Deep France (38 page)

The amateur troubadours started strolling through the alleys, stopping frequently to rehearse or retune. A band of young men in black-velvet doublets paid homage to the Gipsy Kings on guitars
and mandolin, while four nervous maidens, squeezed into brightly coloured taffeta dresses, strolled around with the bagpipes and the hurdy-gurdy.

All the restaurants were suddenly booked solid, even la Terrasse, which, as far as I knew, never took bookings. La Terrasse is my favourite place to eat in Saliès. It’s the complete
Elizabeth David dream, a simple, genuine, everyday restaurant where you’ll find yourself eating next to the postmaster and the florist, and the young waiter is nervous about serving
foreigners. It also has a stunning situation, right on the river, by a pretty stone bridge, opposite the church. But no, La Terrasse was full.

How could we contemplate this festival without a festive lunch? It was particularly bad news for Willow, who suddenly found herself with a large party of friends from way back staying with her
while they looked for a house. Being an adopted Chalossoise, she’d never got into this Béarnais rave and found it hard to understand that this gentle town of discreet middle-aged
divorcees had suddenly turned itself into the St Tropez of Gascony, even if
seulement pour le weekend.

Eventually, we ran into Gordon, who advised a place he’d discovered the year before, a sea-food bar in a little garden
near the bridge over the river. Here, under a
couple of luxu­riant mulberry trees, a fish merchant who’d come all the way from Arcachon set up a bank of griddles and was getting ready to shuck oysters, and grill sardines, prawns and
baby squid, straight out of the fishermen’s crates. Wine could be bought from the stall of a local vineyard, cunningly pitched nearby, and I sent Chloe to buy a loaf of country bread from a
craftsman baker around the corner. It was the size of a computer monitor and slightly charred on the bottom from the wood-fired oven, but the interior was warm, soft and fragrant, exactly what we
needed to clean our fingers and mop our plates. Fifteen of us eventually sat down to eat together, seven English, two Scottish, one Australian, one New Zealander, one Canadian and three French
– Francjoise and her children.

Sunday was the really big day, beginning with a sung mass in Béarnais in the church of St Vincent, which dominates the centre of the town from its position on a rocky outcrop overlooking
the river. It’s an extraordinary building, very simple inside but with wonderful acoustics, and asymmetrical, because of its natural foundations. Grandeur was something it grew into, because
originally it was nothing but a little chapel of rough stones built to serve the spiritual needs of the soldiers who guarded the salt spring.

Saliès has every reason to celebrate its salt, because it owes its beauty and its past prosperity to the geographical accident which, millions of years ago, created a salt marsh miles
from the sea. Rain which falls in the mountains is channelled down towards the earth’s core, and is then pushed up through a freak conformation of rock strata containing the mineral deposits
left by an ancient ocean. The water emerges here, in the middle of the flat and fertile Béarnais plain, as a hot spring redolent with dissolved minerals. The legend which is passed down
tells that the marshes of Saliès were
so salty that they sparkled in the sun with the salt that crystallized on every blade of grass.

The whole history of Saliès is of the ownership, defence and exploitation of this resource. Early in the Middle Ages, the marshes were drained and the River Saleys, thus created, diverted
into a stone storm drain through the centre of the town. There it could be dammed, the water extracted in huge vats which came to be called
samaux
, and evaporated in salt pans, from which
the crystals were brushed into tidy piles, dissolved again, purified, bagged up and sold all over France and Spain.

Since salt was a highly valuable commodity in past times, and Saliès was blessed with a spring whose water was five times saltier than the sea, this industry made
Saliès-de-Béarn rich for centuries. Where any other small market town of comparable size in France would now boast nothing but a ring road and a half-ruined rampart, Saliès is
a half-timbered, droopy-eaved dream, a townscape which looks as if it was mocked up for some 1930s fairy-story book plates. The perfectly preserved medieval centre is made up of handsome
merchants’ houses, several old water mills, the unique church of St Vincent and several less eccentric, later churches, a massive underground cistern and countless other architectural
treasures. Not to mention the spa, called les Thermes, and the bandstand in front of it.

