Deep France (25 page)

We got on the motorway and scoured the trocantes. The word is probably a mixture of true, meaning trick or deal, and brocante. Pau and Bayonne each have several on their outskirts. Anyone who
wants to sell something brings it to the
troc
owner, who puts a price on it and displays it in his showroom, taking an agreed percentage of whatever it fetches.
Trocs
sell
anything from an old lawnmower to the irresistible black oak cupboard carved with scallop shells and marigolds which is now in Chloe’s bedroom in London.

We discovered that, like Ahetze, many villages and towns had regular flea markets. Helpfully, all of these, from the epic to the humble, from Bordeaux to Toulouse, plus the big-city
auction sales, the huge seasonal antiques fairs and special events in the decorative arts, were listed in a wonderfully enthusiastic monthly newspaper, the
Gazette des
Ventes
. Since even Ahetze can suddenly decide to cancel itself at times of year when stock is low or buyers sparse, the
Gazette
was added to my essential reading. Our vocabulary began
to grow exponentially:
enchères
, auction;
particulier
, a private seller;
pomme de pin
, literally a pine cone but also a bed-knob.

On Sundays, there was usually a
vide grenier
, one up from a car-boot sale.
Vide grenier
means ‘empty the attic’. They took place in sports halls and
salles
midtiactivités
, organized by the local ACCA or the fire brigade or the village school. The advertising wasn’t sophisticated – somebody with a computer printed up a few
posters which were stapled to telegraph poles near the main road junctions. A few local
brocante
dealers usually took part, but most of the sellers were ordinary people trading in their
children’s in-line skates and Barbie dolls.

One Sunday, we drove for an hour into the dreamy Chalosse, which was now a shimmering ocean of buttercups. We decided that being there must be like dropping some heavy-duty Sixties narcotic like
a Quaalude. Neither of us had ever done this, but in this undulating landscape, where everything is slow, sunny and blissful and time seems to disappear, your mind definitely feels altered.

Our destination was a
vide grenier
in the hall of a tiny village. It had a surprisingly large range of stalls; as well as the local people, there were Africans with leather bags and Bob
Marley banners, a Basque cheese vendor and plenty of specialists in agricultural antiques and café ware, which meant Ricard water jugs, St-Raphael ice buckets, Cinzano ash trays.

The next Sunday it was the turn of another Chalossois village, Mouscardes, which has what must be the smallest
bullring in France. It would fit into the miniature arena in
the Spanish village of Mijas about four times. The bullring in Mouscardes, however, is intended for the cruelty-free local sport, the Course Landaise, in which there is no matador, only
écarteurs
, and the
sauteurs
, who jumps over the horns of the charging animal, like the bull-dancers painted on ancient Cretan vases. Some of the Gascons also enjoy Spanish
bullfighting. The best matadors and bulls come up for the big
ferias
in Bayonne and Dax every year, and the fans go down to San Sebastian or Pamplona, but it’s an urban, cosmopolitan
thing, whereas the Course Landaise is a central part of the village heritage.

After Mouscardes there were a couple of
vide greniers
in ugly villages along on the RN117, then a small one in a tiny Basque hamlet in a green valley near Aramits, then the first of the
really big sales in Pomarez, yet another Chalossois venue, and the centre of Course Landaise culture where the sport’s annual festival takes place in July.

The stalls were spread out on the sand of the arena itself, and the tarmac of the car park and the linoleum of the sports hall. Many dealers came, with many treasures, over which we lingered a
long time, restoring our energies with trips to the buffet for an Armagnac
crêpe
or a slug of thick black coffee.

By now, we had discovered the unwritten rules of the
vide grenier
game, as they are observed in the Béarn.

The Town Called Love

On the way back from Pomarez, we stopped in a bustling little town called Amou, which has retained an air of prosperity and consequence from its pilgrim days, or maybe even
earlier. It got its name from the Romans, who called it Amor’, or love, and found nearby the only real hill in the region, on which they built a large camp whose sentries could have seen a
barbarian horde coming a hundred miles away.

A river runs through Amou, a gentle big stream called the Luy de Béarn, spanned by a pretty bridge and shaded by immense old lime trees which soar over the arena and the site of the
Sunday market. They also shade a rather grand restaurant, le Commerce, also known by its owner’s name, Darracq. Le Commerce is impeccable; it goes in for formality and white tablecloths,
simple achievements but notable in a country that seems to believe that the uglier the plates are, the better the food will be. The menu features grills
and roasts, with the
most exportable classics of the regional cuisine. At lunch, the terrace seems a tad close to the road that also runs through Amou but on a warm evening, when the scent of hay creeps in from the
meadows, the swallows are diving around the square tower of the Romanesque pilgrim church and there is no traffic, it’s deeply pleasant.

