French Lessons (6 page)

When I told him I was
anxious to learn about frogs, he let out a rumble of laughter and nudged his
friend. An Englishman who was interested in frogs. What could be more
bizarre?

As I’ve often said, there is nothing a Frenchman likes
more than a self-confessed ignoramus, preferably foreign, who can be instructed
in the many marvels and curiosities of France. I think it must be part of the
national psyche, a compulsion to educate and thus to civilize those who have
suffered the misfortune of being born in a less privileged part of the world.
It happens all the time in Provence, where I have received free tuition in
subjects as varied as the skinning of red peppers, the extinction of rats, the
treatment of ailing plane trees, the training of truffle hounds, and the
correct way to administer a suppository
(doucement, doucement).
Now it
was about to happen again.

After a moment or two of muttering to his
friend and another grunt of laughter, my neighbor turned back to me. The first
thing to know, he said, is never to leave frogs in your hotel bedroom.
Jamais.

I nodded. It was undoubtedly a very bad habit to get
into. And then he told me why.

Some friends of his had been away from
home on a job near Lyon, draining a large reservoir before starting work on the
restoration of an old château. It was spring, and the reservoir was
teeming with frogs—succulent young creatures, an opportunity too tasty to
pass up. One of the men, wise in the ways of the frog, knew exactly what to do.
A length of red cloth was purchased, then torn into small pieces. These were
tied to the ends of bamboo rods and issued to each man, together with
instructions on technique.

It was not unlike fly-fishing, a gentle cast
that left the scraps of cloth bobbing on the surface of the reservoir. And the
frogs bit. Whether they were attracted by the color or by the cloth or by the
method of dragging it slowly across the water wasn’t made clear to me,
but, one after another, the frogs rose to the bait. By the time evening fell,
several large plastic bags had been filled.

The idea was to take them
home the following day, to be cooked and eaten over the weekend. But that
night, the workmen were staying in a small hotel close to the building site. It
was a Friday, and the men went out to celebrate the end of a hard week, leaving
the frogs to amuse themselves in one of the hotel rooms.

And amuse
themselves they did. Leaping from the restrictive confines of the plastic bags,
they enjoyed the freedom of the room. Signs of their passage were discovered
later—on pillows and bedspreads and night tables, over the top of the
television set, across the phone, everywhere. And then, no doubt made peckish
by their explorations, they had looked for something to eat. Passing up the
sheets and pillowcases, and not tempted by the carpet, they chose instead to
gorge on the wallpaper—a faded print made tender by the passage of years,
enlivened, no doubt, by a soupçon of mature, crispy glue.

Returning after dinner, the workman whose room it was found the lower parts
of the walls stripped clean. Replete and sleepy frogs covered the floor,
blinking at the light and far from pleased at being disturbed. Collecting them
to put back in their bags took up a good part of the night. The workmen left
early the following morning, leaving the hotel management to puzzle over the
adjustments that had been made to the decor.

It wasn’t the best
story to hear just before starting a dinner of frogs’ legs, and I looked
with a certain amount of suspicion at the plate that had been put in front of
me. The legs, which had been sautéed in white wine, were cream-colored
and flecked with parsley. They looked appetizing and smelled delicious, but I
couldn’t help wondering what kind of diet had made them so firm and well
rounded. Was wallpaper the secret ingredient? Old phone bills? Or had they been
fattened up on sheet after sheet of virginal top-quality Kleenex?

“
Allez,”
said my neighbor. “With the
fingers.”

In fact, as the tiny legs had been served on the bone,
using a knife and fork would have required the skills of a microsurgeon. So I
did as I was told, picking up a leg and taking my first tentative bite.

Chicken? Not exactly. It seemed to have a finer texture than chicken, and
tasted smoother. It was moist, it was tender, and it was flavored with a
well-judged tingle of garlic—altogether different from those explosively
seasoned thighs I remembered eating years before.

I finished the first
leg and put it down, conscious that my neighbor was watching closely.

