Deep France

by Celia Brayfield

  By now, we had discovered the unwritten rules of the vide grenier game, as they are observed in the Béarn.

  1. No vide grenier shall start before decent people have finished their breakfast, or 9 a.m., whichever is the later.

  2. Thereafter, the Béarnais quarter of an hour shall be strictly observed. Any buyer offering money for goods before the quarter-hour has expired is obviously one of those ill-mannered dealers from out of the region, and may be ignored.

  3. Sellers may continue to unpack until 11 a.m., or later if they had a hard night. (Andrew took time to adjust to rules 1, 2 and 3, being used to British sales for which the sellers started to queue in the pitch dark at 5 a.m., when the buyers would already be banging on the van windows.)

  4. No item shall be considered too humble or bizarre to be offered for sale, nor too grand. An old anorak is as good as a Kenzo linen dress, and a cracked flower pot as desirable as a brassy-looking statuette of some oriental goddess which turns out to be solid gold, four centuries old and worth thousands.

  5. If any item offered for sale has a chip, tear or other fault, the seller shall considerately point this out to the buyer before taking the money.

  6. Any buyer claiming to be able to sell an item on eBay for thousands of euros is obviously deluded and shall be heard with a pitying smile.

  7. The seller shall not feel compelled to assist the buyer in examining the stock. It is not necessary to unfold sheets or demonstrate the working of any machinery, merely to keep chatting to one’s neighbour and allow the buyer to browse in peace. (My favourite rule, apart from 9 below.)

  8. If any item shall be dropped, making a loud crashing sound, the entire room may roar with laughter and call out: ‘C’est vendu!’ (‘It’s sold!’)

  9. A bar and sandwicherie shall operate for the duration of the vide grenier, offering coffee, bacon sandwiches, beer, wine and other snacks according to local taste.

  10. Notwithstanding this, all exhibitors are free to bring their own three-course lunches with fresh bread and wine. They may avail themselves of any cooking facilities in the building to reheat daubes or cassoulets, and may dine with the use of such chairs and tables as they may be trying to sell.

  11. The lunch hour shall last from 12 to 2, at least.

  12. Sellers should not be disturbed while cooking or eating. During the lunch hour, one dealer may be appointed to handle, on behalf of the others, any transactions suggested by delinquent buyers wishing to do business while sensible people are eating. In confirming prices, a wave of the glass or gesticulation with a piece of bread may be interpreted as the appointee considers appropriate.

  13. Prices on unsold items need not be reduced towards the end of the day, and any seller suggesting this may be treated as insane.

  The Town Called Love

  On the way back from Pomarez, we stopped in a bustling little town called Amou, which has retained an air of prosperity and consequence from its pilgrim days, or maybe even earlier. It got its name from the Romans, who called it Amor’, or love, and found nearby the only real hill in the region, on which they built a large camp whose sentries could have seen a barbarian horde coming a hundred miles away.

  A river runs through Amou, a gentle big stream called the Luy de Béarn, spanned by a pretty bridge and shaded by immense old lime trees which soar over the arena and the site of the Sunday market. They also shade a rather grand restaurant, le Commerce, also known by its owner’s name, Darracq. Le Commerce is impeccable; it goes in for formality and white tablecloths, simple achievements but notable in a country that seems to believe that the uglier the plates are, the better the food will be. The menu features grills and roasts, with the most exportable classics of the regional cuisine. At lunch, the terrace seems a tad close to the road that also runs through Amou but on a warm evening, when the scent of hay creeps in from the meadows, the swallows are diving around the square tower of the Romanesque pilgrim church and there is no traffic, it’s deeply pleasant.

  While we waited for our meal, we amused ourselves designing our coats of arms. I got crossed pens quartered with chickens. Andrew and Geoff got the dog Otto and their new kitten as supporters. Sandy-and-Annie’s escutcheon featured crossed roll-ups and a set of false teeth. This was because, after years of gentle and not-so-gentle urging, Sandy was to visit the dentist. Three things had brought about this change to the habit of a lifetime. Firstly, he’d got hardly any of his own teeth left. This had been the case for some years, but when you’re an ex-pat it’s easy to lose a grip on what’s considered normal by the rest of the world. When the proprietor of the Belle Auberge cracked a joke about his gummy smile, Sandy simply decided to stop smiling and boycotted the place. Nor was he about to be told by his sons that nobody in Britain goes around with no teeth any more.

