French Lessons (3 page)

In
the course of preparing this book—those long hours with knife and fork
and glass that I like to call research—I was surprised by two things. The
first was the high level of enthusiasm for any event, however bizarre, that
sought to turn eating and drinking into a celebration. The amount of effort put
in by the organizers, the stall holders, and the general public (who, in some
cases, had traveled halfway across France) was astonishing. I cannot imagine
any other race prepared to devote an entire weekend to frogs’ legs or
snails or the critical assessment of chickens.

And while the French
take their passions seriously, my second surprise was to discover that those of
them who come to these events don’t take themselves seriously at all.
They dress up in outlandish costumes. They sing the most unexpected
songs—“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” being just
one—at the top of their voices and often wildly off-key. They make fun of
one another, eat and drink like champions, and generally let their hair
down—not at all what one might expect from a nation with a reputation for
reserved and slightly chilly good manners.

For many years, there has
been a saying in England that I imagine must reflect a widely held view:
“Lovely country, France. Pity about the French.” Perhaps I’ve
been lucky. All the French I met on my travels were helpful, good-natured, and
sometimes embarrassingly generous. There were the strangers who invited me to
stay at their homes when there was no room at the local hotel, the farmer who
presented me with a bottle of 1935 Calvados made by his grandfather, and dozens
of others who went out of their way to make sure I had as good a time as they
were having.

I hope I’ve done them justice in the pages that
follow. To all of them, thanks for the memories.

For
What We Are
About to Receive

Twenty-first-century France is not a country in which
one feels an overwhelming sense of religion. There are, to be sure,
saints’ days by the hundred, each one recorded in the official post
office calendar. There are patron saints keeping a protective eye on everything
from villages and vegetables to farmers and carpenters (although I’ve
looked in vain in the hope of finding the patron saint of writers). There is,
tucked away with the weather forecast in the local newspaper,
le saint du
jour,
whose name appears beneath an illustration of an angel blowing a
trumpet. There are magnificent cathedrals, abbeys, and convents. There are
churches of every age and size. There are also, in many of those stately
properties snoozing away the centuries behind high stone walls, private
chapels. Places of worship are everywhere. But most of them, most of the time,
are empty. Only a handful of the French population—one recent estimate
puts it at 10 percent—goes to church on a regular basis.

“The fact of it is,” said Monsieur Farigoule, the retired
schoolmaster who gives regular dissertations from his perch by the village bar
on the worsening state of the world, “the plain fact of it is that the
religion of the French is food. And wine, of course.” He tapped his empty
glass with a fingernail to indicate that he might be persuaded to accept a
refill. “We worship the belly, and our high priests are chefs. We would
rather sit and eat than kneel and pray. It pains me to say such things about my
countrymen, but patriotic sentiment cannot be allowed to hide the
truth.”

He drew himself up to his full height, such as it is, a
fraction over five feet, and glared at me, clearly anticipating an argument. He
has never forgotten a minor difference of opinion we once had over the tactics
of the English rugby team—Farigoule accused them of biting their
opponents’ ears in the scrum—and he considers me a dissident, a
potential troublemaker. This is a distinction I have in common with everyone
else who doesn’t share his views. The great Farigoule is, by his own
admission, never wrong.

In this case, I happened to agree with him. You
don’t have to be particularly observant to notice that restaurants in
France consistently attract larger audiences than churches, and I said so.

At that, Farigoule pounced.
“Eh alors?”
he said. He
cocked his head and nodded encouragingly, the patient professor trying to coax
an answer from a terminally dim student. “How do you explain this? What
could be the reason, do you think?”

“Well,” I said,
“for one thing, the food’s better.…”

“
Bof!”
He delivered his most withering look,
holding up both hands to ward off any further heresy. “Why do I waste my
time with intellectual pygmies?”

He was on potentially dangerous
ground with pygmies, given his height, only slightly enhanced by thick
crepe-soled shoes, but I resisted the urge to comment. “As it
happens,” I said, “I’m going to church myself on
Sunday.”

“
You?”
Farigoule’s
eyebrows almost took off from his head.

“Certainly. Morning Mass.
No doubt I’ll see you there.” And with that, I escaped before he
could start asking awkward questions.

I was indeed going to church, but
I couldn’t pretend that it was entirely for religious or even social
reasons. The decision to go had been inspired by food. This, in
Farigoule’s eyes, would be yet another nail in the coffin containing my
deplorable character; it would confirm my moral turpitude, gluttony, and
general worthlessness. So I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of
knowing that I was going to attend the annual
messe des truffes
in
Richerenches, a village northeast of Orange. This was to be a sacred event,
under the patronage of Saint Antoine, at which thanks would be given for the
aromatic, mysterious, and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. What’s
more, such are the blessings that reward the devout, there would be lunch after
the service. A lunch that included truffles.

I had been told to arrive
early if I wanted to be sure of a place in the church, and it was just 7:00
a.m. when I left the warmth of our kitchen and flinched at the bitterly cold
January drizzle. It was still dark, and it seemed set to be one of those
days—only fifty-two of them a year, according to local
mythology—when the sun wasn’t going to shine over Provence.

Dawn made a halfhearted attempt to break through the murk, but there was
nothing even an optimist could call light until I left the autoroute at
Bollène and turned east on one of the minor roads leading to
Richerenches. This is wine country, and as gloom gave way to gray I could make
out the twisted, blackened claws of clipped vines stretching away for miles
across the low hills. Trees were crouched low against the wind. Nothing moved
on the landscape. Two disconsolate magpies, normally the most dapper of birds,
were huddled, heads down, by the side of the road like bedraggled old men
waiting for a bus.

