French Lessons

by Peter Mayle

  Back at the hotel that evening, I took from my pocket a shell I’d kept as a souvenir and washed it three times, according to correct procedure. Like my shirt, it still had a residual whiff of garlic. Looking at the shell, which was perfectly designed for its function as a mobile home and beautifully striped in shades of caramel, I wondered who had been the first human ever to peer inside such a shell at the living contents and decide it was edible. In the raw, snails don’t instantly make your mouth water. They don’t have an overpoweringly appetizing smell. Their color and texture are not to everybody’s taste. And yet some brave soul took a bite and pronounced it good. Was it raging hunger, or merely curiosity?

  Greeks and Romans are often given the credit for making gastronomic discoveries, but perhaps this time it was a prehistoric entrepreneur from farther east. Maybe that was it: the early, tentative stirrings of the Chinese Connection. An honorable ancestor of Mr. Chan or Mr. Wu, having sampled his first juicy dozen somewhere in the snail-rich fields of coastal China and finding them delicious, might have sensed an export opportunity: Escargots de Shanghai, preferably accompanied by a bottle of Great Wall Chinese rosé. Alas, we shall never know.

  Undressing for Lunch

  Long, long ago, when the idle rich deserved their description and had time and servants to spare, it was customary to change for cocktails and dinner after a day of country pursuits. “Let’s get out of these wet clothes,” as Robert Benchley used to say, “and into a dry martini.” And so damp tweeds, sodden fishing trousers, muddy plus fours, hacking jackets redolent of the stable—all were put aside, to be replaced by evening wear that had been sponged clean after the previous night’s soup stains and laid out by the valet.

  In due course, this elitist ritual came to the attention of restaurant owners, alert, then as now, to the commercial advantages of attracting wealthy appetites. Their response—presumably an attempt to make the upper classes feel at home even when they ventured out—was to invent the restaurant dress code. It was decreed that a man should not be allowed to enjoy a meal in public unless he was properly groomed and outfitted—that is, with a suit and tie, respectable fingernails, and clean shoes.

  Time passed and standards were relaxed, although not everywhere. As we all know, many of today’s more ornate and expensive restaurants still insist that their male customers wear a jacket and tie. But not, I have noticed, in France. Here, in this most fashion-conscious of countries, the clothes worn in even the best restaurants often strike the foreign visitor as surprisingly casual. Famous establishments fairly twinkling with stars, where you might expect the clients to be dressed at least as formally as the junior waiters, wouldn’t dream of turning you away if you happened to show up without a tie. As for the humiliating edict that allows you through the door providing you agree to wear a borrowed tie—normally a greasy relic selected from the manager’s collection of castoffs—this is something that would never occur in a good French restaurant.

  But nowhere in France has the dress code been adjusted—or indeed tossed aside altogether—with such eye-popping abandon as at Le Club 55, a restaurant on Pampelonne beach, a few kilometers south of Saint-Tropez.

  I had heard many reports about Club 55 over the years, all of them good. A place of great charm, so everyone said, where you could eat simple food and watch the boats at sea. It sounded delightful. But it was a long drive from home, and the thought of the summer traffic on the coast—often a solid, throbbing clot from Marseille to Monaco—had always put my wife and me off. Until one hot morning in July when duty called, disguised as our friend Bruno. He and his wife, Janine, live in the hills behind Saint-Tropez, and they share my fondness for extended lunches.

  Bruno began his phone call on a literary note. “Still pretending to write?” he said. “What is it this time?”

  I told him I was doing research for a book that would include sections on fairs and festivals connected with food and drink, the more unusual the better. Frogs, I said, and truffles. Blood sausage, snails, tripe. That sort of thing.

  “Ah,” he said, “festivals. Well, there’s a good one down here, as long as you don’t mind a little bare flesh. The fête des nanas.”

  “You mean …”

  “Girls, my friend, girls. Girls of all ages, many of them wearing not much more than a handkerchief. A glorious sight on a sunny day. Better come soon, before the weather turns chilly and they put their clothes back on.”

