The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  Havelock, game to the last, had struck his final blow.

  THE MICHELIN MAN

  Many years ago, when I first started to travel in France, a kindly friend pressed a copy of the Guide Michelin into my hands, rather in the spirit that prompts the Gideon Society to fill lonely hotel bedrooms with copies of the Bible. The Guide Michelin (known affectionately as “the Mich ”) is to a traveller and gourmet what the Bible is to a Christian, the Koran to a Mohammedan or the sayings of Buddha to a large section of the world. It is your guide, mentor and friend when travelling in France . It is small, fat and red — like so many cheerful French peasants you see who have become well-padded and polished over the years by good food and wine. Within its scarlet covers are the dossiers of some two thousand hotels, pensions and restaurants, their innermost secrets revealed.

  A glance at the Mich and you know every reasonable hostelry within a fifty-mile radius of your position. It tells you whether the hostelry in question allows dogs in your room, whether they are “tout confort ” or dismissed as merely being acceptable; whether they have garages, telephones, private baths and other adjuncts of modem living; whether they are quiet (a red rocking chair as the inspired symbol) or whether they have a “jardin fleuri ”.

  But in addition to this almost Scotland Yard dossier on each place the Mich does something more; it tells you about food. France is an eminently sensible country where people take food seriously as an art form, which indeed the cooking and presentation of food is; an art form which has, unfortunately, become almost extinct in Britain. In France the choice of a dish is made with the same care as you would employ in choosing a wife, and in some cases even greater. Therefore the Mich has printed in its margins against the various restaurants certain symbols that guide and succour the person who takes food and its preparation seriously.

  The first symbol is a small etching of crossed spoon and fork. One of these denotes a plain but adequate meal, two or three mean comfortable or very comfortable while four crossed spoons and forks mean the presentation is of exquisite excellence. After this the mind becomes bedazzled.

  Four crossed spoons and forks accompanied by a star mean you will have an ambrosial meal in ideal circumstances and are on the first rungs of the gastronomic ladder that leads to that Paradise where you discover a place with four crossed spoons and forks and three stars. There are, however, only four of these in France . Getting three stars in the Mich is considerably more difficult than obtaining the Victoria Cross, the Croix de Guerre or the Purple Heart, and to get even one is an achievement that would make any serious chef die happy.

  Once you have assessed the culinary worth of a place by the spoons, forks and stars in the margin you may then move on to something else which the Michelin company thoughtfully provides. Under each entry they list the specialities of the restaurant and the wines of which they are particularly proud. This means that — having chosen your place of refuge — you can then spend five minutes or so getting your taste buds overexcited by reading the list of specialities that are provided for your delectation, toying mentally with gratin of fresh-water crayfish tails, or turbot poached in cream, lobster soup, or a Charolais steak accompanied by cиpes, those marvellous wild mushrooms, black as sin, that look as though they should be witches’ umbrellas.

  The Guide, therefore, is not merely a guide book, it is a gastronomic experience. Only once did I doubt this incomparable volume. Only once did I think — for a brief moment — that, in its zeal to leave no gastronomic stone unturned, the Mich might have overstepped the canons of good behaviour. This was some years ago when I was paying my annual pilgrimage to a small house I have in the South of France, to which I repair to try to pretend that Alexander Bell has never invented the telephone and to get some writing done.

  That year Europe had crept out from under a warm, wet winter into a riotous, multicoloured fragrant spring. France, always one of the most beautiful of countries was, in consequence, like a magnificent piece of embroidery, ashine and aglitter with flowers so that the countryside was as ravishing and as multicoloured as a Fabergé Easter egg. It was the time of the mustard as I headed south and so the car drifted down country lanes that meandered through a landscape as yellow as a nest of canaries, a delicate but bold yellow. So enraptured was I at the flower-bedecked hedges and banks, the vast yellow fields of mustard, the tiled roofs of the cottages looking in the vivid spring sunshine as crisp as gingerbread, that I drove in a sort of daze.