“No, no,” he said. “Suck the bone.” He lifted one
hand to his lips and bunched his fingertips into a bouquet. “It’s
good.”

Walking back through the streets of
Vittel after dinner, there was no escaping the frog. There he was, crouching in
the windows of patisseries, fashioned from marzipan or chocolate; starring in
all the menus that were displayed outside restaurants; bright green and
inappropriately furry as a prize in the shooting galleries. I stopped by the
grenouillade monstre
in the Salle du Moulin, and there he was again,
three feet high, wearing a top hat and clutching a bottle, beaming across the
room above a low-lying fog bank of cigarette smoke. I wouldn’t have been
surprised to encounter him, jaunty and relieved, in the
toilettes
publiques.
But the tiled walls were bare of any humorous posters, possibly
because evacuation, being part of the cure, is not a joking matter in
Vittel.

There was a uniformed presence in town that night—not,
as one might have expected, patrolling gendarmes to make sure the revelry
didn’t get out of hand, but a squad of Pastis 51 salesmen. Distinguished
by their red jackets and their cheerful diligence with the bottle, they were
offering
dégustations:
a free nip to anyone feeling the need of
a change from beer or Riesling. One overrefreshed gentleman, the beneficiary of
several nips, stood in the doorway of a bar, calling loudly for an accordion so
that he could entertain passersby. The owner of the bar countered by turning up
the volume of his jukebox. Affronted, the would-be accordionist glared at the
source of the noise, lighted the wrong end of a filter-tipped cigarette, and
lurched off in search of artistic fulfillment elsewhere.

Sometime after
midnight, the crowds had thinned, and I went back to the hotel. Leaning out of
my window, I heard the distant fairground music give a wheeze and an electronic
grunt before coming to a stop. The night sky was encouraging, clear enough to
give some hope for good weather the following day, with the light from a
solitary star coming and going through wisps of cloud like blinks of celestial
neon.

Vittel and its visitors were in luck. The
morning started bright and sunny, and it was almost hot by the time I reached
the Palais des Congrès just before nine. While I was waiting in line to
register, I was handed a list of the
confréries
that were
putting in an official appearance to give fraternal support. There were
fifty-seven of them altogether, most of them from various parts of France, some
with highly impressive titles, like the Chevaliers du Brie and the Companions
of the Black Sausage. The rest of Europe was represented by
confrères
from Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, and
Holland—but, as I had already discovered, nobody from Britain but
myself.

The idea of a convivial association based on the enjoyment of
gastronomic specialties seems to hold no great appeal for the British, and I
wondered why not. It may be true that we don’t produce as many edible
treasures as the French, but we have our moments. Why aren’t they
officially marked? Where are the Companions of the Fish and Chip? The Honorable
Brotherhood of Yorkshire Pudding? The Noble Order of Cheddar? The Commanders of
the Winkle and the Whelk? The Friends of the Jellied Eel?

“
Bonjour,”
said a voice from below me.
“You’re the Englishman.”

I looked down, to find that
I’d reached the head of the line and the check-in desk. A smartly dressed
man smiled up at me, introduced himself as Jean Pierre Roussel, and told me
that I couldn’t have a drink until I’d answered a few questions
about my background and signed on as a future
confrère.
With
these formalities over, he nodded me over to the bar.

Alcohol with
breakfast is dangerously pleasant. My first experience of it had been some
years before as a guest of the mayor of Bouzy, a village in the Champagne
region. There had been two different wines to accompany the food, and
politeness obliged me to sample them both. They were cool and invigorating,
slipping down easily despite the earliness of the hour, and I was in a happy
haze by 9:00 a.m. Lunch—and more wine, naturally—had been served
just in time to prevent a return to sobriety, and I ended the day in disgrace
after falling asleep at dinner. Since then, I’ve done my best to stick to
coffee in the morning.