It is also an immensely stable community, in which many families can trace their ancestry back to the Middle Ages. In all its history, Saliès suffered only a tiny blip of deprivation,
between the Revolution, when the salt business was nationalized, and the arrival of the Empress Eugénie in the mid-nineteenth century, when the town was reborn as a fashionable spa and les
Thermes were built. Over the next seventy years, a new phase of building added a clutch of
imposing art nouveau villas and fin de siècle hotels, including the
Hôtel du Parc.

Saliès became a fashionable must-see for the Biarritz set. Marcel Proust arrived in 1885, as a boy of fourteen, coming with his mother to take the waters. He was, his letters to his
grandmother reveal, extremely bored, a great tribute to the soothing properties of the elements of the South-West, which easily overcame the future master of ennui. He was saved by the conversation
of a certain Mme Catusse, the wife of a future senator, who apparently added ‘the essential grain of poetry’ which was necessary for the young genius’s existence. He reported that
she was also very beautiful, physically and morally.

Saliès was probably still enjoying the twilight of its heyday in 1926, when Scott Fitzgerald, accompanied by his wife Zelda and their five-year-old daughter Scottie, fled the severity of
January in Paris to enjoy a couple of months here. He hadn’t picked the best time to visit the Béarn. The only hotel which was open was out in the low-lying meadows of the Bellevue
quarter and the only other guests were seven invalids taking a cure at les Thermes.

They had a simple, pine-panelled room, filled with light from the Pyrenees, and embellished with a bronze bust of Henri IV. The great novelist believed that Henri’s mother had been born
there, whereas every Béarnais knows that Jeanne d’Albret was born in St Germain-en-Laye, now a suburb of Paris. Zelda herself was suffering from a colic contracted from ‘the
abuse of champagne’, but Scott bought himself a beret, a pair of knickerbockers and a walking stick, and took the family on trips to Biarritz, Pau and Lourdes. He did a bit of journalism, and
wandered down the misty alleys buying Scottie sweets, but they too were basically bored. But then, a jazz-age writer had to be bored by everything.

Saliès has drifted gently into lean times, which continue to this day. Many remarkable buildings that should be open to the public are closed, because there’s
no money to restore them. The largest hotel, an imposing wedding cake of white stucco and wrought-iron balconies, had been gutted by fire and was nothing but a burned-out facade with soot stains
streaking upwards from the glassless windows and lingering whiff of corruption.

The town should have been a perfect candidate for those Euro-funds earmarked for preserving our heritage. I had been told the story of how anti-rural prejudice had scuppered their chances.

The local heritage society, les Amis de Vieux Saliès, worked long and hard on a restoration plan worthy of EU funding. One of the wives was entrusted with taking their application to
become a UNESCO World Heritage Site to Brussels, because her husband couldn’t leave his business. When a man owns the only serious plant centre in the department, he has his anxieties. Or
perhaps he suddenly became aware that a big man in a small town may not feel too comfortable as an obscure stranger in an international capital.

Unfortunately, they had overlooked the box on the form which needed to be filled with the name of the restoration project. The bureaucrat to whom the application was handed pointed this out. The
messenger borrowed his telephone to call her husband, who was out in the garden inspecting his plants.

‘Sorry to take so long,’ she said, jokingly to the official, while she waited for him to be fetched. ‘We’re in
la France profonde
, you know – he’s
out in the fields!’ At this admission of peasant origins, the bureaucrat barely suppressed a shudder. The wife spoke to her husband and completed the form, but as she left the office she saw
the official shoving it disdainfully in a lower drawer, from which, she is
sure, it was never to be rescued. So Saliès, betrayed by the Gascon sense of humour, continues
to crumble in charming obscurity.

By midday on Sunday things became even more serious. The marquees and the long tables reappeared in the square, and lunch for a thousand people was laid on, with more music, more singing, more
dancing on tables and a huge pile of dirty plates in the washing-up tent that was set up in a little square out of sight of the revels.

