Deep France Page 8
We found an ATM just outside the walls of the old town, and withdrew our first euros. After us, a young French father stepped up to the machine, his son, about eight years old, beside him. They looked at the notes without enthusiasm before the man stuffed them into his pocket.
Between Boyd Harte and Basque culture, a major love affair had begun. His original plan to draw some of the fantastic mock-gothic villas in Biarritz was almost overcome by the siren calls of half-timbered shopfronts from the back streets of St-Jean-de-Luz.
We spent a day of delights on a whistle-stop tour of the Côte Basque, Glynn setting about his assignment with the intensity of a cruising shark. He sketched incessantly in his Moleskine notebook while sending Carrie, Henrietta and me off on diversions to buy himself concentration time. The most successful distraction was Maison Adam, the macaroon shop on the main square, where a fountain of liquid chocolate was rippling on the counter.
In the cathedral, where Louis XIV was married, a cavernous edifice where the walls are lined with wooden galleries in the traditional style, Henrietta cajoled a churchwarden into switching on the lights on the reredos. Out of the shadows blazed a screen of exquisite paintings, as brilliant with gold as any Russian iconostasis. They were normally illuminated only during services, not for tourists.
The sea is tame at St-Jean-de-Luz, because the port is at the bottom of a bay so wide with a mouth so narrow that it is virtually a lagoon. The result is a wide, flat, golden-sand beach, perfect for small children, with chuckling little waves. At the much smaller port of Socoa, near the lagoon’s mouth, we had one of the most sublime lunches of our lives at Chez Pantxoa, an elegant restaurant where the walls are lined with Basque-school paintings and the tables set with Basque linen and ceramics.
This is a seafood lover’s paradise, and to complement some exquisite scallops we tried a pétillant white wine, txakoli, that has become a symbol of the local cuisine. Txakoli was once something that the small farmers on the coast used to make only for their own consumption, until a full-size vineyard was planted near the little port of Guéthary (Getari, in Basque) and professional wine-makers began to refine its production. The result is a deliciously fresh, light and subtle wine with a pretty hint of green in its tiny bubbles.
At sunset, we finally reached Biarritz, and strolled out to the Rocher de la Vierge on the walkway over the crashing Atlantic breakers before setting off for home. Glynn fell asleep on the journey. He had been diagnosed with ‘indolent leukaemia’, the first of several life-threatening conditions whose exotic names delighted him. Chloe was discovered in tears. The essay had gone badly, and she had left herself only a few days to crack it. I felt terrible for driving off to enjoy myself when she needed my support. I say support, because she always rejects actual help. We would only have one day alone together to talk it over.
Some of her friends never left themselves more than thirty-six hours for a major essay. Others of her friends spent weeks on each piece of coursework, and read every sentence to their parents over the phone. Chloe aspired to the third way, conscientious but independent. However, when she was tackling a subject that daunted her, she could spend days almost frozen with fear, unable to write a word. I suspect that it is no help to have a writer for a mother in this condition. I can never bear seeing her in distress and suddenly felt doubly guilty for enjoying myself with my friends when she was struggling with her work alone in a strange place.
Athos, Portau and Aramitz – All For One, One For All
By the middle of the month, Chloe had left, and finished her essay on time with the familiar support of the university library and her housemates. Glynn was back in London, painting frantically for his show in February, and the house was quiet again.
The weather was still bitterly cold, to the joy of the skiers and that section of the Béarnais population which makes a living in winter from the little resorts in the Pyrenees. I don’t like skiing in the same way that I don’t like driving – the result is marvellous but the process is stressful. I am also a crap skier, being tall, heavy and gutless, with a poor sense of balance. Furthermore, my idea of hell is a bar full of boozed-up idiots in bad sweaters reliving their antics on the black runs at maximum volume.
A mountainside in winter, however, is some kind of paradise. I love the stillness, the champagne air, the soft brilliance of sun on snow, the white-on-white landscape, the crunch of snow crystals underfoot. As it isn’t possible to enjoy a snowscape properly without skiing, I will endure the sport as far as I can – which nowadays isn’t much farther than cross-country, or ski de fond. This is lucky, because the little Pyrenean resorts, with miles of mountain trails and no facilities at all for international euro-trash, are perfect for people like me.