  Somehow, it didn’t sound like an event that would have an official place in guidebooks or calendars of cultural highlights, but it did seem worth a visit. I have known Bruno for many years, and his judgment in these matters is impeccable. “Where does it happen?” I asked.

  “Club Cinquante Cinq, every day, except if it’s raining. I don’t think the girls like getting their sunglasses wet. You really should come and do a bit of research. Never have so many worn so little. The food’s nice, too.”

  Later that month, as our car crawled along behind a caravan on the road that corkscrews down from La Garde-Freinet to the coast, I wondered how any establishment was able not only to survive but to remain fashionable over several decades. Club 55, according to the brief history Bruno had given me, qualified as a grandfather among Riviera restaurants.

  It had been started in 1955 by Geneviève and Bernard de Colmont, whose previous claim to fame had been as pioneers—they were the first French people to go down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon by canoe. Returning to France, they bought a patch of Pampelonne beach. In those days, Saint-Tropez was little more than a fishing village with a couple of cafés, and Club 55 was little more than a hut serving grilled sardines to friends and acquaintances of the de Colmonts. (Any strangers they didn’t like, they turned away, telling them it was a private club.) Madame was an accomplished cook, so the menu expanded and the restaurant flourished, attracting a clientele that liked fresh grilled fish and a bottle of honest rosé, with the added pleasure of eating free from the encumbrance of too many clothes.

  Then, in 1956, came Brigitte Bardot, Roger Vadim, and the film that transformed Saint-Tropez. Vadim was shooting And God Created Woman there, and he had a film crew that, being French, would mutiny unless they were well fed. Could Madame de Colmont provide lunch every day? She did. Word spread, and, over the years, the world came. Geneviève’s son Patrice took over the management of the restaurant in the mid-eighties, and he and his staff have been run off their feet every summer since.

  At the time of my visit, Club 55 was in its forty-fifth year, a considerable age for any restaurant, and a near miracle considering its location and the nature of its clientele. The south of France generally, and the hyperchic area around Saint-Tropez in particular, doesn’t seem to encourage venerable institutions. There are, of course, the old men who play boules outside the Colombe d’Or, the Monegasque royal family, and the casino at Monte-Carlo, but these are exceptions. Change is more common, with boutiques, restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs changing hands and often changing names after a few hard but lucrative years.

  And who can blame the frazzled and exhausted owners for selling? Their customers, the crowds that cluster on the coast each season, are not the sweetest or best-mannered of people. In fact, if you believe half of what you hear, most of them are monsters. This is held to be true regardless of nationality, although I’m told that the Russians are now competing with the Germans, the British, and even the Parisians as the least-loved visitors on the coast. “It’s not just that the Russians these days have obscene amounts of cash,” one local bar owner said. “Nobody down here minds that. But they always look so damned miserable. And after a while, they get drunk and start crying. It must be something in the genes.”

  But it seems to me that maudlin behavior in bars is a minor character flaw compared with some of the other vices practiced by fun-loving visitors. Arrogance, stinginess, impatience, lack of consideration, bullying, dishonesty in settling bills, petty theft (ashtrays, towels, crockery, bathrobes), the cleaning of shoes o
n the hotel curtains—all of these and worse make running a haven of hospitality on the Côte d’Azur a severe test of patience and restraint. And yet here was Club 55, still at it after all these years.

  Turning off the narrow sandy road into the area behind the restaurant, you might imagine that you’d misread the map and ended up in California, the spiritual home of the valet parker. Young men are in attendance to save you the trouble of finding a spot for your car—young men in snappy shorts and reflective sunglasses, with the most perfect, even, burnished tans, shunting cars around with noisy nonchalance. Our elderly Peugeot was consigned to the rear of the parking area so that it wouldn’t lower the tone of the front row, where a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of toys—Jaguars, Porsches, and Mercedes—were cooking in the sun.

  The restaurant was still only half-full, but we found Janine and Bruno already installed, wine bucket at the ready. It was one o’clock—early for the real action, as Bruno said, but he thought it was important that we were well settled before the ladies began to arrive. Les nanas, apparently, prefer to eat a little later, and they wouldn’t be in evidence much before two. So we had time to take a look at our surroundings.

