Deep France Page 7

  You don’t expect a city of such obvious eminence to grab any excuse for a party, and if there is no real excuse, to have a party anyway, but this is Bayonne’s philosophy. If you find the narrow streets below the cathedral frequented by less than three marching bands on any given Saturday, something must have gone wrong. I’ve stood in the old town, on the cobbled patte-d’oie crossroads outside the exquisite pale-blue shopfront of the posh linen emporium, and watched a different marching band jollying towards me down each one of the five roads which meet there, my ears bombarded simultaneously with jazz, Souza, salsa, banda songs and African drums.

  We arrived at lunch time, a common fault of sluggardly foreigners in this deeply traditional region, where everything stops dead at 12.30 and you will be stared at as a potential hooligan if you are still walking the streets at 12.35. After heated argument, bordering on a tantrum from Glynn, we crushed ourselves around the last remaining table in an unprepossessing caff where the day’s special was off and a tantrum in earnest threatened.

  Three musicians then shoehorned themselves into a space by the bar, and played some Basque songs. One had a small drum, another a txistu and the third was a young man with an astonishingly strong but light tenor voice who sent long ribbons of song unfurling in the smoky air over the bowed heads of the diners.

  Glynn’s tantrum turned instantly to rapture. It was agreed that Bayonne was the most gorgeous town south of Paris, that the half-timbered town houses were simply glorious, that the cafe was a perfect dream, that there was no steak and chips in the world more delicious than the cafe standard of onglet-frites. Henrietta — so handy to be travelling with an expert gastronome — wondered why we in England had never learned the trick of slicing what we call skirt steak across the grain this way, thus turning a cheap, tough cut into something tender and extremely good value.

  In due time, we proceeded down one of the cobbled alleys and, leaving Chloe to try makeup in the Sephora store, found what could only be called a draper’s shop. With its plain dark wood doors, long glass windows and generally dusty air it promised more authentic stock than the glamorous emporium at the crossroads. Behind the counter, a traditionally fey male assistant was fussing about unpacking a delivery of Basque table linen.

  Basque linen, like everything Basque, is plain, striking and robust. Originally, it was woven by the farmers’ wives, and used to protect their cattle from insect stings and identify them when the different herds mingled as they grazed the mountain pastures. The traditional design is of seven stripes, one for each province, on unbleached cotton or linen ground.

  Your only challenge is to choose the pattern you prefer on the off-white background — red stripes? blue stripes? blue-and-red stripes? green stripes? yellow-and-green stripes? or — the new design for minimalists — white stripes? Or go mad for the very modish designer range of stripes in singing pinks and oranges?

  Glynn fell into rapture again. He took delight in full colour geometry and was very fond of stripes, which featured frequently in his early work on deckchairs, beach huts, matelot sweaters, gondola poles in Venice. I truly believe he would never have painted my portrait if I hadn’t owned a black-and-white-striped jacket. After stripes, he loved checks. Basque linen comes in a bold, butch windowpane check which is right up his street.

  ‘What sizes?’ asked the assistant, his tape measure round his neck like a doctor’s stethoscope. A beret, he explained, must be chosen for two measurements: the circumference of the leather band which fits around the head, and the depth of the flop. The little stalk at the crown has no practical purpose, except to ward off bad luck.

  The flop is essential. As a bra is measured by band and cup, so a beret is measured by band and flop. In past times, every Frenchman with an outdoor job wore a beret to keep his head warm and dry. For this, the headgear has to overhang the wearer’s face. So a beret worn as my father wore the specimen he collected in Normandy in the war, pulled down snugly over the skull, is of limited use.

  Properly worn the beret should flop over the nose, like a limp flat cap. As it rains a lot in the Basque Country and the ethnic Basque nose is long, a good flop is essential. So is a beret made of densely felted high-quality wool that hasn’t been stripped of the natural lanolin that makes it waterproof. Glynn went for the eleven-centimetre flop and the assistant got out his mini-step ladder to bring down a box of the right size.

