The amateur troubadours started strolling through the alleys, stopping frequently to rehearse or retune. A band of young men in black-velvet doublets paid homage to the Gipsy Kings on guitars and mandolin, while four nervous maidens, squeezed into brightly coloured taffeta dresses, strolled around with the bagpipes and the hurdy-gurdy.
All the restaurants were suddenly booked solid, even la Terrasse, which, as far as I knew, never took bookings. La Terrasse is my favourite place to eat in Saliès. It’s the complete Elizabeth David dream, a simple, genuine, everyday restaurant where you’ll find yourself eating next to the postmaster and the florist, and the young waiter is nervous about serving foreigners. It also has a stunning situation, right on the river, by a pretty stone bridge, opposite the church. But no, La Terrasse was full.
How could we contemplate this festival without a festive lunch? It was particularly bad news for Willow, who suddenly found herself with a large party of friends from way back staying with her while they looked for a house. Being an adopted Chalossoise, she’d never got into this Béarnais rave and found it hard to understand that this gentle town of discreet middle-aged divorcees had suddenly turned itself into the St Tropez of Gascony, even if seulement pour le weekend.
Eventually, we ran into Gordon, who advised a place he’d discovered the year before, a sea-food bar in a little garden near the bridge over the river. Here, under a couple of luxuriant mulberry trees, a fish merchant who’d come all the way from Arcachon set up a bank of griddles and was getting ready to shuck oysters, and grill sardines, prawns and baby squid, straight out of the fishermen’s crates. Wine could be bought from the stall of a local vineyard, cunningly pitched nearby, and I sent Chloe to buy a loaf of country bread from a craftsman baker around the corner. It was the size of a computer monitor and slightly charred on the bottom from the wood-fired oven, but the interior was warm, soft and fragrant, exactly what we needed to clean our fingers and mop our plates. Fifteen of us eventually sat down to eat together, seven English, two Scottish, one Australian, one New Zealander, one Canadian and three French – Francjoise and her children.
Sunday was the really big day, beginning with a sung mass in Béarnais in the church of St Vincent, which dominates the centre of the town from its position on a rocky outcrop overlooking the river. It’s an extraordinary building, very simple inside but with wonderful acoustics, and asymmetrical, because of its natural foundations. Grandeur was something it grew into, because originally it was nothing but a little chapel of rough stones built to serve the spiritual needs of the soldiers who guarded the salt spring.
Saliès has every reason to celebrate its salt, because it owes its beauty and its past prosperity to the geographical accident which, millions of years ago, created a salt marsh miles from the sea. Rain which falls in the mountains is channelled down towards the earth’s core, and is then pushed up through a freak conformation of rock strata containing the mineral deposits left by an ancient ocean. The water emerges here, in the middle of the flat and fertile Béarnais plain, as a hot spring redolent with dissolved minerals. The legend which is passed down tells that the marshes of Saliès were so salty that they sparkled in the sun with the salt that crystallized on every blade of grass.
The whole history of Saliès is of the ownership, defence and exploitation of this resource. Early in the Middle Ages, the marshes were drained and the River Saleys, thus created, diverted into a stone storm drain through the centre of the town. There it could be dammed, the water extracted in huge vats which came to be called samaux, and evaporated in salt pans, from which the crystals were brushed into tidy piles, dissolved again, purified, bagged up and sold all over France and Spain.
Since salt was a highly valuable commodity in past times, and Saliès was blessed with a spring whose water was five times saltier than the sea, this industry made Saliès-de-Béarn rich for centuries. Where any other small market town of comparable size in France would now boast nothing but a ring road and a half-ruined rampart, Saliès is a half-timbered, droopy-eaved dream, a townscape which looks as if it was mocked up for some 1930s fairy-story book plates. The perfectly preserved medieval centre is made up of handsome merchants’ houses, several old water mills, the unique church of St Vincent and several less eccentric, later churches, a massive underground cistern and countless other architectural treasures. Not to mention the spa, called les Thermes, and the bandstand in front of it.
