by its viscounts, minted its own money and paid homage to no one. It was supposed to be the best governed, freest and happiest region in all of France at that time. This was not Sancie’s experience.

  Unlike Corisande, this unhappy queen had not kept her name free of scandal. In 1170, Sancie was charged with what is euphemistically described as the infanticide of her new­born son. The child was deformed, and had most likely died a natural death anyway. If he had survived, Sancie could have become regent, and ruled the province until he came of age, the custom which was to give the Béarn several brilliant female rulers as well as Jeanne d’Albret. Sancie thus had no motive to kill her son . . . unless the child had been conceived outside her marriage, after her husband’s death. Sancie’s real crime, therefore, was to have been suspected of having a lover.

  The Béarn was governed according to an ancient body of laws called ‘fors’, which apparently allowed for trial by ordeal. Sancie protested her innocence. To test her claim, she was tied hand and foot and thrown off the bridge into the river, on the theory that God knew if she was guilty and would intervene to save her if she wasn’t. As it happened, Sancie did not drown nor was she dashed to pieces on the rocks. The river carried her downstream for a distance equivalent to three arrows’ flights, and then washed her up on the bank, alive and well. History does not record that her accusers apologized. To this day, however, the majestic panorama of the river gorge, crowned by the silhouette of the church tower and the grey stone mass of the castle, has a strange air of melancholy, as if the cruelty of a bygone age still lingers in the air.

  A Day on the River

  Besides the two shuttered hotels which overlook the bridge, Sauveterre has three cafes; one, which says it has a terrace that also fronts the river, is always shut. Another, on the main square, is one of those elegant art deco cafes often found in remote French villages, but it’s always empty. The third, which shows signs of life, is known as the cafe with the yellow chairs, because of its ugly plastic furniture. We met there, and gave the rafting staff €50 each. They ordered us to leave everything but a towel and a T-shirt behind, and I had to make a special case for Chloe’s suncream. Our belongings were stuffed into two plastic barrels, which were loaded with us on to a coach, and driven up the valley to Oloron Sainte-Marie, the town from which the Gave d’Oloron gets its name.

  Below the Renaissance battlements of grey stone there was a warehouse containing more wetsuits than anyone has ever seen hanging on rails. We were ordered to take a wet-suit, a life jacket and a paddle each, and to climb onto a yellow rubber raft. ‘Thanks to our qualified team, our activities are accessible to everyone in complete safety,’ promised the brochure.

  Two boats were pushed out in the swirling waters of the Gave. The first was weighed down by fourteen French police cadets on holiday. Ours contained two French couples, an Irish family of two adults and two children, Lesley, her friend Kevin, Chloe and me, plus the raft captain, tanned to a dark cinnamon, who yelled ‘Pa – dell!’ as we approached each set of rapids. He needed the boat to get up as much speed as possible, he explained, otherwise he couldn’t steer it.

  The first stretch of the trip was miserable, since the young cops assumed that we were just longing to be soaked with water, and used their baling buckets and paddles to drench us as soon as they got within range. The weather wasn’t anywhere near hot enough for this to be fun. The French, normally so repressed and orderly, have the propensity to go clear over the top when a window of relaxation is allowed. My dreams of drifting peacefully downriver, watching the herons and the dragonflies, were shattered. ‘What did you expect?’ sniffed Chloe. It wasn’t until one of the young French women burst into tears that the management intervened.

  By the end of June, the Gave was no longer a raging torrent, just a forceful body of dark green water swirling majestically westwards to the Atlantic. The rapids were plentiful, just foamy enough to be fun but not fast enough to be frightening. Having negotiated some peace, we glided happily downstream between curtains of trees. The raft captain pointed to the flotsam and driftwood high in the branches, marking the level of the river that the river had reached only a couple of weeks ago, when storms had combined with the meltwater from the Pyrenees. In a few days, he predicted, the Gave authorities would send a cleaning party down to get rid of all the plastic bags and other rubbish brought down by the floods, restoring the river banks to a picture of green innocence.