  What first struck me was the light, a beautiful diffused glow of sunshine filtered through bleached canvas awnings that were stretched across whitewashed wooden beams. The glow was reflected by pale blue tablecloths, creating a most flattering effect on the complexions of the people around us. They all looked impossibly healthy. Waiters and waitresses, crisp in their whites, distributed menus and chilled bottles. Looking beyond the few stunted but tenacious trees that had taken root among the terra-cotta tiles between the tables, we could see the sharp deep blue glitter of the Mediterranean and the profile of an immense triple-decker motor yacht, doubtless with many glamorous passengers aboard. So far, so good.

  Patrice stopped at our table to say hello to Janine and Bruno, and to cast a professional glance at the wine level in our glasses. Affable, worldly, relaxed, and possessed of a remarkable memory for names and faces, he must have seen the entire cast of Côte d’Azur characters come and go over the years—movie stars and politicians, financiers, gunrunners, dictators on the lam, illicit couples, dilapidated aristocrats, the models and photographers of the moment, gigolos and shady ladies. Sooner or later, they all drop in at Club 55 to look and to be looked at, sometimes hiding conspicuously behind oversized sunglasses.

  Patrice wished us bon appétit and moved on, checking the tables, watching the staff, keeping an eye on the entrance for new arrivals, smiling, smiling. I wondered how he managed to stay charming seven days a week throughout a long season that would inevitably include some truly poisonous customers.

  “The secret is,” said Bruno, “that it’s only once a day, because they only open for lunch.” He grinned at me over the top of his menu. “Mind you, with a bit of luck, lunch can often go on until six. What are you going to have? We’d better get the food organized before the rush.”

  Mesclun and mussels and friture were ordered; more wine was poured. We noticed two men out on the beach, each with a cell phone, staring toward the triple-decker boat. “Bodyguards,” said Bruno. “They’ve been poking around here for half an hour, making sure there aren’t any kidnappers hiding in the salad.”

  We watched a speedboat set off from the mother ship, leaving a long white-crusted curve in the water as it came toward the beach. I could make out a man standing in the stern, one hand up to his ear. What did bodyguards in these circumstances do to keep in touch before they all had cell phones—wave semaphore flags?

  I turned to Janine. “Here come the girls.”

  She shook her blond head, making those busy little clicking noises with the tongue the French love to use when you offer an opinion they don’t agree with. “You’ll be lucky,” she said. “With three bodyguards, it’s much more likely to be Yeltsin’s grandchildren.”

  Whoever they were, it was clearly a highly valuable group of people, and the entire restaurant watched as one of the bodyguards led his precious charges to a table not far from us. Alas, despite our hopes of having exotic or celebrated neighbors, they turned out to be a perfectly normal (even if abnormally rich) American family, complete with baseball caps. Two of the bodyguards stayed out on the beach to frustrate any attempts by topless sunbathers to mount a sudden attack. The third took up his post against the wall behind us, adjusting his black belly pouch as he sat down. Weapons of one sort or another were concealed in there with the cell phone, I was sure—a few stun grenades, a baby Uzi—and I couldn’t help noticing that our table was directly in the line of fire if things turned nasty and someone made moves of a threatening nature toward the baseball caps.

  I was soon distracted from thoughts of perishing in the cross fire by a nudge from Janine. “Voilà. Les mimis arrivent.”

  There were three of them, average age around twenty, swaying through the tables on the platform-soled shoes that were the fad of the season. Their tans were of the luminous, well-established kind—impossible to achieve in the course of a normal vacation—which require many weeks of judicious oiling and broiling. One had the feeling that even the crevices between the girls’ toes would be the same dark caramel color as their long legs, their fashionably concave stomachs, and their jaunty, high-slung bosoms. They had all made the same gesture toward modesty by draping flimsy, brightly colored pareos around their hips. But by some extraordinary mischance, these had become damp on the way to the restaurant, and they clung like another skin to every cleft and declivity they were supposed to conceal.

