Deep France (42 page)

Nobody in
la France profonde
gives any credence whatever to the official line that the country is not at risk from mad-cow disease, and everybody believes that feed made from infected
carcasses from Britain has entered the food chain. This does not stop anyone enjoying a good dish of
tête de veau
with
sauce Ravigote
. The only thing that could possibly put
the Bearnais off this classic dish of well-presented offal is the discovery that the President, Jacques Chirac, likes it.

This was revealed in a cunning little book which was published that month called
A Table Avec Les Politiques
. Two astute young women writers flattered the wives of
a string of prominent politicians and took them out to lunch. In the course of idle conversation, these overlooked consorts of the peacock males of Paris happily divulged all the secrets of their
husbands’ gastronomic preferences. This was considered the most telling information possible about the morals of the men running the country.

The fact that Chirac was said to like
tête de veau
and that the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, formerly described as the man nobody was waiting for, revealed a homely
liking for snails, suggests that both their wives were on to the authors. Nothing was more likely to convince the cynical electorate that these unloved public figures were really honest men of the
people than the claim that they enjoyed these down-home classics. I was ashamed to see that a senior political commentator at
The Times
described
tête de veau
as
‘cow’s brain’, when in fact it’s what traditional British cooking would call brawn, the poached meat from the head of a calf, including the tongue, but not the brains. Brawn
was a staple dinner dish for a poor family in my parents’ day. Being cheap, provocative and quintessentially French,
Tête de Veau
,
Sauce Ravigote
was also
Roger’s favourite dish at La Terrasse.

How To Spend €100 on a Coffee

Andrew and I planned a final day of bargain hunting, at the Foire des Antiquaires at Pau, a grand occasion in that grand little city. With us came a new friend, Penny, who,
with her husband, had forsaken an Elizabethan mansion in Shropshire for a house in the Chalosse with a stunning view
due west over the lush green hills. Penny is blonde,
square-shouldered, athletic-looking and tall. When she stands beside Andrew, at six foot something, Geoff at six foot even more, and me, at only five foot ten, we look like half a veteran
basketball team.

The Foire was a serious event, held in a convention centre in the centre of the town, and in the sports ground and the car park and the warehouses adjoining it. Maysounabe was still fairly bare,
and next year they planned to start work restoring a ruined barn in the garden to add five extra bedrooms to their spread, so furniture was still needed.

By now, we had worked out a bargain-hunting routine. First, we cruised through the whole event, checking out likely items which caught our eye. This we did twice, because you always miss things
the first time when you’re still getting oriented. At this point, it was a good idea to buy any item which was utterly desirable or seriously underpriced, because it would sure as hell be
sold to somebody in the next half-hour.

We would then go for a coffee. Then we went back to look over the things that had interested us, and checked the prices. Then we did another sweep, and had another coffee, and talked over the
merits and demerits of the pieces we fancied. Then, as lunch time began to loom, we made our final choices and went shopping.

At first, Andrew was not enthusiastic about the cornucopia on offer. The dealers were too professional for him to get the thrill of finding a real bargain, and the French taste in antiques, for
anything twiddly, frilly, gilded, encrusted with carved rosebuds and looking as if Mme Pompadour once sat on it, was too much in evidence. He drifted grumpily up and down the aisles, complaining
that all the furniture was over-restored.

Then he found a painting. It was big, about eight feet by
six, late-Impressionist-going-on-Modernist, definitely from the early 1900s, mostly chalky beige and light olive
green, and its subject was the Moulin Rouge in Paris. Not framed, but prominently signed. It had been carelessly propped against the side of a stall, and the dealer wanted €600 for it.

We considered it for some time. On the plus side, it was a really nice painting and we liked it. Also, thanks to Baz Luhrmann, every air-head model in London would be able to recognize the
Moulin Rouge. No damage and a signature – these were also good. On the minus side, Andrew didn’t know enough about paintings from the period to feel confident that the price was right,
and I wondered if the dominance of neutral colours on the canvas might not mean that the whole thing blurred into the middle distance when it was hung on the stone wall of the studio at Maysounabe,
which was the only place with space to hang it.

We went for a coffee and discussed these matters. On balance, it was a great painting, €600 was a good price for a painting of that quality and size, and the subject would make it easy to
sell on if it turned out to be a mistake. Andrew wasn’t 100 per cent convinced, but we decided to go back and take another look.

The painting had gone. Utterly desirable and seriously underpriced, of course it had gone. Andrew was peeved. Now that the painting had vanished, he was 100 per cent convinced that he wanted
it.

We made a final sweep, bought some sexy little water-colours (me) and some massive stone urns (Penny), and intended to meet up on the steps of the hall before going to lunch. As I approached the
main doors, I saw the painting, now more respectfully displayed, on another stall.

‘The Moulin Rouge hasn’t left the building,’ I said to Andrew. ‘It’s on another stall, just inside the doors.’

The three of us went back inside. The Moulin Rouge
looked better than ever. We asked the price. It was € 1,000. Andrew offered €700. The seller, a slightly built
man with thinning hair, dismissed the offer immediately. It was a really nice painting, he didn’t really want to sell it, he wanted to enjoy it himself for a while. Anyway he’d only
just bought it.

‘We know you’ve only just bought it,’ Andrew explained, his French now up to the task. ‘We looked at it with the man you bought it from, and he only wanted €600. You
probably got it for €500. If you take €700 now, you’ve made €200 in half an hour. That’s not bad.’

The seller looked stricken, possibly because the three of us were looming over him from our superior height. He could see our point. We could see his point. Since he had a mobile, sympathetic
kind of face, I decided a bigger guilt trip might swing the deal.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if we’d bought that painting when we first saw it, we’d have got it for €500. All we did was go for a couple of coffees. If we buy it from you
now for €700, those cups of coffee will have cost us €100 each. It’s hardly fair, is it?’