While we waited for our meal, we amused ourselves designing our coats of arms. I got crossed pens quartered with chickens. Andrew and Geoff got the dog Otto and their new kitten as supporters.
Sandy-and-Annie’s escutcheon featured crossed roll-ups and a set of false teeth. This was because, after years of gentle and not-so-gentle urging, Sandy was to visit the dentist. Three things
had brought about this change to the habit of a lifetime. Firstly, he’d got hardly any of his own teeth left. This had been the case for some years, but when you’re an ex-pat it’s
easy to lose a grip on what’s considered normal by the rest of the world. When the proprietor of the Belle Auberge cracked a joke about his gummy smile, Sandy simply decided to stop smiling
and boycotted the place. Nor was he about to be told by his sons that nobody in Britain goes around with no teeth any more.

Secondly, the sale of their house had gone through, and they could no longer plead poverty. And thirdly, it was doc­tor’s orders. Sandy is an enthusiastic steak-eater, but had been
suffering from indigestion. The doctor, finding he had just a couple of incisors left, told him firmly that meat needed to be chewed before swallowing, and sent him to the dentist.

I tried and failed to lure Andrew on to Gaujac, where the gardens were coming into their own. This is where the Romans built their camp; five hundred years later, a local noble family built a
strange new Château on the same site, neither of vernacular nor classic design, but modelled on a Cistercian priory, with all the rooms leading off a cloister. The present owners open it to
the public, and have established
a real plantsman’s garden, which now includes the French national collection of clematis.

Gaujac became notorious in the ownership of the Montespan family. Louis-Henri de Pardaillon de Gondrin, Marquis de Montespan, was a volatile character who helped to get the Gascons their bad
name. His first big mistake was to marry a famously witty and lusciously beautiful young woman from the Poitou region, Françoise de Rochechouart, who had changed her Christian name to
Athenaïs because it had more style. Athenaïs may have been an absolute scream but she was also ambitious, and from the day in 1660 that they left for the court of King Louis XIV at
Versailles, she had her eye on the King.

Seven years later, the King had eyes only for Athenaïs. She had a moment of doubt, and begged her husband to take her back to the country, but he told her she was just being egotistical.
The King then dumped his first mistress and instated Athenaïs as his consort. The Marquis then made his second big mistake. He minded.

At Versailles, the correct behaviour for the husband of a woman to whom the King had taken a fancy was to adopt a low profile and find good reasons to be out of town. This would immediately be
rewarded by a string of well-paid official positions and extra titles. This was not for the Marquis. Was he not a Gascon? Did he not have his honour, not to mention his
panache
?

The Marquis kicked up an unseemly fuss. He raged, he stormed, he complained loudly and in public, and when he got drunk he beat up his wife. His uncle, a grand archbishop of the
fire-and-brimstone Jansenist sect, was foolish enough to take his side, preaching censorious sermons and persecuting unfaithful wives in his bishopric.

So the King banished the Marquis to his estates, the normal punishment for an unruly aristocrat. It meant he was sent
home under house arrest, and one of the houses chosen
was Gaujac, undoubtedly because it was a hell of a long way from Versailles and close to the malaria-infested swamp that was then the Landes. Defiantly, he arrived with his son and daugh­ter by
Athenaïs, and with a pair of antlers lashed to the top of his carriage to symbolize the cuckold’s horns. He then invited all the neighbours to a mock funeral and buried Athenaïs in
effigy, ascribing her demise to ‘coquetry and ambition’.

Athenaïs bore at least nine children, seven to the King, and put on a great deal of weight. She was eventually supplanted by the King’s last mistress, the dreary and self-righteous
Madame de Maintenon, who alienated Athenaïs’ sons and drove her away from Versailles. The Marquis, however, scorned to catch malaria and eventually pulled himself together. He moved to
Toulouse, and was then allowed by the King to return to Versailles. I like to think of him stomping across his lawn at Gaujac, impatiently scanning the landscape for the sight of the messenger from
the court who never came to tell him his wife was coming home.

Meanwhile in the Garden . . .

22 May
. My first sweet pea today. I picked it and put it in a little vase on top of my computer. It scented the whole room.

The so-called lawn looked like Prince Charles’s wild-flower meadow, teeming with camomile daisies, ragged robin, dark blue bugle, sky-blue speedwell, the earliest of the purple
cornflowers, and some crimson-petalled orchids. At the same time, primroses and violets were still flowering in shady corners.

Every herbivore in sight was nose-down all day, doing justice to the banquet. The cows, who lay down the minute
the sun came out, were trying to graze as they reclined.
Annabel’s donkeys had got grotesquely fat, in their different styles. Lulu, the white mare, had a crest of fat on her neck and rolls of fat between each of her ribs, while Coco, her
Pyrénéen consort, being a mountain animal in need of winter insulation, was evenly covered all over.

I picked my first strawberries, which were more exciting as a concept than a dessert. The slugs had got there first. The wild strawberries tasted much better; there were so many plants at the
edges of the garden that I could go out to pick a handful for breakfast every morning.