Every journey begins with but a single step
and ours started at 5.30 am in a bid to beat the traffic flowing north into
France. You won’t be surprised to read that there were moments early on when we
were the only people on the road and worried that perhaps the world had ended
and we hadn’t been informed.
We romped through potential choke points at
the border and Narbonne en route to Perigueux just north of Bordeaux. Part of
that planning was based on pessimism and part was the fact that Igor and
Martine, Manon’s parents whom we were going to see further north in Angouleme,
were also coming back that day from Spain and there’s something a bit pathetic
about visiting people who haven’t actually got home yet.
And we were also on a sentimental journey
to the Dordogne area, where we’d had a canoeing holiday shortly after getting
married in 1990. Maybe it was the first flush or some such but we couldn’t
recognize anything much except the atmosphere. So we fitted in a visit to
Souillac then Sarlat, where the Saturday market reportedly attracts hundreds of
sweating Poms in socks and sandals, seeking the authentic French experience and
finding a) a parking ticket, b) overpriced baubles and c) each other.
We swept on knowingly to have lunch (back
in France, remember) at Les Eyzies where
the French Government has financed a very good
prehistory museum. Bones of mammoths, giant aurochs, tigers etc were all
the go although they did go a bit hard on the Neolithic arrowheads. Seen one,
you’ve seen ‘em all.
So, on to Perigueux where we had a Mercure hotel
room booked Centre Ville, and nice too. Another midsize French town, with Roman
origins and enough winding cobbled streets to satisfy any pedant. We even found
a “national’’ boule competition there. Short of finding an old French bloke in
sky blue overalls riding a Solex with an unlit yellow “mais’’ fag in his mouth
and a baguette under his arm, that’s as Gallic as it gets these days. Bear in
mind, if you will, that 2CVs are all but extinct and even the venerable Citroen
HY van, the big boxy one with corrugated sides, is only now usually found in
gardens holding up vines. Sic transit
Gloria.
And thence to Angouleme for Sunday lunch
with Colette, Iona’s host mother in 2007, and dinner with Igor and Martine.
What a day! We found everyone absolutely
delightful and Anna’s French went through the roof. Colette is a wonderful warm
widow who teaches phys ed, and her son Timothee is now 20 and doing a
management apprenticeship and practicing his English. She’s something of a traveller
now he’s grown up and we’d love to see her (and potentially Timothee) in
Australia. She adores Iona and gave us a lovely lunch.
She showed us the Lycee Marguerite de
Valois, where Iona had been, which has around 2000 pupils and looks like a luxury
liner hard aground. Lots of suitably evocative photos taken , then we were off
to Igor and Martine’s down the road where we got an equally warm welcome even
though Manon wasn’t there…yet.
Igor, who is about six foot two and looks
like a rock guitarist, combines an ironfounding job with fixing houses and we
found him wearing a new red tee shirt he’d bought in Spain featuring a Citroen
2CV. Much Pastis was drunk and his and Martine’s wonderfully inclusive family
(including Martine’s sister Cecile who lives across the garden in a barn that
Igor fixed up) took us to their hearts. Igor and Martine also lent us their
bedroom.
On Sunday, after Igor and Martine’s tour of the town (another midsize belter), Manon arrived with her friend
Pierre, who is a part time model and had all the Mums sighing. A suitably
massive lunch followed and then at 3pm we had to go on to the next stage, the Loire. Before we
went Igor gave me the proverbial shirt off his back: the 2CV shirt, freshly
washed. What can you say? He is so generous it’s almost a worry. I certainly stopped
pointing to things and admiring them in case he gave them to me.
Then it was off to Tours, up past Poitiers,
to book into the Hotel Monarque in Azay Le Rideau on spec, to good effect. The
only monarch we could find had stayed there was the ill fated Edward VIII, Duke
of Windsor, and his skinny wife, but it was a lovely hotel all the same.
We’d hoped to go to our old stamping
ground, the Maison de Garde at the Chateau de la Mothe in Artannes Sur Indre
nearby, but it is no longer available for rent and there wasn’t even a diner
open in Artannes. But we went to Artannes the next day and walked through,
remembering the time we’d had a big dinner at the Auberge de La Vallee du Lys
and got back to the chateau by feel, in unlit streets on a moonless night.
