French Lessons

by Peter Mayle

  The day of the fair began with a fine warm morning. Nothing moved on the streets except a cat creeping home after a disreputable night out. The rest of Contrexéville was still in bed. Evidently, drinking a great deal of water is a tiring business. When I stopped at the next village to have coffee in a sleepy café, it was a relief to stand at the bar next to a man who was enjoying a thick slice of saucisson with his baguette and glass of red wine for breakfast. I felt I was back in France.

  I arrived in Martigny, to find that it had been transformed overnight. The long, straight rue de l’Abbé Thiebaut was packed with stands, throbbing with music, squirming with life. Behind the stands were several examples of the French genius for squeezing very large trucks into very small spaces, and from these trucks, all manner of temptations had been unloaded: spicy merguez sausages, sugar-dusted gaufres (France’s answer to the waffle), cages of chicks, breeding rabbits with impressive written credentials, ducks, hens, quail, guinea fowl. A trio of goats elbowed one another in a cramped pen, their mad pale eyes fixed with longing on a tantalizing display of garden plants, just out of reach on the next stand. Kits of painless face jewelry were on offer—nose studs, tongue trimmings, and ear ornaments that could be stuck on, rather than surgically attached. There was a name I hadn’t seen before on the fashion scene, Nixon Triple Force jeans. (Can Clinton Executive Privilege Sportswear be far behind?) And, stacked high, their lurid colors shimmering in the sun, piles and piles of mattresses.

  This puzzled me. I couldn’t imagine why they were there. Why would anyone in his right mind come to a snail fair to buy a new mattress? Supposing he did, how would he get it home? And yet, even more puzzling, the mattress merchants—there were several of them competing for business—were attracting considerable interest. Knots of people stood inspecting the mattresses, leaning forward to prod them from time to time as if trying to awaken dormant animals. Braver souls came forward to sit down and take a test bounce. One woman was lying full length on a mattress, her shopping basket clutched to her bosom, a salesman crooning in her ear. “Ten years of sweet dreams. Absolutely guaranteed.” For those not won over by the promise of sweet dreams, another mattress seller provided the living inducement of a reclining blonde, tightly clad in black. The crowd around her was mostly male, and rather shy. There were no prods and test bounces here.

  The music was developing into a pitched battle: a traditional accordion medley coming from one stand, versus Abba’s greatest hits coming from another, with occasional fusillades of drumming booming up from the far end of the street. In a tiny garden behind one of the stands, an old lady sat on a cane chair, tapping her stick and nodding her head in time with the beat, a faint smile on her face, her slippered foot twitching. She seemed to know everybody passing by. In fact, everybody seemed to know everybody passing by, stopping for a chat, a slap on the back, a pinch of the cheek. It was more like the reunion of an enormous family than a public fête.

  Leaving the mattresses behind, I came to a bucolic merry-go-round that might have come straight out of the Middle Ages. Four tiny ponies, no bigger than Great Danes, were clopping around in docile, patient circles, each with an apprehensive child clinging to the reins, the mane, or, in one case, a long-suffering ear. Indifferent to the noise, the heat, and their escort of flies, the ponies seemed lost in their thoughts, like reluctant commuters on their way to work.

  When I finally caught sight of Madame Gérard in the crowd, it was obvious from her smiling face that the problems of yesterday had been resolved. She introduced me to her mother, and they steered me to the end of the street so that I could take in every detail of the official opening ceremonies. It was important, so I was told, to observe the cutting of the ribbon and the forming up of the brass band, composed of Martigny’s most accomplished musicians. And there they were, dressed in their best, with peaked hats, sky blue jackets, and white trousers. Almost hidden among the forest of legs was France’s tiniest trumpeter, a boy who barely came up to the drummer’s waist, his eager face several sizes too small for his peaked hat. I felt sure it would slip down over his ears as soon as he took his first energetic toot.

  A nudge from Madame Gérard’s mother. Attention! The mayor arrives, avec son entourage.