  The Basque word for a beret is txapela. The tx is pronounced like a slightly explosive ch in English, and if you say the word aloud you’ll hear an echo of the Latin word for head, capella. The earliest record of it in France is in a document dated 1461 from the Landes, and the early pictures of men in berets suggest that they evolved from a simple square of woollen cloth worn for warmth and protection.

  In 1534, when the Jesuit order was founded in Paris, they adopted a version of the beret for their novices, and called it a biretta. Why would the Jesuits do that? Well, the founder of the great Catholic teaching order, St Ignatius Loyola, not to mention his missionary associate, St Francis Xavier, were both Basques – Loyola from Guipuzcoa, Xavier from Navarre.

  The beret became a political symbol much later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Basques took sides in the civil wars in Spain. The red beret was adopted by those who were Carlists, supporters of the claim of Prince Carlos to the throne of Spain, and of the Catholic Church and the rights of the rural working class. The Carlist leaders were always drawn looking noble under a fine expanse of flop, and the Carlist newspaper was called La Boina, ‘The Beret’ in Spanish.

  The red berets still come out all over Gascony, the Béarn and the Basque Country for fêtes and ferias, for village suppers, pelota matches, school sports days, the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the Carnival in Pau, the Fete du Sel in Saliès. They are worn by the banda musicians, the fans and anyone in the crowd who wants to get with the spirit of the event. With the red beret goes a red scarf around the neck, a white shirt and trousers and a red cummerbund.

  The black beret, meanwhile, became so identified with peasant rights that it evolved into an international revolu­tionary accessory, popularized in the Sixties by the South American freedom fighter Che Guevara, and worn soon afterwards by the young Tony Benn. I was not sure if Glynn had fully appreciated the beret’s radical implications. He was immensely pleased with his eventual choice, and we hit the motorway for home in high spirits.

  Adieu to the Franc

  New Year’s Eve was upon us, and so was the euro. Never had the French had such an opportunity to indulge their passion for perfectionism. At the corporate level, readiness for the new currency was proclaimed everywhere, ‘WE’RE READY:’ yelled the banners at Leclerc, ‘WE’RE READY:’ shouted the posters at the gas stations. Every business, little or big, handed out their own printed conversion tables. Total-Fina-Elf had spent millions on a corporate euro-makeover, with a circular converter in the shape of a cross-eyed cartoon bird in Day-Glo colours.

  I decided to use the official converter pressed upon me by the postmaster. Henrietta immediately spotted a new must-have accessory and demanded we stop at the post office to get her one — but they’d all gone. The laminated, flickering card was in the style usually found at Lourdes portraying the apparition of the Virgin Mary with an on—off flashing halo. When you tilted it, the French flag became the blue EU flag with its yellow stars, and 6.56 francs became 1 euro. The ominous countdown was on the back. 1 January, cheques, cards and bank transactions exclusively in euros. 17 February, the franc will cease to be legal tender. 30 June, the last date at which francs can be changed to euros at the post office.

  From hoardings everywhere, government advertisements screamed: ‘Le euro – c’est nôtre monnaie!’ The official bodies of France were stuffing the euro down the citizens’ throats like the local farmers force-feeding their ducks with maize to fatten them for foie gras. The ducks were accepting their sad destiny much more willingly than the Béarnais.

  Away from official propa
ganda, people didn’t feel ready at all. You heard the same conversation everywhere. It started when someone shook their head and advanced the ominous proposition: ‘On n’est pas prêt.’ Somebody else would shrug, shake their head in turn and agree gravely, ‘On n’est pas prêt.’

  ‘Non,’ emphasized the first speaker, now shaking their head vigorously. ‘Non,’ repeated the second speaker. Then they both shrugged again and paused to contemplate the approaching catastrophe before one of them heaved a fatalistic sigh and said, ‘Eh voilà.’

  Everybody agreed that they themselves were as ready as could be, but expressed grave anxiety about other social groups. ‘Yes, we’re ready,’ said the wife of the proprietor of the Maison de la Presse. With a lugubrious smile, she indicated an evil-looking plastic gadget with a digital screen, sitting beside her till like a malevolent alien. ‘We’ve got our converter. That’s all we’re going for. It’s ten thousand francs for a new till, after all. We’re ready, but what about our customers? Old people will be frightened that people are cheating them.’

