The Discovery of France (45 page)

Before industrial agriculture carpeted the country with cereals, edible plant- and animal life was more varied and abundant. The athletic wild man of the Iraty forest seems to have been a vegan. Victor of the Aveyron, who was captured near Saint-Sernin, may have eaten chicken, duck and crayfish, though probably not the other items on the ‘Menu de l’Enfant Sauvage’ currently on offer at the Saint-Sernin hotel (Roquefort cheese,
soufflé glacé
and walnut liqueur). The feral girl called Memmie who was discovered near Songy in Champagne in 1731 had lived on raw rabbits, frogs, which she ate with leaves, and roots which she grubbed up with a sturdy thumb and forefinger.

Modern tourists who travel through rich agricultural areas only to find themselves confronted with an unapologetic plate of
steak frites
and wilted lettuce galvanized with oil are seeing the results of a process that began over a century ago. As railways rushed tourists to the provinces and produce to the cities, the gastronomic map of France seemed to burst into life. Writers of geographical articles in Paris magazines drooled over the specialities of each region: butter from Isigny, apples from the Pays de Caux, cherries from Montmorency, artichokes from Laon, mustard and
cassis
from Dijon, truffles from Périgord, prunes from Tours and Agen, chocolate from Bayonne. Far from representing the essence of a region, some of these specialties simply reflected the advertising skill of a single grocer. They rarely found their way onto travellers’ plates and were not always available in the region itself. The Dijon area was not particularly rich in blackcurrants until an enterprising cafe owner made an exploratory trip to Paris in 1841, noted the popularity of
cassis
and began to market his own liqueur as a regional speciality. Good wine was often hard to find in wine-growing regions. A connoisseur of French wines was better off in London, Paris or Tours (because of the large English community) than in French provinces where people who could afford to drink wine preferred
eau de marc
with their meals (water passed through the mash of grape-skins left by the wine-making process).

Food that was transported to Paris and marketed by caterers and
grocers helped to create a fantasy image of the provinces. In the recipe section of Mme Pariset’s
Nouveau manuel complet de la maîtresse de maison
(1852), the vital ingredients were obviously a home in Paris and a maid to go shopping at Les Halles. Her recipes called for olive oil from Aix, maize flour from Burgundy, groats from Brittany, Strasbourg bacon and Gruye`re cheese, but the sources of the recipes – fairly modest stews and soups with a preponderance of cabbage – were not the French provinces but ‘the best tables’.

Nearly all those tables were Parisian. By 1889, there were said to be a hundred restaurants for every bookshop in the capital. ‘A nutritional tour of Paris, which would once have been a non-event, would now take almost as long as a voyage around the world.’ It was from Paris that many ‘provincial’ dishes reached the provinces. The Bourbonnais family described by the peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin are shocked (in 1880) to see their visiting Parisian relatives crouching on the edge of ponds and dropping frogs into a bag: ‘Since no one knew how to prepare them, the nephew was forced to cook them himself.’

It was only after a century of foreign tourists that large numbers of French men and women began to discover France for themselves. But even then, most food-conscious people preferred to explore the provinces
à la carte
, in a Parisian restaurant. One of the most revealing voyages of discovery made by a Frenchman was Alexandre Dumas’s trip to Roscoff on the north Breton coast in 1869. Roscoff was the market-gardening capital of western France. By the 1860s, hundreds of boats carrying onions and artichokes left the little harbour every year for England, apparently because one brave man had once successfully sold his onions in London with a board marked ‘The English onion is not good’. But when Dumas settled in Roscoff to write his
Dictionnaire de cuisine
, he was fuelled by imagination more than by food: ‘We had fish in abundance, but very little else: bullethard artichokes, water-filled
haricots verts
and no fresh butter.’ His cook Marie had predicted that nothing good would come of the expedition. She left in disgust and returned to Paris, where all the culinary wonders of France could be discovered and enjoyed.

