The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The gestures, thought Paul; the expressive use of the hands; the shrugs and pouts.

  “And it’s infectious, you know. That’s what people don’t realise until they go there and get under the skin of the place. Then you find out.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, even we can be changed—just by being there. Our northern, Protestant culture, our essential Scottishness, can be shed so very easily.”

  But then Chloe seemed to think of something else, and her expression changed. “Cheese,” she said dreamily. “Jambon sec. Terrine. Confiture. Tarte. Not to mention…how many different wines? Virtually uncountable?” She smiled at him. “How about it?”

  He did not argue. France could be a solution, to many things, perhaps, but mostly to the book. He had to finish the book. “Yes,” he replied.

  She smiled. “As in d’accord?”

  “Yes.”

  4

  Wilde’s Last Words

  Chloe arrived in France ten days before Paul. He caught the high-speed train, the TGV, to Poitiers from Paris, and she was waiting for him at the railway station when the train drew in. She was in the middle of a knot of people, some of whom were ready to board the train, while others were there to meet those arriving. He spotted her immediately, even before the train had come to a complete halt; the straw hat she was wearing, a wide-brimmed floppy construction, singled her out—no French person would wear such a quintessentially eccentric hat—as did her complexion, that pale, almost translucent skin, so different from the sun-burnished tones of the French on their summer holidays.

  He had resolved to travel light, but had failed, and had with him two bulging suitcases that he succeeded in getting off the train only with some effort.

  “Largely books and papers,” he said apologetically, as Chloe tried to help him.

  “My dear,” said Chloe, flinging her arms around him. “You’re going to get so much done. Everything is prepared: the house, the desk in the house, the view from the window in front of the desk. Tout. Tout.”

  They began to make their way towards the car park. A placard beside a newsagent’s stall announced the latest rail strike, and Chloe gestured to this. “You’ve arrived in the nick of time. We’re about to be cut off. Plant courgettes against the revolution, I always say.” She laughed. “I’ve lived through two revolutions, Paul. I must tell you about them one of these days, but I do tend to get them a bit mixed up. One was a bourgeois revolution against a socialist government; the other was the other way round. Both ended up with the same people being in power, but pretending to be different.” She stopped briefly, to get her breath. “Generally, I preferred the socialists to the bourgeoisie. They were more fun, I thought, and were surprisingly ready to recognise that although one was bourgeois oneself—and we are, I’m afraid, Paul, whether we like it or not; in spite of that, the radical socialists were very ready to forgive one’s origins—provided, of course, one was vocal enough in one’s self-hatred. They loved you if you were prepared to excoriate everything in your past. They loved that.”

  They entered the car park. “I managed to negotiate a car along with the house,” Chloe explained. “It’s one of those old Citroëns. I suspect it shouldn’t really be on the road any longer—but it has a great deal of character and seems to start every time I ask it to. It’s a very bourgeois car, of course, but one should never despise anything that gets you from A to B.”

  She was right about the car, he felt. It was one of those low-slung saloons with the swept-back rear that looked nowhere better than being parked in front of a prosperous country house. This car, an extraordinary lilac of a shade more or less never encountered in a vehicle, was beginning to show its age. The paintwork was faded—the lilac might have started life as something a bit stronger—and the leather seats within were covered with a network of cracks and blisters.

  Paul’s luggage loaded, they began their journey.

  “Chloe,” Paul ventured as they left the car park and swung out onto the main road, “one does drive on the right in France, doesn’t one?”

  It took Chloe a few moments to react. She was about to explain the car’s suspension system—which she found quaint—but stopped herself. “Possibly,” she exclaimed, swinging the car into the correct lane. “There’s so much that one has to remember.” And then she sounded forth on the subject of suspension. Paul looked out of the window, struggling with his nervousness. To go anywhere, with anybody, was an act of faith. You trusted in the other’s judgement, navigation, and sense of what they were doing. What did he know about Chloe? Very little, he realised, other than that there had been a succession of husbands, that she had a mind filled with enthusiasms of one sort or another, and that she had a tendency to act on impulse. Yet he had placed himself in her hands and now he was in France—a foreign country, after all, with a different way of doing things—as her guest, having thrown his fate in with that of an eccentric older relative whose life thus far had consisted of a series of scrapes, near-misses, and peculiar dalliances.

  “We’re going to have such a time,” Chloe remarked, as the road snaked out of town. “Such a time. Look at that, Paul. France.”