  Secondly, the sale of their house had gone through, and they could no longer plead poverty. And thirdly, it was doc­tor’s orders. Sandy is an enthusiastic steak-eater, but had been suffering from indigestion. The doctor, finding he had just a couple of incisors left, told him firmly that meat needed to be chewed before swallowing, and sent him to the dentist.

  I tried and failed to lure Andrew on to Gaujac, where the gardens were coming into their own. This is where the Romans built their camp; five hundred years later, a local noble family built a strange new Château on the same site, neither of vernacular nor classic design, but modelled on a Cistercian priory, with all the rooms leading off a cloister. The present owners open it to the public, and have established a real plantsman’s garden, which now includes the French national collection of clematis.

  Gaujac became notorious in the ownership of the Montespan family. Louis-Henri de Pardaillon de Gondrin, Marquis de Montespan, was a volatile character who helped to get the Gascons their bad name. His first big mistake was to marry a famously witty and lusciously beautiful young woman from the Poitou region, Françoise de Rochechouart, who had changed her Christian name to Athenaïs because it had more style. Athenaïs may have been an absolute scream but she was also ambitious, and from the day in 1660 that they left for the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles, she had her eye on the King.

  Seven years later, the King had eyes only for Athenaïs. She had a moment of doubt, and begged her husband to take her back to the country, but he told her she was just being egotistical. The King then dumped his first mistress and instated Athenaïs as his consort. The Marquis then made his second big mistake. He minded.

  At Versailles, the correct behaviour for the husband of a woman to whom the King had taken a fancy was to adopt a low profile and find good reasons to be out of town. This would immediately be rewarded by a string of well-paid official positions and extra titles. This was not for the Marquis. Was he not a Gascon? Did he not have his honour, not to mention his panache?

  The Marquis kicked up an unseemly fuss. He raged, he stormed, he complained loudly and in public, and when he got drunk he beat up his wife. His uncle, a grand archbishop of the fire-and-brimstone Jansenist sect, was foolish enough to take his side, preaching censorious sermons and persecuting unfaithful wives in his bishopric.

  So the King banished the Marquis to his estates, the normal punishment for an unruly aristocrat. It meant he was sent home under house arrest, and one of the houses chosen was Gaujac, undoubtedly because it was a hell of a long way from Versailles and close to the malaria-infested swamp that was then the Landes. Defiantly, he arrived with his son and daugh­ter by Athenaïs, and with a pair of antlers lashed to the top of his carriage to symbolize the cuckold’s horns. He then invited all the neighbours to a mock funeral and buried Athenaïs in effigy, ascribing her demise to ‘coquetry and ambition’.

  Athenaïs bore at least nine children, seven to the King, and put on a great deal of weight. She was eventually supplanted by the King’s last mistress, the dreary and self-righteous Madame de Maintenon, who alienated Athenaïs’ sons and drove her away from Versailles. The Marquis, however, scorned to catch malaria and eventually pulled himse
lf together. He moved to Toulouse, and was then allowed by the King to return to Versailles. I like to think of him stomping across his lawn at Gaujac, impatiently scanning the landscape for the sight of the messenger from the court who never came to tell him his wife was coming home.

  Meanwhile in the Garden . . .

  22 May. My first sweet pea today. I picked it and put it in a little vase on top of my computer. It scented the whole room.

  The so-called lawn looked like Prince Charles’s wild-flower meadow, teeming with camomile daisies, ragged robin, dark blue bugle, sky-blue speedwell, the earliest of the purple cornflowers, and some crimson-petalled orchids. At the same time, primroses and violets were still flowering in shady corners.

  Every herbivore in sight was nose-down all day, doing justice to the banquet. The cows, who lay down the minute the sun came out, were trying to graze as they reclined. Annabel’s donkeys had got grotesquely fat, in their different styles. Lulu, the white mare, had a crest of fat on her neck and rolls of fat between each of her ribs, while Coco, her Pyrénéen consort, being a mountain animal in need of winter insulation, was evenly covered all over.

