Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  It was late afternoon. There were few people stirring in the village of the Postman Horse. Once or twice we heard the clank of pots or the sound of someone stoking a furnace, but the only people we actually met were a few children eating sweets and talking in low voices.

  Here and there some of the plaster had fallen from the wall of a house and I was interested to notice that it had been built entirely of rounded river-stones cemented by mortar; stones the size of ostrich eggs. There was a man trimming fruit trees in a desultory fashion. The sound of the sécateurs fractured the silence. Finally we skirted a long high wall and knocked at an iron gate. It was opened by a dark pleasant-looking girl to whom Lejoie said a word; she was at once all smiles, drying her hands in her apron. But I had already caught sight of the Ideal Palace, of which she was the custodian. It stood there, imposing yet modest in an ineffaceable sort of way, neither inviting nor repelling scrutiny. The gardens surrounding it were full of tall trees. It smelt of peace and repose and verdure.

  We entered the little office to buy our tickets and I saw, with something bordering on irritation, that this girl—an ordinary peasant girl, talking with a marked provincial accent—was reading a book about abstract painting. It was lying face down, where she had left it in order to answer our knock. Really the French drive you mad with anxiety and frustration! Wherever you go, whoever you meet, you find them engaged in some intellectual pursuit, reading recondite books, painting, cooking, playing the harp, or writing sonnets. Damn them, it is unfair that the whole country is creative, or trying to be; the whole blasted population, regardless of education or breeding, is obsessed by the maniacal desire to manufacture a work of art. Finally it gets you absolutely mad with envy when you think of your own damn nation, loafing about in a brutish daze, a sort of Philistine dementia. What ails these big-arsed cart horses at home that they cannot enjoy drinking from the source of all the fun in the world?

  In a sort of way the Facteur Cheval, whose monument stood outside waiting to be examined, increased my feeling of self-reproach. We approached Xanadu in silence and Lejoie, with the typical tact of his kind, turned aside into one of the corners in order to let me take the thing in slowly, in the round. Well, it is not really large, of course. It is not the size of the Parthenon; indeed I should say that it is about the size of the Theseum. But there is a mystery about it, which has nothing to do with the strangeness of the subject matter. It is—and here I am weighing my words—one of the most unexpected of works. It is very much more than a folly: and I realized with shame that, despite Lejoie’s warning, I had come prepared to be touched and amused by a folly. How British! I had really come to Hauterives to Betjemanize! And all of a sudden I was face to face with the fiery Blakeian vision of an uneducated postman, but something brimming with a queer kind of authenticity of its own. Where did it lie?

  Before I answer this question I must, so to speak, subtract the fantasy—this extraordinary monument, crawling like a Hindu temple, with a thousand different things: heads of martyrs, soldiers, monkeys, palm-trees, peacocks, apes, palm-trees, Crusaders, Romans, Greeks, Druids, Persians … but this is not all; almost every type of known architecture was represented here from Stonehenge to Altamira, from Rome and Greece to Babylon, from the White House to a Swiss chalet! There was a cascade, a labyrinth, a Saracen tomb, a menhir, a mosque, a Norman belfry, a labyrinth, a … but the thing was a sort of dictionary of every known style. I understood now why the Surrealists had claimed the Facteur Cheval as one of them (at least Breton did on their behalf): the juxtaposition of styles and modes was fantastic and gave one the requisite Surrealist shock.

  But this was not all; there was something else, something troubling and exciting about the whole work, which was not due to this eccentric mix-up of dissimilar styles and objects. I caught Lejoie as he was climbing the twisted turret staircase to the first floor, so to speak, and expressed my excitement by saying, as I pressed his arm: “But the whole bloody thing has congruence.” He sighed as if with relief, but said nothing. Smiling we mounted the spiral staircase, bringing a whole new set of frescoes into sunny relief. The gargoyles of Notre Dame stuck out their tongues at Apes from Barbary; two Crusaders confronted an effigy from a sarcophagus of the age of Semiramis.