  At noon I stopped in a village that encompassed some fifty souls and bought for myself wine, a fresh loaf of brown bread, a fine, brave cheese and some fruit. Then I drove on until I found a gigantic field of mustard curving over the rolling hilts like a yellow carpet. Here I parked the car in the shade of some chestnut trees, took my provender and made my way into the delicate sea of yellow and green. I lay down among the fragile mustard plants and ate and drank, lapped in this sea of gold. Then, making up my mind that I must drive on, I fell deeply and peacefully asleep.

  I awoke when the sun was getting low, slanting on to my bed of mustard, turning the pale yellow to old gold, and I realized I had driven without direction, slept far too long and now had not the faintest idea where I was. It was reaching that hour of the afternoon when all intelligent travellers on the French roads pull in to the side and start consulting their Michelins. But it was useless my doing this for I did not know where I was.

  I got into the car and drove slowly along the road until, by good chance, I came upon a wagon piled high with fragrant cow manure being driven by a little man who looked like an animated walnut. With great good humour he reined in his two mammoth horses and showed me on the map exactly where I was, pointing out the very spot with a calloused forefinger brown with earth and sun. I thanked him and he clopped and jingled and creaked on his way, while I got out my Mich and started looking up every town and village in a thirty-mile radius. It was a fruitless task. Each one I looked up was treated frostily by the Mich and there was nothing of any gastronomic quality at all. I had apparently struck one of those curious blank spots in France where there was nothing — so to speak — Michelinable.

  Then I spotted a village on the map some twenty kilometres away, but so tiny and remote I felt sure it would have nothing. I looked it up anyway since I was attracted by its name, Bois de Rossignol, the Nightingale Wood. To my astonishment the Mich informed me (almost quivering with delight) that the village boasted one tavern, “Le Petit Chanson” (which in view of the Nightingales struck me as being pleasantly apposite). Wonder of wonders, it not only had six rooms but baths, telephones, a garage, a red rocking chair for serenity and a “jardin fleuri ”. In addition it had three crossed spoons and forks and a star. It closed for the winter but had reopened on this very day.

  I read the description again, hardly believing my eyes, but there it was in black and white. Underneath the description of the amenities was the list of specialities. This riveted my attention for they would have done credit to a large hotel on the Côte d’Azur . The proprietor obviously made up his own names for his specialities, which argued a fine, free spirit. There were tails of fresh-water crayfish “in clouds of eggs”. There was beef in red wine, “For the Hunger of Theodore Pullini”. There was a “Tart of Wild Strawberries for the Delectation of Sophie Clemanceau”. I was enchanted and immediately made up my mind that I must, at all costs, stay at “Le Petit Chanson”. Slamming the Mich shut I started the car and drove with all speed to Bois de Rossignol, hoping to get there before all the other salivating gourmets on the roads should arrive before me and occupy all six rooms in the hotel.

  The village, when I found it, was delightful. It consisted of some two dozen or so houses grouped amicably round a small, sunlit square, lined with huge plane trees that guarded a small and very beautiful fountain. One end of the square was dominated by a tiny and perfect little fifteenth-century church which raised an admonishing, slender spire to the gingerbread roofed houses around it. Every available space on window l
edges on pavements and on the tops of walls was covered by regiments of flower pots, window boxes, tin cans and, in some cases wheel-barrows and old prams, all aglow and overflowing with spring flowers. I pulled up by a bench on which sat five old men, wizened, toothless, wrinkled as lizards, soaking up the evening sun, and asked them the way to “Le Petit Chanson”. Eagerly a chorus of quavering voices and a forest of gnarled hazel sticks pointed me through the village and out the other side. A few hundred yards along the road I came to a side-turning at which was a sign informing me that “Le Petit Chanson” lay to my left. The road was narrow and ran beside a baby river, green and silver in the sun, bounded on one side by woodland, and on the other by vineyards, the vines like black, many-branched arthritic candelabras each with a wig of new green leaves on top.

