Deep France (17 page)

Once, Sauveterre-de-Béarn was a prime destination on the pilgrim route to Compostela. For pilgrims from the north of France, trekking down to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port and planning to cross
the Pyrenees through the pass of Roncesvalles and head for Pamplona, the most direct route lay through Sauveterre, which had a splendid stone bridge across the deep waters of the Gave
d’Oloron.

In the days when the Landes was a pestilent swamp, even pilgrims from England, who used to sail over to Bordeaux before they started walking, favoured this route. In the Middle Ages, two million
pilgrims were making the trip every year. Three of the principal routes, the
chemins de
Tours, Vezelay and Puy, converged just north of the town.

Pilgrims were huge business. Not only did they pay top prices for their guides, board, lodging and walking gear, but they were also happy to make big donations to the churches they stopped at
along the way. Throughout the north of Gascony there are many imposing Romanesque abbeys whose stonemasons were paid with pilgrimage money.

Before its fortunes changed, Sauveterre also managed
to build itself a splendid pilgrim church, with a beautiful Romanesque doorway and the traditional blue ceiling painted
with gold stars. The bridge, however, fell down some time in the eighteenth century. Instead of rebuilding it as fast as they could, the townspeople began a leisurely debate about the sort of
bridge they wanted, no doubt fuelled with whatever was preferred as an aperitif in those times.

They ended up arguing for forty years, in which time the pilgrims had to make other arrangements to cross the Gave. By the time Sauveterre finally built a new bridge, the pilgrims had found
another crossing and taken their custom elsewhere for good.

The Most Beautiful
Brocante
in France

I wanted to go to Ahetze. All I knew was that Ahetze is a tiny Basque village near the coast and on the third Sunday of almost every month it has a flea-market fair, one of the
biggest in the region. I forget who told me about it, but something about the idea sounded excellent. Besides, I had a yen for some twirly garden chairs in nice rusty ironwork.

Willow was away and Fiona wanted to take the children up to Iraty to play in the snow. Annabel, used to trawling the auction houses of Pau for fine art, was not attracted by the prospect of a
flea market. Sandy-and-Annie were doing lunch for the young Irish couple who were thinking of buying her house. In the end I went on my own with instructions to call in on Les Écossais on
the way back, and give the Irish husband a motivational chat about skiing.

Lorries are forbidden on the roads in France on Sunday, and there was so little traffic on the motorway that I counted the vehicles I passed on the forty-minute trip to
the
junction with the busier coast road. Six other cars going in my direction, twenty-two coming the other way. If bliss can be attained on a motorway at all, I made it that morning.

Ahetze was easy to find, hardly ten minutes from the St-Jean-de-Luz Nord exit from the coastal motorway. The road, typical of the inland lanes of the Basque Coast, ran purposefully along the
high ground, between fields which even in the dead of spring were like emerald velvet, patched with russet swatches of bracken or copses of beech.

Suddenly you found yourself running downhill, and there was the village in front of you, a picture-postcard vision of half-timbered Basque houses standing majestically around the church. In the
flat, whitewashed bell tower, two bells swung in round-topped niches.

Even here, less than twenty kilometres into the foothills of the Pyrenees, Basque architecture is quite unlike that of the Béarn. To new eyes, the houses look more Tyrolean than anything
else. They’re massive, made to shelter an extended family under a low-pitched red-tile roof. Under the eaves is a space for the doves, who come and go through neat triangular holes in the
outer wall.

There’s usually a decoratively carved wooden balcony at first-floor level, traditionally used as a dry storage area for firewood. The window shutters and the exposed beams are painted a
bold colour, most often ox-blood red, though dark green, brown and blue are also popular. The massive front door is hung under a stone lintel on which the names of the family’s founding
couple are carved, with the date when they set up the new home.

Often the Basque national symbol is often carved in the top corners; it evolved from pre-Christian sun-worship and looks like four teardrops swirled together into a rounded swastika. A Basque
house tries to face the east and always
has a name, written diagonally on the front wall, in paint or wrought iron.