  They provided an interesting study in sartorial styles. The mayor in his suit and tie, Miss Coquille and her two runners-up with pale flashes of midriff showing above low-slung, snug-fitting jeans, and a clown named Pipo putting them all in the shade with his outfit of vibrant plaid trousers, plaid shoulder bag, and shiny red shoes that exactly matched his shiny red nose. He was limbering up with a few preliminary capers, when the band’s fanfare exploded in my ears, obliterating Abba’s greatest hits, and the mayor stepped forward to cut the traditional tricolor ribbon stretched across the street.

  The band snapped smartly into a military refrain—the march of the escargots—and we set off up the street, Pipo in the lead, capering his heart out, followed by the band, followed by the mayor and his entourage, followed by Madame Gérard’s mother and me. Madame Gérard’s mother, naturally, knew everyone. This slowed us down a little, and we came to a complete stop while she persuaded her own mother to leave her garden and join the parade.

  It was getting close to noon, and the warmth of the morning had turned into heat. As we made our way at a gastropod’s pace up the street, I found myself taking a more than passing interest in the dim, cool rooms I could see behind the stands—rooms decorated with banners bearing pictures of smiling escargots and that eternally inviting word, dégustation. In the gloom, I was able to make out figures holding glasses. They reminded me of my mission—to meet and to eat some of the finest snails in France. Duty was calling, and it was time to get down to work.

  With a final bray of brass and ruffle of drums, the procession ended at the top of the street. Making my way back, I walked into a perfumed breeze, a quiver of warm, garlic-scented air, and my nose led me to one of the salles de dégustation. It had probably once served as a stable, but now it had been converted into a simple restaurant and bar—the walls whitewashed, the blackened tile floor polished, long wooden trestle tables and benches, a temporary kitchen set up in an alcove at the back. The menu was scrawled on a blackboard: You could have snails, snails, or snails, prepared according to your preference, with or without frites. There was Gewürztraminer, chilled and spicy, to drink by the glass, by the carafe, and probably by the barrel. I couldn’t imagine a more pleasant working environment.

  A great advantage of long tables and communal eating is enforced companionship. You might sit down alone, but solitude won’t last longer than the time it takes to say bonjour. And, following the familiar pattern, once I admitted to being anxious for guidance and advice, someone was happy to come to my assistance.

  I took my place opposite a stocky middle-aged man in a flat cap and faded shirt, his face gnarled and seasoned by the weather. He nodded amiably and asked me if I was alone. Not only was I alone, I said, but English.

  “Ah, bon?” He said he had never met an Englishman before, and he studied this novelty in silence for a few moments with a faint air of surprise. I don’t know what he was expecting—a soccer hooligan, perhaps, or Major Thompson in his bowler hat—but he seemed reassured by what he saw. He offered his hand and introduced himself as Maurin, Etienne, before leaning back to take a pull at his tumbler of wine. “You like snails?”

  “I think so,” I said, “but I haven’t had them very often. I don’t know anything about them.”

  “Start with a dozen,” he said, “just with garlic and butter.” He looked down at the heap of empty shells in front of him. “I’m ready for some more myself.” He turned to call the waiter. “Jeune homme! An Englishman dies of hunger here.” He ordered a dozen for each of us, and a large carafe of what he called “Gewürz.”

  Our immediate neighbors at the table were a young couple in an advanced state of romance. They were attempting the impossible—to extract flesh from hot shells, gaze into each other’s eyes,
and hold hands at the same time, oblivious to everything around them. They weren’t going to be much use in my quest for knowledge. I turned back to my new companion and asked him to tell me what I should know about snails.

  It is a perfect arrangement: A Frenchman talks, you listen. But, unlike his countrymen, you don’t argue with him. This is a major social asset, and you are looked upon with a measure of sympathy. You are still a foreigner, certainly, but a foreigner whose heart and stomach are in the right place, willing to sit at the feet of a master and learn about civilized matters. He, naturally, is delighted to share his superior knowledge and to air his views, aperçus, prejudices, and anecdotes to an appreciative audience.

  Before Maurin had time to do much more than clear his throat and arrange his thoughts, the waiter arrived. A basket of bread and a beaded carafe were placed between us, the snails set before us, the blessing of bon appétit pronounced. Practical instruction could begin. Part one: how to eat a snail.