  “Le Petit Chanson”, when I came to it, was no disappointment. The road curved between two huge oak trees and there, in a garden like a patchwork quilt of flowers lay the hotel, a long low building with a red-tiled roof blotched here and there with emerald cushions of moss. The walls and part of the roof were almost invisible under one of the most flamboyant and magnificent wisterias I had ever seen. Over the years it had lovingly embraced the building, throwing coil after coil of itself round the walls and roof until the occupants had been hard pressed to keep it from barring the doors and windows. At ground level the trunk had a girth that any self-respecting python would have been proud of, and the whole complicated web of trunk and branch that had the house in its grip was as blue as a kingfisher’s wing with a riot of flowers.

  In a small gravel square among the flower beds in front of the hotel neat white tables and chairs were laid out in the shade of six or seven Judas trees in full bloom. Their pinky-red blooms were starting to fall; the ground was red with them and the white table tops were bespattered as by gouts of dragon’s blood. Beyond the garden stretched woodland and great skyward sloping fields of mustard.

  I parked the car and, carrying my overnight bag, walked into the hotel. The small hall smelt of food and wine and floor polish, and everything was clean and shining. I was first greeted by an enormous hairy dog that, had you met him in the woods, you would have been pardoned for thinking a bear. He was, however, most amiable. I soon found that he had several delicious, ticklish spots behind his ears and had him groaning with pleasure as I massaged them. Presently a young waiter made his appearance and I asked him if they had a room for the night.

  “Certainement, monsieur, ” he said with grave politeness and taking my case from me he led me down a passageway to a charming bedroom whose window was rimmed with blue wisteria framing the distant fields of mustard.

  After I had bathed and changed I made my way downstairs and out into the garden, floodlit now with the rays of the setting sun. I sat down at a table and started to think hopefully that a Pernod might be a not entirely unacceptable idea when the young waiter appeared.

  “Excuse me, monsieur,” he said, “but monsieur le Patron asks whether you will drink a bottle of wine with him, for you are the first customer we have had this year and it is his custom to celebrate like this.”

  I was enchanted by such a civilized idea.

  “Of course I will be delighted to accept,” I said, “but I do hope that the Patron will come out and join me?”

  “Oui, monsieur, ” said the waiter, “I will tell him.”

  I was anxious to meet the Patron for I felt sure that he was the one responsible for the quaint names of his various specialities, and I wanted to find out why they had been thus christened. Presently he appeared. His appearance was in keeping with the name of the hotel and the whole ambience of the place. He was a giant man, some six foot three in height, with shoulders as wide and solid as a café table. His massive face with an eagle nose and brilliant black eyes, framed in a shock of white hair, belonged to an Old Testament prophet. He wore an apron which was spotless and a chef’s hat perched jauntily on the back of his head and in his huge hands, the joints cobbled by arthritis, he carried a tray on which was a bottle of wine and two very beautifully-shaped glasses. He was, I judged, in his middle eighties, but gave the impression of being indestructible. You felt he would live to be well over a hundred. He beamed at me as he approached as though I was a dear friend of long standing; his eyes flashed with humour; his delighted smile was wide and his face fretted with a thousand lines that the laughter of his life had etched there,

  “Monsieur,” he boomed as he set the tray carefully on the table, “welcome to my hotel. You are our first guest of the season and so are especially welcome.”

  He wrung my hand with courteous enthusiasm and then sat down opposite me. The force of his personality was like a blast furnace. He exuded kindness and good will and humour in equal quantities and so was irresistible.

  “I do hope that you will like this wine,” he continued, pouring it out carefully into the glasses. “It is a Beaujolais from my own little vineyard. I have enough grapes to make some twenty bottles a year, for my own consumption, you understand, and so I only open it on special occasions such as this.”

  “I am honoured,” I said, raising my glass. The wine slid into my mouth like velvet and the fragrance illuminated my taste buds.

  The old man rolled it round his mouth and swallowed thoughtfully. “It is a truthful wine,” he said.

  “Very truthful,” I agreed.

  “You are en vacances here?” he enquired.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have a little house down in Provence and I try to go there every summer.”