The price of the emerald velvet, of course, is that the Basque Country has the highest rainfall in all Europe; it’s even wetter than Éire. The Irish are going to feel right at home
here. On that day, however, the sun was smiling down through big fluffy cumuli, burnishing the green grass and the white-walled village houses.

The flea market was clearly a whole-village effort. The children were out on the hedge banks directing vehicles to park in neat lines on the nearest field, from which it was a short walk down a
lane lined with primroses to the first stalls. These were selling the high-end of
brocante
desirables, the vintage cafe-ware, cottage-kitchen enamels, early twentieth-century coffee bowls,
dressing-table sets, ‘bedroom’ pictures and small mirrors.

Moving on, I came to the realm of agricultural antiques. Here were the old cattle yokes, forks, spades, rakes, trowels, bird cages, horse shoes, rat-traps, watering cans, butterfly nets, fishing
rods, sieves, shoe lasts, bottle stands, plate racks, egg carriers, grape baskets, milk churns, plough shares and prune dryers. The prune dryers are shallow ovoid wicker scoops, like giant snow
shoes, on which plums were spread out in the sun to turn into the famous Agen prunes.

So far, the stalls had lined the narrow village streets. As I drifted out of the agricultural tat section to the serious old iron department, where garden seats, tables, urns, statues,
bedsteads, light fittings, plant stands and fountains lay about, their rust patches twinkling in the sun, I realized that every inch of available space in this village was going to be covered in
goods for sale. Every lane, every alleyway, every sports ground, every large room, every car park – everywhere except the church itself and the graveyard around it.

The car park in front of the village’s two shops was a
battlefield of buying and selling, where everyone with furniture had set up to take advantage of the space. The
dealers’ vans, circled like cowboys’ covered wagons, were parked with their wheels on the grass verges and leaned at crazy angles. In front of them were the tables covered with sheets
and sheltered by fluttering sunshades, crowded with a pell-mell selection of goods.

True tat rubbed handles with real pearls. You could buy anything from a very nice art nouveau marble sculpture of a child’s head to a well-used photocopier, circa 1979. Ahetze was like
Portobello Road in the Sixties, though the clientele were more conservatively dressed and the breeze carried a whiff of the Atlantic ocean rather than of patchouli oil.

The school sports hall housed the down-market textiles, the linen tea towels monogrammed in traditional red cross-stitch, the frayed damask guest towels, the washed-out napkins and their cotton
envelopes, the scalloped fabric shelf-edgings edged with lace or embroidered naively with animals and fruit.

Up a stone staircase, and the posh linen was discovered in the pelota court, transformed into the bottom drawers of a thousand Basque brides. Here I could have spent all day among the snowy
mounds of treasure, reverently unfolding and refolding the embroidered sheets and admiring the drawn-thread work, the stylized deco or nouveau monograms, the insets of lace, the embroidered
flowers, the matching pillowcases, bolster covers, nightdresses and curtain panels.

More steps led up to the church car park and the funky textiles, the chenille curtains, the velvet cushions, the lengths of faded chintz and printed linen, the smocked farmhands’ shirts,
and the very old and very rustic linen sheets, woven in the nineteenth century and earlier, by
hand, on small cottage looms, from thread that had been hand-spun.

Once these old linen sheets, some of them nearly as thick as blankets, were despised as coarse and fit only for peasants. Now they are one of the most prized items in the fashionable catalogue
of French country antiques, the first choice of the international yuppie designer for running up loose covers or curtains with ‘the divine flop factor’.

Dealing in linen is strictly a woman’s business, so
the
most prized buy, the ultimate fetish item, is one of the yellow-glazed earthenware pots originally used for confits, on
which both the men and women dealers are comfortable making a profit. To give you an idea of the scale of the profits they make, I was buying coarse linen sheets at around €15, while they sell
in London at up to £150. Fine linen sheets without embroidery were up to €20, sold in London for up to £100, and the confit pots, depending on size, were up to €50 at
reasonable
brocantes
and up to £120 on the King’s Road or in Portobello. I have even found a confit pot – admittedly a very fine specimen – on sale for £300
in Notting Hill Gate.