  Then, all of a sudden, I understood why this whole piece of work enjoyed a kind of completeness of its own, the kind of completeness which only true works of art enjoy. The Facteur had been neither a madman nor somebody trying to show off. He had responded to the sacred vision honestly, that was all; he had actually copied his dream accurately, trusting it implicitly to carry him where it would, faithful only to it. There was, so to speak, not a dishonest thought, a factice element in the whole of this grotesque monument. In fact one might characterize it as a “naturalistic” work—for where your naturalistic painter reproduces nature as fairly as he sees it, so did the Facteur Cheval.… If he had been a Surrealist, a gimmick-artist, a Dali, something would have smelt wrong about the whole work.

  As it was, it had an extraordinary perfection, a repose. The Ideal Palace is indeed ideal—it is the palace of the world’s childhood, admirably and deftly captured. I wished bitterly that my own children were with me to see it; it would have given them a strange aftertaste of their own daydreams. They would have recognized it inside themselves as something far more truthful than any Disney fantasy. A real childhood accords full reality only to visions, and respects them. Here was the Postman’s vision in stone.

  Here and there dotted about the old Postman carved up aphorisms in order to encourage himself, to freshen up his flagging forces, no doubt. Some are mere cracker mottoes, some little verses, some quotations from Holy Writ: some are free verse poems. It is like riffling the artist’s notebook, or looking over his shoulder as he works.

  Sous la garde des géants

  J’ai placé l’épopée des humbles

  Courbé sur le sillon

  La vie est un océan de tempêtest

  Entre l’enfant qui vient de naître

  Et le veillard qui va disparaître

  Finally, when the whole work was complete down to the last inscription he even built a tomb for the faithful wheelbarrow which had been his constant companion for so many years. More than that, he permitted the wheelbarrow (which appears also to have been endowed with an aphoristic turn of mind) to write its own verses, its own funeral inscriptions. This is how the barrow expresses itself:

  Je suis fidèle compagne

  Du travailleur intelligent

  Qui chaque jour dans la campagne

  Cherchait son petit contingent.

  Maintenant son oeuvre est finie

  II jouit en paix de son labeur,

  Et chez lui, moi, son humble amie,

  J’occupe la place d’honneur.

  Together with the wheelbarrow in its quiet niche lie the tools with which the Ideal Palace was constructed.

  But the path of genius never runs smooth; at the completion of his grand work the Postman Horse announced that he proposed to be buried in it; he had prepared his own tomb. Here he ran into opposition from the Church which has always been against permitting people to get themselves buried in their back gardens—I have never understood why.… A long argument ensued, but finally the Church won. The Postman Horse must, like everyone else, be buried in the village cemetery. Whatever his feelings he accepted this fiat at last and bought himself the requisite site. But here his artistic feelings overcame him. The indomitable old man set about building himself a tomb which is like a small annexe to the Ideal Palace, identical in style and inspiration. It took him ten years to complete it, but complete it he did; and that is where he lies today, under a simple inscription which might well have been carved over a Greek tomb containing the bones of a Heraclitus or an Epicurus.

  Le tombeau du silence et du repos sans fin.

  We motored slowly out of the beautiful village of Hauterives, across the bridge which spanned the rushing trout-stream, in a pleasant silence—the only sort of t
ribute one can pay to artistic experience. Along these leafy green lanes I seemed to see the little postman tramping along, wheeling his choice stones back to the quiet house, talking quietly to himself as he walked. A plump pheasant walked across the road and Lejoie said: “We shall reach Chabert’s in twenty-five minutes.”

  It was only, after all, a switch from one art-form to another, for Chabert we found to be almost as much of a visionary as the old postman. His little hotel stands in the main street of Tain l’Hermitage which has the air of being a little market-town running to urbanization. Like nearly all good eating places in France the exterior is unprepossessing. It is simply a pleasant old-world bar attached to a restaurant. The Hotel is a private one, a mere diversion you might say, for there are only seven guest rooms. You can only stay there if the master invites you, and he only invites a special race of men—les gens qui vraiment aiment manger. I could see him anxiously scan my face to see if really I merited his hospitality.