  “Ah! Provence ! . . . the country of herbs,” he said, “what a lovely area of France !”

  “The whole of France is beautiful. I think it is one of the loveliest countries in the world.”

  He beamed at me and nodded. We drank for a while in respectful silence that one gives to a special wine, and then the old man refilled our glasses.

  “And now you wish for the menu?” he asked.

  “Yes, please,” I said. “I was reading about some of your specialities in the Michelin. You must be an excellent chef to have obtained your star.”

  He closed his eyes and an expression of anguish passed for a moment across his fine face.

  “Ah, the star, the star,” he groaned. “You have no idea, monsieur, what I had to suffer to get that star. Wait, I will get you the menu and after you have chosen I will tell you about the star. It is, I assure you, a romance such as Dumas might have invented and yet it is all true. A moment while I get the menu.”

  He went off into the hotel and returned presently with the menu and the wine list and placed them in front of me.

  “If I may venture to make a suggestion,” he said as he recharged our glasses, “the ‘Pigeons for the Sake of Marie Theresa’ is something I am really proud of and I have some fine, plump, fresh squabs. As you are our first customer of the season I will, naturally, broach another bottle of my Beaujolais to accompany the pigeons.”

  “You are very kind,” I said. “The pigeons sound admirable. Tell me, I notice that you give curious names to all your specialities. I presume they have some special significance?”

  “Why yes, monsieur,” he said gravely. “When one invents a new dish I think it is only befitting that its name should commemorate some event. For example, take the pigeons. I invented this dish when my wife was pregnant with our first child. You know the strange humours women get at such times, eh — ? Well, my wife developed a passion for tarragon and pigeons. Enfin ! It was incumbent upon me to invent a dish that would not only feed her and our unborn child, but would appeal to the finicky appetite of a pregnant woman of great beauty and sensibility. So, I invented this pigeon dish for the sake of Marie Theresa, which is my wife’s name.”

  “What a fascinating idea,” I said. “I must start doing that myself, for I am something of a cook and I always think that so many lovely dishes have the dullest names.”

  “It is true. I see no reason why imagination should not go into the creation of a dish and also into th
e naming of it.”

  I perused the menu for a few moments.

  “I think,” I said at last, “that with your ‘Pigeons for the Sake of Marie Theresa’ as a main dish, I would like to start with the ‘Pâté Commemorating the passing of Albert Henri Périgord’ and then finish with some cheese and perhaps ‘Tart of Wild Strawberries for the Delectation of Sophie Clemanceau’.”

  “An admirable choice, monsieur,” he said, getting to his feet. “Now, please help yourself to more wine. I will just tell my wife of your wishes and then I will return and tell you the story of how we got our star.”

  He went off into the hotel and presently reappeared with a dish of olives and some small but delicious cheese puffs.

  “Yes, monsieur,” he said thoughtfully, easing himself into the chair and taking a sip of wine, slouching easily in the attitude of the professional raconteur. “The fact that we have a star is, to my mind, a small miracle as I am sure you will agree when I tell you the full story. This all happened, of course, before the fourteen-eighteen war, for as you will have discerned, although I aim a fine upstanding man, I am no longer in the first flush of youth.

  “In those days I was something of an artist, albeit an unsuccessful one. I still dabble a bit and do the odd oil or watercolour, but I found my true artistic métier was in the kitchen. However, in those days, as I say, I tried to earn a few francs by doing the odd portrait and pictures of people’s homes. In this way I earned a rather uneven living, but I enjoyed myself tramping through France and if no one bought my pictures I did whatever job was offered. I have mended roads, picked grapes and cherries and even been, for a short time, a snail farmer.

  “Well, one spring in just such a season as this, my wanderings led me to this village. As you may imagine the countryside was looking magnificent and I was captivated by the colours and the scenery. I decided that if I could stay in this vicinity for a while I would be able to paint some really remarkable pictures. But, as was often the case with me, I had no money, so I had to set about looking for a job. As you may well believe in a village of this size jobs were as rare as a goose with five livers.”