Au Revoir (13 page)

Although many of the bastide towns were destroyed during the turmoil of the fourteenth century, some survive to this day in
remarkably good condition. Villefranche was founded in 1261 and was one of the English-built bastides. It has fortunately remained less sought after by tourists so it has retained its character—no rows of shops selling tourist trinkets, indeed quite a few of the shops are empty which makes it quiet midweek and in the off season. One exception is the period during autumn when the cèpe (mushroom) season is at its peak.

Villefranche is a focal town for buying and selling cepes and the Saturday market goes mad with people bargaining for these strange-looking but delicious mushrooms gathered in the nearby chestnut and oak woods.

The large, open square has a covered market hall which still has the fixed, swinging metal containers that were once used to measure wheat, corn and other grains. There are four parallel streets running away from the square, barely wide enough for a horse and cart or a car. The cross streets are very narrow indeed, some barely wide enough for a person to walk through. This street and laneway layout was also part of the bastide plan, to eliminate escape routes for marauders on horseback who would be forced to use the wide streets with no way of disappearing down a back alley. The main street has been made one-way and has no footpaths to speak of, but visitors park down one side, against the wall, and the largest of delivery vans and tourist camper vans squeeze between the parked cars and the opposite wall. Side mirrors take quite a battering and as a shopper on foot I feel no more at ease from impending danger than the original villagers. I really have to have my wits about me, listening for cars coming up behind and learning to jump out of the way quickly; heaven knows how more toddlers don't come to grief on the main street. The locals, however, don't even seem in the slightest
bit perturbed by the perilous pedestrian conditions. Perhaps they have an inbuilt faith that the cars and trucks will stop before hitting them. I simply can't feel so relaxed about it.

The cool, shady archways fronting the Hotel du Commerce would have originally housed shops and market stalls. There is now a bar and a good restaurant, with comfortably furnished rooms upstairs that have been recently renovated. The Commerce quickly becomes my local watering hole, and I wander in at lunchtime or in the evening for a beer. Within a week of my arrival the barmaid greets me with a wide smile and pours my draught beer without being asked. There is another bar, dark and small, where the locals tend to drink more but I never feel quite as much at home when I venture in there; often a card game, with attendant shouting and gesticulating, is in progress and non-regulars tend to be ignored.

There is a small supermarket in the main street run by a very friendly and helpful young couple, an alimentation and a gourmet deli with prepared dishes such as quiche and couscous as well as superior cheeses and wines. On Saturday and Sunday the owner of the deli seductively positions a huge hotplate in the street outside the front door, cooking either paella piled high with saffron rice and prawns, or a mixed dish of sautéed chicken, herbs and potatoes. The aromas that fill the entire street make passing by without buying very difficult indeed.

The charcuterie in the main street is run by a slender, elegant man named Claude who wears an immaculate floor-length white apron over his butcher's pants. He makes a theatrical production out of serving each and every customer—even small orders like mine—and presenting and wrapping everything beautifully. In France shopping for food is an art form, and housewives prize
themselves on thrift and getting good value for money. I am told various anecdotes, including one about a canny woman who points to a joint of meat and asks for its bone, which is virtually given away at no cost. She then asks for the fat from the same joint for rendering down, also sold extremely cheaply. Finally, she decides to buy the meat itself, now much lighter, having been stripped of the weighty bone and outer fat layer, and therefore less expensive. There is also a legendary tale about a woman who visits the same butcher every morning just before lunch when the charcuterie is always crowded with last-minute shoppers. She never has more than just a few centimes tucked in her apron pocket, and ritually begins by denigrating everything in the window display: the lamb looks tough, the pork is too fatty for her taste, and the veal certainly couldn't be fresh. It is her way of saving face, because in the end she buys what she always intended and could afford in the first place—a length of cheap and fatty Toulouse sausage. One day the butcher can take her whingeing and complaining in front of his other customers no longer. As she moves through her diatribe against his display cabinet he suddenly whips a large cleaver from behind his apron, plunges his hand into his groin, and pulls out a grotesque and phallic length of sausage which he seemingly severs from his body in one sharp movement. Horrified, she shrieks and runs from the shop, never to return, patronising the small charcuterie on the square from that day onwards.