  She took a hand off the wheel to point out the landscape that had opened up before them. Crops of wheat and barley stretched out to a distant horizon of low curves; here and there, small forests, irregular in shape and extent, interrupted the sweep of the land, making for dark patches against the lighter green of the fields. Lanes, almost too narrow to admit a car, hemmed in by exuberant hedgerows, ran off the main road at unpredictable angles, marked by white metal signposts bearing the name—inevitably a long one—of some tiny village. The position of those villages was given away by a church spire poking up in the middle distance, or by a cluster of red-tiled roofs. “You could get lost so easily,” observed Chloe. “You could wander around for weeks, and end up nowhere.”

  She turned to him briefly. “But don’t worry, Paul, I know exactly where we’re going.”

  A tractor, towering on impossibly high wheels, a spraying mechanism of some sort attached to its rear, lumbered towards them, taking up most of the road.

  “Entitlement,” muttered Chloe, as she slowed down and edged onto the roadside verge.

  The tractor driver glanced at them dismissively as he passed.

  “Well, I suppose he’s been living here for hundreds of years,” said Paul. “That makes a difference.”

  Chloe nodded. “It’s very reassuring being a peasant,” she said. “You must feel utterly secure. You belong. You’re it. You don’t have to apologise to anybody.”

  Paul wondered whether anybody still used the term peasant.

  “Oh, the chattering classes don’t,” said Chloe. “They subscribe to the notion that we’re all exactly the same. But that doesn’t wash with the peasantry. They don’t need to be condescended to. And they’re not embarrassed by being who they are. Why should they be? Their life consists of looking after the cows and getting the potatoes in, and so on. They understand the importance of such things.”

  “Whereas we…,” Paul began.

  Chloe took over. “Whereas we lead our urban lives with a slight sense of superiority. We admire all the wrong things—and the wrong people. We worship money. We think those who manipulate money are to be handsomely rewarded, ignoring the fact that those money changers—for that is what they are, Paul—couldn’t lift a crop of potatoes if they tried, nor milk a cow, I suspect.” She shook her head in disbelief. “No, give me these people any day of the week. At least the life here is honest.”

  Paul suppressed a smile. He suspected that Chloe needed a theme—some central narrative that dictated what she would do and think. Perhaps that was what this trip to France was all about: the discovery of a rural lifestyle, governed by the seasons, uncomplicated and natural. That had been all but lost in so many other places, but survived with a Gallic stubbo
rnness in France. Small-scale French farmers—that tractor man and his like—took instructions from nobody, least of all from the authorities in Paris. Perhaps this was what motivated Chloe—a romantic, rural idyll.

  He thought of Marie-Antoinette and her fake peasant village, her hameau, in the grounds of Versailles.

  “Marie-Antoinette—” he began.

  Chloe cut him short. “Marie-Antoinette never dressed up as a milkmaid,” she said firmly. “That’s a canard that has been repeated time and time again, but is absolutely untrue. She wore comfortable dresses when she was there, but she was never a milkmaid.”

  “I wasn’t going to accuse her of that,” said Paul. “I was just thinking about how one might romanticise the countryside.” He paused. They were passing a farmyard just off the road; a goat was tethered under a tree; an open barn door gave a glimpse of stacked bales of hay within; an ancient cart was abandoned next to the barn, its wheels at an angle, its shaft resting on a pile of bricks.

  “She had a working farm,” said Chloe. “She had a Swiss guardsman who looked after it. They bred rabbits, chickens, pigs. She used the produce herself.”

  “So that’s where she got the eggs for her brioche,” said Paul. “Let them eat cake…”

  “No,” snapped Chloe. “No, Paul. You should not perpetuate that gross calumny. She never said that—there’s not one shred of evidence. That was Rousseau’s fault. His Confessions are full of invention, and one of them was about somebody—and he did not name her—who made such a remark. Marie-Antoinette’s enemies then attributed the words to her. It was very unfair. She was not like that at all, you know.”

  Paul was surprised. “She had a social conscience?” This seemed to him to be unlikely. Marie-Antoinette represented, in his view, the ancien régime in all its powdered wastefulness. The tumbrils took things too far, but what could the aristocracy expect?

  “Believe it or not, she did, Paul. She was concerned about the suffering of the poor when she came across it. There’s evidence, but of course people don’t always want to look at the evidence.” She gave him a discouraging glance, causing the car to swerve. “Once they decide on something, people are usually very reluctant to take a fresh look.”

  With mock-seriousness, Paul assured her that he would reconsider his attitude towards Marie-Antoinette.

  “So you should,” said Chloe.

  Paul looked out of the window. They had crossed a low-level bridge and the road now followed a gentle incline. Fields of sunflowers flanked them on either side, painting the landscape yellow.

