Deep France (13 page)

We move on to ages.
Je suis une femme mûre
, I am a middle-aged woman, says Renée, laying her elegant hand on her girlish bosom. Literally, I’m a ripe woman. There are
general gasps when Renée reveals that she is actually sixty-three. She looks at least twenty years younger. It’s cheering to figure out that by this scale of reckoning, I am merely a
green girl.

Screams of laughter issue from the next door classroom, where Dominique is trying to control the beginners’ class. ‘
Non, mais alors!
’ protests Renée, flinging
wide the door with play-acted indignation. You get the feeling that after a lifetime of imposing the rigid discipline of a French school-room, it’s quite relaxing for her to be shepherding
these devil-may-care foreigners through the glories of the language.

The comedian among the beginners is Fiona, a dark-haired New Zealand girl with round glasses and sparkling
eyes. In her present situation, all she can do is have a laugh.
With her husband, Gordon, and their two small children, she’s living in an unheated former stables in the grounds of a little chateau at the hamlet of Berenx, and watching their life savings
freeze to death.

Gordon, her Australian husband, arrived in the Béarn eighteen months ago, with a ship-load of baby tree ferns. The idea was that in the mild, humid climate of the Béarn they would
grow twice as fast as in their native New Zealand, and be ready to sell in the UK within a year. In New Zealand, the tree ferns can grow to sixty feet high. In the UK, and in Europe, tree ferns
anywhere between three and nine feet high are the most fashionable thing you can install in an urban patio.

Gordon had a friend who had figured out that tree ferns grown on in France would turn a quick profit, and persuaded Gordon and Fiona to buy into his business. Since New Zealand wasn’t
offering Gordon a great deal in the way of a future, he and Fiona decided to sell up their house, sink half their cash into green fronds and come over to France.

Nobody expected the big chill, which had turned the green fronds brown and quite possibly killed the lot. Fiona invited me over to inspect the damage. Thousands of baby tree ferns, in
eight-centimetre black pots, were bedded in the undergrowth in a small patch of woodland near the stables. At the start of the winter, she had covered the crowns with a thick layer of dead leaves,
which turned out to be no protection at all against the freezing weather.

High in the treetops above are the wooden tree houses built by the chateau’s original owner for hunting
palombes
, the wild doves who used to fly over in vast flocks on their way
south for the winter. Now the autumns bring only a few thousand
palombes
and their migration route is closer to the coast. When storms thrash the trees, the hunters’ hides
rattle towards total dilapidation and random planks fall off to the ground below.

Their partner in the fern enterprise was building a greenhouse to protect the stock. All the outbuildings of the chateau are still in place but crumbling. Among them is an original
nineteenth-century glasshouse, built on to the south side of the stable block, but between the scrolled ironwork half the panes were smashed and nobody has thought to fix it up.

In the stable building, which unfortunately faces north and has no windows at all on the sunny south side, the temperature in the sitting room is just 5°; it was as cold as a fridge. There
is very little furniture. Most of Fiona’s household stuff is still packed up and stored in the cellar, waiting for the day they put the rest of their money into a home of their own. The two
children, Cam, who’s nine and Margot, six, are huddled in duvets on a divan in front of the TV.

Mardi Gras – Not to Mention
Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi and Samedi

‘There’s a carnival in Pau,’ I said. ‘They’re having pig racing on Friday. Why don’t we go?’ Sandy didn’t believe me. Annabel
said it was too cold. Fiona had just been to Pau to take the children to the circus. Nobody else was interested, so I set off alone.

It was already two days since the Tuesday on which the festivities had started with the ceremonial arrival of the bears from the mountains. Pretend bears, obviously since catching a wild one
would have been both dangerous and politically incorrect, not to mention damn tricky. The men in bear costumes were accompanied by others disguised as wild men from the mountains, and they roamed
the streets
indulging in a little licensed vandalism, jumping on restaurant tables and pretending to terrorize the populace.