An agonized expression crinkled the seller’s eyes. Eventually, Andrew bought the Moulin Rouge for €800. I think I was right about the colours against the stone wall, but he’s so
devoted to the painting he doesn’t care.

The Last Flight of Fancy

We planned a final trip to the flea market at Ahetze. I embarked on one last round of trying to persuade people to come with me for a truly spectacular day out, and recruited a
new friend, Sue, who was waiting out the end of a career
with the NHS before planning to live in her pretty little house next to the church in Burgaronne. Living in France, as
we have seen, can be hard on an English marriage, especially when the wife speaks degree-level French and the husband doesn’t, so Sue was taking a break on her own and was glad to have
company and a new experience.

We took off in the morning with the mountains crystal clear, the snow on the top slopes matching the white clouds above. Strong winds were stripping the leaves from the trees, and flocks of wild
pigeons, called
palombes
, were wheeling through the air above us. They were bang on time. The
palombe
season runs from All Saints Day at the end of October to St Martin’s
Day, 11 November. For this frantic fortnight while the birds migrate south the hunters take to the woods and set about enticing them within range of their guns. Or, if they’re determined to
exterminate the species, their nets.

Hunting has reduced the numbers of
palombes
so drastically that it is now rigorously controlled. Once, flocks of thousands of birds darkened the sky every autumn, and they were hunted
as far north as the Gers. Baskets of them were sent up to Paris every day. Now most of the old sites have been abandoned, a mere trickle of birds fly past and it’s unusual to find them on a
menu outside the region. The hunters can only gather at a few designated sites, and only use the traditional methods to catch them.

For two weeks, the
palombe
-spotters, called
paloumayres
, spend all the hours of daylight up in their tree houses, on the lookout for the flocks of birds. They climb up a long
ladder to little wooden cabins, pulling up their supplies – a casserole, a bottle of wine and some water, the camping gas and a coffee pot – in baskets after them. They also carry up
some tame pigeons in a wicker basket. The cabin has a makeshift bed with a mattress of dry moss and a rough table
covered with oilcloth. They take turns to scan the sky for the
tiny black dots of the
palombes
approaching from the north.

The tame pigeon, who spends the rest of the year at ease in a makeshift aviary erected next to his owner’s chicken house, is taken out of his carrying basket and installed on a small
wooden see-saw high in the branches. A light string attached to his leg ring stops him flying away. Another string runs from the free end of the see-saw to the hand of the
paloumayre
.

The
palombes
fly so fast that the hunters have only a few seconds to get their attention. Once a flock is spotted, the hunter tweaks the string attached to the see-saw, causing it to
rock, which makes the tame bird flap its wings as it tries to balance on the moving plank. The wild birds, seeing the telltale flapping below them, assume that one of their number has found a good
source of food. Unwarily, they bomb out of the sky – the
palombes
have a lovely tumbling motion in the air – and within range of the hunters’ guns.

Ahetze was a picture postcard as ever, with the sun shin­ing on the terracotta roofs, the ox-blood shutters, the white walls and the double bell tower of the church rising above the crammed
stalls. A small flock of
palombes
was twisting and turning in the sky as we approached, and the shots of the
palombe
hunters echoed over the murmur of the market all morning.

We browsed for a couple of hours, then ate lunch on the tree-shaded terrace of the village restaurant. The dish of the day, of course, was
salmis de palombe
, much appreciated by the
multinational Lovejoys, and by us. The
palombe
is a finer, more delicate meat than a woodpigeon; it’s delicious, especially if simply roasted, but eating one is nowhere near as
thrilling as watching the living birds spiralling through the crisp autumn air.

We lingered over a last coffee and headed back. By then the clouds had rolled in from the mountains, a giant grey duvet with cinnamon uplights at the horizon. I helped Sue
clear up her garden, then we had a last glass of wine while a spectacular sunset took over the whole sky, turning gold, then teal blue, then bronze, then fading to rose before the darkness
fell.

We talked about stray cats and complicated men, and how I felt about going back. I still had a long list of unrealized ambitions in the Béarn. There was still so much I wanted to do, so
many places I wanted to explore, so many events I wanted to witness. Thanks to my injury, I had hardly been able to walk in the mountains at all. Margaret took me for a mercy stroll near the little
village of Laruns for an afternoon, but my ankle wasn’t strong enough for anything ambitious.

There were things I was distinctly looking forward to in London:

That was it.

There were also many things I was dreading in London: the everyday violence and nastiness of the people, the vast ugliness of the city, the chaotic transport, the draining difficulty of
accomplishing even a simple thing, the cynical, ignorant youth and the despised and despairing old, whose ranks I would inevitably join soon.

In London, I had happily passed days inside my house
because outside it I would find nothing but people spitting, swearing, abusing, attacking and exploiting each other. But
a year of tranquillity had made me feel guilty. After all, I was not without talents, or influence. If my country was turning into a sewer, I could do something about it. I could not justify simply
escaping to another country which had taken greater pains to maintain a good quality of life.

Besides, there were things I was not going to miss in France. I was longing to have a simple, casual conversation with someone who dared to think, whose conscience was still in working order and
whose brain had not yet been overpowered by cheap booze. As if to make me feel good about leaving, I was invited to a dinner party from hell.

The table was dominated by a businessman, who suddenly announced that literature was all rubbish and that J. K. Rowling was all washed up and couldn’t finish Harry Potter V. He
didn’t know Rowling, nor had he read any of her books. He didn’t know anyone in publishing and couldn’t remember who had told him the gossip he was passing on with such authority.
He did know that I was an author, but obviously saw this as no reason to speak with caution.