Deep France (20 page)

I decided to rewrite my first chapter and, with one bound, I was free to start my screenplay.

The House that
Cyrano
Built

We went on a day trip to Cambo-les-Bains. Cambo is a beautiful little town in the Basque Country, a collection of pretty houses scattered along the edge of the River Nive. Here
in the foothills, the river that is a broad mini-
Mississippi by the time it gets to Bayonne is a torrent which roars through a forested gorge.

Cambo is famous for three things. There is a huge spa complex, built above a hot spring. The main room is visited by art lovers for its bas-reliefs by Gabriel Rispal, and a lovely art deco
fountain designed by the architect Henri Sajous, where gold mosaic sparkles through the waters. There are so many huge palms in the grounds that the whole estate looks as if it is in Beverly Hills.
Recuperation is a big industry in France, and Gerald was sent to the convalescent centre at Cambo for three months to recover from his bypass operation.

Cambo also has an excellent restaurant, called Chez Tante Ursule. It’s a perfect place to try the classic Basque specialities and mountain cooking in particular. It does suffer from its
decor, being a huge, gloomy room with a tiled floor, a massive fireplace and lots of stuffed animals glaring down from the walls. Irritatingly, this means it’s cosy in winter but oppressive
in summer, which is the only time that Cambo’s third attraction is open.

This is Arnaga, the house that
Cyrano de Bergerac
built, a gigantic Basque-style villa created by the poet and playwright Edmond Rostand when he retreated to Cambo to recover from the
overwhelming success of his play. We decided that April, when the house opens after the winter, but the gardens have not yet been ruined by excessive planting of municipal begonias, was the perfect
time to visit.

Although they both won their place in history by immor­talizing Gascon musketeers, and Rostand grew up feasting on Dumas’s historical romances, the two legendary writers could not have
been less alike. Rostand was born into a privileged and prominent Provençal family. ‘Always remember that your life had a rosy morning,’ wrote his father, a banker in
Marseille.

Born in that city on April Fool’s Day 1868, Rostand was a slim, fine-featured young man with soft skin, a delicate aquiline nose and black, heavy-lidded eyes. He was
always exquisitely dressed and, being himself painfully sensitive, was known all his life for his kindness and empathy with other people. His only real vice was clothes – he loved to dress
well and even after he’d settled in the rural obscurity of Cambo he wore a different outfit every day.

The summer before he went to Paris to study law, Edmond fell in love with an ethereal, well-connected young poet, Rosemonde Gerard. They met in Luchon, a hugely fashionable spa town in the
central Pyrenees, and lived in Paris after their marriage.

Edmond Rostand wrote poetry and plays ceaselessly, no doubt to the detriment of his legal studies. He had some minor success, writing lyrics for the composer Chabrier, and his literary skills
were also called upon by one of his friends, a shy young man hopelessly in love with a girl who barely knew he existed. Edmond coached his friend to woo her, and wrote his love letters for him,
with such success that they soon married.

Just before he and Rosemonde married in 1890, he paid for the publication of five hundred copies of his first book of poetry. He sold only thirty of them. ‘This young man will never do
anything worthwhile,’ prophesied one of Rosemond’s advisers.

Edmond began to submit comedies to the Comedie-Française. He crashed into depression every time he was rejected, but eventually succeeded, and made the acquaintance of the legendary
actress Sarah Bernhardt. She in turn introduced him to Constant Coquelin, a veteran actor whose extraordinary voice was praised by Henry James as ‘the most wondrous of its kind that the stage
has ever known.’

Rostand called himself a ‘smuggler of idealism’ and was
absolutely clear that his duty as an artist was to appeal to the widest possible public while pursuing
the highest intellectual ambitions. He wrote a serious work for Bernhardt, which flopped, but by then, although battling through another suicidal depression, he was already working on
Cyrano de
Bergerac.

Cyrano, like most of the leading characters in the play, was a real person. Born in Paris in 1619, he took his name from the town in which he was brought up, Bergerac, which is up in the
Dordogne valley, near Bordeaux. He became a musketeer, fought alongside Dartagnan at the siege of Arras, but died at the age of thirty-six in Paris when a plank of wood from a building site dropped
on his head.