The area in front of the bar was crowded with
men and women I took to be
confrères.
At this stage, they were
still wearing civilian clothes, except for a blond Labrador, very chic and
apparently quite comfortable in a well-cut waistcoat of royal blue satin, that
was standing guard below a dish of croissants in case one should fall from the
table. According to his owner, the Labrador was an old hand at these events.
The waistcoat was part of the regalia of another distinguished order, and this
was to be his third time as a
confrère.
I asked if he liked
frogs’ legs.

“Monsieur,” said his owner, “he is
a Labrador. He likes everything.”

By now, there were signs of
preparation among my future colleagues, who were starting to line up before
taking their turn in the cloakrooms. Men and women of conservative appearance
went in. Peacocks came out.

The frog contingent wore caps and cloaks of
a bright and froggy green, edged with yellow, but this was one of the more
sober outfits. I saw cloaks trimmed with silver and something that looked very
much like ermine, cloaks of silk, and cloaks of velvet. Official decorations
were worn, massive medals that clanked against one another as they bounced up
and down on the wearer’s sternum. And hats. My God, what
hats—troubadours’ floppy berets, tricornes, fedoras of medieval
design, which were pierced with great swooping feathers, straw bonnets, and one
creation of truly outstanding frivolity, more of a giggle than a hat. It
consisted of what looked like two small pillows made from pink plush that hung
from a purple headband so that they covered the ears and rested on the
shoulders of the wearer (a gentleman who was probably a highly respectable
judge or tax inspector in real life). The hat was worn with a purple cloak,
baggy Elizabethan-style bloomers, and tights. It will give you some idea of the
mood of the morning, as well as the variety of sartorial treasures on display,
when I tell you that this extraordinary apparition attracted no particular
attention.

With a final swig of Riesling and one last adjustment to the
tilt of a hat or the drape of a cloak, the assembled
confrères
moved outside to form up in lines of three abreast for the opening event of the
proceedings. This was a parade that would take us through Vittel for a
rendezvous with the mayor. He had invited us all to join him for a drink at the
mairie,
an alcoholic bridge between the wine at breakfast and the wine
at lunch.

But first, there was the length of the town to negotiate in
correct ceremonial order. The procession was led by a small but impressively
loud marching band, their brass instruments gleaming against the red and black
of their uniforms. They were followed by Les Majorettes de Vittel, encouraged
in their twirlings and baton tossing by a watchful coach—from the look of
her, an ex-twirler herself—who hovered alongside hissing technical
advice.
“Haut les genoux!”
Lift those knees!

And
then came the
confrères.
Foreigners had been given precedence,
and I found myself at the front of the procession, among a group of Portuguese,
Belgians, and Dutch. We congratulated each other on the sunshine, a contrast to
some parades of the past, when rain had caused headgear to wilt and
dispositions to droop. Today was perfect, bright and breezy, with the sound of
the band and the sight of the majorettes to sustain us on our way.

For
the first few hundred yards, all went well, and a brave sight it must have
been, feathers and cloaks fluttering, medals twinkling, and the uniformed
Labrador—now wearing a cap to match his waistcoat—receiving much
encouragement from the crowd. We were managing to maintain a disciplined
marching order that would have done credit to Napoléon’s troops,
when suddenly there was a
crise de baton
. One of the majorettes
attempted an overambitious toss, and the baton went astray, ending up among the
spectators. The majorettes came to a sudden stop. Ahead of them, the band
marched on, unaware of the enforced halt. Behind them, the procession of
confrères
contracted like a human concertina. We waited while
the baton was retrieved, a pause just long enough for my neighboring
confrère
to unscrew his ceremonial staff and hand me the hollow
top. “Do you like pastis?” he asked, tipping up the staff and
filling the top. “I make it myself.” The top was passed around,
emptied, and screwed back on while the majorettes resumed formation, and off we
went again, on the double this time to catch up with the distant band.

The end of the march was marked by a ribbon stretched across the street,
with Monsieur le Maire waiting on the other side, smile and scissors at the
ready. The band played a suitably triumphant piece, cameras clicked, and the
ribbon was cut. It was time to move on to the next and perhaps most important
part of the program: the initiation of new thigh-tasters.