French Lessons (21 page)

“I wonder if you can help me.
I’m looking for the Foire au Boudin.”

He leaned forward in
his seat to study the dripping apparition looking up at him.
“Comment?”

“You know, the sausage fair. The
one with the Grand Mangeur.”

He pushed his cap back, leaving a
smear of mud on his forehead. The corners of his mouth went down; his shoulders
came up—every Frenchman’s way of telling you he doesn’t know
and doesn’t particularly care.

I felt the beginnings of panic.
“This
is
Monthureux, isn’t it?”

He nodded.
“One of them.”

“There are more?”

“This is Monthureux-sur-Saône. There is also
Monthureux-le-Sec.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“It’s a long way, over near Vittel. For all I know, there may be
others.” He nodded again, adjusted his cap, put the tractor into gear,
and chugged off to resume his communion with the horizon.

By now, the
Grand Mangeur, wherever he might be, would be loosening up with a few
chipolatas
before moving on to the main challenge. I stood, moist and
muddy, watching the tractor disappear into the murk. I had blown it. The
expedition had been a disaster, but I was too wet to worry about it. They say
that missed pleasures only heighten the anticipation of pleasures to come, but
all I wanted was to get back to Dijon and into a dry pair of socks.

A Civilized Purge

It is astonishing how many experts there seem to be
nowadays whose mission in life is to lecture us about the perils of pleasure.
Scarcely a week goes by without some ominous pronouncement about the price we
must pay for our brief moments of indulgence. Even moderation, which used to be
an acceptable excuse for the beef on your plate or the wine in your glass, is
no longer good enough. If we are to believe some of the more extreme disciples
of clean living, the only sure salvation for the human body is almost complete
denial—no red meat, no butter, no cheese, no fat of any kind, no alcohol,
no sugar, no tobacco, no direct sunlight.

I’m a sitting target
for the health vigilantes, since three of my favorite sins are wine, a certain
amount of fat in the diet, and lying in the sun. These are the habits of a man
whose days are clearly numbered. I have this on the authority of our friend
Odile, the harbinger of gloom. Strangely enough, I like Odile. She is a
good-looking, charming woman, splendid in every respect, except for her
well-meaning but infuriating attempts to save me from my wicked ways. She
appointed herself some years ago as my gastronomic conscience, and there was
even a time when she urged me to follow her example. Here, I have to say, she
practices what she preaches. She leads a life of shining intestinal virtue:
water by the bucketful, herbal infusions, biologically active yogurt, brown
rice, soy milk, shoots and sprouts, one naughty glass of red wine a week,
frequent days of fasting. It is a regime that suits her. For some extraordinary
reason, she thinks it would suit me as well, if only I would give it a
try.

When I started to work on this book, her murmurs of concern about
my dreadful habits turned into cries of alarm. To go around France eating and
drinking and, no doubt, carousing? Madness! Suicide by knife and fork! I tried
to explain to Odile that it was research, no more than a professional
necessity, but she wasn’t fooled. She preferred to see it as an
invitation to wretched excess: a surfeit of food, a torrent of alcohol, a death
knell for the liver. There was only one hope for me, she said, and that was to
end my research—if indeed I survived—with a period of exile in a
spa, where a thorough cleansing of my internal workings could be carried out
under professional, medically approved conditions. I would eat sparingly. I
would turn my back on the grape. I would flush my toxins out with water. With
luck, I would be saved.

The idea wasn’t appealing. I had never
been to a spa before, but, in my ignorance, I was sure I knew what to expect:
expensive suffering. I anticipated a diet of roots and berries and bean curd,
strange leafy drinks, high colonics, savage bouts of exercise under the
supervision of perfectly formed, tireless human robots—in other words,
the boot camp system, based on the premise that the treatment can’t be
doing you any good unless it is humiliating, foul-tasting, and painful. I
foresaw starvation, sweat, guilt, and discomfort in equal doses, and, at the
end of it all, a bill to curdle your newly purified blood. A truly hellish
prospect, and I was determined to have nothing to do with it.

But I had
reckoned without my wife. She has an admirably open mind about health and
nutrition, and she is quite happy to experiment with anything from ginseng root
to royal jelly and tofu tips. She liked the idea of a few days in a spa. She
thought it would certainly be good for us and might even be enjoyable.
“Don’t forget,” she said, “it would be a French spa.
And you know what the French are like.”

Yes indeed—a people
hardly noted for holding back when it comes to food and drink, or famous for
their love of exercise. On the other hand, they have a deep fondness for
luxe et volupté,
for coddling themselves inside and out. The
Anglo-Saxon idea of the boot camp route to health is alien to them, and it
would send them rushing in the opposite direction, probably to dive into a
five-course meal. For a spa to succeed in France, it would have to cater to
French tastes and appetites, and therefore even I would find it quite
acceptable. So ran the argument. Eventually, I was convinced. Now all we had to
do was find the spa with the best chef.

I have no doubt there are good
chefs working in spas throughout France, but the godfather of them all is
Michel Guérard, one of the first modern celebrity cooks. He became a
household name in France more than twenty years ago when he invented
cuisine minceur.
This was based on the thought—revolutionary in
those days, and not all that common even now—that a regime could actually
be pleasant. You should be able to eat real food, drink a little wine, refresh
your system, and take some pleasure from the normally dreary process of inner
cleansing and weight loss.

