by William Boyd
C. Camus
Is Albert Camus the most famous French writer in the United Kingdom? I think it very likely—though he is run a close second by Gustave Flaubert. The reason is, I think, that almost everyone studies L’Etranger at school and the novel continues to haunt its readers long after the need to study it has gone. It remains enduringly modern in spirit. As does its author. Camus seems a prototypical French writer: handsome, engagé, moody, intellectual, sexy. And he liked football. Of course, like all those who die young his image is fixed in time, unchangingly. A friend of mine used to see him at parties at Gallimard in the 1950s—“always surrounded by pretty girls.”
D. Dordogne
When people ask me where I live in France I always hesitate to say “the Dordogne” because I realize it is so associated with the British. In fact I know hardly any British people in the area—almost all our friends and neighbours are French. But at the same time I am very conscious that this part of France has a powerful and curious draw for my fellow countrymen and women. I love it as much as they do, I suspect, but why do I not want to be too closely associated with these new colonialists?
E. Eurostar
There are, reputedly, some 200,000 French people living in and around London and the Eurostar link brings tens of thousands more each weekend. Sometimes when I walk up the King’s Road in Chelsea, where I live, I hear nothing but French voices. My impression is that the French love London and indeed that “London” represents “Britain” for most of them: they do not voyage further afield. This is not true the other way round. The British range throughout France, many of them choosing to avoid Paris.
F. France
There is an idea of France that exists in the minds of the British that is a fantasy. It is impossible for any country to live up to an ideal that is so persistent and so prevalent. No doubt there is an equivalent French fantasy about the British. Le style anglais, for example, is a very French concept. Or let’s say a very French evaluation of a form of unreflective Englishness. I have a French friend who dresses in a way he imagines is appropriate for an English gentleman—tweed jacket, striped tie, brogues, a certain type of haircut. In fact he looks very elegant and completely French—not remotely like an English gentleman.
But the British dream of France is more complex and I think more profound. It’s not just a question of attitudes, values and fashion styles. It is this dream of France that sends the British there year after year, decade after decade. At its essence, I feel sure, is the conviction that, of all the countries on earth, the French have solved the problem of the quality of life, of how to live well.
G. Good Manners
I have to say that after some eleven years of living in France the welcome we have received from our neighbours, the tradesmen and the people we deal with on a day to day basis has been both warm and unaffected. I often wonder if, say, I was a Frenchman living in the English or Scottish countryside would the welcome I’d receive there measure up in the cordiality stakes. I have a strong feeling we would suffer in comparison. You see something of the difference in the small formalities of everyday behaviour that are commonplace in France but are still somewhat baffling to the English. The handshake, the kissing, the salutations on parting—“Bonne continuation,” “Bon fin de l’après midi”—the Messieurs-Dames acknowledgement as one enters a crowded shop. This quotidian politesse is very marked—but we British notice it because it is lacking in our own daily lives.
H. Hunting
Many of our French friends and neighbours in France are avid hunters. The most ardent kill migrating doves in October, luring them to feed on acorns and then shooting them from palombières, extravagant firing-platforms cum tree-houses in the oak woods that surround our house. Our local palombière is a deluxe version fitted out with a kitchen and a dining room some twenty metres above the forest floor. Hunting in France is classless, it seems to me—insofar that it’s for everyone: rich and poor. Hunting in Britain is steeped in class: it’s designed to be socially exclusive. Perhaps no one concept better illustrates the divide between the two countries. A book could be written on it.
I. Immensity
My English life is lived in the south-east of England, the most densely populated place in Europe. By contrast in France, even in the height of summer, I often feel isolated, a solitary presence. You forget how big France is compared to Britain—how easy it is to find yourself in an unpeopled landscape. One August, driving back from the Côte d’Azur we were caught up in a massive traffic jam on the autoroute. We decided to take the backroads home—the C and D roads—and drove across the Hérault and the Aveyron in the general direction of Cahors and then on westwards to the Dordogne. I had an impression of great tracts of emptiness, with a few signs of cultivation and the odd ancient village. It took a full day to make our journey home but when I looked at a map of France to see the way we had come it didn’t seem that great a distance—just the crossing of a corner of the hexagon. You can, of course, find a similar sense of remoteness in Britain but you have to go looking for it. In our case we just turned off the motorway from the broiling hell of the Mediterranean holiday traffic and there it was—and we followed the minor, single-track roads through a virtually untouched wilderness.
J. July
23 July 1993 to be precise: this is the moment when I date the beginning of my French life. This was the first night that we spent in the old farmhouse we had bought and renovated on the Monbazillac plateau, south of Bergerac. We had bought the house two years previously, spontaneously, not really able to afford it but captivated by its perfect location. It’s a solid, thick-walled farmhouse with a large stone barn, surrounded by woods, set on a hill overlooking a quiet valley, with a winding drive one kilometre long. It answered all our wishful dreams about the kind of house we imagined living in.