It is also an immensely stable community, in which many families can trace their ancestry back to the Middle Ages. In all its history, Saliès suffered only a tiny blip of deprivation, between the Revolution, when the salt business was nationalized, and the arrival of the Empress Eugénie in the mid-nineteenth century, when the town was reborn as a fashionable spa and les Thermes were built. Over the next seventy years, a new phase of building added a clutch of imposing art nouveau villas and fin de siècle hotels, including the Hôtel du Parc.
Saliès became a fashionable must-see for the Biarritz set. Marcel Proust arrived in 1885, as a boy of fourteen, coming with his mother to take the waters. He was, his letters to his grandmother reveal, extremely bored, a great tribute to the soothing properties of the elements of the South-West, which easily overcame the future master of ennui. He was saved by the conversation of a certain Mme Catusse, the wife of a future senator, who apparently added ‘the essential grain of poetry’ which was necessary for the young genius’s existence. He reported that she was also very beautiful, physically and morally.
Saliès was probably still enjoying the twilight of its heyday in 1926, when Scott Fitzgerald, accompanied by his wife Zelda and their five-year-old daughter Scottie, fled the severity of January in Paris to enjoy a couple of months here. He hadn’t picked the best time to visit the Béarn. The only hotel which was open was out in the low-lying meadows of the Bellevue quarter and the only other guests were seven invalids taking a cure at les Thermes.
They had a simple, pine-panelled room, filled with light from the Pyrenees, and embellished with a bronze bust of Henri IV. The great novelist believed that Henri’s mother had been born there, whereas every Béarnais knows that Jeanne d’Albret was born in St Germain-en-Laye, now a suburb of Paris. Zelda herself was suffering from a colic contracted from ‘the abuse of champagne’, but Scott bought himself a beret, a pair of knickerbockers and a walking stick, and took the family on trips to Biarritz, Pau and Lourdes. He did a bit of journalism, and wandered down the misty alleys buying Scottie sweets, but they too were basically bored. But then, a jazz-age writer had to be bored by everything.
Saliès has drifted gently into lean times, which continue to this day. Many remarkable buildings that should be open to the public are closed, because there’s no money to restore them. The largest hotel, an imposing wedding cake of white stucco and wrought-iron balconies, had been gutted by fire and was nothing but a burned-out facade with soot stains streaking upwards from the glassless windows and lingering whiff of corruption.
The town should have been a perfect candidate for those Euro-funds earmarked for preserving our heritage. I had been told the story of how anti-rural prejudice had scuppered their chances.
The local heritage society, les Amis de Vieux Saliès, worked long and hard on a restoration plan worthy of EU funding. One of the wives was entrusted with taking their application to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site to Brussels, because her husband couldn’t leave his business. When a man owns the only serious plant centre in the department, he has his anxieties. Or perhaps he suddenly became aware that a big man in a small town may not feel too comfortable as an obscure stranger in an international capital.
Unfortunately, they had overlooked the box on the form which needed to be filled with the name of the restoration project. The bureaucrat to whom the application was handed pointed this out. The messenger borrowed his telephone to call her husband, who was out in the garden inspecting his plants.
‘Sorry to take so long,’ she said, jokingly to the official, while she wa
ited for him to be fetched. ‘We’re in la France profonde, you know – he’s out in the fields!’ At this admission of peasant origins, the bureaucrat barely suppressed a shudder. The wife spoke to her husband and completed the form, but as she left the office she saw the official shoving it disdainfully in a lower drawer, from which, she is sure, it was never to be rescued. So Saliès, betrayed by the Gascon sense of humour, continues to crumble in charming obscurity.
By midday on Sunday things became even more serious. The marquees and the long tables reappeared in the square, and lunch for a thousand people was laid on, with more music, more singing, more dancing on tables and a huge pile of dirty plates in the washing-up tent that was set up in a little square out of sight of the revels.