The real Cyrano was also a writer of some note, celebrated for his daring political satires and for a number of comedy sci-fi epics. Rostand researched his life meticulously, read all his works,
then put away his notes. He gave himself complete freedom to create the Cyrano of the stage, the poet who is judged by the woman he loved more on his long nose than his fine mind, and whose heart
is big enough to help a better-looking man to court her.

The entire story is a metaphor for the tragedy of Ros­tand’s own condition, and the paradox of every writer’s exis­tence, forced into loneliness by their work and condemned
to live through less sensitive souls. It was also an elegant condemnation of the cynicism and materialism of the times.

The first night of
Cyrano de Bergerac
was in Paris, in the depth of winter, 28 December 1897. Constant Coquelin, Bernhardt’s friend, played the title role. Edmond, who was only
twenty-nine years old, was so convinced that the play would be a flop that he hugged him in tears, saying, ‘Forgive me for dragging you into this disastrous adventure.’

What followed was one of the great historic events in the French theatre.
Cyrano
was an instant hit. The audience
went wild. Edmond was dragged on stage to take a
bow halfway through the play. Women threw their gloves and their fans on the stage, men threw their opera hats. At the end, Coquelin took forty curtain calls, after which the curtain was simply
left up. The audience stayed, applaud­ing and singing the ‘Marseillaise’ until they were exhausted, then lingered in the streets outside until the small hours of the morning,
laughing, crying and hugging each other.

The critics too raved about
Cyrano
, calling it not merely a masterpiece but a work which restored the honour of the French theatre and gave the whole country the comfort of knowing they
had a new genius in their midst. The show sold out for two years and the new genius was immediately awarded the Légion d’honneur.

He followed up quickly, with another historical verse play, called
L’Aiglon
. Written for Sarah Bernhardt, it was also hailed as a triumph. For Edmond Rostand, however, success was
even more stressful than failure. He became withdrawn and paranoid, then collapsed with pneumonia. His hair fell out and his doctors told him he wouldn’t survive another winter in Paris. One
of them recommended Cambo, and so the playwright, chronically ill at the age of thirty-two, arrived with Rosemonde and their two sons and rented a house.

Apart from their love of the musketeer era, the other passion Dumas and Rostand shared was for building. Edmond soon fell in love with the gentle beauty of the Basque countryside and appreciated
the genuine warmth of the people. When his health recovered, he bought a white Arab mare and went for long rides, often getting lost when his mind wandered in a poetic reverie. Eventually he found
a place he wanted to call home, a small plateau of land above the Nive valley, and began to design his dream house. A smaller river, the Arraga, bordered one side of the estate and
he adapted the name, which in Basque means ‘water on the stones’, for his mansion-to-be.

Rostand must have endeared himself immensely to his neighbours by choosing to build a house in the Basque style, instead of the classical Château which his background would have suggested.
Arnaga, which we approached from the front, walking down the long formal garden between the walls of topiary beech that enclose the ornamental lake, seemed to be colossal, even beside the massive
Basque farmhouses. It’s also asymmetrical, making it a Belle Époque take on the traditional form. Edmond designed much of the house himself, and amused his family after dinner with his
plans, sketches and cardboard models of the building.

For the interior, Rostand commissioned the leading artists of his time to create a palace. In the great hall are murals by Gaston La Touche illustrating poems by Victor Hugo and, in the small
games room, a charming frieze, illustrating French folk songs, by George Delaw. Opulent nudes by Hélène Dufau loll around in the library, and delicate fairy-tale paintings by Jean
Veber decorate Rosemond’s boudoir.

As we found the house, a desk had been installed in the little Empire study, which is panelled in lemonwood. It’s an elegant room, but Rostand seldom worked there. While the rest of the
family had spacious bedrooms overlooking the lawns with views out to the mountains, the writer found himself most comfortable in two little rooms over the porch. His bathroom was a hydrotherapy spa
in itself, designed to allow him to profit from the healing powers of the local waters even when he was too weak to go outside.

