Deep France Read online

  There are traces of England all over the land that Eleanor and Henry ruled together, which includes most of the west of France. The stained-glass window they commissioned to commemorate their wedding is still in Poitiers Cathedral, while the cathedral in Bayonne is rampant with three-lion emblems. The pretty little town of Mauleon, half an hour south of here, is overlooked by the ruins of the massive castle built by the most appealing of Henry and Eleanor’s sons, Richard I of England, Coeur de Lion. There are also places called Hastingues and Commingues, and families called Smith and Richardeson, and liking for bacon sandwiches, and a passion for rugby. Also, there is a folk song in the repertoire of the local bands which shares almost everything with the Cockney classic, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Then there is the question of the Gascon sense of humour.

  The third possible way to describe my location is to say that it’s in Gascony. I wouldn’t attempt this in front of a hard-line Béarnais, because the Béarn has always claimed the status of a state separate from its larger neighbour in the South-West of France, even though at times they’ve been ruled by the same person. Nor would I talk about Gascony to Parisians, because they would just snigger. Nor would I mention Gascony in the hearing of one of my French friends in London, who sniffs that only the English talk about Gascony. However, my bank account comes under the Gascony department of the Crédit Agricole and the bit of the Atlantic off the coast by Biarritz is called the Golfe du Gascogne on my Michelin map, so it seems that the French also recognize the name.

  Besides, Gascony is as much a state of mind as a region. A twelfth-century travel guide written for the pilgrims to Compostela describes the Gascons as poor but generous people, but warns that they can also be frivolous, talkative, cynical and promiscuous. No wonder I like them so much.

  By the time of the Three Musketeers, the Gascons were also known as swashbuckling meat-heads, all mouth and trousers, always looking for a fight. Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, made his hero one of the Gascony cadets, under a commander called Castel-Jaloux, and this is how Cyrano introduced his regiment:

  These are the Gascony cadets –

  Captain Castel-Jaloux is their chief –

  Braggers of brags, layers of bets,

  They are the Gascony cadets.

  Barons who scorn mere baronets,

  Their lines are long and tempers brief –

  They are the Gascony cadets,

  With Castel-Jaloux as their chief.

  They’re lithe as cats or marmosets,

  But never cherish the belief

  They can be stroked like household pets

  Or fed on what a lapdog gets.

  Their hats are topped up with aigrettes

  Because the fabric’s come to grief.

  These are the Gascony cadets.

  They scorn the scented handkerchief,

  They dance no jigs or minuets.

  They cook their enemies on brochettes,

  With blood as their aperitif.

  These are the Gascony cadets,

  Compact of brain and blood and beef,

  Contracting pregnancies and debts

  With equal lack of black regrets.

  Thanks to the mythology of the Musketeers, the word ‘panache’ came to be associated with the Gascons. Literally, panache means a plume. As a personal quality, Rostand tried to define it for the Académie française in 1901: ‘It’s not greatness, but something which can attach itself to greatness, and which moves underneath it. It’s something fluttering, excessive and a bit decorative . . . panache is often in a sacrifice you make, a consolation of attitude you allow yourself. At bit frivolous, perhaps, a bit theatrical, probably; panache is just a grace – but what a grace.’

  The Three Musketeers came from all over the region, while Bergerac is some way north of it. This is how outsiders have seen the Gascons. There is also the question of how they define themselves. There are tastes, pursuits and customs which bind this region together, for all its citizens like to protest their differences. All Gascony, and the Béarn, plays rugby, enjoys the music of the bandas, the village brass bands, and tucks into hearty meals based on the traditional dishes of the region, confit of duck or poule au pot Henri IV. Nothing succeeds like excess, for the Gascon, and it is almost possible to enjoy all these pursuits at the same time, by singing the rugby song in which every verse is about a different dish in the local cuisine.

  All Gascony, and the Béarn, shares a folklore featuring the man-headed monsters that live in the mountains and the pot­bellied guzzler San Pansard who is ritually burned in effigy at carnival time for the crime of feasting in Lent. There are the old languages, too, a cluster of the Occitan dialects which are still spoken in this region. All these ties bind Gascony together.

