by Susie Kelly
As it was, after Louis XIV and Louis XV had between them ruled France for more than 130 years, their legacy to poor Louis XVI was a realm teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
History has depicted him as an inept simpleton with no thoughts in his royal head other than hunting and eating. Yet he was a keen student and very learned on the subjects of history, geography and astronomy, and also fluent in English. His apartments at Versailles housed collections of woodworking instruments, maps, globes, rare books, prayer books and manuscripts. He may have been indecisive and weak when it came to politics and government, but he wasn’t unintelligent.
His portraits are proof that he most definitely wasn’t a handsome man. According to Madame de Campan: ‘The features of Louis XVI were noble enough, though somewhat melancholy in expression; his walk was heavy and unmajestic; his person greatly neglected; his hair, whatever might be the skill of his hairdresser, was soon in disorder. His voice, without being harsh, was not agreeable; if he grew animated in speaking he often got above his natural pitch, and became shrill.’
I know people with voices like that.
Lovers of gratin dauphinois and frites have particularly good reason to be indebted to Louis, who gave 100 acres of otherwise useless sandy soil to a certain M. Parmentier, a botanist and chemist, so that he could plant potatoes. Until 1785 the French were strongly anti-potato, holding it responsible for, amongst other evils, leprosy. M. Parmentier, however, realised that the plant would be a valuable addition to the table if only people could overcome their prejudices against it. To pique the curiosity of his farming neighbours, he placed an armed guard around his potato patch. How could any red-blooded French farmer resist the challenge, when one night the guard was absent, of helping themselves to a few plants? Which is what they did, precisely as M. Parmentier had intended. The farmers planted their booty, his spuds, in their own fields, and the frite was on its way. What greater legacy could a king bequeath to his country?
A golden eagle soared into the sky ahead of us as we approached Montmirail. Perched on a tall column, the Imperial eagle is an unmistakable sign that Napoléon had been here. It marks the position from where Boney, outnumbered by two to one, gave the Russians and Prussians a good bashing during several battles in the surrounding areas during February 1814. Although the monument was intended as a tribute to those victories, it seemed to me that it’s really more of a signpost pointing to the end of his career. Maybe his successes here restored his ego somewhat after the Russian campaign debâcle and his mortifying retreat, but the Bonaparte star was fading. Less than two months after the battle of Montmirail, Paris had fallen to the enemy, and the Emperor was forced to abdicate and exiled to the pleasant island of Elba, off the Tuscan coast. He could have lived there in comparative freedom and comfort. Instead he chose to escape and return to France, rally his troops and lead them to a thorough trouncing at the battle of Waterloo. It was all over for him, and he’d never return from his second exile home, St Helena, in the south Atlantic, hundreds of miles from anywhere. It was a sad ending for the belligerent little general who left such a legacy of orderliness in French law and life, even if it does sometimes make for tiresome bureaucracy.
Overhead a phutting microlight was making its final approach to land on a small grass airstrip. It looked like a deckchair held up by an umbrella and propelled by a lawnmower engine. The pilot waved to us. Did he, I wondered, ever think about Napoléon, or Louis and Marie-Antoinette?
Montmirail‘s municipal campsite was delightful. A vast area of perfectly mown green grass which we shared with just one other family. A night’s stay cost a negligible €2.80 ($3.90). The town centre emanated a rather defeated atmosphere and bore little resemblance to the description by Spanish war correspondent and travel writer, Seňor Gomez Carrillo, who toured the area in 1914 as a neutral journalist. He portrayed ‘a vain and gentle little town’, where the cheerful inhabitants went about the ‘busy monotony’ of their lives, sipping aperitifs in the cafés, shopping in stores filled with elegant goods, and streets that were miniatures of Paris. And, furthermore, to the envy of neighbouring towns, Montmirail boasted three railway stations, serving the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l’Est between the Ourcq Valley and Esternay; the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer Départementaux linking La Ferté-sous-Jouarre and Montmirail, and Chemins de Fer de la Banlieue de Reims from Epernay to Montmirail.
