The Discovery of France (76 page)
Read The Discovery of France Online
Authors: Graham Robb
Tuileries, Gardens and Palace, Paris
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Turkey
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Tyrol
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Ubaye region
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United States of America
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Urdos (Pyrénées-Atlantiques)
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Usingen, Germany
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Vacères-en-Quint (Drôme)
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Le Val d’Ajol (Vosges)
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Valence (Drôme)
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Valenciennes (Nord)
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Valensole plain (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence)
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Varangéville (Meurthe-et-Moselle)
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Varennes-en-Argonne (Meuse)
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Vaugirard, Paris
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Vaumale, Pas de (Var)
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Vauxbuin (Aisne)
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Velay region
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Vendée
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Venice
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Ventoux, Mont
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Vercors massif (Isère and Drôme)
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Verdelot (Seine-et-Marne)
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Verdun-sur-Garonne (Tarn-et-Garonne)
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Le Vernet, suburb of Perpignan
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Vernet-les-Bains (Pyrénées-Orientales)
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Versailles palace
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Versailles (Yvelines)
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Vesdun (Cher)
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Vexin region
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Via Agrippa
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Via Aurelia
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Vienne
département
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Le Vigeant (Vienne)
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Vigneulles (Meurthe-et-Moselle)
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Vilaine river
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Villard, nr Bourg-Saint-Maurice (Savoie)
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Ville-Affranchie (Lyon)
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Villemomble (Seine-Saint-Denis)
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Villequier (Seine-Maritime)
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Villers-Cotterêts (Aisne)
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Le Vitarel (Aveyron)
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Vitteaux (Côte-d’Or)
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Vizille (Isère)
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Vole Regordane
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Vosges mountains
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Voûte d’Émeraude, Verdon Gorges
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Wesserling (Haut-Rhin)
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West Indies
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Western Front
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Winy Fountain
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Yeu, Île d’ (Vendée)
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Yeux du Blaireau, Les, Montpellier-le-Vieux
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Yonville-l’Abbaye
(Madame Bavary)
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Yssingeaux (Haute-Loire)
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This book began and ended with the friendliness and expertise of Andrew Kidd and Sam Humphreys at Picador, Starling Lawrence at W. W. Norton, Gill Coleridge and Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White, and Melanie Jackson. Along the way, I incurred debts of gratitude to many people (some will have to remain nameless and others are acknowledged only by the frequency with which their names appear in the notes): Morgan Alliche, Jean-Paul Avice, Nathalie Barou, Nicholas Blake, Alain Brunet, Wilf Dickie, Camilla Elworthy, Laurence Laluyaux, Molly May, Claude and Vincenette Pichois, Raymond and Helen Poggenburg, Chas Roberts and team, Stephen Roberts and Morgen Van Vorst. I am especially grateful to the staff of the following institutions: the Social Science Library of Oxford University, the Taylor Institution Modern Languages Faculty Library, the Bodleian Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée Dauphinois, the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris and the Musée d’Aquitaine.
1
. A
commune
is the smallest of the administrative divisions introduced in 1790. Today, there are 36,565
communes
, 3,876
cantons
, 329
arrondissements
, 96
dèpartements
(including 4 overseas) and 22
régions
.
2
. These moral maps of France are still quite popular today, and even more implausible than they were in the eighteenth century. For example, in the 1997
Guide Bleu
: ‘The Norman’s measured replies are perhaps an effect of the unpredictable climate’; ‘The Bretons once wore round hats [an allusion to an insulting song], and they are still hard-headed’; ‘In the land of bullfights and rugby [Languedoc], passions always have the last word’.
3
. Even after the introduction of the decimal system in 1790, a ‘
pinte
’ was just over a litre in one Limousin village and well over two litres in another. The Nord
département
had thirty-five different measures of capacity, all bearing the same name. Travellers from the north found their ‘leagues’ getting longer as they headed south. Some parts had still not adopted the older systems that the decimal system was supposed to replace. In 1807, Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphics, found that the country people of the Isère ‘have retained the custom of using Roman numerals’.
4
. ‘Loudmouths of St Nicks, / Open your gob when I’m taking a . . .’ (in the local Lorrain dialect).
5
. An assortment of adventurers and bandits employed by Henry II of England.
6
. A man in the Basque province of Soule told me in 2002, ‘Once upon a time the sea covered the land as far as San-Sebastián, and when the sea went out, there were the Basques.’
7
. These doors are often said to have been made unusually low to humiliate the cagots, but the surviving examples (Duhort, Monein, Navarrenx, etc.) are well above the average height of the population, then and now. There is no sign of any attempt to conceal the prejudice. At Monein, the cagot section is marked by a dwarfish figure at the base of a column on the north side (see illustrations). An almost featureless stone head, not much bigger than a tennis ball, can be seen under a window-sill in the Pyrenean village of Bielle. Another cagot head survived in Hagetmau until 2004, when a clump of semi-derelict old houses known as the Quartier des Cagots was pulled down.
8
. E.g. the Parlement de Bordeaux, judgement of 14 May 1578: The ‘officers and consuls of Casteljaloux and all other places’ are instructed to force ‘ladres and lépreux’ (lepers) and ‘capots and gahets’ (cagots) to wear ‘the marks and tokens they have always worn in the past: for the former, a rattle; for the latter, a red sign on the breast in the form of a duck’s foot.’
