Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  The University of Grenoble occupies an enviable position in the academic esteem of Frenchmen, and is among the first three universities of France, sharing its honours with Paris and Strasbourg. But it is also peculiar to itself, for of all the centres of learning in France it is the most international in outlook. Perhaps geography has something to do with its cosmopolitanism, its Swiss and Italian orientation; or perhaps it is simply the excellence of its summer courses for foreigners, and the fact that some two thousand students a year from other countries spend the summer here. Since the inception of these Cours de Vacances in 1896 over 80,000 foreigners of 45 nationalities have studied here; and of course this figure does not include those foreigners who (summer courses aside) become fully fledged undergraduates of the University and complete their studies here. (“You don’t want a lot of dull figures,” said Martine. “Yes I do.” She sighed. “All right. I’ll go to the Rectorate where they will give me the answers to any questions you have.”)

  Figures, dull as they are, can often be illuminating, though Martine herself wore a distinctly contemptuous air as she rode up to the hotel on her Vespa with her bundle of jottings sticking out of the pocket of her duffle coat. “Voilà” she said, and added, “Though I don’t know who you are going to interest with this sort of thing.”

  Nevertheless, she sat patiently, if somewhat quizzically, in the lobby of the Three Dauphins (where Napoleon is supposed to have lodged during his lightning advance northward on Paris during the Hundred Days); and she even accepted a glass of rosé while I tried to sort out the skeletal structure of the university from the neatly tabulated lists of chiffres. It did not take long to sift the relevant detail: though when I shut my notebook and slipped the official papers back into their green envelopes she still looked rather unconvinced. “What have you found?”

  I had, in fact, found one or two things of great interest. The student body of Grenoble is about 5,500 strong, though the registrations for the new department of Theoretical Physics and Nuclear Fission (just opened) is expected to add another five hundred pupils to the list this year. Of this number some six hundred students are foreigners, and in the academic year ’56—’57 Britain, the United States and Germany provided the greatest numbers—in that order. Of course the foreign students are nearly all grouped in the faculty of letters—understandably enough; countries which are technologically advanced would have centres of learning at least as specialized for them to attend at home. There would be less incentive for Americans, British, Germans, and Swiss to take scientific degrees here. Hence they throng the Faculty of Letters. But the more backward nations which are still grappling with a shortage of technicians do send their students to Grenoble—Syria and Greece are both well represented. The spacious dining-hall of the Maison des Etudiants at lunch-time has the air of being a miniature United Nations. Martine and I lunched in a group consisting of a Chinese, a Japanese, a Pakistani, and an American (Sidney Simon of Brooklyn College, studying French). The Japanese had been four years in Grenoble studying letters, and had a good deal to say in praise of its excellence both as an academy and a ski-centre. It was queer to listen to his lucid and faultless French to which he had added the use of typical gestures of the hand and head. He was a chemist. “All the emphasis today is on science. More and more people are enrolling for science and technology courses. It is understandable. Grenoble is the best of the universities for a scientific training—as Cambridge is in England.” It is not merely that the University is expanding its technological faculties faster than any other—it is also that Grenoble as a town is growing fast towards the position of a small capital, with new industries and plants springing up everywhere. Here (and this is unique in France) the industrialist works in with the university authorities to help accentuate the studies of technicians, often subsidizing their studies or putting forward incentives such as the guarantee of a reserved job. “Once,” said the American, “a university was regarded as a mind-trainer. But today it is becoming a meal-ticket. Science is a hungry monster and needs more and more hands and brains.”

  Here I was able to throw down a question which has been exercising the Anglo-Saxon mind of late. “Is there a tug-of-war between science and the Humanities here, as there seems to be in England and America? Is there a disquiet about technical education, and a clear division of aims and ends?”