Today, there is just one station, and the only passengers are those who travel on the tourist route between Mézy in the south of the Aisne département, and Montmirail in the Marne. An association of enthusiasts ‘Tourisme Ferroviaire de la Brie Champenoise à l’Omois’ operate the line, running a quirky Picasso railcar, so named because of the strange position of the driver’s cab. Perched asymmetrically to one side on the roof of the train it looks as if it might slide off, like the noses on the artist’s paintings.
Unlike the ruined and pillaged villages all around, Seňor Carrillo found Montmirail untouched by the war. German General von Bulow had established his headquarters there and had given an undertaking that his army would behave themselves as long as the inhabitants did likewise. A local inn-keeper related how German officers made use of his kitchen and provisions to prepare themselves fine meals, washed down with his best Chambertin and champagne. A good meal seemed to be the Germans’ priority, and the inn-keeper remarked that if he hadn’t been so angry at them for helping themselves to his produce, it would have been a pleasure to see how they enjoyed their food.
General von Bulow demanded 10,000 rations of bread a day for his troops. An impossible undertaking for the only two bakeries still functioning, so the local citizens had to roll up their sleeves and bake to fulfil the order. Luckily the Germans would soon be driven away in the first battle of the Marne, retreating with their tattered dreams of taking Paris.
Now, a little more than 90 years later, wandering around the deserted town it was difficult to imagine it as a miniature Paris. And then, in the otherwise bleak and empty street – it was, after all, Sunday – we came upon a light, bright, airy, chic salon de thé. Standing in the doorway was a super-slim lady with flame-red hair (not beetroot like mine, but a true Titian) wearing a floaty, flowery chiffon dress that would turn heads on any Parisian boulevard. She smiled and beckoned us. “Come in,” she said. So we did.
Charmingly, authoritatively, insistently, gently, she sat us down and extracted an order for one cup of coffee, and a hot chocolate that she assured us would be made in the correct, traditional way. Then she gestured to an enticing display of cakes and pastries that she had personally baked with love and skill, and which would go very nicely with our drinks. While she made the hot chocolate she explained, without any conceit, that she was a perfectionist in everything she did. Watching her elegant hand blending the rich brown squares of chocolate into scalding full cream milk and then adding fresh cream, I pushed the word “cholesterol” from my mind. I asked her cautiously why she had chosen Montmirail in which to be perfect and to establish her tea-room, because if there was something special about the town, it wasn’t evident. She wrinkled her elegant nose disdainfully, and told us that she was a music teacher, who had been transferred to Montmirail from Meaux and it was not, sadly, a move which had given her any joy. Despite having a positive attitude and cheerful outlook on life, she could find nothing whatever to appreciate about her new home.
Just then there was an alarming noise outside, coming from a bunch of slack-mouthed, pimply youths fighting amongst themselves to climb onto my bike. Terry leapt through the door and the boys fled shouting, leaving the bike rocking on its stand but otherwise undamaged. Five minutes later they were back again, jeering raucously, staggering around and waving beer bottles, but they soon got bored. After yelling a few obscenities and giving us the finger they wandered away, bumping into and pushing each other.
“Et voila! That’s what it’s like here,” said our hostess angrily. “It’s the fault of the parents. Unemployment is very high, there’s
a lot of alcoholism, a lot of hopelessness. The parents don’t care if their children are educated or not, so how can the children care? I don’t understand this attitude.”
Couldn’t she move somewhere else, I asked. It wasn’t so easy to get a job, she replied, and her husband worked in Meaux so they couldn’t move far away. She felt like a prisoner in Montmirail, but tried to maintain her morale by opening her tea shop and baking fine cakes.
I admired her spirit and hoped that she would find sufficient custom in this depressed area to make her investments and efforts worthwhile, and that her bright little salon would survive. Although towns like Montmirail are not on the tourist trail, we found them interesting because they offered an insight into the reality of daily life in rural France far beyond the rose-tinted veneer that we see so often.
