Deep France (8 page)

‘Do you know Fay Weldon?’ asked a fine-looking man whose white hair waved strongly off his forehead. We were at another party by then. It wasn’t the first question I’d
expected to be asked in Deep France. ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘I’ve met her once or twice. She’s been awfully kind about my books.’

The speaker turned out to be a painter, the artist whose panorama of Saliès-de-Béarn was then one of the must-sees of the town. Roger came to Saliès ten years ago, with his
wife. She didn’t like living in France and returned to England, where Fay Weldon was one of their friends. So he had a tenuous link to the world of books.

Roger lived more or less alone, in an eccentrically spiky modern house in a beautiful valley on the outskirts of the town, and could often be seen driving around in one of his cars – a
vast cream-coloured Mercedes for formal occasions, or a dilapidated Mini Moke for every day. His fox terrier, Fanny, sat on the seat beside him, enjoying the wind in her ears.

It was, I discovered, hard on a marriage when a couple decided to make a new life in a new country. It seemed to be rare for both partners to feel equally happy, and common for one spouse to
suddenly develop a social disability which kept the other one reassuringly enslaved. Often a husband
wouldn’t learn French. Often a wife would declare she couldn’t
possibly drive on French roads. Annie, who refused either to drive or to learn French, had clearly gone for the belt-and-braces approach to anchoring her mate.

On Boxing Day, I was determined to drive up into the mountains, where the snow was lying deep and white and magical. My goal was the forest of Iraty, halfway to Pamplona, not from the pass of
Roncesvalles where Roland, commander of the Franks, supposedly blew his horn to call his uncle Charlemagne to help him after he had been attacked.

According to the eleventh-century epic poem
The Song of Roland
, he was attacked by the invading Moors. According to history, however, Charlemagne’s army, retreating from the
invasion of Catalonia, roused the enmity of the Basques in August 778 by sacking Pamplona. In revenge, a small number of Basque fighters let the Frankish army march into the narrow pass, then
ambushed and massacred them.

I wanted Chloe to see this real primeval woodland, the largest beech forest in Europe. Iraty is awesomely lovely under the snow and a perfect place to watch showers of tiny crystals fall upon
the bottomless drifts as some rare Pyrenean bird hops from twig to twig.

The trouble with trying to get in the mountains, as I had discovered before, is all the stuff you come across on the way. This time plans were derailed as early as St-Palais, where we found a
horse fair in progress. Or, more accurately, a donkey and pony fair. Including baby donkeys. Irresistible. We parked the car and went to investigate.

Only one horse was on offer, a skinny young bay, whose owner, following the tradition of the fair, was dressed for the animal’s work and carried the tools of its trade. Which meant that
she was got up in her best dressage jacket and carried the saddle in her arms. She stood shyly apart from the farmers,
who chatted in small groups, their Basque berets pulled
low over their long noses, leaning on the yokes or the panniers belonging to their donkeys.

The donkeys were mostly of the Pyrenean breed, relatively large animals with chocolate-brown coats and markings like a panda in negative, with pale rings around the eyes and muzzle. The ponies
had shaggy golden manes and chestnut coats, typical of those seen in the fields in the Basque Country. Their colouring suggested they shared some ancestry with the
pottocks
, the wild
ponies who must once have roamed the whole of south-west France, since drawings of them exist in prehistoric caves as far north as the Dordogne.

Their phenomenal strength and tiny stature – a pottock is never more than 120 centimetres at the shoulder – made them useful pit ponies and some were exported to Britain in the last
century to work in the mines; their chunky build also made them good eating, though, since France had its own BSE scare, the
bouchers chevalines
buy 95 per cent of their meat from
Argentina.

The demands of these two trades nearly drove the breed to extinction, but the mayor of the small Basque town of Sare stepped in and saved them. There are still wild
pottocks
in the
Pyrenees, most of them now in protected reserves. The ponies in the square in St-Palais, however, with their gentle faces and big dark eyes, looked safe enough and, judging from the number of small
girls pulling their indulgent fathers in their direction, were destined to be pampered pets.