Villages without people appeared through the
windshield: Suze-la-Rousse, where a university of wine has been installed in a
fourteenth-century château; La Baume-de-Transit, shuttered, dripping, and
silent; and then, as the rain died away after a final flurry of spitting,
Richerenches.

The name of the main street provides a whiff of what
preoccupies the village during the winter months—the avenue de la
Rabasse, or Truffle Avenue, is the setting for a truffle market every Saturday
morning from November through March. I’d been there once before on market
day, making my way slowly along the line of dealers, each with a modest fortune
in fungus displayed in small sacks or plastic bags. Feeling like a novice
attending an ancient ritual for the first time, I imitated some of the buyers
who seemed to have perfected the correct technique. Like them, I bent to inhale
the ripe, almost rotten scent coming from the bags. I made admiring comments
about the bouquet, about the impressive size and color and undeniable beauty of
the deformed black lumps. And like the others, I was careful to wince in horror
at the price per kilo. This information was delivered in a mutter from the
corner of the mouth, accompanied by a shrug.
Eh beh
ou
i—
what can you expect? Good ones, like these jewels here,
are few and far between, almost impossible to find.

I had explored the
original heart of the village behind the market. Richerenches had started life
in the twelfth century as a commandery, or fort, built by the Knights Templars.
They had followed the classic rectangular plan of military architecture, with
stone walls as thick as small rooms, and round towers at each corner.
Impregnable for all those centuries, the fort had now been invaded by
pint-sized Peugeots and Citroëns, squeezed into spaces that would have
been a tight fit for a well-fed horse.

Low archways led into dark
alleys, smelling of history. The houses were small and well kept, intimately
close to one another. A single rowdy neighbor could keep the entire village
awake. The largest open space was in front of the church, and I went up to try
its heavy nailed door. It was locked. On that particular bright Saturday
morning, village devotions were taking place over the plastic bags in the
truffle market.

This being a special Sunday, things would be different,
I was sure, but Richerenches was in no hurry to get up and greet the day. I was
the first customer in the café, just as the coffee machine was
performing the opening movement in its symphony of hisses and splutters while
madame, behind the bar, flicked a cloth at nonexistent dust.

Early
morning in a French country café. The furniture, chosen for function
rather than style, is arranged with meticulous precision, a tin ashtray
centered on each table, chairs neatly tucked in. The day’s edition of the
local newspaper—in this case,
La Provenc
e—
lies on
a ledge inside the door, its pages of regional news smooth and unthumbed. The
tiled floor, swabbed down the night before with water and a dab of linseed oil,
is still spotless, unsullied by the sugar-cube wrappers and cigarette butts
that accumulate by the end of each day in a scuffed row on the floor by the
bar. (This is normal. For some inscrutable French reason, ashtrays on
café bars are rare, and smokers there are expected to drop their butts
on the floor and stub them out by foot.) Bottles gleam on the shelf,
practically every variety of brand-name alcohol one can imagine, with one or
two local curiosities thrown in. There is always a choice of several different
kinds of pastis, reflecting a thirst for the national nectar that accounts for
the consumption of twenty million glasses a day.

The café smell
is distinctive, and not to everyone’s taste—a mixture of strong
coffee and black tobacco, with occasional piercing undertones of bleach.
It’s a distinctive French smell, which I happen to like, as it reminds me
of the many happy hours I’ve spent being a foreign fly on café
walls. The sounds—the clash of cups, the scrape of chairs, the rasp of an
early-morning cough—echo against the hard surfaces. Then there’s a
boom as the next customer comes in and wishes the room a sonorous
bonjour.
He has the massive build to match his big voice, and he is
friendly enough to offer me, a solitary stranger, his hand to shake as he
passes my table. His palm feels like iced sandpaper. Standing at the bar, he
sips coffee from a cup, with his little finger delicately extended. When he
pays, it is with change extracted, coin by coin, from a battered leather purse
no bigger than a box of matches. Does any other country in the world issue
dainty purses to its largest male inhabitants?

More customers arrive,
all men, regulars who know one another, and the boom level increases. That
morning, in voices that could easily carry to the other end of the village,
they condemned the awful weather. Nothing to be done about it, but perhaps a
quick shot of red wine would help, tossed back with a shrug. At least
they’d be indoors today, and the church should be warm. Some tourists
trickle in. Heads turn in unison to inspect them, then turn back again, like
spectators watching a tennis match.

I left the café to find more
life on the street, much of it clearly not local. A television crew of
fashionably razor-cropped and bestubbled young men was unloading equipment,
dodging cars with foreign plates that were nosing around looking for parking
spaces. Men and women with smooth pink indoor complexions, wearing elegant
foul-weather clothes of Parisian cut, were hovering indecisively on the
pavement. It was time to go to church, before all the pews were taken.

The rest of the world seemed to have had the same idea. The church doors
were not yet open, but the small
place
in front of the steps was
packed with truffle worshipers, some more official than others. Moving through
the crowd like visitors from another century were senior members of the truffle
brotherhood, the Confrérie du Diamant Noir, in full and formal regalia:
black cloaks to midcalf, medals suspended from their necks on yellow-
and-black-striped ribbons, wide-brimmed black hats. I watched two of them who
had found a space at the edge of the crowd and were comparing truffles taken
from hiding places beneath their cloaks. Each showed the other his truffle,
cupped in both hands and partly concealed, presumably to prevent curious eyes
from catching a glimpse of it. Their heads were tilted, close enough for their
hat brims to touch as they whispered to each other. They might have been
conspirators exchanging state secrets.