We weren’t able to find very much to explore in the town so we returned to the tent and spent a few quiet hours reading before going to find somewhere to eat. For a small town it was well supplied with several pizzerias that only served plates containing meat, a few kebab houses that only served meat, or places that were closed and served nothing at all. Panic, nay despair, began to overtake us as we had nothing with us to eat. We had a short, bitter debate about which of us was to blame for this, but as we turned back to the camp site in hungry silence we came upon Le Vert Galant, (one of Henri IV’s nicknames meaning ‘the indefatigable romantic’) a hostelry that looked as if it had been there since the beginning of time. The owner/chef and his wife were welcoming and the food and service were unexpectedly good. I wondered if this was the same inn where the German officers had helped themselves to the contents of the pantry and wine cellar.
We drank rather a lot, hoping it would help us to sleep through the icy night. (It didn’t.) One of Terry’s stranger habits is carrying on silent conversations with himself and believing that he is speaking to me. At some arbitrary point, he begins to talk aloud, continuing the conversation where he had left off in his mind. He expects me to have picked it up telepathically. Quite often I do, but not on this occasion.
“Did they ever find out who did it?” he asked, in the darkness.
“Who did what?”
“Did they ever find out who killed them?”
“Find out who killed whom?”
“Those cyclists.”
“What cyclists?”
“That British couple who were on a cycling holiday.”
“Where?”
“Up in Brittany, I think. Years ago. They were found shot in a field.”
“I think I remember something, vaguely. Why, do you suspect we might be murdered?”
“No. But I was just thinking about it.”
“Let’s try and go to sleep,” I suggested.
Between the miserable weather, my eyes that had been watering persistently since we left Versailles, and private, growing doubts as to whether I was really up to cycling several hundred more miles after finding today’s hills gruelling even with the help of the electric bicycle, I thought I had enough to contend with without having to worry about being murdered, too.
By the next morning I could barely see; my eyes were swollen almost shut and still dripping incessantly, so we cycled back to town to find a pharmacy. Montmirail had come to life, and a busy market sprawled over the streets crowded with cheerful and noisy people wrapped in heavy coats and carrying bulky shopping baskets. However, we had forgotten that it was Pentecost Monday, and all the shops were closed, so the eyes would have to wait.
Providence had put in our path on the way to Epernay the Château d’Etoges, with a worldwide reputation for fine dining, where I had booked a table for lunch. After more than one hundred miles of cycling, mostly in the rain, five days of effort, and three uncomfortable nights, a little luxury couldn’t come too soon.
There isn’t a great deal to see on the fifteen or so miles between Montmirail and Etoges, apart from gentle up and down countryside beneath a carpet of lush crops.
For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with the structure of France’s administrative areas, these are divided into regions – of which there are twenty-one in mainland France – the Champagne-Ardennes being the one in which we were travelling. Each region is sub-divided into départements, and it is in the Marne, département 51, in which we were spending most of our time. Although the Marne has been the theatre of some of the most terrible fighting man has known, and its name, like that of the Somme, will always be synonymous with warfare on an unthinkable scale, it is also home to the majority of vineyards producing that most quintessentially French of French products, champagne.
Online map, Champagne region
During the Middle Ages the Champagne region was famous for its six great annual international trade fairs; merchants travelled from Italy, Spain, North Africa, Germany and the Low Countries to buy and sell leathers and furs, spices, silks, linens, livestock, precious metals and jewels. A crossroads of trade routes between northern and southern Europe, and from Eastern Europe to Paris and the Atlantic, the region was ideally situated as a major market place. Independent of the French crown, Champagne was ruled by powerful counts under whose control the fairs flourished. The safety and security, both physical and financial, of merchants were guaranteed by strict rules enforced by the ‘Guards of the Fair’ and armed escorts provided by them.
Jewish money-changers conducted their business from benches; if one of them failed, his bench was said to be broken – ‘banca rotta’ in Italian, and in English ‘bankrupt’.