In the end, we got no further than the next town in the general direction of the mountains, an elegant and prosperous little place called Mauléon, which seems to have got rich on
espadrilles, since its only industry is the manufacture of these rope-soled sandals. The day was almost as warm as an English summer, and we ate a picnic under the walls of Richard Cœur
de Lion’s castle, watching a shepherd check over his flock, some of whom had just begun lambing.

Our Good King Henry

On a bitterly cold morning, I went out to retrieve the post and saw a wild ginger kitten dart into the bamboo thicket. Domesticating a wild cat is, of course, the height of
folly, since they always make terrible pets and will probably run away. All the same, he was damn cute. But he probably belonged to somebody.

A wild cat can smell a soft heart from a hundred kilometres away. The kitten took to reappearing at about eleven every morning. Quite soon, he was discovered in the kitchen, finishing off the
breakfast left by Piglet and the Duchess. He then moved uphill to Annabel’s kitchen, but she had three ex-wild cats already and they were not welcoming. I decided to call him Henri Cat, after
the great king of the Béarn, and of France.

‘A young man with a keen eye, black hair cut very close, thick eyebrows, and a nose curved like an eagle’s, with a sneering smile and a growing moustache and beard’ was how
Alexandre Dumas imagined the youth who would soon be King Henri IV. His description matches the face of an anonymous but contemporary drawing of Henri at the age of eighteen. He was only a few
months older when his mother died and he became King of Navarre. The year was 1572.

Henry was raised by feminists, or the nearest creatures to feminists that Renaissance France recognized. His grandmother was a free-thinking princess, Margaret of Angouleme, who attracted
intellectuals of all disciplines to her brilliant court. Her husband, Henry II d’Albret, who had ruled the little kingdom of Navarre wisely and well, had no male
heir.
Their daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, married a local duke, Antoine de Bourbon.

Henri was born in Pau and legend states that his grand­father moistened the baby’s lips with Jurançon wine and a clove of garlic, an aromatic Béarnais baptism. Legend
also states that Henry’s cradle was a tortoiseshell. Visitors to the chateau in Pau, where he was born, are duly shown the carapace of a giant tortoise, suspended on silk ropes from crossed
spears, but the castle was lavishly restored in the late nineteenth century by the Empress Eugénie and the shell was discovered in a house in the town at that time.

Henri’s father then went back to the battlefield, leaving his mother, a passionate advocate of the new Protestant religion, to do as she liked with her kingdom, which she converted with
fire, sword and English mercenaries. She naturally raised her son in the Protestant faith.

Jeanne d’Albret and her son were invited to Paris by another ruthless female ruler, Catherine de Médicis, the Italian-born queen-mother of France, who proposed that Henri should
marry her daughter, Marguerite, in order to help reunite a country that was being torn apart by religious intolerance.

The Catholic view is that Jeanne then died of pleurisy, and the unfortunate massacre of the Protestants in Paris on the evening of St Bartholomew’s Day, shortly after the wedding, just
happened. The Protestant view was that Catherine had Jeanne poisoned, and staged the wedding on purpose to draw a large number of Protestant leaders into Paris so that the Catholic elite could
murder them. Jeanne’s unhappy ghost is said to haunt the forest of Iraty.

Henri won his place in history by the brilliance with which he tiptoed to the throne through this political minefield. He was a scruffy, garlic-breathed teenage princeling from an obscure and
far-off province, and his accent was so strong the courtiers in Paris could hardly understand him.
The Pope refused to bless his marriage to Marguerite, known as
la reine
Margot
, so the wedding of the two teenagers took place on a special dais built outside the cathedral of Notre-Dame. They were both in love with other people at that time, and frequently
afterwards.

Somehow – Alexandre Dumas attributes it to the cleverness of his wife – Henri survived the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. According to legend, when it was put to him later that
Paris would never accept a Protestant as King, he said, ‘Paris is worth a mass,’ and converted to Catholicism. After his marriage he spent much of his time in Paris in prison or under
house arrest. He finally escaped the toxic atmosphere of the court in 1576, re-converted to Protestantism and became the very able commander of the Huguenot resistance. The King, Catherine’s
neurotic oldest son, died a hideous death, bleeding from every pore, either from poisoning or TB. His younger brothers did not last much longer, and Henri of Navarre became Henri IV of France in
1589. He was a popular ruler, not least for his famous promise that when he was king every peasant would have a chicken in the pot every Sunday.

