Deep France (4 page)

Second, there is the provincial. On some maps, such as that used by the electricity board, Orriule is in Aquitaine. Everything south of Bordeaux and west of Toulouse gets lumped into Aquitaine
at times. British people with a taste for history can usually relate to Aquitaine, because the English used to think they owned it. Maybe we were tempted by the description of a medieval writer
called Heriger of Lobbes: ‘Opulent Aquitaine, sweet as nectar thanks to its vineyards, dotted about with forests, overflowing with fruit of every kind and endowed with a superabundance of
pasture land.’

For a while, England had a right to Aquitaine. This came with a queen, a beautiful red-head, in her day the richest
heiress in Europe – Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was
thirty-one, the ex-wife of the King of France, when she ran off and married a nineteen-year-old, Henri, Duke of Normandy, in Poitiers. By way of a honeymoon, the young power couple travelled
through Aquitaine to recruit some troops, and with the help of this army, Henry became King Henry II of England two years later, in 1154.

Although Henry owed a lot to his French soldiers, forging a kingdom out of England and Aquitaine was straining the logic of geography, at a time when it would take a month to travel the length
of the realm, most of which was still a collection of small feudal states with ever-changing borders and ever-shifting alliances. The dynamic Henry and the astute Eleanor kept their dual kingdom
together in their lifetimes, but after both were dead much blood was spilled by later English kings trying to pursue their claim to this lush French province. After the Hundred Years War, Crecy,
Poitiers, Henry V at Agincourt and finally Joan of Arc, the French reclaimed Bordeaux and everything south of it in 1453.

There are traces of England all over the land that Eleanor and Henry ruled together, which includes most of the west of France. The stained-glass window they commissioned to commemorate their
wedding is still in Poitiers Cathedral, while the cathedral in Bayonne is rampant with three-lion emblems. The pretty little town of Mauleon, half an hour south of here, is overlooked by the ruins
of the massive castle built by the most appealing of Henry and Eleanor’s sons, Richard I of England, Coeur de Lion. There are also places called Hastingues and Commingues, and families called
Smith and Richardeson, and liking for bacon sandwiches, and a passion for rugby. Also, there is a folk song in the repertoire of the local bands which shares almost everything with the Cockney
classic, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Then there is the question of the Gascon sense of humour.

The third possible way to describe my location is to say that it’s in Gascony. I wouldn’t attempt this in front of a hard-line Béarnais, because the
Béarn has always claimed the status of a state separate from its larger neighbour in the South-West of France, even though at times they’ve been ruled by the same person. Nor would I
talk about Gascony to Parisians, because they would just snigger. Nor would I mention Gascony in the hearing of one of my French friends in London, who sniffs that only the English talk about
Gascony. However, my bank account comes under the Gascony department of the Crédit Agricole and the bit of the Atlantic off the coast by Biarritz is called the Golfe du Gascogne on my
Michelin map, so it seems that the French also recognize the name.

Besides, Gascony is as much a state of mind as a region. A twelfth-century travel guide written for the pilgrims to Compostela describes the Gascons as poor but generous people, but warns that
they can also be frivolous, talkative, cynical and promiscuous. No wonder I like them so much.

By the time of the Three Musketeers, the Gascons were also known as swashbuckling meat-heads, all mouth and trousers, always looking for a fight. Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de
Bergerac, made his hero one of the Gascony cadets, under a commander called Castel-Jaloux, and this is how Cyrano introduced his regiment:

Thanks to the mythology of the Musketeers, the word
‘panache’
came to be associated with the Gascons. Literally,
panache
means a plume. As a personal quality,
Rostand tried to define it for the Académie française in 1901: ‘It’s not greatness, but something which can attach itself to greatness, and which moves underneath it.
It’s something fluttering, excessive and a bit decorative . . . panache is often in a sacrifice you make, a consolation of attitude you allow yourself. At bit frivolous, perhaps, a bit
theatrical, probably; panache is just a grace – but what a grace.’

The Three Musketeers came from all over the region, while Bergerac is some way north of it. This is how outsiders have seen the Gascons. There is also the question of how they define themselves.
There are tastes, pursuits and customs which bind this region together, for all its citizens like to protest their differences. All Gascony, and the Béarn, plays rugby, enjoys the music of
the
bandas
, the village brass bands, and tucks into hearty meals based on the traditional dishes of the region, confit of duck or
poule au pot Henri IV
. Nothing succeeds like
excess, for the Gascon, and it is almost possible to enjoy all these pursuits at the same time, by singing the
rugby song in which every verse is about a different dish in the
local cuisine.

All Gascony, and the Béarn, shares a folklore featuring the man-headed monsters that live in the mountains and the pot­bellied guzzler San Pansard who is ritually burned in effigy at
carnival time for the crime of feasting in Lent. There are the old languages, too, a cluster of the Occitan dialects which are still spoken in this region. All these ties bind Gascony together.

None of them, however, quite holds the spirit of the Béarn. Strictly speaking, the Béarn is the wedge of land south of Gascony proper, an ancient province which only became a full
part of France after the Revolution of 1789, and remains a distinct region, with its own language, its own music, its own history, its own heroes, its own face, its own voice, its own wines, its
own flag – red and yellow – and its own coat of arms, featuring two cows of its own breed.

The boundary of the Béarn in our corner of it is the Gave de Pau, running from Lourdes, through Pau, through the nearby town of Orthez and on to join the Gave d’Oloron near the town
of Peyrehorade, forty minutes west of here.
‘Gave’
is a Bearnais word, meaning a torrent that runs down from the mountains. Orriule is the French name for our village; in
Béarnais, it would be called Aurriula. Confusing, isn’t it?