The more circumspect party-goers arrived later and dug in at the bars. At three thirty plus the Bearnais quarter of an hour, a procession of floats began to form up outside les Thermes, a long line of hand-made marvels pulled by tractors, which moved slowly through the crowd. The theme was the ‘riches heures’ of the Béarn, from prehistory to the present, and every nearby village had been given one era to depict. They were cheered on their way by at least four bandas, belting out the old favourites on cornet, trumpet, hunting horn and tuba, and reinforced by music from musicians in the crowd.
At the rear of some of the floats, boxes and barrels of wine had been mounted, and whenever the parade halted the followers energetically poured plastic cups of wine for the crowd, while giggling schoolgirls tossed out handfuls of confetti, the user-friendly modern substitute for the ancient custom of hurling salt at the onlookers.
All the usual suspects were presented: Gaston Fébus hunting the boar, Henri IV in his tortoiseshell cradle, a team of Aztec maidens honouring the maize, a man in a chicken suit capering around the poule au pot, a tableau featuring a giant Bayonne ham, a lorry draped with vines and dispensing wine and a giant black beret, about five metres in diameter. Every village in the neighbourhood was represented, plus some of the town social clubs, the cycle club, the rugby club and les Amis de Vieux Saliès. Geoff and Andrew were not amused to find that Castagnède had chosen to depict what in heartless English would be called the village idiots. In ancient time the ‘cagots’, the programme explained, were originally the marginalized folk of the village, who lived like the untouchables of India. Perhaps the offspring of outcast lepers, their origins were lost to history, and they disappeared when the Revolutionary government granted them equal rights.
A Nazi tank (‘Mum, it’s just a drainpipe on a tractor painted khaki,’ said Chloe, eager to deflate my sense of wonder) signified World War II, when the demarcation line dividing the German-occupied zone from the region ruled by the collaborationist Vichy regime ran right through Saliès in the Cout quarter, slicing off the east side of the town for the enemy. Nobody ever refers to the agony that this innocent country town must have suffered when it was ripped apart by the Nazi army, but the wounds must have been deep. No doubt the hundreds of Allied fugitives following the secret Resistance route over the border to Spain found a warm welcome in Saliès. Annabel’s house, La Maysou, was then the home of a Vichy governor. When it was clear that the Germans were losing, he fled by night, but was hunted down to Nancy, in the north, where he was found in possession of a vast sum of money and jewellery worth 850,000 francs. He was arrested, tried and executed.
The modern floats were the most inventive. The 1950s were represented by masses of silver pipes for the gas plant at Mourenx, while the present day was symbolized by the tunnel through the mountains at Somport. This was almost my favourite float. Its builders had erected a five-metre chunk of cardboard mountain, thickly decorated with pine branches and heather, and embellished it with borrowed taxidermist’s masterpieces, a stuffed fox, a pine marten, an eagle and a stag’s head. At the back of the float was mounted a bright blue Peugeot, as if it was emerging from the tunnel to be greeted by the tableau of a family picnicking in the middle of the road, being noisily admonished by a gendarme in full uniform. The tunnel at Somport runs under a mountain pass that was given its name by the Romans.
After the parade, and another Bearnaise quarter-hour, and more beer, and more ‘selgria’ and more music, the samau races began. By this time the town square was completely packed, apart from the race course running from the old salt works, past the fountain and the Credit Agricole, up almost to the bridge, round a barrel which marked the halfway point, and back.
One after another, a pair of young men ran up and down the course, carrying on a wooden yoke a huge tub of salt water. The fastest time would win. The samaux were tall wooden pots made of oak, bound with iron hoops, wide and flat at the bottom to keep them upright even on uneven ground. A samau could contain up to 100 litres of water, so even for two strong rugby-playing lads, running over the cobbles was a challenge.
The trick was not merely to win, but to get around the treacherous corner by the Credit Agricole without the swinging weight of the water bringing down the runners and causing the whole kit and caboodle to hit the deck, thus spilling salt water over the track and making it even more slippery for the later racers. The very first team managed to do this, to a roar of disapproval from the crowd. Feeling sensitive to the prospect of somebody else breaking a leg, I decided it was time to head home.
