At one o’clock, lunch was served at the linoleum table. Martine had arrived—same bangs, same black slacks, same leopard-print top—in the company of an elderly cousin and the cousin’s middle-aged son. Claude joined us, as did Martine’s two other alembic-tenders, taciturn men in rugby shirts whose names were never shared.
The energy at the table was less than effervescent. As we sipped our aperitifs while awaiting the first course, the conversation remained at the lowest simmer, mostly gossip and bits of local news, the kind of chitchat made by people who spend a great deal of time in one another’s company.
A platter of oysters came out. What little talking there’d been ceased as the bivalves were eaten with an every-man-for-himself urgency. I was beginning to wonder why Martine had bothered inviting me.
When the grilled wood pigeons arrived, accompanied by toasts topped with a flambéed hash of the birds’ hearts and livers, I ventured a conversational foray, asking about the aperitif Martine had served.
She described the drink as a Pineau.
Before I’d thought better of it, I let slip that I thought Pineau was usually made with Cognac.
At the utterance of the C-word, Martine looked like she’d swallowed a horsefly. “The original Pineau was made with Armagnac!” she said. “The Charentais stole the idea from us.”
I started in on my grilled palombe and listened to the others talk for a while. Soon enough, though, my foot was in my mouth again. I mentioned to Martine that more than a few of my American friends, on tasting Armagnac for the first time, had likened it to a fine Scotch. I realized instantly that I’d uttered another dirty word.
Martine choked down a bite of food and made a sour face. “Armagnac can’t be compared to whiskey!” she said. “Armagnac is a nectar of the vine.”
Her laugh was tinged with bitterness. “You cannot put the date of the harvest on a spirit made from mashed-up grains!”
I decided to change tack and asked if Martine could tell me about the different Armagnac-growing areas. She seemed to warm to this. Pouring herself another glass of wine, she explained that there are three official appellations and proceeded to list them in ascending order of esteem. On the lowest rung is Haut Armagnac, in the south and east of the Gers; the brandies made there are simple and usually drunk young. The Armagnacs of the Ténarèze, covering the center of the Gers and a sliver of the Lot-et-Garonne, are often harsh and require long aging. And finally, straddling the border of the Gers and the Landes, is Bas Armagnac, home to tawny-sand soils that produce brandies of unparalleled depth and richness.
“I presume that’s where we are now,” I said.
An index finger went up. “Where we are now is in the heart of the heart of the Bas Armagnac,” said Martine. “We are in the Grand Bas Armagnac.”
It seemed she had waged a long battle, as yet unwon, to gain official recognition for this fourth, ultraprestigious appellation, which had been coined by her and the owners of a handful of nearby estates.
“We are not allowed to put Grand Bas Armagnac on our labels,” said Martine. “It’s idiotic. But of course the lesser houses are always happy to see their fortunes lifted by the great ones.”
Martine went to fetch something from the kitchen. I looked around at the others, who were gnawing at the bones of their pigeons. I was suddenly overcome by the feeling that I’d stumbled onto a lost world, or rather had been summoned to it so that I might bear witness to its final throes.
Martine returned to the table with a half-full bottle of a deep-hued Armagnac and poured a round. I read the bottle’s sepia-colored label. It was printed in old-fashioned gothic lettering:
Bas Armagnac
Folle Blanche
1986
Domaine Boingnères
I imagined Martine in her bottling room with a quill and inkwell, writing Grand at the top of each label.
Everyone warmed the snifter in their hands before taking a sip. I did so, too, then drank. Nothing special happened at first. The brandy was compact, a little hot. I chewed on it for a second or two. Then something did happen. The Armagnac effloresced with flavors, crazily and in so many different directions at once that I couldn’t quite get a handle on what they were—flowers and dried fruit, maybe, and certainly vanilla and some kind of warm spice, plus all kinds of nutty and fire-tinged notes, and many lovely things in between that made me wish I had that sommelier’s word list handy. Then the whole, mad explosion resolved itself in a kind of symphonic chord.
I hardly realized it, but I’d had my eyes closed. When I opened them, Martine was watching me. She smiled for the first time all day.