  We were in a no-frills establishment. My plate was a rectangle of aluminum foil, marked with a dozen shallow indentations. Snails nestled in each of the indentations, and I could feel the heat rising from their shells. A paper napkin and a wooden toothpick completed the place setting.

  The smell was glorious and I was ravenous, but my first attempt to pick up a shell ended in failure and singed fingertips. The equipment didn’t run to a set of those miniature tongs supplied to snail-eaters in more luxurious restaurants. I looked across at my companion to see how he was dealing with the problem and saw an example of practical ingenuity at work in the service of the stomach. Maurin had hollowed out a slice of bread and was using the piece of crust like pincers, wrapping it around each shell so that his fingertips were insulated from the heat. With the other hand, its pinkie delicately cocked, he aimed his toothpick, stabbed, and, with a half turn of the wrist, extracted the sizzling contents. Before putting the shell down, he raised it to his mouth and sipped the last of the juice. It all seemed terribly easy.

  I imitated him as best I could, managing to extract the first snail from its shell with only minor damage to my shirtfront from an unexpected spurt of garlic butter. I looked at the object on the end of my toothpick, a dark and wrinkled morsel, not immediately appetizing, and then remembered something Régis had told me: One should eat snails through the nose, not through the eyes. They certainly smell better than they look.

  The taste was better still. Snail critics—usually speaking with the conviction that is informed by considerable ignorance—will tell you to expect nothing but an aggressive rush of garlic and a mouthful of rubber, but they haven’t eaten snails in Martigny. Garlic was there, of course, but it was mild and buttery and well behaved. Nor was there any hint of resistance in the flesh, which was as tender as prime steak. So far, so good. I drank the juice from the shell, mopped my chin with a piece of bread, and settled back to listen to Maurin.

  He started with the nutritional news that snails are good for you, low in fat and rich in nitrogen. But—a warning finger was wagged under my nose—precautions need to be taken. Snails can thrive on a diet that would put a man in hospital; they are partial to deadly nightshade, equally deadly mushrooms, and hemlock. Not only that. They can eat huge quantities of this fatal salad—the equivalent of half their body weight in twenty-four hours.

  It wasn’t the best moment to hear this, as I was halfway through my first dozen. My laden toothpick stopped in midair, and Maurin grinned. With these, he said, you risk nothing. They are cultivated snails, raised in an enclosed park and unable to wander; or, as he put it, to indulge their humeur vagabonde. Problems only arise with wild snails, who can roam the fields at will, gorging on those deadly pleasures, but even these creatures can be rendered safe and delicious. All one has to do is starve them for fifteen days. At the end of the fast, each snail is carefully examined for ominous signs, then washed three times in tepid water before having its shell brushed in readiness for the oven. This is known as the toilette des escargots.

  Surely, I said, they would be well past their best, even dead, by that time. But no. The snail can live for extended periods without food, and Maurin told me the story of a certain Monsieur Locard to prove it. It seems that Locard had invited some friends to his house for a snail feast, but he found himself with more than enough to go around. He put the surplus snails away to eat later, and for some reason, which even Maurin couldn’t explain, he stored them in the bottom of his wardrobe.

  Time passed, and the snails were forgotten. It was not until eighteen months later that Locard, searching for something in his wardrobe, discovered his pile of shells. You and I would probably have thrown them away. Locard the optimist put them in a bucket of water and, to his astonishment, they revived.

  Inspired by this tale of survival against all odds, Maurin and I ordered another dozen snails each. I was beginning to get the hang of extracting the flesh from the shell with an anticlockwise twist of the toothpick—not unlike taking the cork out of a bottle—but despite my most careful efforts to control it, the juice remained a problem. My shirt was now freckled with garlic butter, and for those of you faced with snails for the first time, I can tell you that there are only two sure ways to keep your clothes clean: nudity or a bib.

  Possibly prompted by the sight of the couple next to us, who were now exchanging long, investigative kisses between snails, Maurin brought up the subject of sex. It was, as he said, the month of May, the start of the mating season, when a hermaphrodite’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. And like everything else in a snail’s life, this is not something to be rushed.