  ‘Won’t you be sad to see the last of the franc?’ I asked her.

  ‘We haven’t got the choice, have we?’ she replied, smiling bitterly.

  The vet took the same line. ‘We’re ready,’ he said, waving a charged hypodermic around the chaotic surgery to indicate the high level of preparation that had taken place, ‘but what about our patients? Some of these old farmers are still working in old francs. They’ll never master another new currency.’ Then he clamped the hypodermic between his teeth while he respectfully parted the Duchess’s fur to find a good spot for the vaccination. Like everyone else around here, he was impressed with her pedigree, and wondered why I was complaining when I pointed out that she was hopelessly overbred and at times, like the time she tried to walk on duckweed, just too stupid to live.

  In the media, the tone was cynical. All France shares a high level of anxiety about being diddled, and the new opportunities for fraud became the focus of national hysteria. The TV news programmes dutifully visited the secret vaults near Paris where a mountain range of new notes were stacked in readiness, but once the official bulletin was over, a Saturday night prime-time dating show was dropped in favour of an investigation of scams and swindles blamed on the euro, conducted by a telly-totty in a power suit.

  Le Figaro, like the rest of the press, went large on the discovery that the coppery cents, the .01, .02 and .05 euro coins, corroded easily and were possibly toxic. It also ran a massive feature headlined, ‘Welcome to the labyrinth of euro-centimes’, pointing out that under cover of rounding-out the prices, a mass swindle was about to take place. The FF12 cup of coffee was gong to be €2, a FF1.12 increase. The identity card photos, of which every French person needs several every year, would go up from FF25 to €4, another swindle. The biggest hike of all was going to be the price of a Paris parking meter, one of the many slot machines designed for the old FF10 coin, which would now be modified to accept the €2 coin, a 31 per cent price rise.

  The Sud-Ouest took the emotional line, and ran a huge editorial on the last days of the franc, mourning the coin that had symbolized the nation for 642 years and whose very name resonated with freedom, since it was first struck to ransom the French king, Jean the Good, who had been captured by the marauding English at the battle of Poitiers.

  There had already been an eight-page euro supplement, with an FAQ section. ‘Q: Will you have to take special precautions when reading prices in euros? A: You’ll probably have to be more careful of the two decimals after the comma. Euro cents will be more valuable than the old centimes – 90 euro cents, for example, will be 5.9 francs. After 1 January, you won’t be able to take centimes so lightly.’

  For all the head-shaking and shrugging, in the market in Saliès, the Leclerc in Orthez, the pharmacy in Sauveterre and the dépôt de pain in Ossages, all the sanctimonious invocation of frightened old people, simple-minded old farmers, vulnerable old grandmothers and brainless young hooligans, the Béarnais were really quite proud of their unreadiness.

  They behaved like lovers forced to put a brutal end to their affair. There was a general sense of futile regret, of an illicit passion being sadly and dutifully stifled, of people tearing themselves out of a lingering farewell embrace. The banks were threatening a strike. The Auberge de la Fontaine in the nearby village of Laas, the only hostelry in the region whose proprietor has a real sense of humour, ran an advertising campaign for a special farewell dinner, with the slogan, ‘Let’s enjoy ourselves with our francs one last time!’

  Infected with the national nostalgia, at Maison Bergez, we took out our francs and looked at them as if we’d never seen them before, so gorgeously heavy, so brilliantly silvery, the last currency in the world to really look and feel like money. I had an irrational sense that once this familiar little art work was gone, real money, money that weighs heavy in the pocket and jingles merrily in the purse, would be on the road to extinction and the world would go to hell with electronic cash transfers.

  To us, as foreigners and Francophiles, the franc embodied all the sophistication, the exoticism and the beauty of France. The coin was a portable, everyday, national manifesto, the entire glory of France expressed in that little disc of metal. How noble to have the value side embossed with the national mission statement, Liberté Egalité Fraternité, and the other side stamped with the graceful figure of Marianne, the symbol of revolutionary freedom. How much more appropriate than an outdated profile of a monarch, encircled by the claim that she defended a religion of shabby origins and little respect.

