Deep France (11 page)

Our ribs thus lined, we set off in freezing fog and total darkness, to return to the Hôtel du Pare in Saliès to enjoy the promised spectacle, featuring
showgirls
from
Paris. In fact, the spectacle consisted of two show girls and one show boy, each encrusted in panstick, sequins and several pairs of false eyelashes.

In vain they flaunted their permatanned ribs under the noses of those who had stayed for the Parcs FF850 (£85) seven-course dinner and were now slumped biliously in gold Lloyd loom chairs
under the potted palms in the atrium, while the fruit machines winked in the distance. Carrie, Annabel and Chloe made for the temporary roulette table, which had been set up near the bar for the
convenience of those who wanted to gamble without missing any excitement. Zoe, Annabel’s daughter and Gerald’s stepdaughter, hit the dance floor with her escort.

For a province with such a magnificent musical heritage, with folk songs so haunting they make cynical urbanites
cry, the Béarn has a strange taste in DJs. A definite
taste, because they’re all the same. The essential repertoire combines cheesy French pop with the less demanding disco classics including Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’
and ‘YMCA’ by the Village People. For 2002, ‘Mambo No. 5’ had been added to the box of hits without which no party was complete. At midnight, the disco let up for long
enough to allow the showgirls and boy to twirl through the room, scattering sequins and singing ‘
Bonne année! Bonne année! Bonne année!
’ to the tune of
‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’.

At breakfast next morning, Chloe found the
fève
in the
gâteau des euros
, a tiny porcelain figure of a soldier in uniform of the Napoleonic era. We left her to
start the New Year as she intended to go on, writing her next essay. Our destination was St-Jean Pied-de-Port, another handsome Basque town and a rallying point for the pilgrims making for
Compostela. From the seventeenth-century citadel you can see the road to Spain leading straight into the rounded green foothills, with the vineyards of Irrouleguy to the west.

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 T
he 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.