In the mountains, the bears would be waking from hibernation around this time. There are still estimated to be a few dozen brown bears in the Pyrenees but they are not a common sight; in my
year, I met only one person who had seen evidence of them, bear prints in the snow beside a mountain trail.

By Friday, the festivities had moved on to the legend of Sent Pançard, the carnival king who gets a brief day of misrule before being captured, put on trial and ceremonially burned. In
case anyone should be in doubt as to the permitted scale of Saturnalia, the programme, in French and Béarnais, contained the mission statement:

The programme also bore witness to an impressive list of sponsors, including the tourist board, the regional development agency, the newspaper
La République
, the radio station
France Bleu Béarn, the association of
charcutiers
, the Béarnais language and cultural institute, Intermarché, the vineyards, many farmers and small businesses, and a
bakery.

Nevertheless, it seemed at first as if the citizens of Pau were well able to resist the invitation to enjoy forbidden
delights. They were tearing out of their offices in
large numbers and making for the car parks, eager to get home out of the freezing drizzle. Or perhaps they were still recovering from the all-night fancy-dress disco at the students’ union
the night before. Only a small knot of people, mostly with tiny children, had gathered in the small Place Gramont where the procession was due to start. Across the road, a couple of police cars
were parked, their drivers standing about waiting for the action.

Quite soon, the carnival king joined us. At some point in Gascon history, perhaps when the Protestants were in charge, it was decided that the good-living population was having far too much fun
with the traditional feast before the deprivations of Lent. Or perhaps the moral tale of Sent Pançard, the carnival king, has more ancient roots, and was acted out right back in pre-Roman
days, when the ancient Gauls were famous pig-keepers. The character is certainly a close cousin of Gargantua, the greedy giant of Celtic origin whose exploits were satirically recorded by Rabelais
in the sixteenth century.

Whatever his ancestry, the enactment of the rise and fall of Sent Pançard is the centrepiece of the carnival festivities, and in Pau the whole masquerade had been elevated into a
political satire, as befits a university town and a seat of government. He had spent the week electioneering.

With a huge false belly, bright red cheeks, a tottering gold-foil crown and the essential string of sausages around his neck, an actor playing Sent Pançard worked his striped socks off
pressing the flesh, kissing babies, meeting the mayor and introducing himself personally to every single member of the crowd. ‘Sent Pançard,’ he said ingratiatingly, ‘vote
for me!’ The manifesto for his regime was simple: eat, drink and party on.

The carnival had been going on all week, and this was
to be the final night of sacrilegious feasting, when Sent Pançard invited his fellow ruler, San Porquin, the pig
king, to a night of gluttony and excess. In due course, when about a hundred people were in the square, San Porquin appeared through a gateway to a hidden courtyard. The pig king was another actor,
this time in a black monk’s habit, with a string of garlic around his neck, riding on a dark brown Pyrenean donkey.

After him, a golden statue of a pig on a red-curtained palanquin emerged through the gateway, carried shoulder-high by twelve men in red and gold satin robes and black berets. As the procession
formed up, various figures representing Sent Pançard’s government appeared, including a fake bishop and a Ku Klux Klan figure in red satin. In front of them came a troupe of dancers in
white shirts and trousers set off with scarlet sashes and green berets, accompanied by a lone fiddler.

Finally the police got back into their cars, turned on their flashing lights and moved to block the traffic on the processional route. With the dancers hopscotching gravely in the vanguard, and
a good crowd of people now in place to line the route, the procession set off uphill towards Pau’s largest urban space, the Place Verdun, where a huge marquee had been erected.

The pigs were not compelled to walk the whole route. They were waiting in a small cattle truck at the corner of the square, watched over by five marshals, in red jackets and red berets, armed
with sticks. As the procession slowly drew level, the marshals ceremonially opened the tailgate of the van. Inside were nine pedigree porkers, blissfully asleep on their bed of clean straw. The
crowd laughed and somebody told me an old Gascon saying: seven hours of sleep for a man, eight for a woman and nine for a pig.