  The great Chabert was a small compact man with greyish hair and finely cut features; he gave off a feeling of unhurried calm, of gentleness. He was obviously someone who could watch a pot boil without getting rattled; every movement of the hands was eloquent. They were the hands of a musician, of someone who was sure of his effects.

  Of course there was a good deal of hubbub, introductions, explanations, when first we arrived. Lejoie’s mother was delighted to see him; it was nearly six months since his last visit. He had brought characteristic presents for them both in the form of a rare cheese from Gascony and a bottle of liqueur. Our luggage was unloaded while we had a stirrup-cup. Chabert popped in and out of his kitchen where half a dozen white-capped young men juggled with the pots and pans under his watchful direction. The promised dinner was already on the slips. It would be ready within the hour. But first, said Chabert, he would like to convey some general information about the wines of the district and to this end we could profitably kill an hour or two before dining, combining information with pleasure. Chapoutier? Where had I heard the name?

  As a matter of fact it is written in letters a mile high right across the hillside behind Tain l’Hermitage; you can read it four miles off. It signals the ownership of the best vineyards of the region. As we set off down the darkening street Lejoie refreshed my memory on this point. It was only two streets away from Chabert.

  Chapoutier himself was seated before his desk in the imposing central office of the firm, waiting for us; before him stood a magnum of champagne. From time to time he touched it and turned it in its bucket with the air of a doctor taking its pulse. He was a young man, gay and spirited as became a wine-specialist. The keys to the great cellars lay before him.

  Lejoie was an old friend, of course, which got conversation away to a merry start. Pouring out the champagne Chapoutier said deprecatingly that it should not be taken seriously; it was a mere rince-bouche, a mouth-wash, in order to clear the palate before we tasted the wines in the cellar. I tried to regard it in this light, purely as a medicament, but I could not help enjoying it just a little. It had an exquisite flavour. In fact I could have gone on rinsing my palate all night with this admirable stuff.

  But at last the bottle was finished, and deeming us all suitably clean-palated, Chapoutier pressed a tall goose-necked wineglass into each hand, and taking up his keys and his pipette he led us out into the dark street and across to the great cellars.

  The night was clear and fine; the cellars deep and immense and secret. As the lights were switched on here and there they showed bins and barrels and tonneaux stretching away on all sides, into the darkness, around us, symmetrically ruling away perspectives into infinity. Keen-eyed, clean-palated, we followed our host slowly from bin to bin, accepting a squirt of each of the vintages from his hospitable pipette, and sitting down to savour it on the nearest cask. There is no need to go into the details of all we tasted. Chapoutier’s wine is too well known and has been the subject of numberless essays and studies. It is, however, important to record that his conversation sparkles every bit as excitingly as his most sparkling wine. But then the object of good wine is, and always has been, good conversation. The eleventh commandment has always been, “Drink well to talk well.”

  In those cavernous cellars, their walls covered with a deep lichen-coloured fungus—the bloom you get on an over-ripe peach—in the semi-darkness, voices muffled by the thick medieval walls, we found conversation take wing. By the time we had broached the twelfth white bin and the fourth red we had discussed as well as toasted Rabelais, Mallarmé, and Stendhal; we had sent Marxists about their business, decried religious bigotry, deplored the French Revolution, denounced the Bourbons and the Jesuits, flung defiance at nuclear physics, vaunted Byron, Poe, and Rimbaud, rapped Henry James over the knuckles, and sung a few staves of Georges Brassens. Intellectually speaking we left no glass unturned.

  By the time we staggered out into the night, somewhat dishevelled but still keen-eyed and burning with intellectual zeal, I felt as if I were moving on castors.