  There was a long moment of silence. “Yes,” said the Japanese, but thoughtfully, reflectively. “There are more girls taking letters, more men taking science, these days.” It was not quite the answer I was hoping for and I waited. Finally it was the spidery French student from the end of the table who provided it; he had been listening in silence with his chin on his hand. “I don’t agree,” he said. “And I think that French educational attitudes would prevent such a décalage. I understand your question and have read a number of articles in the English press about the matter. Apparently you woke up the other day and found that the Russians were producing more scientists than England and America put together; some sort of panic followed. But if you don’t mind my saying so it seemed to me to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding as to what science really is. It is not simply the multiplication of amenities, the practical and applied end of things. Applied science is based upon something far more profound, namely the abstractions of pure mathematics. Ideas are everything to science. It isn’t based on reasoning, but imaginative daring; the amenities like bombs and penicillin are simply by-products. But the supply of these would soon dry up if it were not sustained by the purely abstract work of the mathematicians. (After all, the whole science of hydraulics is based on an idea of Leonardo.) Now in France we consider that scientists are really poets too, poets of ideas. You can’t read Poincaré’s account of how his imagination works when he is thinking mathematically without admitting that it is the same order of phenomenon as what happens to Valéry when he drafts a poem. In other words the key to both crafts is intuition; and the function of a Humanist education is not simply to supply a training in moral or ethical values, but to nourish the intuition. I think this is the French spirit which animates our education, and this is what has distinguished the French student from the Anglo-Saxon one. At any rate visit our medical and technology faculties and see how many people are painting and writing as well as studying these subjects. I don’t believe there is another country which has this attitude; and I hope France will never lose it.”

  “He’s right,” said Martine. “But.…”

  “But what?”

  “Will it outlast this generation?”

  This of course was not a question that any of us could answer. But the spidery French student nodded firmly and precisely. “If science itself is to go on it will have to.”

  “Things have changed so much.”

  But here our deliberations were interrupted by the chimes of a clock and the students began to bustle off to their lecture halls. Martine, too, had a lecture to attend, and this left me free to wander along the quays by the swift-flowing icy Isère for an hour, listening to the lazy sounds of life from the Place Grenette, and trying to reconstruct from my memories of Stendhal what it all must have been like to this awkward fat boy of sixteen, standing at an upper floor window to watch the Lyons coach rumble into the square at dusk. (“Here are my memories,” he writes. “The sound of the bells of St. Andrés when they were rung for the elections; the sound of the water-pump when the maidservants at night used to pump with the great iron bar; last the sound of a flute played by some merchant’s clerk on a fourth story of the Place Grenette.”)

  It was in search of that vanished flute that my steps led me to where St. Andre now stands in its twilit corner by the river, shabby, beautiful and with that air of indestructibility which only good works of art have. I sat for a few moments by the yellow stone slab under which lie the mortal remains of Bayard—the Chevalier Sans Peur and Sans Reproche—reflecting on the fact that it was France which invented chivalry, and so nourished the historic imagination of Europe for
centuries afterwards. And now? The stained-glass windows filtered their jewels into the dark church. I could hear the river flowing. Also the clicky click of the small wooden sabots—some children were playing hopscotch outside the great doors, their heels clicking on the paving stones. “Un deux, trois …” the small voices pierced the gloom, so touching and so clear. Then suddenly the darkness was shivered into pieces by the vibrations of a bell and I reluctantly rose to complete the interviews for which I had been sent on what for me was (but the editor must never know) a sentimental pilgrimage to the shrine of my favourite novelist.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  Up in the sky! The téléférique or cable-car is one of the most delightful features of Grenoble. It spans the outer bastions of the fort and the further bank of the Isère, lifting you with a cradle-soft smoothness up into the night, swinging over the glittering river water until drop by drop the whole city is spread out before you, a dazzling criss-cross of coloured lights, diamonds, lozenges, and harsh single spots of emerald or scarlet. The whole valley brims with the soft furry pollen of light filtered through mist. And behind it the snows rise, majestic, unruffled, stretching away north and south. The view from the bastions of the fort with its great green T-shaped lighthouse is magnificent. The three of us hung there for a while over the city, speechless with pleasure, like the gargoyles over Notre-Dame. Somewhere around us in the darkness I could hear voices, and the faint strumming of guitar strings. The night was deeply pine-scented. “They are up there,” said Martine and led me upwards along the dark paths.