9
. In Béarnais. Recorded near Oloron-Sainte-Marie, c. 1844.
10
. The ‘discovery’ of Francoprovençal is always attributed to the Italian linguist G.-I. Ascoli, who described it in 1873. However, ‘a patois that is neither the language of Oc nor the language of Oïl’ was known in the 1820s to a travelling cabinet-maker, Agricol Perdiguier, and presumably to most other itinerant artisans and traders. Perdiguier called it ‘Allobroge’, from the tribe that once occupied the region of Geneva, Grenoble and Vienne.
11
. ‘A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.’ (Luke 15:11–12)
12
. For example:
English bird horse water pear ripe
Latin aucellus caballus aqua pera maturum
Occitan aucel caval aiga pera madur
French oiseau cheval eau poire muˆ r
13
. The États-Généraux: the disjointed predecessor of a national parliament, composed of the three ‘estates’: clergy, nobles and commons.
14
.In 1887, a priest near Toulon recommended, as a practical form of exorcism, spilling lentils on the floor and leaving them overnight. Apparently, picking up lentils was too tedious even for a supernatural being.
15
. ‘[ . . . ] d’ine si baëlle fraichur qu’y paeu ja meille t’quimparerr qu’à t’chié chimps d’junes chaoux avin qu’les ch’neuilles y seillejin passerr.’ (Maraîchin sub-dialect of Poitevin.)
16
. Since 1768, all distances have been measured from a point in the square in front of Notre-Dame in Paris. The octagonal brass plaque that now marks ‘Point Zéro’ replaced an earlier triangular stone with a post bearing the arms of Notre-Dame of Paris.
17
. About 2.2 percent of the population of France was Protestant in the mid-nineteenth century – just over 833,000 people, four-fifths of whom were concentrated in Alsace and around Montbéliard (Lutheran), in the region of Nîmes and western Provence, and in a narrow crescent from Montpellier to La Rochelle and Poitou (Calvinist or ‘Huguenot’).
18
. The Bête du Gévaudan was an unusually fierce and daring wolf, which roamed over a sparsely populated area of about nine hundred square miles, claiming at least twenty lives in two years (1764–65) and giving rise to two pilgrimages. The Beast now makes an important contribution to the tourist economy of the southern Auvergne and is responsible for the controlled reintroduction of wolves to the Gévaudan.
19
. Apprentices from France and other parts of Europe whose trade involves the transformation of raw material (carpenters, stonemasons, plumbers, bakers, etc.) still undertake a Tour de France and stay in hostels run by ‘Mothers’. Football matches have taken the place of pitched battles. There are three orders: le Compagnonnage du Devoir, le Compagnonnage du Devoir de Liberté and l’Union Compagnonnique des Devoirs Unis.
20
. One of the three main Orders of Compagnons believed that their founder was a Frenchman who helped to build Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and retired to the Sainte-Baume. Compagnons still make a pilgrimage to the grotto in July. Relics of their patron saint, Mary Magdalen, are enshrined in the nearby Saint-Maximin basilica, where the graffiti of nineteenth-century Compagnons can still be seen on walls and columns just inside the entrance.
21
. Deaths caused by speeding vehicles have a significant effect on animal populations. The 600,000-mile-long menagerie-morgue includes some relatively rare or rarely seen species: adders, kites and martens. Larger animals such as boars, deer and of course human beings are removed from the road. A law of 1791, long since repealed, imposed a fine on owners of speeding carriages that ran over animals. The earliest reference to large-scale road-kill appears to be an entry in Jules Renard’s diary (8 October 1906): ‘The automobile lives on the animals of the road, especially on hens. It consumes at least one hen every fifty kilometres’.
22
. Rion (named Col de Severen: probably the Col de Louvie, north of the Great Saint Bernard).
23
. About fifteen brown bears are thought to survive in the Pyrenees. Most were imported from Slovenia. The last female of pure Pyrenean stock was shot by boar hunters near Urdos in October 2004.
24
. For his baselines, Delambre used the conveniently straight sections of road from Lieusaint to Melun (near Paris) and from Le Vernet to Salses (aligned with the Roman Via Domitia near Perpignan).
25
. The Cassinis are numbered, for convenience, like kings. Cassini I, II, III and IV: Jean-Dominique (1625–1712), Jacques (1677–1756), César-François Cassini de Thury, who took the name of the family château in Normandy (1714–84), and Jacques-Dominique (1748–1845).
26
. There were twelve
lignes
in a
pouce
(inch), twelve
pouces
in a
pied
(foot), six
pieds
in a
toise
(just under two metres) and two thousand
pieds
in a
lieue
(league).
27
. The Beast of the Gévaudan was never this far south. The guide may have been referring to the Bête des Vaissettes which lived in a pond nearby at Le Bouquet. It made a horrible screaming noise at night and could be heard for miles around.
28
. In 1756, the price was four livres for a sheet and five hundred livres for the whole map. Five hundred livres was the salary of a well-paid village schoolteacher or the annual income of a successful farmer.