15

Postcards of the Natives

A
CENTURY AND A HALF
after Windham’s expedition to the glaciers of Savoy, when cyclists were pedalling over the Pyrenees and the first cars were chugging along the dusty roads of France, it would be hard to believe that there was anything left to explore – though the fact that the grandest canyon in Europe somehow escaped attention until 1896, when it was discovered less than twenty miles from a departmental capital (p. 335), suggests that the country was not quite as well known as it seemed to be. In 1869, a daily newspaper pointed out that it would soon be possible to travel ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ by using the Mont Cenis tunnel and the Suez Canal. Jules Verne read the articles and used the title for his novel
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
(1873), in which the journey across France takes up just four lines of Phileas Fogg’s notebook:

Thanks to the railways, France could be crossed in just over a day, provided that the journey began and ended in a major city. In the 1860s, according to Dumas’s collaborator Joseph Méry, Paris was only ‘thirty-three cigars from Marseille’. The novelist and travel writer Amédée Achard looked forward to the opening of a branch line that would place the seaside spa of Trouville on the Normandy coast ‘at a distance of four cigars from the Boulevard des Italiens’. This represents about one cigar every fifteen miles in a train travelling
at a top speed of 38 mph. Migrant labourers measured distances in bread and shoe leather rather than in cigars, but they too began to use the railway when they realized that a few hours in a third-class carriage cost less than five days on the road.

The gentleman who published an anachronistic account of travelling in a restored vintage coach
From Paris to Nice in Eighty Days
(1889) saw himself as a pioneer to the past, a guide to the days when people went on journeys instead of ‘transporting themselves from one point to another’. He knew that pleasure and discovery were inversely related to speed. The faster the mode of transport, the less one saw and the more slowly time seemed to pass. People who had once sung songs and told tales in the swaying diligence learned to hate their fellow passengers on the train. The heroic tone of shared discomfort gave way to the peevish impatience of the modern traveller. In 1882, after ‘six weeks of constant railway-travel in France’, Henry James found himself wondering, as he fitted his body into a carriage on the north-bound express from Marseille, ‘laden with Germans who had command of the windows, which they occupied as strongly as they have been known to occupy other strategical positions’, whether it was all worth the bother: ‘the deadly
salle d’attente
, the insufferable delays over one’s luggage, the porterless platform, the overcrowded and illiberal train.’ The best a modern traveller could hope for was oblivion. ‘Fortunately a railway journey is a good deal like a seavoyage; its miseries fade from the mind as soon as you arrive.’

Never before had it been possible to cross the country in such a state of blissless ignorance. As early as the 1850s, the great roads from Paris were being drained of traffic by the railways. Travelling east across the plains of Brie was as lonely as it had been before the Revolution. When the Freycinet Plan of 1879 poured billions of francs into the railway system to gee-up the economy, blacksmiths, carters, innkeepers and peasants who made a living from hungry travellers and their horses were forced out of business. Cows and chickens reoccupied the middle of the road. The thin corridors of land covered by earlier guidebooks became narrower still. In the age of steam, the outside world seemed to shrink away and vanish.

Victor Hugo had noticed the effect when travelling by diligence to Bordeaux. Now, it was noticeable even on the rivers. Jean Ogier’s
guidebook for travellers by rail and river from Lyon to Avignon (1854) wondered what tourists would find to do when their vehicle reached escape velocity and began to cross the space between the cities. As the
Ville d’Avignon
or the
Missouri
steamed out of Lyon, the passengers could observe the tobacco factory, the prison, the hippodrome and the abattoir, but then,

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P
ROGRESSIVE POLITICIANS
of the time would have been delighted by modern histories of nineteenth-century France with their streamlined panoramas of blurry landscapes and speeding trains, their statistics of passenger miles and journey times flagging up the progress of the nation like the illuminated kilometre markers in the Mont Cenis tunnel. Most people who witnessed the spread of the railways saw something quite different.

A native returning home after a long absence in the 1860s or 70s would have made more discoveries in the first moments of return than a tourist on an eighty-day tour of France. He might arrive on the railway – not in a carriage but on the track itself, since the flat, well-drained causeway was often the best road in the region, and local trains on branch lines moved slowly enough for people along the line to become familiar with all the faces in the carriage windows.