  Somewhere up above us a voice was softly singing a verse from one of those traditional student songs replete with all the healthy bawdry of adolescence.

  Dans son boudoir

  La petite Charlotte

  S’donnait d’la joie

  Avec une passoire.

  Martine giggled. “I hope you are blushing,” I said severely, though it was too dark to see. Nils said: “That is Pierre. As for blushes poor Martine was initiated last year and blushes no more. Here, give me your hand.”

  “Do you still have the famous initiation ceremonies they used to call bizutage?” I asked.

  “Yes. Student folklore is dying out, but we medicals and the long haired Beaux Arts boys still keep them up.”

  “It’s horrible,” said Martine. “I found a cadaver’s thumb in my soup. And afterwards they sang a very dirty song.”

  “Comparatively mild stuff,” said Nils. “There are more serious ceremonies, and somewhere, in the lab there is a witch doctor’s outfit made of bones, and a necklace of human vertebrae, and … other items. The girls got off lightly.”

  There was a camp fire burning—in the sky it seemed, so intense was the darkness. A group of faces surrounded a simmering pot from which came the delicious odours of fondue. We were introduced to each other, and Pierre sang a small and highly questionable song in my honour which met with general acclamation. I offered suitable thanks and took my place in this congenial circle of light carved out of blackness. Dimly one could feel the shoulders of mountain running up into the sky behind us. The toast was piping hot and wrapped in a white napkin. “The cold air makes you hungry,” said Pierre. “Dip, my children.” We sat there talking and dipping. Martine’s bonbonne of wine was produced. It was obviously thoroughly “rested,” and tasted magnificently rich. Below us, on the floor of the world glittered the jewelled city.

  So we sat and talked in that cold and disembodied Alpine air, and drank the good wine, and utterly banished from our minds the problems of the world and its future.

  It was late when we reached the town again and set off to walk through the gardens where the fallen leaves were being whirled and scratched along the walks by the night wind.

  Martine always crossed the little garden in order to have a glimpse of the little terrace of Stendhal’s grandfather with its thick trellis of vine. It is over a hundred years old, and is today exactly as the good Poncet (the amiable drunk carpenter) built it for the old man. Yet you can only peep at it over a high wall with an iron door in it. “I’ve always wanted to walk on it,” said Martine. “But in some mysterious fashion it has been cut off from everything. I’ve tried to reach it through the grounds of the school, but you just can’t; it is too high, perched on the Roman wall. And none of the houses appear to give on to it.”

  “The entrance must be in the Grande Rue,” I said.

  “The Grande Rue is all shopfronts with no courtyards. I have asked in every shop on the façade. There seems to be no way to reach it. And yet once I saw a silver-haired old lady dressed in an old-fashioned way standing up there under the vine. It gave me a start; I wondered if it were the ghost of Séraphie, the dreadful aunt who tormented him so when he was a small boy.”

  We gazed through the flickering street-lamps’ light at the little terrace, and sighing turned back towards the Place Grenette where the brilliantly lighted Café du Commerce was serving its last black coffees to its clientele of students. I thought no more of the little trellis. It was late and everyone was sleepy.

  It was the next afternoon that the adventure befell me; I had packed my things, and was taking a last walk round the town. Martine and Nils were to meet me at my hotel to say goodbye. I wanted to drive to Valence and spend the night there on my way home. Dusk had fallen, and the whole façade of the Grande Rue was ablaze with lights—shops crammed with Alpine sports-wear, souvenirs, toys, and huge boxes of walnut pralines. Instinct must have led my steps, for I was not thinking of anything in particular, and certainly not of Stendhal—though it is true that I had just bought a copy of De l’Amour to give to Martine as a parting present.