Then off to the wondrous garden at
Villandry, revived by a genius Spaniard in about 1907, and a sampling session
at Vouvray where there is a light bubbly wine that tastes of gunflint and costs
a fraction of Champagne.
We then set off up the road to see our
friends Charles and Sylvie Watkins in Montmorency, north of Paris, for dinner.
We got stuck on the Peripherique of course, and lobbed in late, but they had
seen it all before and laughed. Much cheer over drinks and dinner. Younger son Benjamin
was absent, reportedly in love, but Jeremy was in residence and told us about
his (water) engineering course at Strasbourg which may well land him a job.
Wednesday was Nostalgia Day for us. Charles
dropped us at Enghien station and we set off to “do’’ the 6th
arrondissement. RER to Port Royal, then a walk through the old ‘hood and
through Luxembourg gardens where I hired a yacht for old times’ sake. We went
past the Sorbonne and Lycee Henri IV , where Charles teaches. Then down to Bon
Marche, a bus or two, and the Hotel de Ville.
The Conciergerie, meanwhile, where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned, has
been cleaned and looks glorious.
The Hotel de Ville had an excellent if
wrenching exhibition about the 9600 French Jewish children who were killed at
Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944, which for what may be the first time actually
noted that the roundup had been by the French police, not the Gestapo. It’s
taken a while but the truth is out.
On Thursday Charles and Sylvie took us to
Malmaison, Napoleon and Jospehine’s love nest, where there’s a lot of early 19th
century art in sometimes dubious taste, plus the best version of David’s
painting of ol’ Boney crossing the Alps. Charles has his doubts about Bonaparte
so we enjoyed looking at the closed Berlin carriage he took on the Moscow
campaign I 1812 (there and back please, you will note) and which the Prussians
captured entirely intact at Waterloo. That’s two-nil.
Then we drove round eastabout to St Maur to
see our friends Jacob and Martine Mayne, late of Sydney, and their son Theo who,
unlike his two glam sisters Alice and Matilda, was at home. The traffic was
terrible, thus usefully puncturing our notion that we could live in Paris, and
we took hours to get there but the company was a joy and by the time we drove
home (with a bit of help from Otto the German GPS system) the road was all but
clear. Alice is French pairs rowing champion although she just missed out on
Olympic selection, while Matilda has fallen in love with a double bass player.
Theo, whom I used to throw in the air, is now 17 and starting his Bac in
between video games.
It was back to Montmorency late and an
early start for Luxembourg (the duchy, not the garden) to see two old Paris
friends, Marianne and Bertrand de Mazieres. We did stop at Reims to say hello
to the cathedral and to find a patissier to sell us two religieuses to mark our
exit from France. It was, yes, a religieuse experience to eat those custard
puffs.
Marianne greeted us with open arms after a
17 year absence and gave us the guided tour of the Grand Duchy, which we joked
had been closed when we tried to have lunch there on a Sunday many years ago. She
was a very funny guide and we had a lot of laughs despite the rain before
meeting up with Bertrand, a heavy at the European Investment Bank, for a pizza
in an Italian place that was half the price of anywhere else and just jumping.
He too has a wonderful dry sense of humour. His job is raise finance
for EU infrastructure projects, which takes him away for long periods.
Luxembourg has had a slightly bogus boom because of the EU’s Three Capitals
(Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg) policy which means you can’t buy a
terrace house for 2 million Euros. They rent!
As with so many of our friends, they still
had one child at home and we met Antoine, now studying PPE at Durham in England
and breaking all the girls’ hearts. Just to ram home the point, he also has a
slight French accent when he speaks English. No shoving in the line, girls. We
last saw him when he was three.
Marianne had been all set for the full art
tour and leisurely lunch but alas we had to keep moving as we have to get to
Berlin. We spent a longish day driving without mishap and got to Naila, just
inside the old West Germany on the Eastern border, by around 5pm, reaching a
little hotel I had booked. It was folklorique in the way that it was full of
farmers eating dinner at 5.30pm…so we did the same and had schnitzels various
in a pizzeria nearby at around 6.30pm. Highlight of the meal was when we
explained to the table next door that we were from Australia and thus brought
the whole restaurant joyously into the conversation. Everyone else had been
pretending not to listen, since we were the only strangers in the place.