The scene can be imagined. On either side of the track, the fields are larger and more monotonous, stretching to the horizon instead of huddling around the town. In some parts, they look wilder than before. Fields where cereals used to grow have been given over to cattle to feed the railway workers. The workers have gone, but they leave a scar as deep as their tunnels and cuttings: the memory of their riotous paydays, their rubble of dialects and swear words, their incredible roughness. Hanging from rope ladders, they planted explosives in the rock and pushed off with their feet, far enough,
usually, to escape the blast. The navvies, both men and women, were violent missionaries of a new world in which time was measured in minutes and the worth of a human life in money.

Even at a distance, there are signs of new wealth: the glint of glass windows and iron roofs, the little skyline of limekiln chimneys and a concrete church spire. The place on the edge of town where women used to fetch the water has been deserted since a local man who made a fortune in the coal trade in Paris paid for a safe water supply and a fountain to commemorate his generosity. The old town gates have been removed and anyone can enter the town after dark. In the town itself, a clock face as large as a rose window has been embedded in the west wall of the church. Across the square, the town-hall clock shows a different time – the approximate average of all the nearby village bells that strike the same hour, one after the other, for half an hour or more. Meanwhile, the station clock disagrees with both the town hall and the church. The railway has brought the hour of Paris on the engine drivers’ chronometers. The official hour straddles lines of longitude and disregards the march of the sun: Paris time is twenty minutes behind Nice and twenty-seven minutes ahead of Brest, where people regularly arrive at the station to find the train long gone. Portable sundials and clepsydras will soon be collectors’ items. Like the decimal system, which is still widely ignored a century after its introduction, standard time is seen as an irritating bureaucratic imposition. At Berthouville in Normandy, the bell ringer upsets the routines of animals and people by changing summer time to winter time in a day, instead of making imperceptible alterations throughout the year.

A new road sign and public notices outside the town hall show that the town itself has been renamed. The old name has been translated into French. In the Alpes-Maritimes, San Salvador (its name in Alpine Gavot) becomes Saint-Sauveur, then Saint-Sauveur-sur-Tinée, to distinguish it from the thirty-nine other Saint-Sauveurs with which it now shares the fatherland. Postal administrators have demanded an end to the confusion. Ironically, the names of some ancient
pays
will be preserved for administrative convenience: Vachères-en-Quint, Rochefort-en-Valdaine, Aubry-en-Exmes, Conches-en-Ouche, etc. Other places, suddenly self-conscious in their national context, have
asked to change their names. Worried that outsiders will be reminded of swamp fever and shaking limbs, Tremblevif in the swampy Sologne (‘Tremblevif ’ comes from Latin for ‘aspen’ and ‘village’) changes its name to Saint-Viâtre in 1854. Merdogne becomes Gergovie in 1865, because the site of the Gauls’ great victory over Julius Caesar is more glorious than a name that sounds like shit.

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T
HESE AND OTHER INTERFERENCES
with local life are a topic of conversation on the square, on Sundays, when the women are in church. The men still speak the old patois, but their talk is full of fancy French words like top-hatted gentlemen at a village fête:
agriculture, démocratie, économie, salaires
. Politics has arrived with conscripts and migrants, postmen and railway engineers, apostles of socialism sent from the central committee in Paris, and travelling salesmen who sell manifestoes instead of magic spells. In the cafe, pictures of Napoleon and the Virgin Mary, stuck to the walls with a bit of yeast, have been replaced by photographs of political leaders. Some of them will be torn down by the gendarme, acting on orders from Paris. A few of the local citizens voted in the council elections of 1831. Many more cast their vote in 1849, after the February Revolution, and then again, for Napoleon III, in the plebiscite of 1852, swayed by free drinks from the local factory owner, by threats of redundancy, or the belief that Napoleon III was a reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was widely believed to have possessed supernatural powers.