  “Did you see the girl at the back?” Bruno asked. “I swear her sunglasses were bigger than her bra.” He looked toward the entrance. “I wonder where the wallets are.”

  In fact, the nubile trio were making do with a single companion, an older, leathery man with a grizzled froth of chest hair escaping from an unbuttoned shirt. He settled himself among his girls, arranging his lunchtime essentials on the table—cigarettes, gold lighter, and cell phone—before reaching over to pinch the cheek of one of the mimis.

  Janine sniffed. “Their uncle, of course.” It takes a Frenchwoman to recognize these distant family connections.

  By now, there was a continuous flurry of new arrivals cruising the tables to greet long-lost acquaintances, some of whom they hadn’t seen since dinner the previous night. The air was loud with chirrups of joyful surprise—“Tiens! C’est toi!”—and the moist little smack of social kisses. The festival of nanas was warming up, and it was possible to identify two distinct generations by their choice of clothing. For the young: vestigial bikinis (baseball caps optional), shorts trimmed off to just this side of decency, revealing a hint of the lower curve of the buttock, and T-shirts worn as dresses. The more mature ladies were almost discreet by comparison: sarongs, silk shirts, gauzy transparent trousers—in some cases rather too transparent—profound cleavage, and emphatic jewelry. There were also some interesting examples of the cosmetic surgeon’s art to be seen, and we were fortunate in having an expert to instruct us in the finer points.

  Janine, although unlifted herself, says she can spot le lifting from a distance of twenty paces. Why, only the other night she had been at a dinner party where three of the guests, one a man, were displaying what she called “signature lifts.” All three of them, she could tell, had been performed by the same surgeon.

  I wondered if he signed his work. And if so, where? And how? A maker’s mark under the left breast? A monogram behind one ear? An actual signature, even, somewhere on the downy reaches of the upper thigh? With status labels being so popular these days, it wouldn’t have surprised me. But it’s nothing as crude as that, apparently; it’s more a question of individual style, not unlike the distinctive cut of a couturier. Cosmetic surgery has its Diors and Chanels, and when looking at a suspiciously taut and chiseled jawline or an artfully hoisted bust, the informed eye can often identify who did what.

  With some women, the urge to tinker with nature turns into the hobb
y of a lifetime, and what started as a minor nip and tuck around the eyelids is extended downward, until very little remains of the original bodywork. Janine told us of one legendary fixture on the Côte d’Azur each summer (her winters were spent under the knife and in recovery) who had been lifted so many times and in so many places that when she smiled, the skin on the backs of her ankles could be seen to tighten and twitch upward.

  “There’s another one who’s overdone it,” said Janine, nodding toward a woman of a certain age who had stopped on the way to her table for a chat with some friends. “Watch when she lifts her arms.” I watched as the woman raised her arms to tuck a few tendrils of hair behind her ears. “See? C’est la poitrine fixée. The breasts don’t move. They have been anchored like buttons on a waistcoat.”

  I don’t think I ever would have noticed. But once it was pointed out to me, I found the phenomenon fascinating, and I had to force myself to look away. “It’s terrible,” I said to Bruno. “I can’t stop staring.”

  He shrugged. “Why do you think she had it done? Nobody comes here to be ignored. It’s a show. The bodies are here to be looked at.” And he went on to tell us of an incident that illustrated his point.

  A lovely and amply endowed young woman discovered, in the course of a particularly animated conversation, that one breast had managed to slip out of the top of her swimsuit. She could quite easily and unobtrusively have slipped it back in, but instead, she let out a piercing “Ooh-la-la!” This, of course, had the desired effect, attracting the attention of all those at the neighboring tables, who were then treated to the sight of the young woman seeming to have an enormous problem—a crise de sein—persuading the playful breast back into the swimsuit from which it had escaped. One of the gentleman spectators, sympathetic to her difficulties, was heard to call out, “Waiter! Bring the lady two large spoons.” He then added a considerate afterthought. “And be a good fellow—make sure the spoons are warm, will you?”