The more circumspect party-goers arrived later and dug in at the bars. At three thirty plus the Bearnais quarter of an hour, a procession of floats began to form up outside les Thermes, a long
line of hand-made marvels pulled by trac­tors, which moved slowly through the crowd. The theme was the ‘
riches heures
’ of the Béarn, from prehistory to the present,
and every nearby village had been given one era to depict. They were cheered on their way by at least four
bandas
, belting out the old favourites on cornet, trumpet, hunting horn and tuba,
and reinforced by music from musi­cians in the crowd.

At the rear of some of the floats, boxes and barrels of wine had been mounted, and whenever the parade halted the followers energetically poured plastic cups of wine for the crowd, while
giggling schoolgirls tossed out handfuls of confetti, the user-friendly modern substitute for the ancient custom of hurling salt at the onlookers.

All the usual suspects were presented: Gaston Fébus hunting the boar, Henri IV in his tortoiseshell cradle, a team of Aztec maidens honouring the maize, a man in a chicken suit capering
around the
poule au pot
, a tableau featuring a giant Bayonne ham, a lorry draped with vines and dispensing wine and a giant black beret, about five metres in diameter. Every village in the
neighbourhood was represented, plus some of the town social clubs, the cycle club, the rugby
club and les Amis de Vieux Saliès. Geoff and Andrew were not amused to find
that Castagnède had chosen to depict what in heartless English would be called the village idiots. In ancient time the ‘
cagots
’, the programme explained, were originally
the marginalized folk of the village, who lived like the untouchables of India. Perhaps the offspring of outcast lepers, their origins were lost to history, and they disappeared when the
Revolutionary government granted them equal rights.

A Nazi tank (‘Mum, it’s just a drainpipe on a tractor painted khaki,’ said Chloe, eager to deflate my sense of wonder) signified World War II, when the demarcation line
dividing the German-occupied zone from the region ruled by the collaborationist Vichy regime ran right through Saliès in the Cout quarter, slicing off the east side of the town for the
enemy. Nobody ever refers to the agony that this innocent country town must have suffered when it was ripped apart by the Nazi army, but the wounds must have been deep. No doubt the hundreds of
Allied fugitives following the secret Resistance route over the border to Spain found a warm welcome in Saliès. Annabel’s house, La Maysou, was then the home of a Vichy governor. When
it was clear that the Germans were losing, he fled by night, but was hunted down to Nancy, in the north, where he was found in possession of a vast sum of money and jewellery worth 850,000 francs.
He was arrested, tried and executed.

The modern floats were the most inventive. The 1950s were represented by masses of silver pipes for the gas plant at Mourenx, while the present day was symbolized by the tunnel through the
mountains at Somport. This was almost my favourite float. Its builders had erected a five-metre chunk of cardboard mountain, thickly decorated with pine branches and heather, and embellished it
with borrowed taxidermist’s masterpieces, a stuffed fox, a pine marten, an
eagle and a stag’s head. At the back of the float was mounted a bright blue Peugeot, as
if it was emerging from the tunnel to be greeted by the tableau of a family picnicking in the middle of the road, being noisily admonished by a gendarme in full uniform. The tunnel at Somport runs
under a mountain pass that was given its name by the Romans.

After the parade, and another Bearnaise quarter-hour, and more beer, and more ‘
selgria
’ and more music, the
samau
races began. By this time the town square was
completely packed, apart from the race course running from the old salt works, past the fountain and the Credit Agricole, up almost to the bridge, round a barrel which marked the halfway point, and
back.

One after another, a pair of young men ran up and down the course, carrying on a wooden yoke a huge tub of salt water. The fastest time would win. The
samaux
were tall wooden pots made
of oak, bound with iron hoops, wide and flat at the bottom to keep them upright even on uneven ground. A
samau
could contain up to 100 litres of water, so even for two strong rugby-playing
lads, running over the cobbles was a challenge.

The trick was not merely to win, but to get around the treacherous corner by the Credit Agricole without the swinging weight of the water bringing down the runners and causing the whole kit and
caboodle to hit the deck, thus spilling salt water over the track and making it even more slippery for the later racers. The very first team managed to do this, to a roar of disapproval from the
crowd. Feeling sensitive to the prospect of somebody else breaking a leg, I decided it was time to head home.