  Maurin’s hands sketched vague but suggestive intimacies in the air, his fingers weaving and then joining together, as he talked about “preliminaries.” These can apparently last for several hours, and I couldn’t help thinking that this was perhaps to give the participants time to decide on their respective genders. At any rate, once the preliminaries are out of the way, the snails copulate. Un bon moment, according to Maurin. Ten to fifteen days later, anything from sixty to one hundred eggs are laid. For the survivors, life expectancy can extend to six or seven years.

  Maurin paused to sip his wine, and I asked the obvious question: How is it decided which of the hermaphrodite partners is female and which is male? Telepathy? Scent? The position of the moon? Discreet horn signals? It is, after all, the most basic of the preliminaries, and if confusion occurs here, it could spoil a lovely evening. Unfortunately, Maurin was unable to answer with any scientific precision. “Ils s’arrangent” was the best he could do. They arrange themselves.

  The room was pleasantly cool. Through the doorway, the street simmered in the afternoon heat. We persuaded each other to stay inside and split another dozen. I was discovering that escargots are like addictive snack food—one can always find room for some more. We were eating gros blancs, or escargots de Bourgogne, one of the best-known among hundreds of varieties that can be found in France. Another is the smaller, less distinguished gray snail, the petit gris, and mentioning this reminded Maurin of a wicked deception.

  There is, he told me, a criminal element at work in the snail world. Tromperies, or frauds, have been known to dupe the unsuspecting consumer, and one of the favorites is to disguise the small gray snail as his larger and more expensive cousin. This is achieved by an imaginative system of recycling in which empty shells, once inhabited by escargots de Bourgogne, are reused. Into each capacious shell is placed a petit gris, with stuffing added to take up the extra space. Et voilà—the customer pays for the biggest and the best, but he has been hoodwinked. It is a veritable scandale. And as if this weren’t bad enough, one should also be aware of the menace from the East, the Chinese Connection. Maurin’s face became serious, and he shook his head at the enormity of it all. Oriental mollusks, imported in industrial quantities and passed off as honest French snails!

  It wasn’t the first time I had heard the Chinese accused of shady practices. The truffle scam had caused a surge of outrage, and there had
been talk of Chinese attempts to infiltrate the frog market. Conveniently overlooked, of course, was the fact that foreign truffle shysters and frog smugglers need the cooperation of French partners. Imagine a salesman from Beijing, his sample case bulging with almost genuine truffles and grade A French-type frogs. Would he pass unnoticed as he wandered through the corridors of French gastronomy? I doubt it, no matter how fluently he spoke the language.

  But Chinese ingenuity didn’t stop at truffles and frogs’ legs. After excavating in several pockets, Maurin found a rumpled newspaper clipping that he passed across the table. “Foie gras,” he said in a voice laden with gloom. “Now they’re making foie gras.”

  While he consoled himself with the carafe, I read the article. Two enterprising gentlemen, Mr. Chan and Mr. Wu, had recently set up a goose farm in the county of Hepu, just north of China’s border with Vietnam. A stupendous goose farm, with a potential production capacity of more than a thousand tons a year of the real thing—goose foie gras, rather than the much more common and less expensive duck liver. This, according to the journalist’s research, was nearly twice as much as current French production.

  I finished reading and looked up, to see Maurin shaking his head. “Alors?” he said, raising both hands and letting them fall to the table with a dispirited thump. “Where will it stop?”

  We were now alone at the table. Our neighbors, the lovers, had left, joined at the hip as they squeezed together through the door—on their way, I liked to think, to one of the piles of mattresses, now that they had dealt with the preliminaries over lunch. I had run out of questions, and Maurin was showing signs of fatigue brought on by Chinese infiltration and one Gewürz too many. He was going to take a siesta before returning to the festivities. We made one of those convivial after-lunch arrangements, genuinely meant but seldom carried out, to meet at the same place the following year for another few dozen. I left him adjusting his cap against the glare of the sun, and we lurched off in opposite directions.