Deep France (28 page)

The local taste was rigidly conformist. Leeks were eaten in the winter, along with chicory. Green beans were eaten in the summer. Slices of squash or pumpkin might be contemplated in the autumn.
Haricot beans were grown to be dried and eaten in the winter. A salad might be made of one of three recognized lettuce types,
laitue
, batavia or escarole. And that was pretty much it, a
tragedy in a land where every seed that fell to earth grew as heartily as Jack’s beanstalk.

A Trip to the Cinema

Films are one of my greatest pleasures in life. It was, in fact, the discovery that foreign films were shown in repertory in the local cinemas that was a clinching factor in my
decision to leave London for a year. Salies, St-Palais and Orthez all had little
local cinemas which showed a wide range of films, the imports often being screened in
‘version originate with subtitles and their original soundtracks. Pau and Bayonne had real art-houses, as well as small multiplexes.

However, getting someone to come to the movies with me had been a challenge. Annabel ventured out to see
Amélie
with me, but our diaries never had a window big enough for a trip
to Pau for something more ambitious. I had managed to catch
Le Seigneur des Anneaux (The Lord of the Rings)
in St-Jean-de-Luz, but had been forced to go by myself to enjoy the spectacle of
Christopher Lee whirling furiously around on his computer-generated crag, snarling, ‘
Qu’est-ce qu’on pent faire avec ces ‘obbits?
’ (‘What can you do
with these hob-bits?’). The hobbit family of Baggins had been renamed Saccin, which was understandable, since
sac
means ‘bag’, but Bilbo Saccin just didn’t sound as
intrinsically loveable as Bilbo Baggins.

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 impregnable 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.