French Lessons (22 page)

The light was fading as we sat outside the café on
Eugénie’s main street. A small and friendly place, it acts as an
occasional refuge for those in need of a brief escape from the cure. Three
people whom we had seen in the thermal spa had come into the café from
the direction of the
boulangerie
a hundred yards away. They were
nursing small paper bags. They looked around with furtive, sideways
glances—the very essence of guilt—before ordering large cups of hot
chocolate. With a final check to make sure there were no
minceur
officials watching, they unwrapped their tarts and almond biscuits and slices
of cream cake, took that first rich, melting mouthful, raised their eyes in
ecstasy, and sighed. Anyone would think they’d had nothing but nut
cutlets for weeks. Would this be us in the days to come?

Suddenly
hungry, we looked at each other and reviewed our options for dinner. In the
hotel dining room, there was a choice between
cuisine minceur
(for the
serious seekers after weight loss) or the longer and more robust
menu
gourmand
(for writers doing research). Or there was Guérard’s
country restaurant, La Ferme aux Grives, a two-minute stroll from the hotel. We
had already looked at the menu posted outside. It listed delights that we were
sure would be frowned upon the next day. And then, we easily persuaded
ourselves, was soon enough to start on the road to restraint.

The
restaurant, in what was once a farmhouse, had the feeling of an enormous
kitchen. At one end of the room, a long butcher’s table was piled with a
landscape of fresh vegetables—peppers, leeks, tomatoes, white aubergines,
and crinkly deep green cabbages. Behind the vegetable panorama was a
ten-foot-wide fireplace, where legs of lamb twisted slowly on a spit, their
juices hissing as the drops fell on the fire, giving off the nostalgic scent of
wood-roasted meat. We could hear above the ebb and flow of conversation the
gentle creak and muffled pop of corks being eased out of bottles.

It
was an ideal setting for our last supper, and the food lived up to the
surroundings. We ate grilled leeks wrapped in a tissue of pink Bayonne ham, a
perfectly grilled chicken with a crisp skin the color of old gold, and—a
final treat before the thin days to come—the pick of the cheese board.
Let the following day bring what it might. At least we would meet it with
contented stomachs.

Before going to the thermal farm
the next morning, I read through a different kind of menu, one that listed all
the treatments offered, from rejuvenating baths to a variety of massages
tailored to different body parts. For the most beneficial results, according to
the instructions, it was recommended that these activities should be performed
entièrement nu,
or naked, as nature intended. I thought nothing
of it at the time, but it came back to me a little later when we had changed
into our linen robes and were waiting in the reception area for battle to
commence. Looking around, I noticed a distinct imbalance in the sexes. There
was not a single man on the spa staff. They were all young
ladies—attractive, slim, and amiable young ladies—and I was to
deliver my body into their hands. I instinctively stood up straight and
inhaled, hoping to disguise the effects of dinner the night before.

But there was nothing else to be done except lie back and enjoy whatever
the young ladies had in mind, and as it happened, the first two or three
treatments were carried out with a regard for modesty that would have made
Queen Victoria nod with approval. I was taken to the doors of various rooms,
told what to do and what to expect, and left alone with my nudity. The program
was so well organized and discreet, so private, that I might have been the only
client in the spa.

I sweated in solitude, enveloped in the steam clouds
of the
hamm
m
. I lay on a slab of
heated marble for an overall herbal rinse—excellent for cellulite, so I
was told—before moving on to a miniature swimming pool, where I was
pummeled from neck to ankle by jets of thermal water. My cricks disappeared, my
joints were eased, and my muscles became elastic. By the time I met my wife in
the main salon, halfway through the morning, I was so relaxed, I was having
difficulty keeping my eyes open, and I nearly dropped off in the armchair while
drinking a warm herbal
tisane.

This mixture, tasting
pleasantly of lemons and seemingly quite innocuous, is part of the inner
purging process.
“Buvez et éliminez”
is the
spa’s motto, and they’re not joking. In my case, the liquid had an
almost instant eliminating effect on the bladder. It was a reaction that I
learned to anticipate over the next few days, making sure I never drank any of
these
tisanes
unless there was a bathroom within fifty yards. I even
caught myself keeping an eye open on the way to and from our room for
convenient clumps of shrubbery in case the great eliminator struck again.

After our first dose of this rather dramatic pick-me-up, it was time for my
wife and me to share the next treatment. We were taken to a room with a sunken
bath, big enough for half a dozen people, which was filled with a thick, opaque
liquid. It was mud, but thermal mud, mud of great refinement, mud
de
luxe,
somewhere in color between off-white and the palest green. I had
always thought of mud baths as barely one step up from the swamp—lumpy,
gaseous, and noisome, bubbling with smells of rot. But this was as smooth as
oil, inoffensive to the nose, and astonishingly buoyant.

We found that
after a few minutes of experimental wallowing, we could float in a sitting
position, knees drawn up, arms spread out for balance, while the mud went to
work. And what therapeutic mud it was, according to the young lady in
charge—wonderful for rheumatism, excellent for stress, and a godsend for
anyone suffering from that popular malady the French describe so delicately as
“les problèmes de transit intestinal.”
On top of
all that, it was an extraordinarily pleasant sensation, as though we had
immersed ourselves in warm cream. We could happily have spent the rest of the
morning bobbing around in it, half-standing, half-floating, slippery and
weightless, giving not a thought to problems of
transit
intestinal.

