French Lessons (23 page)

Over the next three days—which consisted of treatments
and consistently superb food and an increasing sense of having left real life
somewhere else—I was conscious of a change in my disposition. As a rule,
I am terrible at vacations. I run out of books and boredom sets in, and then
some faint, nagging echo of my Anglo-Saxon conscience tells me that I should be
doing something useful, or at least active. But here, my daily responsibilities
were limited to turning up on time at the thermal farm and raising an eager
knife and fork twice a day in the restaurant. I was doing absolutely nothing
and enjoying it, something that had never happened to me before. Perhaps it was
the mud baths and the attentions of all those young ladies in white. Or maybe
it was the total absence of any pressure to take part in conventional
exertions. Tennis, swimming, cycling, hiking—these were all available,
but we happily ignored them, quite content to be idle. And that, I suppose, is
the great benefit of a civilized spa.

As if the
rigors of everyday life at Eugénie were too much to bear without a
period of recovery, the Guérards decided not long ago to open a rest
camp by the sea. Their new outpost, the Domaine de Huchet, is on the Atlantic
coast, about an hour and a half from the spa. It overlooks the longest beach in
Europe—a wide, unbroken ribbon of smooth, clean sand that extends all the
way from Arcachon in the north down to Biarritz. And there at Huchet, we were
promised three days of sea air and
farniente,
or lazing around, after
our exhausting time dashing in and out of mud baths and needle showers.

Despite the map and the detailed instructions we’d been given, we
were convinced we were lost as we turned off a road and on to a rutted earth
track that disappeared into a dense pine forest. The ruts became deeper, the
tunnel of trees closed in, and if the track had been wide enough, we would have
turned the car around. We must have made a mistake, we thought. This
wasn’t the middle of nowhere; it was the end of nowhere. But we pressed
on, and after a mile or so, the trees thinned out and the sky reappeared. And
there, perched on a dune, we could see a vast wooden house, immaculately
painted in shades of sand and deep, faded red, a model of colonial
architecture—low and square, with long verandas on two sides. In the area
of flatland in front of the house were two other low buildings the color of
driftwood, each with a tiny fenced garden. A pathway made from slatted wood led
through the dunes to the ocean, and we could hear the thump of surf as we got
out of the car.

There was a welcoming committee of two. Martine and
Max, the young couple in charge of Huchet, showed us around while explaining
how we were going to keep body and soul together over the next three days.
Every morning,
un petit déjeuner copieux
would be served in the
dining room up until 11:00 a.m. Martine assured us that it would be more than
enough to keep us going until 5:00 p.m., when there would be tea. Dinner at
7:30, courtesy of Max. “It’s not
minceur,
” he said,
“but it’s healthy. I do a lot of grilling.” He pointed to his
barbecue outside the kitchen door, an iron contraption that looked like the
wheelbarrows used in the vineyards of Provence for burning clippings. That
night’s choice was either sea bass or breast of duck, with cream of
potato and leek soup or foie gras to start and two desserts to finish. We
thought we could forgive Max for not being a
minceur
cook.

We
spent the afternoon exploring. The main house, which had been built in 1859 by
a Bordelais baron as a hunting lodge, looked as though it had just been
prepared for a photographer from
Interiors
or
Côté
Su
d—
an elegant series of rooms with four-poster beds,
unfussy antique furniture, wood-burning fireplaces and stoves, and wide-plank
floors of honey-colored wood. It looked beautiful without being precious, and
it gave you the feeling that you could actually live in it, which is not always
the case with photogenic houses.

Outside, we followed the wooden
pathway down to the Atlantic. We shared the beach with a solitary fisherman,
thigh-deep in the foam, casting for bass. Otherwise, we had no company apart
from seagulls. We could have walked a hundred kilometers in either direction
and still been walking on sand. We could have swam westward toward America. Or,
after a brisk half hour, we could have gone back to sit on the veranda, had
tea, and watched the sun slide slowly down before dipping into the horizon. Not
a difficult decision.

We had seen no other guests so far. Huchet can
only take about half a dozen, and it wasn’t until we went into the dining
room for dinner that we met the only other couple staying there. We
congratulated one another on our good luck at finding what they called
“paradis-sur-mer,”
then sat down with a drink at our table
in front of the fire. Like the rest of the house, the dining room was a study
in comfortable good taste: a floor of putty-colored flagstones, a ceiling with
whitewashed beams, the glow of candlelight on crystal glasses, linen tablecloth
and napkins, bone china. The attention to detail was an example to any
restaurant, let alone a tiny dining room hidden away behind God’s
back.

Looking through the glass door that opened onto a terrace, we
could see Max hovering over his wheelbarrow barbecue with two long-handled
forks, looking like a xylophone player in a chef’s hat. Martine put
another log on the fire, refilled our glasses, and opened the bottle of wine we
were having with dinner. All was well with the world.

Max showed
himself to be worthy of his hat, and a virtuoso on the barbecue. The breast of
duck, a fan of pink slices on the plate, tasted of the outdoors: gamy, juicy,
tender—everything my efforts on the barbecue aspire to but never achieve.
Maybe I should use aged wood and pine needles instead of charcoal. Maybe I
should invest in a tall white hat. Or maybe I should spend years in
Guérard’s kitchens trying to learn what Max learned. He cooks all
you eat at Huchet, from soups and flans to desserts and the pound cake served
with afternoon tea. My wife wanted to take him home with us.

Dinner
ended with cheese from the Pyrénées, followed by coffee and the
favorite local sedative, a generous shot of Armagnac. This has been accurately
described as brandy with a rustic character. It has a taste of caramel and a
kick like a mule with a velvet hoof, and its immediate effect is eight hours of
innocent slumber.