“Ah oui,” she said, a little wistfully, “la sacrée folle blanche.”
Before I left, Martine showed me her cask cellar. There were vintages going back to the 1960s that had yet to be bottled. On our way out, she pulled a bottle off a shelf and handed it to me. It was another 1986 folle blanche.
She gave it a gentle pat. “A little gift to remember us by.”
19
Aux Armes, Citoyens!
As late as the 1860s, on the eve of the Third Republic, virtually none of the communes in the Gers were French-speaking. The Gascon dialect of Occitan was the lingua franca, and even that tongue had its variants within the département. “The old dialectical world was fragmented in the extreme,” writes Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen. “Dialect might change from one valley to another, from high ground to low, from one riverbank to the next, if physical barriers made communication difficult.” As was the case with much of southern France, rural Gascony and its subregions were essentially countries unto themselves almost until the twentieth century: loose assemblages of isolated and self-sustaining peasant communities conducting their daily life almost completely outside the purview of the French national identity. Weber cites the account of a British visitor to the western fringes of Gascony in the 1860s: The people there, the visitor wrote, “‘live on French soil, but cannot be called Frenchmen. They speak a language as unintelligible to a Frenchman as an Englishman; they have none of the national characteristics—little, perhaps, of the national blood.’”
Weber’s book is packed with surprising anecdotes about the insularity of the Southwest of France. Until the mid-nineteenth century, for example, no one had bothered to build a bridge anywhere along the length of the Garonne River—Gascony’s northern frontier—between Bordeaux and Toulouse. Similarly, when a representative of the French government proposed constructing roads connecting Gascony to its adjacent provinces after the Revolution, “the people of Auch, bourgeois and common folk alike, protested: ‘We have all we need to live well.’” For many generations, Weber notes, any villager who made the difficult journey north to Paris was, upon his return, referred to forever after as a “Parisien.”
One of the best parts of Peasants into Frenchmen is a short history of “La Marseillaise.” According to Weber, France’s national anthem—born as a battle hymn in Strasbourg in 1792 to rally the Army of the Rhine against Prussian and Austrian invaders—did nearly as much as roads and bridges to bring far-flung peoples like the Gascons into the French national fold. Weber does not fail to point out the irony of the fact that the song’s name—coined in honor of the Marseille Battalion, whose soldiers embraced the hymn with a particular fervor—refers to “a city whose people did not speak French” at the time. And yet, Weber avers, in very short order the song became an incredibly effective vector for the spread of the national language and of Frenchness in general.
What’s fascinating to me about all of the above is that, while I’ve heard “La Marseillaise” sung in other parts of France, I have never seen it accorded more respect and solemnity than I have in Gascony. Nowhere has that hymn made me feel more firmly rooted in French soil, or more unreservedly respectful of the French national ideals. It seems that somewhere along the line the Gascons, though they remain quite happily a nation unto themselves in certain ways, became model Frenchmen.
THE EVENT THAT SP
URRED THIS particular revelation was Armistice Day, an anniversary that’s largely yawned at in the United States but is still a big deal in France—the First World War having been a lot deadlier for Frenchmen than the Second. Public commemorations take place all over the country, in cities, bourgs, and bourgades alike. In preparation for the ceremonies in Plaisance, Charlotte’s class had been practicing “La Marseillaise” daily, and with a diligence that I thought was impressive. It seemed I was hearing the verses emanating from the classroom windows every time I passed by the school. For two weeks, Charlotte had been reciting the song at home, sometimes with a school-issued lyric sheet in front of her and sometimes just idly, while going about her usual business. One morning, I found her in her room dressing a stuffed animal in a toilet-paper gown while repeating the lines “Form your battalions!” and “Let impure blood water our furrows!”
