The produce market in Fouras.
A passage from The Great Gatsby has always stuck in my mind. It isn’t particularly poetic or profound, but it strikes a chord. It occurs near the beginning, when Nick Carraway is remembering how he came to know Gatsby. He’d just moved to a remote corner of Long Island.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
Was there a defining moment when I started to think of myself as French? A Gatsby revelation on the road?
I paged back through my mental scrapbook. My first visits to France dated from the ‘seventies, when I lived in London. There'd been a few days on an early camping tour, a couple of overnights en route to some film festival, various research trips to the Cinematheque Française, and some dirty weekends, all drawn curtains and occasional weak-kneed forays to the superette for supplies.
None were particularly glamorous. Dragging heavy suitcase around the 19th arrondisement looking for a hotel we could afford, I thought of Ellen Burstyn’s cry in the film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More when she cruises an American town on the same search. “Why don’t they just have a sign that says ‘Cheap Motel’?”
The Luxembourg Gardens in autumn.
And who could forget watching movies in cinemas the size of closets, where an usherette guided you to your seat, and expected a tip? Walking romantically hand in hand across the Luxembourg in autumn, shoes scuffling the sludge of fallen chestnut leaves - which, I was not surprised to find, just left one with wet feet and muddy shoes?
In each case, my perspective was that of customer. It's the role most of us play in our overseas trips. All travel books are, at bottom, advertisements. It’s OK to expend a chapter or two on the amusing antics of the locals but that sort of thing isn’t much use if you’re just there for the weekend. The suggestions for off-piste culinary adventures are also, for the most part, just window-dressing. I once spent a weekend in Venice enquiring at restaurant after restaurant for Fegato a la Veneziana, which the travel guides insisted was a Venetian speciality. It's only calves’ liver fried with onions and served with polenta, but one would have thought from the baffled looks of a dozen waiters that I was asking for the dish proposed by Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fillet of Unborn Octopus Basted in Barnacles.
So when did I stop reading the guides and start taking France at it came? On reflection, there were probably a number of such occasions, but one sticks in my mind.
In A Paris Christmas, I describe our adventures preparing Christmas dinner for the first time for my extended French family. Rather than follow the traditional route of roast turkey and trimmings, I decided on a sucking pig. We were in a village on the Atlantic coast so I went to the local halles or produce market and consulted the butcher.
In the book, he’s M. Mortier, “a jovial man with a belly and a bushy moustache, like Balzac. He was the most popular of the market’s three butchers mainly because of his tendency to chat. Each man got a joke, each woman a comment on her hat or dress, each mother a compliment about her child, and everyone the inevitable advice on how to cook what they bought.”
I explained my need for a porcelet de lait. And most important, the necessity that it still have its skin.
“Its skin, m’sieur?”
I steeled myself for an argument. No French butcher understood the crucial importance of crackling on roast pork. Mortier, however, was the exception.
“But of course it will have its skin!”
Turning into profile, he made fluttering hand gestures up and down his body, like a dandy showing off his new outfit or a torero admiring his traje de luces.
“Reassure yourself, m’sieur, that your piglet will be as well-dressed as if by the best tailor in London.”
Mortier retired a few years later and I’d almost forgotten him when, not long after, standing in line to buy vegetables in the same halles, the woman next to me said, “Excusez-moi mais…vous etes l’ecrivain?”
“Er..oui. C’est moi.” I introduced myself.
“Je suis une amie de M. Mortier,” she explained. “Le boucher?”
A friend of M. Mortier, the butcher. Oh dear. He’d retired by the time the book came out, so I never had a chance to give him a copy. Did he resent being compared to Balzac? I hope he understood I meant my description affectionately…
She brushed aside my fears. On the contrary, M. Mortier was delighted. He spoke no English, but a friend had translated that chapter for him. He had told her that, if she should ever run into me, to send his regards.
I left the halles feeling something like Nick in Gatsby. No longer l’Australien or le mari de Madame Montel; not a stranger or a customer, but “l’ecrivain”. The writer.
It wasn’t the Croix de Guerre or the Legion d’Honneur. But it would do
.