I quickly make myself known to the baker, whose wife cheerfully cuts me a half baguette; French bread is wonderful when fresh but becomes stale within twelve hours and leftovers are wasted unless you have a machine that will grate them finely for breadcrumbs. Traditionally, stale bread is used as the filling basis
of a rustic garlicky soup and some cooks also use old bread to thicken stocks and stews; otherwise it ends up being fed to the chickens.

Village life is slow and measured. Much of the culture and conversation revolves around food—what's in season, what's worth buying at the market and how it should or could be cooked. Lunch is the most important meal of the day, and it's a time when I love to wander up and down the back streets where the shutters and windows have been thrown open against the summer heat, just so that I can absorb the mingled aromas of a hot lunch being prepared and listen to the sounds of knives and forks clattering against plates and wine glasses being clinked. A cynical friend asks if during my midday rambles I also hear the sound of soap operas blaring from television sets, implying that the villagers now watch television while they eat lunch. But I can only hear the convivial sounds of conversation and laughter, and smell aromas like pommes frites being sautéed.

Most of the permanent village residents appear to be older people, women in particular, who wear blue coverall aprons like a uniform over their day clothes as they go about the morning shopping and cleaning chores. They lovingly tend their pots and tubs of geraniums and begonias; there isn't exactly a competition to create the most splendid display, but there's certainly a great sense of pride in maintaining these lush gardens on narrow balconies and against the front wall of each house. The pots are watered daily, spent blooms are routinely deadheaded, and the area around each display swept spotlessly clean.

The women shop carrying straw baskets and talk together in the street in small huddles, always greeting me with a warm smile and a ‘Bonjour Madame' as I also do my morning shopping.
Some engage me in polite conversation about the weather, which I find most encouraging for my faulty French language skills. They have a curious way of saying, ‘It's not hot' when it's cold and, ‘It's not cold' when it's hot, which causes me some temporary confusion as the words hot and cold are my lifeline in any conversation about the weather. Within weeks I am copying their quirky turn of phrase. During hot summer afternoons and evenings the women also tend to sit outside on their front steps in small groups, to chat and watch the passing parade. Sometimes they sit there for hours—I see them when I am sauntering to the Commerce for a beer, and they are still there when I am going home. Again, they always give me a cheerful greeting or a wave. I have managed to communicate that I am living in the village for two months, and I am locally known as ‘the Australian woman'. I begin to feel very much at home.

Most of the houses in the village have exposed creamy stone facades, but they didn't always look like this. Thirty years ago if you had visited Villefranche-du-Périgord it would have seemed grey and drab because the fashion for rendering the stone with ‘crépi' earlier in the nineteenth century meant that virtually every building looked the same. Over time this grey concrete render ages to a dirty and depressing shade, and it was only as the English started buying up old houses and restoring them to their former glory that the crépi started to disappear from the scene. Fortunately most of the older style windows and doors have been retained, except in a few instances where modern prefab windows and metal shutters have replaced the old timber. Now, however, Villefranche is protected from modernisation because of its bastide heritage, and it is illegal to make ‘improvements' that spoil the ancient appearance of the buildings. Some
of the older towns and villages even have their electricity cables running underground so that no poles or wires detract from the mediaeval atmosphere, and television aerials and satellite dishes are by law positioned where they cannot be seen from the street. In Villefranche, however, the dishes that allow people to watch several hundred European television stations are visible everywhere, and there are other modern conveniences like ‘hole in the wall' banking and phone boxes that can be used for international calls.