French as a Foreign Language

I set off for Orthez, where I had been told that there was a class in French as a foreign language every Thursday, because I can sure as hell stand to improve my French, and I
like being a pupil; it’s a role with such tiny responsibilities and easy to play well.

Once, I got a good-grade French O-level, but that didn’t go far, although I learned to love France as I learned the language
at school. I had begun to study French when
I started secondary school at the age of twelve, and the three women who taught me – tall, white-haired Miss Bareham, rounded, witty Miss Drewe and the glamorous Mile Béal – all
delivered their lessons with elan – a unique sense of excitement and superiority. This, they taught us, as they coaxed us patiently through Alphonse Daudet’s
Lettres de mon
Moulin
and the thrillingly macabre short stories of Guy de Maupas­sant, was the study of an extraordinary people, an extraordinary place, an extraordinary culture. One day, if we were
incredibly lucky, we might be able to actually visit France.

They also gave me the priceless gift of some French conjugation – the different forms of verbs, which we learned by heart. I’m largely unaware of this amazing heritage until I find
myself struggling to say something that’s tense-dense, such as: ‘I used to think that learning verbs was boring, but now I’m in France I’m really glad I did it.’
Suddenly, like swamp gas bubbling to the surface, the right words can just pop up out of my memory. Today’s GCSE candidates have a much worse time, being deprived of so much formal grammar
teaching that they cannot master their own language, let alone French. Institutionalized barbarism, if you ask me.

Later, I spent the best part of a year on a language course at a French university, in the eastern industrial town of Grenoble, where my ear was attuned to the inflexions of spoken French, but
my grammar did not improve because our lecturer was an adorable man who looked like a New Wave film star and it seemed silly to pass tests to move up into the advanced class, which was taught by
two sadistic women.

On this basis, with years of visiting France and reading the original
Marie-Claire
, I’ve reached what you might call a working knowledge of French. This means that I can read
Le Figaro
, but I can’t read
Le Monde
without a dictionary, or understand the rugby reports in any medium. I can
understand people, as long as they
don’t talk too fast, and talk to them, as long as they’re patient with me. In my first week at Maison Bergez, I discovered that I could also read instructions for operating an answering
machine in French, something I find challenging even in English.

Orriule is only ten minutes by car from three gorgeous medieval towns – sleepy Sauveterre-de-Béarn, where I buy my
Times
, half-timbered Saliès-de-Béarn,
always conscious of its status as a royal spa, and Orthez, which has such pretensions to urbanization as pay and display parking (20 centimes (2 p) for two hours) and an underpass in which the
graffiti art has been commissioned by the municipality.

Above the exit from this underpass is a former school building, probably dating from the Sixties, now the home of the Centre Socio-Culturel, a voluntary organization whose aim is promoting the
well-being of society. Here I enrol for the year for FFr60 (£6), which entitles me to learn sewing, painting, patchwork, yoga, hip-hop or household budgeting as well.

The class is taught by Renée, a classic Béarnaise beauty with dark hair waving vigorously back from her forehead, a fine-bridged aquiline nose and a humorous mouth. Her colleague,
Dominique, teaches the beginners’ class, and they are both unpaid volunteers. I have treated myself to something I’ve always wanted to own, a French school book, with the pages
elaborately ruled to make sure that the handwriting upon them will be of exactly the right breadth, depth and height for classic French script.

My normal handwriting is terrible. It looks like the tracks of a stoned centipede dancing the macarena. Had I been forced to write by hand, I would never have written a single book. Now perhaps
some French discipline will improve things.

Around the table are people from all over the world: an Argentinian exchange student, a Brazilian au pair, a German grandmother, three Australians, a New Zealander, a Palestinean,
two Moroccans, one Thai, two Vietnamese, three or four English.

The Christmas party, Renée informs us, will be on 20 December, and each student is invited to contribute a dish from his or her country. This naturally brought out competitive nationalism
among the pupils. The English went for mince pies and smoked salmon. The South-East Asian faction brought a stupendous dish of green curry and fragrant rice, but the outright winners were the
Moroccans, with a plate of incredibly light and creamy pastries called Gazelles’ Horns. Renee and Dominique brought plates of Bearnais black pud­ding and
charcuterie
.

Local Media

I needed news. As a journalist, I was trained on the stories of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook giving spot quizzes on the day’s paper to any young journalist he met in
the corridors of his Fleet Street flagship and sacking any hapless cub who passed on an answer. They had left me in permanent terror of losing touch.

Mad fantasy number one was that I would be able to read the London newspapers on the Internet. My first browse revealed that the online editions were cut down to skeletons for the barely
literate. French television was no help, because the news programmes were fixated, not with the action in the war in Afghanistan, but with the part that French aid workers and doctors were planning
to play in the peace.

Mad fantasy number two was that I would cycle into Sauveterre every morning, buy newspapers at the Maison de la Presse and read them in one of the cafes over a leisurely
grand
crème
. The cafes didn’t open until almost lunch time and the road would have been challenging if I had been
twenty years younger and three stone lighter. I
took the car, and slotted the trip into the day’s schedule after lunch.

In the Maison de la Presse, the proprietor offered to keep a
Times
for me every day.
‘Le Time,’
he called it. The editions were a day old, and the
Sunday
Times
came with all its pointless supplements except the one you really wanted.

Just before I left London, a new editor had arrived at
The Times
. A new editor means that dead wood will be cut out, heads will roll, budgets will be slashed, sorrows will be drowned,
new brooms will sweep clean and wheels will be reinvented. I had been writing regular features for
The Times
, but with all this agony going on in Wapping, burying myself in France seemed
like a smart move. All the same, the paper was still part of my identity. As things turned out, they did not lose my phone number. Every now and then, when I was in the car park at Leclerc or out
feeding Annabel’s donkeys, my mobile would be called by a newly promoted editor eager to commission a feature.