Henri never went back to the Béarn, which he entrusted to the rule of his sister, Catherine. He did, however, pass the Edict of Nantes, which allowed both Catholic and Protestant
religions to exist side-by-side in France for almost ninety years. Ironically, he was assassinated by a Catholic in 1610. To this day, most towns in the Béarn have both a Catholic church and
a Protestant temple, and Henri remains a well-loved figure.

Ten years after Henri became king, he and Marguerite had gone their separate ways and he married the Tuscan princess, Marie di Médici. Marguerite was a beautiful and clever woman, who
wrote poetry and a useful and amazingly frank volume of memoirs. Their marriage she regarded as the
blight of her life, but it was an effective political alliance, and it seems
a pity that it was never more, since they had a lot in common, not least a good appetite for
la vie galante
. One of the many legends about ‘la reine Margot’ is that she kept
the hearts of her dead lovers in gold boxes, so it was perhaps as well for Henri that he was not among them.

Our First Guests

The beds were made, the croissants bought, the plans for New Year’s Eve laid. I drove to Dax to pick up our first visitors, Glynn and Carrie Boyd Harte, both painters,
and Henrietta Green, food writer and founder of the farmers’ market movement. They arrived together on the TGV, exclaiming over the interminable boredom of the Landes. Half an hour later, and
the serendipity of an outing in good company kicked in as soon as we stopped in Saliès-de-Béarn for the cashpoint at France’s most picturesque branch of the Credit Agricole.

Since everyone fell in love with Saliès immediately, and started to feel frisky after the journey, it seemed like a good opportunity to show Glynn the interior of the Hôtel du Parc.
For reasons which nobody appreciates, this lovely building is in the hands of casino operators, who have filled its airy salons with fruit machines. Sedate as life in Saliès is, only a
handful of old ladies are so desperate for a good time that they find the fruit machines irresistible. The place can be a ghost Las Vegas, the
croupières
in the gambling rooms sit
chatting and inspecting their manicures all night and the machines twinkle into empty space.

The hotel was built in the glory days of Salies. A builder from Oloron Sainte-Marie, J.-B. Cazenave, commissioned by a local developer, completed most of the work in a year. In
good Béarnais tradition, the developer then ran out of money and a hotelier from Arcachon, on the Atlantic coast just south of Bordeaux, took over the enterprise. The hotel was
finished and opened for business in round about 1893, under the direction of the owner’s son, Gabriel Graner, whose initials, GG, are carved into the facades. It’s an imposing building,
overlooking the thermal baths, and surrounded by a melancholically unkempt park.

After the Belle Époque, the White Russian princesses and the ‘sirs’ from England migrated to the Riviera, Saliés fell from fashion and the hotel’s fortunes
continued to be chequered. An Alsatian family owned it for forty years, then sold it to a British hotel chain operating out of Jersey, who sold it to the commune in 1977, who restored it and made
it into a holiday village for members of the public sector workers’ union, then decided that what the town really needed was a casino.

The chief beauty of the hotel is its main hall, a huge atrium, whose walls are painted old-rose pink with squirly art nouveau flowers. It’s dominated by a sweeping double staircase of
polished wood, which leads up to a series of Italianate galleries. The design is strangely similar to that of the bigger Basque churches.

Off the galleries would be the bedrooms, if the present management had got around to restoring them. The atrium is so huge, twenty-seven metres high and fifty-four metres long, that it has cost
a bomb to restore and money ran out before the job was finished. It usually looks the picture of Edwardian elegance all the same. On that day the potted palms had been pushed aside and the art work
was hard to see because the place was packed for the weekly tea dance.

A small band played a medley of Bearnais tunes and half the company was stepping out on the floor, girls in satin jeans, matrons in chiffon, a few older men perspiring in
suits. Since some traditional Bearnais choreography is a close cousin of Texan line dancing, the body of the hall was filled by a crowd of smiling and self-absorbed individuals
enjoying the pleasure of their own nifty footwork.