  No wonder the French were approaching 1 January with fear, and sadness, and regret. No wonder that they had persuaded Brussels to allow them six weeks’ trial separation, and give them until 17 February to phase out their coinage. They just couldn’t bear to say goodbye. And besides, the very large proportion of people with francs earned on the black – i.e. without declaring them to the taxman – needed to launder them in a hurry. Throughout Gascony, this had created a mini-property boom, as people dragged their francs out from under the mattress and bought cars, tractors, or studios in the ski resorts.

  We stopped in Sauveterre to buy a dessert for our New Year’s Eve supper, and found that the pâtissier, a willowy young man called M. Charrier, had designed a euro cake with the dough traditionally used for the seasonal gâteau des rois, the Three Kings Cake. This yeasty confection, glossy with a sugar glaze and decorated with candied fruits, is baked with a ‘fève’, literally a bean, a tiny porcelain figure bringing good luck for the new year to whoever finds it in their portion. They also get the right to wear the gilt card­board crown that comes with the cake.

  The gâteau des euros completely charmed my guests, and we decided to buy it for the first breakfast of 2002. There was a muted outbreak of delight among the other customers in the shop. Glynn heard a patter of discreet applause. The new currency wouldn’t work unless all the Union joined it, they explained. It was very worrying for the rest of Europe that the British government had reserved its position. But if we were buying the gateau, perhaps the British people really did like the euro after all. So everything was going to work out just fine.

  Bonjour à l’Euro

  Since New Year’s Eve meant a large party, various elements of which might or might not show, with or without extra guests, it was a good excuse to cook a dish that is as elastic as it is delicious, Henri IV’s Poule au Pot. Henrietta, a great lover of foie gras, would have probably preferred the traditional French réveillon dish of hot foie gras with grapes, but my confidence was not up to handling this expensive, delicate and non-PC luxury. We finished the meal with one of M. Charrier’s heavenly chocolate cakes, the Beret Basque, composed of two circles of soft, dark chocolate sponge with something fabulously rich and chocolaty between them. The upper circle is larger, causing it to flop over the filling as the beret flops over a man’s head.

  Our ribs thus lined, we set off in freezing fog and total darkness, to return to the H�
�tel du Pare in Saliès to enjoy the promised spectacle, featuring showgirls from Paris. In fact, the spectacle consisted of two show girls and one show boy, each encrusted in panstick, sequins and several pairs of false eyelashes.

  In vain they flaunted their permatanned ribs under the noses of those who had stayed for the Parcs FF850 (£85) seven-course dinner and were now slumped biliously in gold Lloyd loom chairs under the potted palms in the atrium, while the fruit machines winked in the distance. Carrie, Annabel and Chloe made for the temporary roulette table, which had been set up near the bar for the convenience of those who wanted to gamble without missing any excitement. Zoe, Annabel’s daughter and Gerald’s stepdaughter, hit the dance floor with her escort.

  For a province with such a magnificent musical heritage, with folk songs so haunting they make cynical urbanites cry, the Béarn has a strange taste in DJs. A definite taste, because they’re all the same. The essential repertoire combines cheesy French pop with the less demanding disco classics including Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ and ‘YMCA’ by the Village People. For 2002, ‘Mambo No. 5’ had been added to the box of hits without which no party was complete. At midnight, the disco let up for long enough to allow the showgirls and boy to twirl through the room, scattering sequins and singing ‘Bonne année! Bonne année! Bonne année!’ to the tune of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’.

  At breakfast next morning, Chloe found the fève in the gâteau des euros, a tiny porcelain figure of a soldier in uniform of the Napoleonic era. We left her to start the New Year as she intended to go on, writing her next essay. Our destination was St-Jean Pied-de-Port, another handsome Basque town and a rallying point for the pilgrims making for Compostela. From the seventeenth-century citadel you can see the road to Spain leading straight into the rounded green foothills, with the vineyards of Irrouleguy to the west.