  The night air was cool and soothing to our fevered heads, however, and while our tongues had been loosened by these excellent snecks of wine they were still attached to our brains. At any rate that is how it felt. Under a street lamp we all embraced ferociously like French generals conferring decorations upon each other, and swore undying blood-brothership. “Come again,” cried Chapoutier with warmth. “Any time at all. It is a pleasure to have some good conversation.”

  By the time we reached Chabert’s the cozy table had been laid in a private corner of the restaurant, and the master watched us enter with a quizzical eye. “Ah, you are just in the right mood,” he said approvingly. “Often people are knocked silly by a visit to the cellars and run the risk of not appreciating their dinners. Then I have to let them wait an extra half-hour—and of course I risk the quality of the dinner.” Everything is very finely calculated in France—according to a graduated scale.

  Now began one of those famous Chabert dinners, gathering its way slowly like a Bach fugue, moving through scale after scale, figure after figure, its massive counterpoint swelling and gathering. And yet without any pomp whatsoever; quietly, deprecatingly the great Chef himself attended to the dishes, getting up from the table to make some minor arrangement with his own hands, and sitting down again to reminisce quietly over his early life in the French navy. He had started as a sea-cook when he was thirteen; slowly he had worked his way up the scale into what he had now become, a master-chef, an artist. His wife smiled as she listened, chin in hand, to these early adventures, and then she in her turn spoke about the Facteur Cheval whom she had seen when she was a little girl. “An irascible quick-tempered little man,” she said, nodding her dark Mediterranean head and smiling. “He was very much on the defensive because everyone said he was a fool. He defended his own genius to the death.”

  “He was right,” said Chabert approvingly.

  “He was right,” said Lejoie.

  “He was right,” said I.

  Meanwhile this memorable dinner was slowly gathering form and momentum before us. Later that night on my way up to bed I asked Chabert to write it all down for me in his own hand. I wanted an autograph as well as the Menu. It is perfectly useless to describe good food. The thing escapes words, as poetry does, and indeed all good art. Here, then, is what Chabert wrote down in his fine nervous hand.

  Les Quenelles de brochet à ma façon

  Le vin St. Joseph Rouge

  Côtes Ràties 1952

  Pâté de Canard truffé avec des petits oignons à la Grecque et à la mode de chez-moi

  Pintadeaux nouveaux aux bananes

  (Sauces avec Madère, Porto, Crème, Glace de Viande etc.)

  Petits Chèvres de Chantemerle

  Coupe de Fraises Melba

  The reader will notice the phrases “à ma façon” and “à la mode de chez-moi,” and imagine that like all great chefs Chabert is keeping his trade secrets to himself. This is not the case; it is simply his modesty which
prevents him from adding his own name to the dish, as he would have every right to do—as every great inventive chef does in France. He deplores this habit and says that it smacks of pretentiousness. For his part he believes that a great chef should do everything well and a few things of his own choice superbly.

  “You see? He is another fanatic,” said Lejoie as he listened smiling. We were all sitting together over a glass of fine brandy listening to the clock chime midnight. Soon I would be comfortably tucked up in bed, my drowsy brain packed with dazzling impressions of this visit, trying in vain to sort them out. “I hope you’ll write something about it,” said Lejoie suddenly, as we were all saying good-night. “I would feel the visit had been worthwhile.”

  We lagged upon the staircase, slowly talking our way up into the darkness of the first floor.

  “If I did what would I call it?” I said.

  “‘In Praise of Fanatics,’ of course,” said Lejoie.

  So I have.

  The River Rhône

  Published in Holiday. Philadelphia. January 1960.

  EVERY GREAT RIVER gradually grows its own history, its own temperament, its own quite distinguishable personality. It becomes an image of a nation or a capital city, a word with echoes. To the philosopher it has always suggested the notion of time, perhaps because it never flows backwards (except in mythology or poetry). To the map-maker it suggests a living artery in the body of a country. But to the historians it is always a road—a highway along which the peoples of the world have always undertaken their slow pilgrimages to distant shrines of worship; or more prosaically and more recently their business trips in search of customers for their wares.