  None of them, however, quite holds the spirit of the Béarn. Strictly speaking, the Béarn is the wedge of land south of Gascony proper, an ancient province which only became a full part of France after the Revolution of 1789, and remains a distinct region, with its own language, its own music, its own history, its own heroes, its own face, its own voice, its own wines, its own flag – red and yellow – and its own coat of arms, featuring two cows of its own breed.

  The boundary of the Béarn in our corner of it is the Gave de Pau, running from Lourdes, through Pau, through the nearby town of Orthez and on to join the Gave d’Oloron near the town of Peyrehorade, forty minutes west of here. ‘Gave’ is a Bearnais word, meaning a torrent that runs down from the mountains. Orriule is the French name for our village; in Béarnais, it would be called Aurriula. Confusing, isn’t it?

  French as a Foreign Language

  I set off for Orthez, where I had been told that there was a class in French as a foreign language every Thursday, because I can sure as hell stand to improve my French, and I like being a pupil; it’s a role with such tiny responsibilities and easy to play well.

  Once, I got a good-grade French O-level, but that didn’t go far, although I learned to love France as I learned the language at school. I had begun to study French when I started secondary school at the age of twelve, and the three women who taught me – tall, white-haired Miss Bareham, rounded, witty Miss Drewe and the glamorous Mile Béal – all delivered their lessons with elan – a unique sense of excitement and superiority. This, they taught us, as they coaxed us patiently through Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin and the thrillingly macabre short stories of Guy de Maupas­sant, was the study of an extraordinary people, an extraordinary place, an extraordinary culture. One day, if we were incredibly lucky, we might be able to actually visit France.

  They also gave me the priceless gift of some French conjugation – the different forms of verbs, which we learned by heart. I’m largely unaware of this amazing heritage until I find myself struggling to say something that’s tense-dense, such as: ‘I used to think that learning verbs was boring, but now I’m in France I’m really glad I did it.’ Suddenly, like swamp gas bubbling to the surface, the right words can just pop up out of my memory. Today’s GCSE candidates have a much worse time, being deprived of so much formal grammar teaching that they cannot master their own language, let alone French. Institutionalized barbarism, if you ask me.

  Later, I spent the best part of a year on a language course at a French university, in the eastern industrial town of Grenoble, where my ear was attuned to the inflexions of spoken French, but my grammar did not improve because our lecturer was an adorable man who looked like a New Wave film star and it seemed silly to pass tests to move up into the advanced class, which was taught by two sadistic women.

  On this basis, with years of visiting France and reading the original Marie-Claire, I’ve reached what you might call a working knowledge of French. This means that I can read Le Figaro, but I can’t read Le Monde without a dictionary, or understand the rugby reports in any medium. I can understand people, as long as they don’t talk too fast, and talk to them, as long as they’re patient with me. In my first week at Maison Bergez, I discovered th
at I could also read instructions for operating an answering machine in French, something I find challenging even in English.

  Orriule is only ten minutes by car from three gorgeous medieval towns – sleepy Sauveterre-de-Béarn, where I buy my Times, half-timbered Saliès-de-Béarn, always conscious of its status as a royal spa, and Orthez, which has such pretensions to urbanization as pay and display parking (20 centimes (2 p) for two hours) and an underpass in which the graffiti art has been commissioned by the municipality.

  Above the exit from this underpass is a former school building, probably dating from the Sixties, now the home of the Centre Socio-Culturel, a voluntary organization whose aim is promoting the well-being of society. Here I enrol for the year for FFr60 (£6), which entitles me to learn sewing, painting, patchwork, yoga, hip-hop or household budgeting as well.

  The class is taught by Renée, a classic Béarnaise beauty with dark hair waving vigorously back from her forehead, a fine-bridged aquiline nose and a humorous mouth. Her colleague, Dominique, teaches the beginners’ class, and they are both unpaid volunteers. I have treated myself to something I’ve always wanted to own, a French school book, with the pages elaborately ruled to make sure that the handwriting upon them will be of exactly the right breadth, depth and height for classic French script.