An incurable workaholic, Edmond continued to write at Arnaga even on days when he could not leave his bedroom.
Cyrano
and
L’Aiglon
were constantly revived in France and
toured the rest of the world. His poems were acclaimed but
his only new play, based on the antics of farmyard animals, was a disappointment.

A stream of smart visitors, from Paris, from Biarritz and from the still-fashionable spa towns round Cambo, kept him entertained, but Arnaga, for all its strange mixture of intimacy and
grandeur, was not a happy house over the next seven years. The Rostands’ marriage, once such a joyful and nurturing relationship, broke up and both Edmond and Rosemonde found new lovers.
Edmonds younger son Jean, who remained loyal to him, became a celebrated biologist and philosopher. Maurice, the elder, who sided with his mother, was a successful writer and a flamboyant
homosexual.

On 10 November 1918 Rostand left Arnaga to go to Paris, planning to complete a great poem celebrating the end of World War I then oversee the New Year production of
L’Aiglon
, by
now a theatrical tradition. He burst into tears when he left. The omens for his trip were sinister; earlier in the day, his lover, Mary Marquet, had been telling his fortune with cards and turned
up the ace of spades. A little later, one of his white pigeons flew into the room and fell dead in front of the fireplace.

In Paris, he immediately caught the flu, the deadly strain that was to kill more people than the war itself. Pneumonia set in again, and Edmond Rostand died in less than a month. Arnaga was
inherited by Rosemonde, who let Jean live there only four years before selling it. She claimed she needed the money, but, given the royalties rolling in from
Cyrano
, the decision looks
more like pure spite. The great house passed through the hands of several owners, including a Parisian couturier and a Brazilian arms dealer, before the town of Cambo-les-Bains bought it in 1961,
and turned it into the museum it is today.

Election Time

Everything around me seemed caught up in a frenzy of growth. In my garden, the grass was knee high and so full of flowers that I couldn’t bear to mow
it all. The trees were suddenly lush with foliage and the fields blazing with dandelions. M. Lavie’s tractor was out until ten at night, getting the earliest maize planted. Within hours of
the seeds touching the earth, rows of bright-green cotyledons appeared, changing immediately to the first trembling leaves of the region’s major crop.

Beside this sudden upsurge of new life, the first round of the Presidential elections seemed a dry, distant and irrelevant event. Some of the candidates issued coloured brochures, which stood
around in the supermarkets looking for takers. ‘France doesn’t know where she’s going any more,’ proclaimed one. ‘She has lost her destiny. The world financial markets
do what they want with her. More and more, the law of the jungle is taking over our society.’

So – what did the candidate propose in the way of policies? ‘Define a coherent law and order policy! Revalue work! Keep France as a great political force!’

In the media, the arguments were passionately anodyne. A radio talk show would introduce a ‘debate’ but the speakers, whatever their affiliation, waffled so energetically that they
were totally unable to argue with each other, or even define any issue on which to argue except the ever-popular ‘security’, which in Britain would be called ‘law and
order’, and on which everyone was in agreement anyway.

Small wonder that the candidates seemed to have no purchase on the minds of my neighbours. The major law-and-order issues in the Béarn were fatal road accidents and con men preying on
pensioners. Either of these events would
make a headline in
La République
. Were a crack-house ever to be raided in Orthez, it would probably merit a special
supplement on the imminent collapse of civilization.

In our French class, Renée took time off from the
partitifs
to lay out the landscape of her country’s politics. This election was for the President, she explained. It was
the first round, in which any candidate who could scrape up five hundred signatures of support could stand. There were going to be sixteen candidates, and this first vote would get them down to
two.

As for political parties, well, there was the Left, repre­sented by M. Jospin, the Prime Minister, and his Socialist Party. She introduced him with great satisfaction. There was the Right,
represented by M. Chirac, the President, and his Rassemblement pour La République, which she managed to name in a resolutely fair tone but with a telling lack of enthusiasm.

Then there were minority parties, like the Greens and the Communists. And then there was the far Right, led by M. Le Pen. But that – and here Renée actually shuddered – that
was fascism, and that would never be accepted by the French people, who would never forget the Nazis and the atrocities of World War II.