I’d never realized how violent France’s national anthem was until I studied Charlotte’s lyric sheet. Throats are slit, mothers’ breasts are ripped, warriors are struck down by mercenary phalanxes. The song paints a violent scene. (Here’s an interesting fact I learned later: In the 1990s a coalition of activists, including France’s first lady at the time, Danielle Mitterand, started a campaign to change the lyrics. The movement gained steam after a ten-year-old French girl sang an a cappella version of the anthem at the Albertville Winter Olympics, shocking quite a few non-French viewers who were following along to the subtitles. The campaign ultimately failed.) I confess I was a little taken aback by the lyrics, but not terribly surprised. The French don’t, on the whole, sugarcoat bloody episodes in their national history for the benefit of their children. Indeed, Charlotte was having nightmares about some World War I photos she’d seen with her class during a field trip to the local médiathèque. The exhibit wasn’t pulling any punches. There were pictures of bodies piled in the trenches and portraits of the gruesomely disfigured faces of mustard-gas victims. It was enough to give a grown-up bad dreams, too.
The day of the commemorations dawned damp and gray. Over breakfast, I helped Charlotte practice the song one last time. She’d been tripping over the line “Against us tyranny’s bloody banner is raised!” Then, at ten o’clock, the three of us walked up to the esplanade, where townspeople were assembling in front of the war memorial—a white-marble statue of a bare-breasted heroine with an upraised sword, set atop a plinth bearing three marble plaques inscribed with the names of Plaisance’s war dead.
The mood was somber. Members of the town council, dressed in dark suits, had lined up alongside the mayor and the president of the conseil général, all of them wearing serious expressions. Four veterans—of which war I wasn’t sure—took their place as flag-bearers; they wore white gloves and had medals pinned to their chests. A few gendarmes from the local caserne, in their flat-topped kepis and dress uniforms, were there, too, as was a good cross-section of the village, with most of the attendees crowded around the perimeter of the esplanade. In my immediate field of vision, I could see Coscuella, Alphonse, Lorette, the butcher from the new bastide, the baker from the old bastide, Doudou from the school cafeteria, and at least a dozen other familiar faces. I received a few tight-lipped smiles and nods of the head—subdued greetings appropriate to the tenor of the day.
Charlotte joined her classmates on the esplanade. I could see Charlotte in front, horsing around with her friends, looking not the least bit nervous or out of place. The Maîtresse got the kids settled down, and the crowd fell silent.
Now a marching band—a mix of high-school kids and adults, maybe fifteen musicians in all—rounded the corner down by the town hall, playing a military tune. We made way for them as they trooped past and installed themselves next to the war memorial. The band stopped and it was quiet again. A thin, slouching man wearing a ski parka over a suit approached a dais draped with red-and-blue bunting. He picked up a microphone, tapped it, and announced that the ceremonies would begin with a rendition of “Le Soldat” by the singer Florent Pagny, as interpreted by members of the local junior-high-school choir. Nine kids of wildly varying heights filed onto the esplanade. A young teacher played a chord on a portable electric piano, and the students’ quavering, pubescent voices rose up. Michele, who has been known to cry at Halloween parades and school band concerts, palmed away a tear.
Next, the mayor, accompanied by three students, laid a wreath at the foot of the memorial. A town council member gave a short, poignant speech about how war binds nation and family together. Then, one by one, the names of Plaisance’s war dead were read aloud. After each name, the entire crowd—babies and toddlers excepted—responded in unison with an incantatory “Mort pour la France.” This funereal call-and-response took quite a while. I counted more than seventy names in all, starting with a man named Ader and ending with someone named Touzy.
Now the band played a “Taps”-like tune. The man in the ski parka returned to the dais. “To conclude our commemoration,” he said, “I invite you to lend your ears as the pupils of the École Primaire sing our hymne national.”
The children began to sing: “Allons enfants de la patrie / Le jour degloire est arrivé . . .” They were out of tune, but they knew the words, every blood-soaked verse. Though I couldn’t make out her voice, I could see Charlotte’s lips moving, exhorting her fellow citizens to slay the foreign cohorts and vile despots. The crowd—reverent, standing rigidly as if at attention—mouthed along.
It was hard not to get swept up in the moment. Though I generally took a dim view of flag-waving and other nationalistic displays, standing there shoulder to shoulder with the people of Plaisance as “La Marseillaise” rang out, with the names of the dead still hanging in the air, I couldn’t help but feel moved. A sense of inclusion and gratitude welled up in me. It was a sentiment that might accurately be described as fraternité.