As well as a market place, the fair was somewhere for the exchange of intellectual and cultural ideas, and a great social gathering, but as financial transactions became more sophisticated, merchants began to conduct their business through correspondence, rather than travelling the long and arduous roads to the fairs. Wars in parts of Europe made road travel risky, and the Italians began to open up new maritime trading routes, so the great fairs fell into decline.
Then the Champagne region became known for centuries as ‘the lousy Champagne’ , a land fit for nothing except for grazing a few sheep; ‘…and we are in a hungry Champagne Pouilleuse, a land flowing only with ditch-water’, wrote Thomas Carlyle. Sitting on a chalk bed 1,300 feet deep, it was long regarded as an impoverished and ugly place. Its geographical location makes it a natural bulwark to protect Paris from attacks from the east, so it was frequently a theatre of war.
‘There is scarcely a region in all France where a battle could have been fought with less injury to property. Imagine, if you please, an immense undulating plain, its surface broken by occasional low hills and ridges, none of them much over six hundred feet in height, and wandering in and out between those ridges the narrow stream, which is the Marne. The country hereabouts is very sparsely settled; the few villages that dot the plain are wretchedly poor; the trees on the slopes of the ridges are stunted and scraggly; the soil is of chalky marl, which you have only to scratch to leave a staring scar, and the grass which tries to grow upon it seems to wither and die of a broken heart.’ [Vive la France by E Alexander Powell 1915]
Pine forests were planted to hinder invaders; the towns of the Champagne were heavily garrisoned, and the rural population abandoned their homes to find work in Paris. Succeeding wars destroyed small villages; the land was peppered with shells and mines, and the forests destroyed by heavy artillery. Consequently, after World War II land here was cheap and plentiful, and its vast horizons ideally suited to mechanised cultivation. The porous structure of the once despised chalk acts as a sponge to bring deep water to the surface, belying the apparent dryness of the soil. Now the Champagne has become one of France’s most productive areas for sugar beet, cereals and lucerne. And despite being the birthplace and homeland of the world’s most renowned effervescent drink, symbol of luxury, nowadays the Champagne-Ardennes is still one of France’s poorer and less known regions. It has about it an air of the land that time forgot. With its unspoilt provincial towns and gentle, undulating landscape the place seems at od
ds with its history of warfare. It’s a popular choice for Parisians and people from the Low Countries looking for low-cost second homes. The sparsely populated and tranquil rural land that we saw today had once been a ruined wasteland ravaged and trampled by war. It is a most paradoxical part of the world.
Ten minutes before we reached our destination a light spitting of rain began to fall. Within seconds it became a substantial downpour leaving us soaked to the skin as we arrived in Etoges, a town comprising a single street whose only commerce is a wine merchant, and the château. By the time we had cycled up the tree-lined gravel path and over the moat bridge the rain was cascading off us in runnels; we looked as if we’d been swept in by a tsunami.
In the shelter of an open-fronted out-building where mopeds and sports equipment were stored, we towelled ourselves as dry as we could and Terry changed his clothing. I didn’t feel like struggling out of the tight, wet black leggings and frightening anybody who might be passing, so I took my little bundle of clean clothes into the château, and called at reception to ask for the ladies’ cloakroom. As I stood quietly dripping onto the carpet the receptionist looked at me with a mixture of wonderment and horror.
The cloakroom was roughly the same size as a telephone cabin. After I had writhed out of the clinging wet clothes like a python sloughing its skin, and changed into my chiffon skirt, blouse and gold moccasins, the reflection in the mirror was no different except for the costume and the fact that my face was even redder after my cramped exertions.
The décor of the château is spot-on. 18th century elegance with rich furnishings, spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, marble floors, stately potted plants and statuary. In the dining room, which was filled to capacity, we sat by a window overlooking the gardens, beneath a chandelier and under the blind gaze of an undraped lady statue in an alcove.