The Real Spa Experience
Fountain, waterfall, geyser, swans’ necks, power jets, the boiling banquette, jacuzzi, jet shower, hammam . . . there was absolutely nothing you couldn’t do with salt water at les Thermes. I dragged every one of my guests there, and took huge pleasure in watching them step tentatively into the distinctly 1970s swimming pool and suddenly beam with pleasure as they felt the magic of the spring water. Now that I was a genuine convalescent, I sent myself there to swim as often as I could and give my recovering ankle the full benefit of the medicinal waters.
Now until I went to les Thermes, I was sceptical about hot springs. All those legends about the old boar and the old dog – well, they were just folk tales. Nothing could get through skin, the epidermis was designed to be impermeable, and swimming in water in which all sorts of odd minerals had been dissolved couldn’t possibly make any difference to your metabolism.
Well, incredible as it is, it does make a difference. You feel fantastic. Even with a hangover. And it takes about five minutes. Les Thermes are a complex of pools, some of which are specifically designed for remedial treatments, but the one to which I was addicted was simply a swimming pool with lots of fancy massage jets to pound your shoulders, tickle your back and wobble your cellulite. The water was the natural spring water, maintained at 32°C, the pleasant warmth at which the spring comes out of the ground.
Of course, people have analysed the spring water. Its really heavy on sodium and chlorine, of course (NaCl, the salt, right?) and also in bromium and magnesium. But there’s lots of calcium, chromium, cobalt, iron, lithium, manganese, nickel, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, silicone, vanadium and zinc in it, too. All those jolly trace elements that nutritionists are always waffling about, just naturally bubbling out of the ground, and then cunningly piped into les Thermes. The waters are meant to be particularly beneficial to gynaecological problems and children’s illnesses. This is as may be. All I know is that I always came out pink-cheeked, ultra-relaxed and distinctly euphoric.
There was probably some kind of spa here when Eugénie and Napoleon arrived, but as soon as they felt the amazing tingle, the instant zest, the supernatural sparkle that the hot spring water gives you, they delegated their own doctor to supervise the development of the station into something appropriately luxurious. Hot springs are a nationalized resource in France, so nobody can develop them without government backing, and in the case of les Thermes at Saliès, the Emperor himself supervised the process. A new spa building was erected, a fantasy palace of pink and white brick, with Venetian crenellations around its decorative tower. It looks like a little sister of Kuala Lumpur railway station.
From the old photographs,
the inside hasn’t changed much. There is still a wide marble-floored central corridor, with park-type benches for the weary curiste to rest on. The public pool was obviously redesigned in the 1970s, though given the lingering fascination which the French have for the bad-taste decade it could be much later.
Outside, there is a little park, shaded by blue cedars, containing the bandstand and the little circular gallery where Roger’s panorama was exhibited until he got bored and turned the building into a studio. After 1870, there was also a statue of the silent, bare-breasted spirit of the spring and a group of gambolling infants whom she had cured, but between erosion and vandalism, La Mude was disfigured and removed to a less prominent spot.
Everybody goes to les Thermes. The Salisiens use it just like any other pool; in fact, they probably use it more. Fathers bring their children at the weekend, mothers bring their children after school, groups of giggling office girls come in after work, pairs of lovers enjoy a relaxing hour together, old people come in the evening when it’s quiet and the curious from out of town come any time the pool is open, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week, but not, obviously, at lunch time.
There are concessions to modern ideas about fitness, a small cardiovascular conditioning suite and some weights which occasionally get lifted, always by men. There’s a studio where the supernaturally patient young men who supervise the pool take aerobics classes. These were not well attended, though the handful of women in the advanced class looked as stringy as marathon runners.
It may be different in the cities, but in the South-West, French women do not seem greatly enthusiastic about exercise. When I visited the big sports hypermarkets, Decathlon and Sportner, there would be just a couple of racks of limp pink Lycra leotards hiding coyly behind rows and rows of clothing for men and boys. Even finding trainers in a woman’s fitting was a challenge. I never saw women out jogging, cycling or snowboarding. For a woman of my age, a decorous promenade up a not-too-steep hill, preferably with someone to chat to, was considered a real workout.
Deep France Page 27