Having bought it and having planned to do it up piecemeal—room by room, as we could afford it—we were then visited by one of those strokes of luck that everyone needs from time to time. In 1994, the following year, a film was made based on my novel, A Good Man in Africa, and suddenly our cash-flow problems were eased and we were able to instruct the builders to go full steam ahead. I looked on this as a good omen, not just because it linked my old African life with my new one in France but because Sean Connery had agreed to play the role of the Scottish doctor, “Doctor Murray,” one of the two “Good Men” in Africa that the title alludes to. “Doctor Murray,” moreover, is a portrait of my father—who died in 1978. I took all these auspicious biographical congruencies to be a form of blessing on this new French life we were embarking on—a choice that has never prompted a moment’s regret ever since.
K. King’s Road
Our life in France is largely rural; our nearest town of any size is Bergerac. Occasionally we will visit Périgueux. Such a tranquil life has mixed blessings for a writer: there is plenty of uninterrupted time for the imagination to work but there is an absence, nonetheless, as the weeks roll by, of the stimulation of the passing parade. You cannot be a novelist without being a compulsive observer of your fellow human beings and I find myself, for example, as the summer wears on and July gives way to August, hankering for London, for Chelsea, for the King’s Road. The King’s Road is not as bohemian as it used to be but I spend a good portion of each day, when I am in London, wandering up and down it. It never fails to deliver something surprising, strange, beguiling, intriguing. If I want to witness the full gamut of human types the world has to offer the King’s Road has them in abundance.
L. Lunch
When we were having our house renovated in France the builders would work from eight to twelve, then they would stop for lunch. There would be an aperitif (Pernod, usually) then a full three-course lunch with a hot main course (provided by the wife of the head builder) served with wine and as much bread as you could eat. Work would start again at two and go on until six.
When our house was being renovated in London the builders would go out at odd times of the day t
o buy fizzy drinks, sandwiches, hamburgers and chocolate bars. They ate them fast, often not bothering to sit down.
M. Manifestations
The French are much better at political protest than the British. I was once in Marmande where a mountain of fresh tomatoes had been dumped in front of the Marie. I was denied access to Bergerac because local ambulance drivers were protesting about an insignificant pay rise. I’ve missed planes because lorry-drivers have blocked motorways. There is an easy formulation that claims some countries make bad citizens and good soldiers and others where the inverse applies. It seems to me that being a good citizen—caring about your rights, protesting about your rights, trying to safeguard your rights against an overpowerful government—is more valid in this day and age.
N. Nice
I first went to France when I was seventeen. I stayed in Paris for a week before hitch-hiking to the Mediterranean. I spent my last few days in a cheap hotel in Nice and came to like the town enormously. This drew me back two years later when I had the chance to study at a French university after I left school. I chose Nice unhesitatingly (I could have chosen Aix, Montpellier, Tours, Grenoble). When I lived in Nice as a student in 1971 there was a protracted postal strike in Britain which lasted many weeks, meaning that no money (my allowance) could be sent out to me. I have never been so poor and so alone. I could afford to eat one frugal meal a day at the restaurant of the Fac de Lettres. I lived in a small room above a cafe. The cafe owner took pity on me and every evening allowed me to eat what remained of his croissants, chocolatines and pizza—free of charge. So I survived pretty well until the strike ended. I was away from my family, friends, language, country and culture. In many ways I think Nice was the making of me.
O. Oaks
Symbol of England. But in France I live surrounded by dense oak woods, with tall ancient trees. We have a large oak wood on our property called “Le bois de Vinaigre.” This year I am planting fifty oak saplings. And the next year. And the next.
P. Paris
I love living in London. Perhaps the only other city I could move to would be Paris. Yet Paris, beside London, seems so small. In an hour or less you can walk from Montparnasse to Montmartre, but an hour’s walk in London hardly gets you anywhere.
I spent a week in Paris in 1969 when I was seventeen, sleeping on the floor of a house on the Ile St Louis, planning the great adventure of the hitch-hike to the Mediterranean coast. Even then my callow eyes were struck by the city’s classy beauty. Now I go to Paris several times a year and, banal observation though it is, its claim to be the most beautiful great city of the world is effortlessly re-established.
Q. Quiet
Nowhere is as quiet as our house in France. In bed at night with the shutters closed the loudest sound you hear is the blood rushing in your ears. In the total darkness of the bedroom it is almost as if you are taking part in a sensory-deprivation experiment. The consequence of this silence in the night is that you become abnormally sensitive to noise in the day. The sound of birds—the cuckoo’s call echoing through the woods—the angry sound of distant chainsaws, the creak of old beams, the battering of a stink-bug against a light shade, rain spitting on window panes, the hum of bees in the lavender, the wind in the big oaks. These are the sounds of la France profonde.