The test of Guérard’s
delightful theory, obviously, was how this magical diet tasted. Was
cuisine
minceur
really delicious? And was there enough of it, or did you leave the
table sucking your napkin, with your stomach growling for
steak-frites
? The answers to these questions have clearly been
favorable, because Guérard and his cuisine have prospered enormously
over the years. His establishment at Eugénie les Bains, about a two-hour
drive south of Bordeaux, is one of the best-known spas in Europe, and the
restaurant is one of only twenty-two in France to have been awarded three
Michelin stars.

I kept that thought in mind as we were driving through
the pine forests toward Eugénie, ready to be cosseted and restored to
perfect health. I had spent a grueling year with knife, fork, and corkscrew,
and to be put on a diet by a three-star chef would be a fitting end to my
research. The sun was shining, anticipation was doing wonders for my appetite,
and the only small cloud on the horizon was the realization that we were going
to be late for lunch. So late, in fact, that lunch was probably out of the
question.

And so it would have been, I believe, in most hotels or
restaurants (even in France, where there is an instinctive sympathy for the
empty belly). But within minutes of checking in, well past lunchtime, we were
sitting on the terrace outside our room, where a table had been smothered in
white linen, decorated with fresh flowers, and equipped with all the essentials
for a comfortable afternoon: an ice bucket with a bottle of chilled white
Bordeaux, generous servings of foie gras, a plate of local cheeses, salad, and
a large bowl of raspberries on a bed of chopped strawberries. At a stroke, I
felt my misgivings about spas begin to melt away. Perhaps I’d been a
little hasty in my rush to judgment. This was certainly no hardship.

Our program of treatments—
la
cur
e—
didn’t begin until the following morning, and
so, once the foie gras had settled, we had a chance to inspect our
surroundings. We were staying in a building tucked away in the hotel grounds, a
restored eighteenth-century convent, built in the shape of an E around a
charming garden and a tiny fountain. In our room, there were exposed beams,
polished flagstones, Oriental rugs, a large canopied bed, and—most
unusual in France—a vast bathroom with a powerful shower and a tub easily
big enough for two. There were tulips and roses. There were linen sheets as
crisp and smooth as new five-hundred-franc notes. There was, just a short
stroll away, the kitchen of one of the most eminent cooks in the world. The
whole place oozed with
luxe et volupté,
and I had some
difficulty persuading my wife to venture outdoors so that we could take a look
at the rest of the spa.

The main building is a sweeping, elegant affair
and contains other guest apartments, the kitchens, and the restaurant. There
are none of the obvious signs or smells of a health resort—no
insufferably perky instructors with clipboards and stopwatches and paramedical
uniforms, no panting guests in workout clothes, none of the antiseptic,
self-righteous whiff I had always associated with premises dedicated to
physical improvement.

It wasn’t until we walked across the
gardens to
la ferme thermale
that there was any intimation of spa
life, and even this was presented with considerable restraint and style.
Outside, the building looked like a classic eighteenth-century wood-framed
farmhouse; inside, beams and plaster gave way to marble and tiles and more than
three thousand square feet of assorted aids to feeling immortal—or at
least feeling a little thinner, cleaner, and more relaxed.

Young ladies
in white were gliding in and out of various treatment rooms with their clients,
some of whom looked rather apprehensive in their linen robes, as though they
feared that public nudity was just around the corner. Other clients were
fortifying themselves between treatments with aromatic teas in front of a huge
fireplace in the main salon. Logs crackled discreetly in the hearth. Otherwise,
the atmosphere was serene, with not even the muted rumble of a
minceur
stomach to disturb the calm. The next day, it would be our turn to plunge into
the herbal Jacuzzi, the
hamm
m
room, the mud bath, and the needle water massage. Meanwhile, we had what
remained of the afternoon to explore the village.

At last count, there
were 507 inhabitants of Eugénie les Bains, and I suspect that a high
proportion of them work in one way or another to attend to the well-being of
visitors in search of internal improvement. This has officially been a healthy
spot since 1843, when a license was granted to exploit the waters. And there
the village might have remained, little known and hidden away, except for two
events that made it famous.

The first was in 1861, when the senior
members of the commune decided that a little royal assistance would do wonders
for the reputation of the local liquids. History doesn’t relate exactly
how the mayor pulled it off, but he managed to persuade the Empress
Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III, to give not only her patronage but
her name to the village. Overnight, the water was promoted from an everyday
tipple to a noble elixir, suitable for the most aristocratic digestive
systems.

And then, in 1975, Michel Guérard arrived. He had
married a local girl, Christine Barthélémy, whose father owned
the Etablissement Thermal. There was plenty of room for a kitchen. There was
also an opportunity to provide food that complemented the water
cure—something light, something healthy—something, in other words,
like
cuisine minceur.

Today, Eugénie calls itself
France’s premier
minceur
village. It has also been called
“Guérardville,” because the maestro’s influence is
everywhere. There is the main hotel, the annex where we were staying, the
thermal farm, a second, smaller hotel, another restaurant, a local vineyard. It
is a small industry built on a paradox: eat, drink, and lose weight.