  We did not see any of the disturbing sights about which Margaret, who lives in a riverside village nearby, had warned us. No bags of drowned puppies, no thickets of tomato plants flourishing on the sandbanks. The tomato plants betray the presence in the river of untreated human waste. Tomato seeds pass through the gut without being digested, but like nothing better than to put down roots on a sunny sandbank.

  Medieval plumbing standards prevailed in many of the old houses in these riverside villages. Those built near the banks had only short pipes leading directly from the lavatories to Mother Nature’s own original sewers. As an ecosystem, the Gave d’Oloron must work pretty well; the river was teeming with fish, and with fishermen, after the season opened in April. Near the towns, it also teemed with canoeists, swimmers and rafters like us, from whom I heard no reports of vile infections.

  The northern river, the Gave de Pau, is a different kettle of bacteria. This body of water is a brilliant turquoise whatever the colour of the sky; in its defence, it must be said that the water in all the rivers gushing down from the Pyrenees was the same astonishing colour from high up in the mountains, and that the hot springs bore witness to quite enough deposits of copper, iron and chromium to make the colour naturally possible. However, the Gave de Pau runs from Lourdes, up in the mountains, through Pau and then past the chemical works at Mourenx and on through Orthez.

  Whatever goes on at Mourenx, so many local jobs depend on it that no questions are asked. Here, a few kilometres from Pau, is the largest natural-gas deposit in Europe, which earned the region the name of ‘le Texas Béarnais’. The lights of the vast plant which extracts and processes this precious fuel give an orange tinge to the eastern night sky which is visible from Orriule, and when the wind was in the right direction – which it rarely was – I could smell its chemical fumes in my garden.

  The gas will soon be used up, and the plant is switching to process chemical waste which will be stored in the underground chambers that once held the gas. ‘No risk to the environment is posed by the injection of liquid industrial effluent at a depth of 4,000 metres,’ the departmental newsletter reassured us. Thus the alpine colours of the Gave de Pau were much admired, but nobody actually swam in it.

  The two Gaves meet at Peyrohrade, a small town with a huge intact medieval castle whose four towers dominate the valley. They flow on towards Bayonne as a single stream called les Gaves Reunis, where they join the mighty, meandering Adour, which, with its tributaries, drains the entire midsection of the chain of the Pyrenees and sweeps over the plain of the Chalosse before turning south to Bayonne. The Nive, which runs down from the mountains through Cambo-les-Bains as a chattering torrent, is the last of the lesser rivers to join what by then is a swirling grey waterway ab
out 800 metres wide. The pleasure of sitting in the riverside cafes in Bayonne can be seriously spoiled by the antics of the rats playing by the waterside when the tide is low.

  Where we were paddling, the Gave d’Oloron was a rela­tively innocent river and we enjoyed it as much as you can when paddling for your life in a cut-off wetsuit. Between the rapids, we cruised serenely between the green walls of wood­land, stopping occasionally to enjoy a swim or to squelch into a muddy inlet to admire a waterfall. By lunchtime, we had reached a little beach by the wooded foreshore below the chateau at Laas. The captains made a fire and barbecued lamb chops and sausages, then offered us some gateau Basque for dessert.

  I blame what followed on that gâteau Basque, the only classic of the local cuisine which I regard as a complete waste of space. It’s a heavy cake, like a Bakewell tart with an extra layer of custard, sometimes cheered up with some of the semi-sweet black cherries which are unique to the Basque Country. Freshly baked with the finest ingredients, a gâteau Basque can be memorable, but you rarely find one in that condition. Usually it is as it was on this occasion, leaden and boring, one up from eating a carpet tile. But we were hungry, so they were eaten, and the boat was definitely lower in the water as we approached what seemed to me to be quite a small waterfall. I thought the smooth green cascade was only about four feet high. Chloe says it was about eight feet high.

  We paddled towards the edge of the falls like good galley slaves, the raft tipped up as it slithered over the rocks and I was thrown off its upper side into the bottom. My left foot was tangled in a strap and twisted at an ominously unnatu­ral angle. It was also agony, agony of the precise quality I remembered from the last time I broke my leg.