  My normal handwriting is terrible. It looks like the tracks of a stoned centipede dancing the macarena. Had I been forced to write by hand, I would never have written a single book. Now perhaps some French discipline will improve things.

  Around the table are people from all over the world: an Argentinian exchange student, a Brazilian au pair, a German grandmother, three Australians, a New Zealander, a Palestinean, two Moroccans, one Thai, two Vietnamese, three or four English.

  The Christmas party, Renée informs us, will be on 20 December, and each student is invited to contribute a dish from his or her country. This naturally brought out competitive nationalism among the pupils. The English went for mince pies and smoked salmon. The South-East Asian faction brought a stupendous dish of green curry and fragrant rice, but the outright winners were the Moroccans, with a plate of incredibly light and creamy pastries called Gazelles’ Horns. Renee and Dominique brought plates of Bearnais black pud­ding and charcuterie.

  Local Media

  I needed news. As a journalist, I was trained on the stories of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook giving spot quizzes on the day’s paper to any young journalist he met in the corridors of his Fleet Street flagship and sacking any hapless cub who passed on an answer. They had left me in permanent terror of losing touch.

  Mad fantasy number one was that I would be able to read the London newspapers on the Internet. My first browse revealed that the online editions were cut down to skeletons for the barely literate. French television was no help, because the news programmes were fixated, not with the action in the war in Afghanistan, but with the part that French aid workers and doctors were planning to play in the peace.

  Mad fantasy number two was that I would cycle into Sauveterre every morning, buy newspapers at the Maison de la Presse and read them in one of the cafes over a leisurely grand crème. The cafes didn’t open until almost lunch time and the road would have been challenging if I had been twenty years younger and three stone lighter. I took the car, and slotted the trip into the day’s schedule after lunch.

  In the Maison de la Presse, the proprietor offered to keep a Times for me every day. ‘Le Time,’ he called it. The editions were a day old, and the Sunday Times came with all its pointless supplements except the one you really wanted.

  Just before I left London, a new editor had arrived at The Times. A new editor means that dead wood will be cut out, heads will roll, budgets will be slashed, sorrows will be drowned, new brooms will sweep clean and wheels will be reinvented. I had been writing regular features for The Times, but with all this agony going on in Wapping, burying myself in France seemed like a smart move. All the same, the paper was still part of my identity. As things turned out, they did not lose my phone number. Every now and then, when I was in the car park at Leclerc or out feeding Annabel’s donkeys, my mobile would be called by a newly promoted editor eager to commission a feature.

  I decided that I would also buy a French national paper, Le Monde if I was feeling strong enough for the tiny grey type and advanced vocabulary or Le Figaro if I was feeling weak. Then there were the three local papers: Le Sud-Ouest (Béarn edition), La République (Béarn-et-Soule edition) and Le Pyrénéen. And I had ordered from the UK the weekly Guardian, which proved to be a caricature of the bad old Guardian written exclusively for social workers in Africa, and the inestimable news digest The Week, an absolute must-read, even in London.

  These packages intrigued the post lady. She was also besotted with the Duchess. Homage is this cat’s favourite conversation, and she took to waiting by the door in the morning to receive her daily fix. I apologized to the post lady for the extra work I was making for her, explaining that I was a writer and I needed my newspapers. The is proved to be my introduction to my neighbours.

  The White Van Men

  There are a lot of white vans about. They are parked in odd places, nosed with intent into field gateways and little patches of woodland. They seem to be empty most of the time. Occasionally, the soft pop of guns somewhere in the hills tells you where the action is.

  In London, a white van is traditionally driven by a skin­head with a bad case of road rage. Around Orriule, the white vans belong to the hunters. A beat-up old van is perfect for setting out before dawn with your dogs and transporting your kill to the railway station in the late morning, in time to be loaded onto the train for Paris for the wholesale meat market in the wee small hours. The vans then rattle back to the shelter on the edge of Orion, a barnlike building at the crossroads. Here at weekends the hunters gathered from noon, and set up long tables for their lunch, which lasted until well into the afternoon.