  I picked my first strawberries, which were more exciting as a concept than a dessert. The slugs had got there first. The wild strawberries tasted much better; there were so many plants at the edges of the garden that I could go out to pick a handful for breakfast every morning.

  A week or so later, after a few dry days, my own strawberries were much better. They were an elongated oval shape, deeply red, gorgeously soft and sweet, quite unlike the sour, cold things bought in supermarkets at home. They were of a local variety called ‘Garrigues’, and the first commercial crop of the year got the front page in the Sud-Ouest. When Andrew’s parents and his Aunt Rose came to visit, I mashed some wild and garden strawberries into Eton Mess and decorated it with crystallized petals from the deep-red rose climbing up the front of Maison Bergez.

  I also had the first cherries, a small, light-scarlet variety which suffered hardly any bird damage. This is surprising, because in most gardens the birds wait until the exact day that the cherries are ripe and then swoop down to strip the tree, which they can do in a few hours. The children, when they were off school for one of the bank holidays, were allowed to sit up all night to be ready to run out at dawn banging saucepans to scare away the winged marauders.

  The lines of peas were flowering, but not growing very tall – I wondered why, then checked the seed packet and found I’d planted a dwarf variety. The broad beans and the runner beans were looking good, the tomatoes were getting under way and the courgette plants could only be called ‘costaud’. This was another new word which I was enjoying. It means beefy, butch or muscular. Thus to foreign ears the famous undersea explorer, Jacques Cousteau, sounds like Jack Butch.

  All the woods were laced with cream – the petals of the acacia flowers. The hill on which Andrew and Geoff lived was covered with so many of these tall, hard-wooded trees in full flower that their scent rolled down to greet you; it was like driving into a wall of honey halfway across the valley.

  The weather was operatically temperamental. For a few days it was like some caricature of good growing weather, brilliant sunshine one minute, bucketing rain the next. Then there would be storms. One morning I woke up to see a blanket of mist in the valley below; by the time I’d made my coffee, the mist was all around the house, so thick I could hardly see the road.

  When it was hot now, it was hot, over 30°C at least. The rivers were raging grey-green torrents, and Sauveterre was suddenly full of kids who’d been rafting, squelching up from the river in their trainers, looking happy and exhausted.

  Sometimes the mountains were invisible in a heat haze, but sometimes the whole range was so brilliantly clear I felt sure I could see every stone on their snowy sides. When the air was so transparent, the mountains seemed to move closer, then drift away again as a veil of cloud came down.

  One Monday, when I was just leaving Annabel’s house, we had a tornado. As I stepped out of her kitchen, black clouds rolled up from the South-West and covered the sky. By the time I’d walked downhill to my own gate, a huge wind was thrashing the hedges. With it came a blizzard of acacia flowers, and then, by the time I’d run all over the cottage locking down the shutters, a swirling gale was ripping branches off trees. In the morning, the garden was full of torn-off branches of mistletoe. At Chris’s house, the wind slammed the bathroom door with such force that it knocked a hole in the wall.

  The First Cuckoo

  I heard the first cuckoo, calling in the wood by the tile factory. Several pairs of blackbirds were nesting and ceaselessly combing the garden for worms. From twilight onwards they scolded the cats non-stop, until I went and got Piglet in just for the sake of some peace. Annabel pointed out the beautiful liquid call of a golden oriole, coming from the bamboo thicket by my gate. We also had a wren, hardly bigger than the yellow butterflies now dancing over the flowers. He was extremely aggressive, and at first poured such vicious abuse on Piglet that he took fright and ran indoors.

  At the far end of the garden, under the huge oak tree, were some sawn-off oak logs, grouped around like the table and chairs set up for a leprechaun’s tea party. As I passed by them one afternoon, I found a woodpecker frantically chipping the oak stumps to shreds in search of the beetles which had already bored them hollow. These were the notorious capricornes, another insect capable of condemning a house to death, and in a few days they had completely destroyed a section of oak trunk about two feet in diameter.