After a shower, we went our separate ways: my wife to
the heated marble slab, while I was led off by one of the young ladies in white
to a large glass box. And there I stood,
entièrement nu,
as she
had instructed, spread-eagle against the glass wall, with my back to her. I
looked over my shoulder with what I hoped was a nonchalant expression and asked
the young lady, who was standing outside the box, what was going on. She smiled
sweetly and adjusted the nozzle of a hose before aiming it at me through a hole
in the glass.

“This is very good for toning the body and for
drainage,
” she said. “First, I do your back part. When I
tap on the wall, you turn sideways so that I can do your side part.”

I was still wondering whether my
drainage
was that obvious a
problem, when she let rip. For those of you who have never had a concentrated
high-pressure massage, I can tell you that it is just this side of pain—a
million liquid needles going up and down your body, from the calves to the base
of the skull. In fact, it felt terrific, but I was glad I wasn’t facing
the other way.

After a few bracing minutes, there was a tap on the
glass wall. I turned sideways. One hip, half a set of ribs, and a shoulder were
made to tingle. Then another tap, so that the other side could be dealt with. I
felt as rosy as a freshly cooked ham.

The jet stopped. I was just about
to thank the young lady for a uniquely stimulating experience, when she tapped
again. “Now I do your front part,” she said.

The full
monty.

It is a most curious feeling to stand naked, poised to flinch,
facing a young woman you have only just met while she directs lethally powerful
jets of water up and down your body. Not unpleasant by any means, but curious,
and it poses one or two social questions. Should you attempt to make polite
conversation, or would that distract her and put her off her aim, possibly with
excruciating results? And what should you do with your hands? Should one assume
the at-ease position, with hands clasped behind the back? The casual,
full-disclosure pose, with hands on hips? Total surrender, with hands on the
head? Or should the hands be on guard duty farther down? It was one of those
moments that defies any attempt at sophisticated deportment. I wondered what
Cary Grant, the king of savoir faire, would have done in similar
circumstances.

I also wondered how the young lady would reply if she
was at a party and someone asked her about her work.

“Tell me,
what do you do for a living?”

“Oh, I put naked men and
women up against a wall and give them hell with a high-pressure
hose.”

By now, I had a full-body blush. Lingering traces of
drainage,
I was sure, would have been washed away, together with
cellulite and any bodily hair and layers of epidermis that weren’t
securely anchored. But the sense of well-being was marvelous. My skin felt as
though it had been sluiced down with champagne.

So ended the first
morning, and it was remarkable how two and a half hours of treatments—a
period during which I had done nothing more physically demanding than take off
my clothes—could provoke such a ferocious appetite. As we were walking
over to the hotel restaurant, fond memories of the previous night’s
dinner returned, only to be suppressed. Now we were in the grip of the cure.
Now we were to experience our first encounter with
minceur
food,
described in lyrical style by Guérard as
“une cuisine gaie,
harmonieuse, et savoureuse.”

Before we had even reached our
table, I was struck by one of the great joys of staying in a top-class hotel:
Life has no rough edges. You are surrounded by people who have been trained to
please, and, God bless them, they seem to enjoy doing it. As we were escorted
through the lobby, we were greeted by smiles, inquiries after our health, and a
salvo of
bons appétit
s. We felt welcome. We felt loved. Above
all, we felt hungry.

The fact that we kept to our original high-minded
intentions and chose the
minceur
menu instead of the gourmet’s
special is a tribute to my wife’s willpower rather than mine. I have a
tendency to waver at the prospect of lobster and truffled tidbits. She is made
of stronger stuff. Also, as an accomplished cook herself, she was fascinated to
see what Guérard could do with fewer calories than a cheeseburger and
french fries.

Minceur
cooking, if you should want to try it
yourself, is based on a few simple principles: Use plenty of fruit and
vegetables; replace butter and cream with olive and colza oils; replace
synthetic sugar with natural fructose; prepare a lighter meal—usually
fish—in the evening, for a thinner dinner; and drink wine every day. So
much for the rules. Stick to those, and produce meals that look and taste like
the very best three-star food. Nothing to it, really. All it takes is a
prodigious amount of time and talent.

Ignoring the example of the
couple at the next table, who had ordered two different types of mineral water,
I asked for the permitted glass of red wine, and we set to. There were three
courses in that first lunch, and they bear describing in some detail.

First was a broth made with mussels, carrots, garlic, mushrooms, olive oil,
and white wine. The flavor was intense and rich, and I felt sure that someone
must have slipped a dollop of cream into the recipe while the chef wasn’t
looking. But no; the calorie count was 165, about the same as a small pot of
low-fat yogurt. The broth was followed by a vegetable risotto—rice from
the Camargue cooked in chicken stock with peas, shallots, baby onions, and
white and green beans—a moist and glorious mixture served with a dusting
of fresh Parmesan. Calories: 240, slightly fewer than a bar of chocolate.
Finally, the most delicate combination of tastes: raspberries, strawberries,
and black currants bathed in a light fructose syrup and topped with ice cream
made from yogurt and
fromage blanc.
Calories: 95.

Including
the glass of red wine, the entire lunch added up to fewer than six hundred
calories. It had been beautifully presented and served, and it was delicious.
But what impressed us as much as anything else was the feeling that we had
eaten a satisfying meal. We had no pangs of deprivation, and it was hard to
believe that food of this astonishingly high standard was part of a health
cure. Here was a diet, my wife told me, that she would be happy to live with
for a long time.

We sat over coffee and looked around at our fellow
dieters. They were mostly French, with a sprinkling of Americans, and you could
tell where they came from without hearing them speak. The Americans were
consulting maps and guidebooks and making notes. The French were studying the
menus for dinner (480 calories for the
minceur
meal of soup, fish, and
sorbet, and a tactfully unspecified amount for the five-course gourmet’s
delight).