Every confit pot is a different shape and the golden glaze is a different shade; the older the pot the darker the glaze. Some, which were used for haricot dishes, are dappled with the marks of
the beans. They are wide-mouthed and made with a pair of looped handles on the shoulders, through which they could be suspended from a ceiling beam. Confit pots are so fashionable, and such easy
items to sell, that some dealers simply barged through the door of small country sales as soon as they opened, bought every confit pot in the room, and drove off for breakfast twenty minutes later
without wasting a thought on the more obscure collectables. This market means that the confit pots are becoming rare.

Possibly the pot dealers missed a trick or two. The single biggest mark-up I discovered was on a humble moulded-glass salt and pepper cellar, which nobody at Athetze would
have bothered with and at a Béarnais
vide grenier
, the equivalent of a boot sale, would have gone for €1 or less. At one of London’s temples of French country style,
these were offered with a ribbon-tied hand-lettered label reading £29.50.

I sat down with a coffee in the weak spring sun, outside the village’s one buzzing restaurant. The array of gorgeous, evocative and underpriced goodies felt overwhelming. I needed a budget
and buying policy. For today, it would be €100 and nothing for which I didn’t have a specific use. For the future, I would run to embroidered linen only if it had my own initials on it.
And, if the price was right, old linen sheets and confit pots, because … well, it would be daft not to and they
were
lovely.

The squirly ironwork chairs of my dreams were sitting right across the alley from me, at €7 each. €21. The table to go with them, big enough for four, or for one writer and her laptop,
was down in the car park, painted mud brown but it would be the work of a lunch-hour to fix that. A bit of a rip-off at €40, but it was in good nick. €61.

On the way back from leaving a deposit on the table, I passed a sweet-faced, white-haired woman fussing over a pile of sheets, while a man of the same age, presumably her husband, sat on the
tailgate of their van, enjoying a pipe. She was evidently too much of an amateur to have a pitch in either of the main linen areas. Perhaps … yes! A few minutes’ browsing revealed
three gorgeous sheets of fine, pure linen, with simple ladder-stitch borders, priced at €15 each. They would have been the last remaining undersheets of a trousseau; the more decorated top
sheets had already been sold.

Haggling is expected, of course, though it goes against
the grain with an English person when something so lovely is priced at a fraction of what it would be in London.
‘Would you take €40 for the three?’ I asked her.

Her husband, who had abandoned his pipe and bustled over to watch his wife make money, got quite excited. ‘Three fifteens are forty-five,’ he calculated, ‘but she’s
offering forty for all three … that’s a good deal, you ought to take it.’

‘Is this your husband?’ I asked her jokingly. ‘Whose side is he on?’

A pained look flashed into her eyes. The husband looked utterly foxed. Clearly the Gascon sense of humour stopped at the Basque border. I apologized as fulsomely as I could. She apologized back.
Her husband concentrated on relighting his pipe. The money changed hands and I scuttled away before another opportunity for embarrassment opened up. €101. I wasn’t going to beat myself
up for one euro.

Listening to the babble of conversation around me, I realized that Ahetze was a trilingual event. French, obviously. Basque, obviously. And Spanish. The Spanish dealers were unmistakable. With
their dark hair, flashing eyes, cowboy boots, leather jackets and tight jeans, they out-Lovejoyed Lovejoy. The Spanish were buying strictly for their home market, anything in black metalwork or
dark wood, no twee faded French cottage knickknacks for them.

As I wandered back to the car with my arms full of sheets, trying to pick out phrases I recognized from this agreeable babel, I heard something completely familiar and utterly unexpected: an
East End voice, speaking English. It came from a tall young man with a number-two haircut, who was talking to an even taller young man with a small white dog in his arms and a Paul Smith scarf.
A Paul Smith scarf? An East End accent?

‘Good heavens,’ I said, the words hopping out of my
mouth before I could stop them. ‘I haven’t heard a London voice for weeks.’

‘Nor have we,’ said the speaker, and he laughed a good, nasal, East End heh-heh-heh.

They had been in France two weeks. They lived in Castagnède, a pretty village on the far side of Sauveterre, famous for its restaurant, la Belle Auberge. The speaker couldn’t
remember his phone number. The one with the dog could. We agreed to do tea the following Tuesday.