  I once dropped in on some French friends to find one of their hunting neighbours already in the parlour, dipping his long nose into his aperitif, well satisfied with the dead deer lolling from the rear doors of his elderly Renault. He wore an old green anorak and well-worn boots. Unlike the Italians, for whom hunting is an excuse to pose around in brand-new camouflage jackets festooned with bandoliers, the Béarnais enjoy their sport without making a fashion statement.

  The hunters are gifted, skilled and experienced men, and at this time of year they are after the big game, the deer and the wild boar. There is no dispute that the main motive is the pleasure of the chase, but also acknowledgement, formal and informal, that controlling these species is necessary for the ecological balance of the farmland. Though the argument gets a little strained sometimes.

  ‘Deer are swarming all over the region!’ warned the Orthez edition of La République, reporting at least two hundred and fifty animals causing crop damage, breaking down the hedges and alarming passing motorists. One driver counted seventeen animals in a field next to the Route Nationale 117. ‘Only the panel beaters are going to be happy if people stop hunt­ing,’ he predicted grimly.

  Hunting is, of course, licensed and controlled. The local clubs are called the ACCA, Association Communale de Chasse Agréée. On the notice board outside the mairie, a memo from the Fédération de Chasse and the Direction Départmental de l’Agriculture confirms that the village’s annual quota for deer has been raised to eight.

  The regulation is that no more than 30 per cent of the estimated local population may be shot in a year. This is enough to keep the ACCA Gaston Febus, around Orthez, busy with a shoot every fortnight, beginning in late October after the final maize harvest and ending in late March with a hunting supper to which everyone is invited, and three different venison dishes are served. The ACCA Gaston Febus was also authorized for three fox-shoots a year, but foxes are thought of as low-status vermin.

  Since the boar and the deer have no predators other than man, plus a benign climate and an abundance of food, they
breed fast – some does giving birth every six months. It is forbidden, the notice sternly reminds the hunters, to transport a dead animal any distance at all, even from the ground where it has fallen to the white van which awaits it, without first attaching a bracelet provided by the Federation confirming that it is part of the quota.

  The hunt club in Orthez was named Gaston Fébus after one of the romantic personalities from the Béarn’s history, whose presence is still so vivid you half expect them to come riding into the market square any day. This is partly because they are remembered as much for embodying the spirit of the people as for their historical achievements.

  Fébus is just a vernacular spelling of Phoebus, and the Viscount Gaston, who ruled the Bearn from 1343 to 1391, was given this nickname because of his blazing red hair. Long before the Renaissance, he was a perfect Renaissance man, writing poetry, playing music, addicted to hunting and the creator of a brilliant court to which troubadours flocked from all over the Pays d’Oc, the pleasure-loving, sun-kissed southern provinces.

  The manuscripts kept in the Bibliotheque de France witness that Gaston Fébus wrote very well, particularly when he was writing about one of his favourite subjects, hunting. ‘War, love and hunting are enough to fill a man’s life’, he believed. ‘In the field, the hunter lives joyously, because he is in communion with Nature. He gets up early and sees the blush of the dawn on the branches, and learns to recognize the songs of the birds, which bring great joy to the heart of the hunter. The hunt is at the same time an apprenticeship for war which is essential to a horseman. The hunter has to understand his territory, to analyse all the possibilities of the ground which the hunt will cover, and all the tricks of the quarry. This makes him a cunning warrior who never makes a move without thinking.’

  Gaston Febus was not only a brilliant military commander but also a wily statesman. From his postage stamp of a principality he intimidated and manipulated his predatory neighbours so successfully that his subjects enjoyed peace and prosperity for decades, protected by his majestic castles, which still dominate the skylines of Pau, Orthez and Sauveterre. Febus thus gave his subjects the maximum opportunities for enjoying their lives and the minimum need to involve themselves with the rest of the world, although the French and English armies were fighting all over Aquitaine during his time.