At one end of the village is the old cemetery, surrounded by a high stone retaining wall that fronts the main road on one side. There don't seem to be any really old individual gravestones, as families customarily have a crypt where all the generations are buried together. Some of these family crypts are quite elaborate, taking the form of a small house, with a roof and steps, but most are simple stone structures covered with elaborate china memorial plaques. The family name is at the back of the crypt, and the individual memorial plaques are added after each funeral; some are brightly coloured china pansies with inscriptions. But there are no dates so it's impossible to tell when individuals have died. I am told a story about a violent storm several years back, which flooded the town and caused one side of the cemetery retaining wall to collapse into the main street during the night. In the morning the villagers were horrified to discover that a recent grave had cascaded open, with the coffin rolling out leaving the body exposed. The worst part was that instead of being clad in his best suit, as is the custom, the deceased was roughly wrapped in an old sheet. His widow evidently kept the suit and sold it, and it was many months before the poor woman was brave enough to show her face in the main
street again. It proved to me that even in these sophisticated times of satellite television connection and electronic banking, many of the old customs die hard. So to speak.

There are quite a few retired English couples living in Villefranche, and there seems to be a general tolerance of such invaders. Indeed, this part of France is renowned for its racial tolerance, which I suspect must be the result of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years of having to adapt to invaders of one sort or another. The only groups who appear to be universally disliked are the Germans—many of the locals endured German occupation during the Second World War—and Dutch tourists who are considered very parsimonious. Apparently, Dutch visitors come in campervans and bring all their own food and wine, contributing nothing to the local economy. Even if they rent gites they do all their own cooking without shopping at the markets or dining in the cafés; in some villages where a dozen or more Dutch families are holidaying, a huge truck comes across from Holland selling food and beer. It is greatly frowned upon.

The Parisians are also generally disliked for their arrogance, whereas the British, if they are friendly and attempt to assimilate by learning the language, are much more warmly welcomed. My favourite local story involves two such Parisians, a couple of gay men who arrived several years ago to open a small antique shop in the main street and to live in a cottage on the outskirts of the town. Within a few months they managed to alienate their neighbour—a well-loved farmer—by complaining bitterly about his rooster which woke them up far too early in the morning for their Parisian tastes. When the farmer refused to silence his bird, the couple took their complaints further, initially to the local
gendarmerie then to the Palace of Justice in Bordeaux. With a good lawyer on their side they won the case, however the court awarded a fine of only 10 ff against the farmer to symbolise its disgust at the proceedings. The next weekend the farmers and villagers banded together and staged a protest street parade of children and animals. Cows and chickens, goats and horses, ducks, geese and sheep all paraded down the main street to the beat of drums and the clanging of cymbals, passing slowly and ceremoniously in front of the antique shop. The children wore T-shirts printed with the slogan, ‘Ne touche pas à mon coq', which loosely translates as ‘Hands off my rooster', and at the end of the parade they gathered in the ancient village square where a jaunty local band had been hired to play music. There was much singing, dancing and general merriment while the Parisian antique dealers peered out nervously from behind their shutters. The story was well covered in the local media and even made it to the evening news in Paris—the ultimate humiliation. Surprisingly, four years later they are still living in Villefranche, though keeping a much lower profile and never complaining publicly about a thing.

There is a strong feeling of community within the township, with everyone throwing their full support behind events like village fêtes and repas (feasts), brocantes (antique fairs) and fundraising evenings organised for the football club or the Pompiers, which is a group of civilian volunteers who perform vital services such as firefighting, ambulance and rescue operations. In my first week there is a village meal organised to raise money for the football team, and Jock comes over to join in. The poster bills it as a ‘Paella Géant' which indeed it is—a paella pan about four metres across that starts being prepared about
midday for serving at 9 pm. The smell of garlic, saffron and seafood fills the entire square, and tables are set out in the hall for several hundred people. For 100 ff ($25) patrons get a five-course meal: a rich soup of garlic and bread; a rough country pâté with fresh bread; the paella piled with prawns, chicken and spicy sausage; followed by cheese, then glazed apple tart. The red wine is compris (included in the price) and as each bottle is finished another appears as if by magic. There is coffee and the local pear liqueur, eau de vie, which is about as potent as any alcohol I've ever tasted. Strictly speaking distilling liquor is highly illegal, but it is such a strong tradition in these parts that nobody dares enforce it. Eau de vie can be made from any fruit that can be fermented but plum, pear and apple are the most popular. I remember this stuff from my birthday lunch: one tiny glass of this firewater is more than enough.