Before I could get to the snow, however, I found myself driving through a chapter of French literary history. After bowling east alongside the Gave d’Oloron, I had turned south, following hopeful road signs to Saragosse, or Zaragoza, in northern Spain. The road to the ski-stations ran up the valley of Bartous through the village of Aramits. This is now a handful of stone-walled barns and houses that crowd the gutter of the route to the mountains, apparently begging to be knocked down by one of the juggernauts, loaded with ewes’-milk cheeses, that come thundering down in the direction of Pau.
Aramits gave most of its name to its most famous citizen, Henri d’Aramitz, a young squire of the old military nobility of the Béarn, who was called to Paris in 1640, at the age of seventeen. The captain of the musketeers, the elite bodyguard of King Louis XIII, had heard that he was handy with a sword.
One of his friends, another young Béarnais with a great reputation for fighting, named Armand de Sillegue, Seigneur of Athos and of Auteville, was called up at the same time. So was Isaac de Portau, from Pau. Portau’s family title dated back to 1590, when Henri IV rewarded one of his forebears for good service as comptroller of his household. Athos and Auteville are both villages in the lush valley to the west of Sauveterre. The Three Musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, were based on real people. In Orriule, Athos, the handsome one, is our local hero.
D’Artagnan’s real name was Charles de Batz-Castelmore. He came from Lupiac, a village some way north of Pau, in the Gers. His pretty little chateau, with its conical towers, is still a private home. He too joined the musketeers in 1640 and rose to the rank of captaine-lieutenant. He then became governor of the substantial northern town of Lille, before he took a bullet in the siege of Maastricht and died in 1673.
The life stories of the real musketeers may be read in the old archives of Gascony, and in the romance called Memoirs of D’Artagnan, written only a few years after his death by a contemporary novelist called Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. This work was, in turn, discovered in the early nineteenth century by a writer of dreary historical fiction named Auguste Maquet. Maquet was never famous himself, but he found notoriety working as a researcher in the hit-factory of the bestselling writer Alexandre Dumas. ‘I have collaborators,’ said Dumas, ‘the way Napoleon had generals.’
In his novels, Dumas romanticized the Béarn and its people on such a glorious scale that he shaped the attitudes of the whole world. Although he certainly visited the region, he never lived here. His ancestors were not born here – his mother’s family were inn-keepers from north of Paris, and his paternal grandparents were a black slave from Haiti and a young aristocrat exiled there after a scandal. In spirit, however, this gutsy, witty, down-to-earth and hugely energetic genius is as much a Béarnais as any of his characters. A photograph of him around the time that The Three Musketeers was published shows an ebullient, hilarious hedonist whose fleshy face gazes out keenly below a grizzled afro.
Dumas’s father joined the army, and became a general during the Revolution; his troops called him ‘the black Hercules’. Once he returned to Europe, however, the miserable climate of northern France finished him off when his son was only four years old. Little Alexander left school at fourteen to become an office boy.
He
then took part in a marathon billiards match and won six hundred glasses of absinthe. These he sold for ninety francs to finance his move to Paris, where he became a clerk to one of his father’s aristocratic associates.
The young Dumas wrote up ledgers for an eleven-hour day, finishing at 10 p.m., when he sat down with his books to make up his education. He fell in love with a seamstress and they had a son – how he found the time for affairs when he worked all day and read all night would always be a mystery, even to his friends. The son would grow up to be a writer as well, known as Alexandre Dumas fils, and best known for The Lady of the Camellias.
Dumas père didn’t have an easy start. He wrote plays which nobody wanted to produce, and self-published a short-story collection which sold only four copies. Then his late-night orgies of autodidacticism led him to Shakespeare, who he called ‘the greatest creator after God’, as well as the dusty works of history and bad period novels from which he grabbed characters and plots by the armful.