  There was a tiny aperture between two shopfronts—a sort of dark tunnel at the end of which I could see a dim patch of shadowy light, as in an aquarium. I walked warily down it to see where it led. In a gloomy courtyard there was a little old man repairing fuses in a fuse-box. Suddenly I saw that there was a staircase leading upwards. I paused. The old man turned the face of a benevolent earwig to me. “Are you looking for someone?” he asked. I hesitated and said: “No. I had an envie to walk under the trellis of Stendhal.” (One can say this sort of thing in French without looking foolish.) “But there is no way, is there?”

  He thought for perhaps half a minute. I could hear the traffic in the Grande Rue and children’s voices crying. “There is,” he said at last. “It belongs to a private apartment. An old lady lives there. Three flights up.”

  I walked up the stairs of the Gagnon house with a beating heart and rang the bell, beset by an absurd sense of familiarity. An old lady with silver hair opened the door and asked my business. She was dressed in a dress of some silvery material which gave her an air of great and completely unemphatic distinction. A low melodious voice. Faltering rather—and feeling like some annoying intruder—I told her that I was an ami de Stendhal and that I was overcome by an absurd envie to walk upon the terrace where he had spent such a great part of his childhood.

  “But of course,” she said warmly and impulsively, and stood aside to let me enter. I followed her across the tall severe rooms and found myself standing on the parapet under the vine, under the trellis at which Martine and Nils gazed so lovingly the night before. The old lady was smiling but silent. The terrace looked out across the dark foliage of the park. “This is the place; it is completely unchanged. At least if you can remember the drawings he made of it in Henri Brulard you can follow his life here, room by room; here is the little study with the natural history collection—do you remember?” I did. She took fire at once, leading me from room to room while we recalled to memory those trivial childhood events of the great man. At last she folded her hands and said: “Would you care to pluck a leaf or two from the old vine?” It was still there, hairy and twisted with age, but as thick as the thigh of Pan himself; I plucked three of the broad green leaves and thanked her.

  “People say,” said the old lady, “that he was hard on Grenoble in his writings, but it is so clear to me
that his memories were poisoned by the death of his mother here. Do you remember where he says ‘She perished in the full flower of her beauty’ and then adds the quick phrase ‘Là commence ma vie morale’?” She paused for a moment, and stood in the sunlight staring thoughtfully at the old vine. Somewhere a church bell started to ring, full of the leisurely sleepiness that comes from deep valleys full of drowsing cattle, and high mountains. She said: “And do you remember where he writes about the Church where she was buried? I can quote it: ‘The very sound of the cathedral bells produced in me in 1828 when I returned to Grenoble a dull and arid grief, without any stirring of the feelings, a grief akin to rage.’” She sighed.

  Together we walked in silence across the terrace, through the little study and the tall severe rooms. “And yet,” she added with a smile, “he also says that he detested Paris at first because it had no mountains and woods! In other words he detested it because it wasn’t Grenoble! Such are the paradoxes of the feelings.”

  At the front door I thanked her and kissed her slender hand. “I am happy about your visit,” she said. “But I must ask you a favour. Please don’t tell other people how you came to find this place. There are not enough leaves on Dr. Gagnon’s vine to give to Stendhal’s admirers; and, then, one has one’s own life to live. Will you promise?”

  I promised. I did not realize how late it was until I once more reached the Place Grenette; it was in fact time for me to take the highroad back to Valence. But I slipped two of the vine-leaves into the little copy of De l’Amour. Martine and Nils were standing in the vestibule with Pierre and two other companions of the night before. It was good of them to come and see me off. The car was already loaded up with baggage. “Here,” I said, not without a certain complacence I suppose. “Here is a present for you both. Somewhere in it you will find two leaves from Stendhal’s vine, just as green as his prose is.”