After the anthem was over, the master of ceremonies invited everyone to the town hall to share le vin d’honneur. A nip seemed much needed, so we gave Charlotte a long congratulatory hug and proceeded together to the mairie. Plates of crackers and cups of sparkling wine had been laid out on plastic-covered tables in the salle de réunion. We sipped and snacked and chatted with Maîtresse Nathalie and the school principal; Alphonse and Lorette drifted over to say hi, as did Coscuella. The town council had mounted an exhibition of children’s artwork on the theme of World War I. Charlotte’s class had pasted Xeroxed photos of French infantrymen onto construction paper and written words and short phrases next to the photos: “hunger,” “homesickness,” “fear,” “mud and lice,” “dying too young.” Charlotte showed us her contribution: “beaucoup trop de morts.” Her words were written in the perfectly uniform cursive drilled into every French citizen at an early age.
20
Chez Guérard
Elizabeth David, the famously opinionated British food documentarian of the postwar era, had little patience for Nouvelle Cuisine. In the third edition of Provincial French Cooking, she called that culinary movement—which in the 1970s became France’s herb-flecked answer to rich béchamel sauces and heavy things cooked in aspic—an “affectation.” She went on to say: “Everyone who has experienced it in restaurants where it is practised . . . has his or her own story of the five green beans sitting lonely on one side of a huge white plate, three tepid chicken livers avec quelques feuilles de salade nine inches distant on the opposite edge.” Presumably to David’s dismay, Nouvelle Cuisine eventually went mainstream, becoming the model for posh restaurant food the world over, and for more-radical culinary experimentation yet to come.
The principles of Nouvelle Cuisine—smaller portions, lighter sauces, faster and more-direct cooking methods, artfully deracinated presentations—would appear to be patently un-Gascon. And yet Gascons are quick to claim as their own one of the movement’s founding fathers. I feel obligated to point out that this chef, Michel Guérard, is not a Gascon, at least not by birth. He hails from the vicinity of Paris, and earned his stripes there at a restaurant, long gone, cal
led Le Pot au Feu. But since the 1970s he has made his home, and sealed his reputation as one of France’s best-loved culinary personnages, in a village in the Landes called Eugénie-les-Bains.
Guérard has the dual advantage of being a naturally great cook and also having married well. Guérard’s father-in-law was Adrien Barthélémy, the founder of an immensely successful chain of thermal spas. Barthélémy’s daughter and heir, Christine, helped Guérard transform Eugénie-les-Bains—formerly a run-down spa station once frequented by Napoléon III’s wife, the Empress Eugénie—into a culinary and wellness empire.
Though Eugénie-les-Bains lies only forty minutes or so from where we lived, it is the anti-Plaisance: a showpiece of impeccably restored buildings lining immaculate sidewalks decorated with ceramic planters. An old convent and handsome stone farm buildings, painstakingly renovated, have been put into service as guesthouses and restaurants for spa-goers. Guérard’s fief also includes a culinary institute devoted to the chef’s trademarked Cuisine Minceur (slimming cuisine), which is an even lighter offshoot of Nouvelle Cuisine, designed specifically for the kinds of Parisians who routinely travel hundreds of miles for a mud bath and a massage. Cuisine Minceur begat a line of popular cookbooks during the 1980s and earned Guérard a feature in Time magazine.
The jewel of Guérard’s realm is Les Prés d’Eugénie, a fancy restaurant—certainly the fanciest in all of Gascony—that received its third Michelin star in 1977 and, in an impressive feat of staying power, has hung on to it ever since. From what I’d gleaned, the restaurant—Nouvelle Cuisine’s daintier aspects notwithstanding—was an haute-cuisine temple of the unabashedly decadent kind. (Though a “slimming menu,” I’d been told, was available on request.) Among my Gascon friends, the place was talked about in terms of degrees of separation—so-and-so knew someone who knew someone who ate there—but the reports that trickled down were never less than ecstatic: truffled this-or-that, opulent déclinaisons of foie gras, an ambiance of unparalleled refinement. Invariably, such secondhand accounts would wrap up with that reliable cautionary coda: C’est très cher.
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