His genius was for animating the past as everyone wants it to be, a brilliant cascade of sword fights, love affairs, heroism, passion and treachery with a good few laughs along the way. His genius was also for finding in these dusty old tales the themes that pushed buttons with his audience. They were, like him, members of the newly literate masses who were hungry for stories that dramatized their own lives, rather than the old intelligentsia who ‘enjoyed’ endless revivals of Racine.
Historical fiction was already the genre du jour, but Dumas had a diamond instinct for giving people a good time. Coming after the nit-picking authenticity of Sir Walter Scott, the moralizing of Prosper Merimée and Victor Hugo, and the colonial primitivism of James Fenimore Cooper, his writing was a hurricane of fresh air.
Once his plays had made him rich, a media revolution swept him away from the theatre and into a new form, the serial. In Paris, as in London, newspapers began to use serialized novels as weapons of mass destruction in their circulation wars. In the mid-1830s, two popular Parisian newspapers decided to accept advertising and were immediately locked in a deadly battle for new readers.
A writer as prolific, crowd-pleasing and gifted with narrative as Dumas was a natural for the new roman feuilleton and his new serials were soon auctioned for massive sums. The first of these was The Three Musketeers. It came out in 1844, overlapping with The Count of Monte Cristo, which in turn ran almost concurrently with La Reine Margot. This, the story of the feisty princess forced into a political marriage with the future Henri IV, was cobbled together in three months for a newspaper called La Presse, after its editor had sacked Balzac because his gloomy work had started a haemorrhage of readers.
Dumas was writing the way his father had fought, on a Herculean scale. He wrote around ten thousand words a week, working for fourteen hours at a stretch without revising or even punctuating, dropping finished pages on the floor for his secretaries to pick up, correct and rush round to the printers.
Then a new law was passed which imposed a hefty tax on newspaper profits, and Dumas’s income fell dramatically. Within a few years the theatre he owned had to be sold, as did his house, a folie-de-grandeur called the Château de Monte Cristo, which was bought by an American dentist. In 1851, Dumas was made bankrupt.
Who cares about going bust, when a man has panache? Dumas immediately wrote his way out of debt, producing another forty-three novels, eleven plays, travel books, history books and his six-volume autobiography over the next ten years, all while travelling, lecturing, supervising foreign productions of his plays and planning to open a restaurant. Finally, in 1870, he suffered a stroke in September, lingered on in the care of his son for a couple of months, and died on 5 December.
Dumas was eulogized by Victor Hugo, the literary lion-king of the day, and his works sold a further three million copies over the next twenty-three years alone. Once the cinema was invented, they inspired over two hundred films. Such popularity cannot be entirely forgiven. At the time I first drove through Aramitz on my way into the mountains, Dumas’s remains lay in an obscure cemetery north of the capital, not in the Panthéon in Paris, where most great French writers are interred.
Recipes
Poule au Pot Henri IV (or, in Béarnais, our Henry, nouste Henric)
Occasionally, you find an ironic version of this recipe, featuring nothing but the liver and giblets of the chicken, chopped and mixed with breadcrumbs, then wrapped in cabbage leaves or sausage casing and poached. This was the poule verte, the poor man’s chicken, which, so the legend goes, was all that the peasants could afford until good King Henry brought peace and prosperity to the land. A quick glance at the subsequent history of France suggests that the poor peasants were probably stuck with poules vertes until well after the Revolution, but hey – why spoil a good story?
The full version, with a real chicken, is a classic Sunday lunch dish in the Béarn. Pierre Koffmann remembers it as the traditional dish for the harvest supper, finished off with a blanket of poached brioche dough, and served between the charcuterie and the roast. It is one of those accommodating recipes that can stretch to feed dozens and wait a reasonable time for latecomers without spoiling, and is in every way a dish to share, because the preparation can be a bit fiddly, especially for cooks of the River Café, buy-it-and-grill-it school. Its great flaw is that the poached chicken looks a bit pale to a modern eye accustomed to ready-meals glazed with caramel. The Béarnais solve this simply by serving the meat with a good, piquant tomato sauce.