I was woken up by two seagulls having an argument
outside the window, and I remembered that today we were planning to walk at
least part of the way to Biarritz before attempting
le brunch.
The
dunes were coated in the cotton wool of an early-morning sea mist as we went
down the path, a mist that muffled the surf the way a snowfall deadens the
sounds of the countryside. A fisherman—perhaps the same optimist we had
seen the day before—stood with his hands on his hips and the butt of his
rod stuck in the sand, gazing intently at the waves, as though sea bass could
be enticed out of the water by hypnosis.

We left the beach to follow a
track through the tufts of sea grass and into the dunes, carpeted as far as the
eye could see with low-lying green scrub. There were no buildings, no telephone
poles, no jarring signs of human interference, and we were reminded how easy it
is in France (which has the same population as Britain, and three times the
landmass) to find great tracts of land where there is nothing but nature.

An hour’s march later, the view was still the same green carpet,
rolling down toward the Pyrénées. The sun had burned through the
mist, and our calf muscles were beginning to ache from trudging through loose
sand. We decided that Biarritz could wait. We had earned our breakfast.

Unlike the British and the Americans, who traditionally see their first
meal of the day as a chance to top up their cholesterol levels, the French
habitually do little more than nibble. Instead of eggs, bacon, sausage, beans,
waffles, and buttered toast, the Frenchman tends to confine himself to the
three C’s—coffee, croissants, and cigarettes—conscious of the
fact that he needs to be on form for lunch. (There is a theory that this is a
poor start to the day, and that insufficient nutrition makes him bad-tempered
until noon, but in my experience, this applies only to café waiters and
cabdrivers.)

Breakfast at Huchet was, as Martine had promised,
copieux:
baked apples and yogurt, eggs however we wanted them, plates
of Bayonne ham and cheese, thick slices of grilled country bread, homemade jams
from the kitchens at Eugénie, and two warm silver-wrapped packages the
size of small loaves—the mother and father of all croissants, a good
eight inches from nose to tail, plump, light, and buttery. No chewing required.
They melted.

We rose to the challenge, then walked it off during the
afternoon. And that was the pattern of our days at Huchet—sea air,
glorious food,
farniente.
It had been a memorably pampered, well-fed
week.

The morning after we got home, Odile called,
curious to know if I had now been converted to the low-fat life.

“
Alors?
How was it? How do you feel?”

“Never felt better, Odile. Like a young sprig of eighteen. It was
marvelous.”

“Did you lose weight?”

“I
never weighed myself. But I’m relaxed, clear-eyed, bursting with health,
ready for anything. And we never really felt hungry.”

“Ah,
you see? It is just as I keep telling you. You have more sensible food, you cut
out the wine, and, voilà, you are a new man. Tell me, what did you
eat?”

“Duck, lamb, guinea fowl, pâté, cheese,
butter, eggs, a little foie gras, potato soup,
huge
croissants for
breakfast …”

Silence on the other end of the
line.

“And there were some very nice little wines, too. And
Armagnac. You should try it sometime. Do you the world of good.”

Odile laughed. “
Toujours l’humour anglais.
But
seriously …”

Ah well. Sometimes, there’s
nothing as hard to swallow as the truth.

The Guided Stomach

Advice to the motorist in search of a room for the
night:

Stop at the door of the hotel, and instruct the porter to
leave your bags in the car. Make sure you discuss personally with the hotel
proprietor the matter of his prices. If you judge them to be fair, but before
committing yourself, demand to see the room he wants to give you. It is in his
interest to fill his worst rooms first. If you are not convinced by the famous
phrase “We don’t have anything else! We’re completely
full!” return to your car and make as if to go elsewhere. Nine times out
of ten, at this precise moment, the hotel proprietor, smiting his forehead with
his hand, will find quite by chance an excellent room that was vacated just an
hour ago, and which he has completely overlooked.…

A new
century was dawning. Paris was preparing for the world’s fair, some cars
had attained dizzying speeds well in excess of ten miles per hour, hotel owners
were notorious for their dramatic habit of smiting their foreheads with their
hands, and it was recommended that the comfort-conscious traveler check his
room for fleas before settling down for the night. It was 1900, the year of the
first Michelin guide to France, from which the extract above is taken.

It is a pocket-sized volume, this first edition, of just under four hundred
tightly set, busy-looking pages, and it was given away to owners of
voitures, voiturettes,
and even
vélocipèdes
by
the brothers Michelin. They had created the removable pneumatic tire in 1891,
and the guide was their way of encouraging motorists to wear out as much rubber
as possible by extending their travels throughout France.

Car
manufacturers, most of them long since gone, were permitted in those days to
advertise in the pages of the guide, and we find the Rochet & Schneider
two-seater—
“robuste, simple, confortable,
élégant, silencieux
”—
sharing space with
the larger Schaudel, shown fully equipped with four men in peaked hats gazing
out sternly over the facial topiary of their mustaches. One of the few
advertisers whose name we would recognize today is Peugeot, although a hundred
years ago, the Peugeot specialty was not the car but the folding bicycle,
constructed in accordance with
“Le système du Capitaine
Gérard,”
a pioneer in the field of bicycle folding.

Nearly sixty of the opening pages in that first guide were devoted to
explaining the marvels of the pneumatic tire: its cushioned ride, its valves
and grommets, its optimum levels of inflation, its care and repair. Other
technical information took up more than a hundred pages at the back. In the
middle was the filling in the sandwich, a listing of cities, towns, and
villages, arranged in alphabetical order from Abbeville to Yvetot.