R. Republicanism
A few days ago, I flew from Edinburgh to London on the same plane as Prince William, the future king of Great Britain. The plane was absolutely full but this twenty-two-year-old young man sat beside his detective and around them was a protective ring of nine empty seats. Who paid for all these empty seats, I wondered? The British tax-payer? Why did he have to have nine seats, three full rows, empty? Why were we being kept at such a distance? I suspect the official answer would have been security but I bet the real reason is privacy. They just don’t want anybody getting too close to a royal. In that case I would reply: then don’t travel on commercial airlines, don’t pretend you’re a “normal” passenger catching a normal plane like anyone else—why not fly in one of your royal aeroplanes, the ones that we pay for anyway.
It was not Prince William’s fault—he’s a nice enough lad, by all accounts—but the symbol of this young university student with his expensive and needless cordon sanitaire made me think. It reminded me of the undying hierarchical structure of British life: it was a sour indication of our unhealthy obsession with royalty and aristocracy and titles of all kinds.
I know that the fact I’ve been living on and off in France for the past ten years has made this tendency in me—this anti-royal, anti-aristo, anti-class feeling—more pronounced. It’s not because France has no class-system—every society has a class-system of some kind, every society contains snobbery—but the saving grace is that because France is a republic the notion that every citizen is as good as the next seems hardwired into the social life you lead. I feel that in my dealings with the French men and women that I meet—whether a captain of industry or a plumber, a femme de ménage or a novelist, a mayor or a schoolteacher, a vigneron or a député—there is an implicit and strong egalitarianism that functions in that encounter. We are all “monsieur” or “madame”; no one need defer or kow-tow; no one need assume superiority or inferiority. I find it enormously refreshing to relate and communicate with other people in France because I know that when I cross the Channel back to England I go back to the Land of Rank and Artificial Status. And, moreover, I go back to a country where so many judgements and aspirations, so many ideas of success and failure are determined by your perceived social classification. Furthermore, and even worse, this social ranking has nothing to do with ability or talent or achievement. It’s all a result of an accident of birth or an expression of patronage.
I think that this is an iniquitous and degenerate situation and it breeds other noxious side effects: snobbery, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, class-hatred, social shame and so on. Almost everything I dislike about British society can be traced back to this type of aristocratic ranking and its outmoded values.
S. South
Where I live in France is, I feel, where northern Europe ends and the south—the “South”—begins. Some people place that demarcating line further north at the Loire valley, but for me it is signified by the Dordogne river. The transition is marked: five miles north of the Dordogne feels and looks completely different from five miles south. Périgueux, the capital of the Périgord, possesses a quite different ambience from its regional rival, Bergerac, forty kilometres south, and straddling the river. A friend of mine, a Bergeracois who lives in Périgueux and works in Bergerac, tells me that the weather is different too and that those forty kilometres mean that Bergerac is usually a noticeable few degrees warmer. It’s hard to determine what’s different about north of the Dordogne—maybe it is something fundamentally atmospheric, a less luminous quality of the light, a preponderance of dark pine woods—but once you cross the river you notice some distinct change has taken place—the landscape is gentler, the skies seem higher, the air is sweeter. There are other more easily verifiable, more obvious signs of the south too: not just the clustered vineyards but also, in summer, the fields of sunflowers and maize and the pale mottled salmon-pink tiles on the low farm buildings and the great pitched roofs of their barns. And yet here we are not in the citrus belt, no oranges or lemons will survive the winter frosts and neither will you see any olive groves; but as you venture south to the Lot valley, down past Agen towards Toulouse, the landscape is imbued with a hint of the approaching Mediterranean, another few hundred kilometres away, but present somehow in the mineral, pure quality of the sunlight, in the flaking crépis of the rural churches, the shuttered fastness of the villages at noon.
T. Tomatoes
In our vegetable garden in France we grow, routinely, between fifteen and twenty varieties of tomatoes. In July and August I eat a flavour-rich tomato salad at least once a day—salads composed of tomatoes coloured black, purple, yellow, green and orange as well as the more normal red. I find it almost impossi
ble to eat a tomato in England as a consequence. So if there is one fruit I particularly associate with my life in France it is the tomato.
U. Underground
I travel on the London Underground and (less frequently) on the Paris Métro: both are subterranean modes of transport but there all comparisons effectively end. Amongst the many things the British really, truly envy France are—in pride of place—the Lycée system and the Métro, and the TGVs.
V. Vin
When I occasionally begin to worry about how much wine I drink each day I console myself—or excuse myself—with the thought that I drink wine like a French person. It seems to me almost sinful to sit down to eat food without a glass of wine. And how does one signal the end of the working day without opening a bottle?
When we bought our house in France there was an old vineyard attached. Our farmer—who is also a major vigneron in his own right—suggested we tear out the old vines and replant them. Now we have our own small vineyard that produces 7,000 bottles a year: a fruity, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon, appellation Côtes de Bergerac contrôlée. Our first vintage was 1996; 2003 sits in its vats awaiting transfer to its oak barrels. I don’t claim to be any kind of a wine expert but living beside a vineyard has given me a new understanding of this amazing drink, of how the place, the weather and the cultivation—and the luck—shape the end product. Completely impossible, now, to live without it.