The marshals respectfully prodded the animals awake.
They were not enthusiastic, so the youngest man was sent into the van to heave them bodily onto their trotters, then
push them out onto the ramp to take their place of honour at the head of the cavalcade. The pigs were all light-skinned examples of the local breed, the Cochon Noir de Gascogne, ranging in colour
from dark ash to fresh pink with grey spots.

Now bumbling forward at the pace of a dozy pig, the procession left the road and proceeded between crash barriers towards the marquee. Halfway down this path was parked a smart vintage van,
reminiscent of a Harrods brougham, but painted in red and cream, with the words
Jambon de Bayonne
on the side.

The van was a mobile deli, whose sides could be opened to reveal a counter, on which a massive ham was displayed on a stand, ready to be carved. Behind this, in the body of the vehicle, more
hams dangled from the roof and a fresh-faced young man in a red jersey was sharpening his carving knife. His hands were covered in immaculate white muslin gloves.

As the pigs approached the van, he began to carve the ham into slices so thin you could have read a newspaper through them, piling them reverently onto a serving plate on the counter. When the
pigs were level with the ham, the procession halted for a minute, to allow the carver to bow to them. The crowd cheered, the pigs looked thoroughly bored and seemed determined to get back to bed as
fast as possible.

The parade continued until it reached the doors of the tent, where huge platters of fine
charcuterie
and crates of Jurançon and Madiran wine were waiting for the festival crowd.
Beyond the aperitif area, tables were laid up ready for the promised
repas gastronomique
prepared by the restaurant Chez Ruffet:
pâté en croûte
, jellied
pig’s ears, shoulder of pork with spring vegetables, prunes with Grand Marnier ice
cream, for €24. Not having a ticket, I went home and made an omelette, but felt an
entirely new sense of respect as I ripped open a packet of ready-chopped lardons.

Lent Will Be A Little Late This Year

Next morning, my description of the night of the pig king was colourful enough to inspire Annabel, and in the evening we set off together for Pau. The main event was to be the
trial of Sent Pançard for the hideous crime of feasting in Lent, and we arrived in time to see him being dragged through the streets in a cage of bamboo, like an American prisoner of war in
Vietnam. His fate was to endure a travesty of justice in front of the Law Courts, to be found guilty of causing all the social problems the citizens found most annoying, and then to be burned to
death, accompanied by a firework display and dancing.

This time the whole town was in carnival mood. People were dressed as cows, sunflowers, clowns and political figures – Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac were popular. Sent
Pançard’s cortège was escorted by huge papier mâché effigies of the mythical giants of the Pyrenees, they who are supposed to live in caves and to have set up the
standing stones and built the colossal walls and houses of boulders which can be found in the mountains.

One giant had only one eye, in the centre of his forehead. Another was stuffed with straw and covered in animal skins. A third was an old man with a three-metre beard and silver hair. The
legends of the Pyrenees feature so many giants that there was probably one for every mountain. They are supposed to have given the Basque people all the wonderful discoveries that set
Homo
sapiens
on the road to world domination, including fire, agriculture, metallurgy and the saw.

There was also a lady giant with a blue face and red hair, probably Mari, the Great Goddess, who was worshipped in one form or another all through Europe before the
Indo-European people spread from the east with their modern patriarchal religions. Mari was supposed to travel along the chain of the Pyrenees in a ball of fire, blazing from peak to peak,
accompanied by her dragon lover, hurling thunderbolts at anyone who annoyed her.

Marching along in the cold was tiring, so we sat down at a cafe for refreshment, only to be set upon by a band of students dressed as bee-keeping monks. One of them carried a pot of honey and
the rest brandished wooden spoons. They were spreading the carnival spirit by going from bar to bar dipping the spoons in the honey and giving every customer a sticky dab on the back of the
hand.