  At dusk, the churring of cicadas was joined by calls from the big brown toad who lived by the stop-cock on the water pipe. Huge bugs began to fly about and a hornet came to visit my office every evening, flying in for an inspection about six, droning around officiously for thirty seconds, then flying on his way.

  After him, a cinnamon-coloured beetle about fifty millimetres long tried to get over the kitchen window sill; there was no need to deal with him, because his own clumsiness eventually sent him tumbling out into the flower bed. In the bathroom, exquisite grey moths, some with orange eyes on their wings, lined up on the window panes.

  All this delighted the cats. The Duchess went out every morning, picked the softest spot on the bank of grass beyond the catalpas, and spent all day alternately dozing and watching the butterflies. Piglet’s claws had grown as hard as steel, and he wanted to be out all night, prowling the bamboo thicket, or sitting on the kitchen window sill watching out for game, and also for Henri Cat, the ginger kitten, who was now to be found in the kitchen on most days when I came home from Sauveterre. He whisked out of the window and into the wood shed as soon as he heard me. Of course, it is folly to try to domesticate a barn cat but allowing him to live in the woodshed would, I reasoned, definitely discourage the mice.

  Recipes

  Blonde d’Osso Bucco à la Landaise

  There are far more recipes for poultry and pork in the traditional cooking of the South-West than there are for beef and veal. This is, after all, a cuisine of the people, who could only eat the cheapest and least-esteemed cuts of meat, while the roasts, steaks and chops were enjoyed by the milords and the bourgeois. One of the most popular cuts of veal is the jarret, the equivalent of the shank of lamb, which is often pot-roasted. It’s also cooked in slices, which we know in Britain by its Italian name, osso bucco.

  This is my adaptation, using Jurançon wine and pine nuts, a classic Landais ingredient, with the veal shin in a sauce made with onion, celery and anchovy, rather than the traditional tomatoes. Fear not, the anchovies dissolve and enrich the sauce undetectably – absolutely no hint of fish. The veal shank is cut through the bone; the marrow is kept intact in the cooking and is considered a great delicacy. It’s also bursting with vitamins. But if you have to feed people who can’t deal with bone marrow, this dish is nearly as good made simply with chunks of veal shin without the bone.

  Serves 4

  4 good slices of osso bucco

  oil a
nd butter for sautéing

  a little flour for dusting

  salt and pepper

  2 red onions

  4 sticks of celery

  3 cloves of garlic

  9 salted anchovies

  half a bottle of Jurançon wine (if you can’t get Jurançon, use any other slightly sweet white wine)

  500ml (16floz) stock, or water

  the pared rind of 1 fresh, unwaxed lemon

  4 tbsp chopped parsley

  4tbsp pine nuts, toasted until pale gold

  Preheat the oven to 150°C/300°F/Gas2.

  Wash and dry the osso bucco slices, taking care to get rid of any bone crumbs. Set some butter and oil to melt in a heavy-bottomed casserole over a medium heat. Mix a handful of flour with a pinch or two of salt and pepper – if you put it all in a plastic bag the whole process is easy and not too messy. Dust each slice of veal with the seasoned flour, and when the casserole is sizzling but not burning, fry the slices on each side to seal them.

  Chop the onions and the celery. Crush 2 cloves of garlic. Wash the anchovies, pull out any visible bones and chop them.

  When the meat is sealed, remove from the pan and set aside on a plate. Put the onions and celery in the pan, reduce the heat and cook gently until the onion is transparent. Then add the garlic and anchovies, and cook for a couple more minutes. The anchovy scraps will start to melt.

  Pour in the wine and turn up the heat to reduce it a little. Put the slices of meat back into the casserole. The liquid and sauce ingredients ought to come up around the sides of the slices, but not cover them, so if you need to, add some stock or water to get enough liquid in the casserole. You don’t want the dish to burn.

  Cover the casserole and put it in the oven for 2½ hours, checking occasionally and adding more liquid if necessary. To get an attractive golden colour on the meat, uncover the casserole for the last half-hour and glaze the slices with a little butter.