Serves at least 8, if not 14
a seriously decent chicken
a Savoy cabbage
some fine cooking string or heavy thread
and you need a really large pot to hold the chicken and the vegetables
For the stuffing
400g (l4oz) chicken livers, chopped
fat or oil for frying
400g (l4oz) fat Bayonne ham (or any other raw ham)
400 g (14 02) fresh breadcrumbs
2 eggs
a pinch of cinnamon
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
100g (3½oz) shallots, chopped
a handful each of chopped tarragon, parsley and chives
100 ml (4floz) dry white wine
1½ tbsp Armagnac
salt and pepper
For the broth
2 white onions
4 carrots
4 cloves
bouquet garni
12 peppercorns
2 celery stalks
2 leeks
and, if you can get them, some chopped veal bones
6 whole, peeled cloves of garlic
For the garnish, per person
1 baby onion
2 baby carrots
1 baby leek
1 baby turnip
First make the stuffing. Fry the chicken livers gently in a little fat or oil, drain and mash them in a bowl big enough to hold all the ingredients. Chop the ham finely, as in the blender, and add to the livers. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix thoroughly.
With half the stuffing mixture, stuff the cavity and breast of the chicken and sew up, or skewer, the opening. If you haven’t bought a trussed chicken, tie the legs together at this point to keep it whole while it cooks.
Put a saucepan of water on to boil. Break off a large, outer leaf of the cabbage for each person, and plunge the leaves all together into the boiling water for 2 minutes. Then drain them, refresh under cold water, drain again and pat dry. Spread each leaf on the chopping board and cut out the thick part of the central rib. Put a spoonful of the remaining stuffing on each leaf and roll it up into a parcel. Tie with the string and set aside.
Peel and halve the onions and carrots. Stick each half-onion with a clove – this stops them getting lost in the saucepan when you want to fish them out. Tie the bouquet garni and the peppercorns in a small piece of muslin for the same reason. Scrape the celery, and wash, trim and halve the leeks. Cut the remaining heart of the cabbage into portions, trimming away most of the
stalk but leaving just enough so the sliced leaves remain attached.
Put the chicken into the pot, followed by all the vegetables except the cabbage, and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes, then skim the surface carefully to remove any scum. Then add the veal bones, if you managed to find them, and the seasonings, and continue to simmer, uncovered, for about 2 hours, which will give you plenty of time to prepare the baby vegetables.
At the end of this time, take the chicken out of what will now be a delicious broth, and lay it on a carving board or plate. Strain the broth and return it to the pan, keeping the ugly boiled vegetables as a soup base for another day. Put the cabbage parcels into the broth and simmer for about 10 minutes, then add the baby vegetables, for 5 more minutes, and finally the cabbage slices, which should be barely cooked and still green. Meanwhile, cut the chicken into serving pieces and arrange it on a serving plate. Moisten with a little broth and keep warm in a low oven.
Pour off, into a tureen if you have one, enough broth to serve first as a clear chicken soup. Then assemble the serving plate with the chicken, the cabbage parcels and the vegetables, drizzling a little tomato sauce over the white meat if you like, or scattering some chopped herbs over it. Put the dish on the table and let everyone help themselves. Serve with some country bread or plain boiled potatoes, and the rest of the sauce on the side.
Béarnais Tomato Sauce
A word about the classic Béarnaise sauce, that aromatic confection of tarragon, vinegar and egg yolk. It’s a great thing to go with steak and chips, and would, indeed, go well with a poached chicken, but there’s nothing very Béarnais about it, the restaurants of the region rarely offer it and the master works of regional cuisine never mention it.
There is a Basque recipe for a sauce to go with trout that is made on the sauce Bèarnaise principle using mint instead of tarragon, but I’ve never found a reference to sauce Béarnaise in the traditional cuisine of the region. The whole thing was cooked up in the 1830s, in the Paris suburb of St-Germain-en-Laye, by a chef called Jules Collinet who named his creation ‘Bearnaise’ because his restaurant was called Le Pavilion Henri IV. He counted on the Béarnais being so far away, so unaware of events in the capital, and anyway so contemptuous of all things Parisian, that they would never know, and, if they did find out, never bother to show him up by protesting.