  “Are you a monarchist, Chloe?” The question seemed to follow naturally from the discussion of Marie-Antoinette. Yet, he thought, you could be a monarchist and still disapprove strongly of somebody like her—if that is what she really had been like. And he thought, for all that Chloe had defended her character, she was like that. All of them were.

  Chloe took some time to answer, initially repeating his question as if to tease out some unspoken nuance. “Am I a monarchist?”

  “Yes.”

  “It depends, I suppose, on the context.”

  He waited for her to explain.

  “You see,” Chloe continued, “there’s the principle, then there’s the practice. You might approve of the idea of monarchy—of constitutional monarchy, shall we say—and yet disapprove of a particular monarchy. As far as that monarchy is concerned, you might not be a monarchist, but you may approve—possibly quite strongly—of other monarchies.”

  “Or you could reject the whole notion,” said Paul. “You could reject it as being fundamentally undemocratic.”

  “Yes, you could.” Chloe paused. She slowed the car. “We’re getting close. It’s the next turning on the right.”

  She returned to monarchy. “I rather like the Scandinavian monarchies. And our own, I suppose, subject to some qualification, of course. They do a good job, by and large—rushing round opening things and encouraging people.”

  She laughed, and sounded the car’s horn, perhaps for emphasis.

  “What tedium for them,” she continued. “And they provide people with a sense of tribal identity, which I think people need, deep down. But then you get some other monarchies that are definitely not to my taste. Monaco, for example. I can’t bear the place. Did I tell you I spent a month there once? All expensive flats and glove shops and so on. But there was one of their princesses who really was very colourful.”

  They were approaching the turning now, and Chloe slowed down further. “I have had more than one husband, Paul, as you know, but that princess—well, I’m not in her league. She’s wonderful—positively inspiring for the rest of us. She had some very remarkable companions—a Corsican bartender, for example; a Belgian bodybuilder; and then, as you must already know, she ran away with a famous elephant tamer from a circus. One could not make that up, Paul. Such colour. And all in the Royal House of Grimaldi—good for her. What chutzpah!”

  They were now on a narrow lane that twisted and turned unexpectedly. “One has to be so careful on these roads,” said Chloe. “I almost hit a motorcyclist yesterday. He was travelling at terrible speed. His fault entirely, of course, but what’s the point of talking about fault after you’re both dead? None, I’d say.”

  Paul agreed. “No need to hurry.”

  “Precisely,” said Chloe. “And then there’s Zog. King Zog of Albania. That was his real name, you know. Delicious, isn’t it? The ultimate Ruritanian monarchy. He more or less appointed himself—he had been some sort of tribal chief, rather like those clan chiefs we have in Scotland—and he was promoted to king. He built a palace in Tirana that wasn’t very grand at all—a sort of large suburban villa, in fact—and installed himself in that. Toy soldiers at the gate—that sort of thing.” She paused. They were passing a small field of pigs. “Look at them. Look how utterly content they are. They don’t like the sun, though, you know. Pigs can get sunburned. They love shade. Shade and mud. That’s what a pig wants out of life.”

  “King Zog,” Paul prompted.

  “Oh, him. Yes, there he was. He was a rather melancholy-looking man—not entirely happy with his lot, I suppose. And he had a mother and four or five sisters. Four, I think. The sisters lived with him—all of them—and he dressed them in naval uniforms. I’ve seen photographs of Zog’s sisters, all kitted up in white uniforms—caps, the lot. They put a big sofa out on the lawn and the sisters sat on it in their uniforms and had their photograph taken.

  “Nobody invited him anywhere, apparently. He waited and waited, but received no invitations at all. All the other royal houses were far too snooty to recognise him properly, and eventually he had to leave the country. He ended up in the Ritz hotel in London, poor Zog. But I suppose if you need temporary quarters, you can do worse than the Ritz.”

  They were approaching a village. A sign by the road announced St. Vincent de la Colline and beyond it a hand-painted notice, at a slightly drunken angle, advertised Oeufs, Pommes de Terre, Fruit, an arrow pointing in the direction of a farmhouse just off the road.

  “We’re here,” said Chloe. “Or almost. We’re on the other side of the village.”

  “Saint Vincent de la Colline,” muttered Paul. “Who exactly was he?”

  “Oh, some local saint,” Chloe replied. “Of great obscurity—I doubt if anybody knows anything about him any longer. There are any number of these saints. France has hundreds and hundreds of them. There are no real hills around here, so I suppose he must have come from some other hill altogether. But he must have done something. If he existed, of course.” She smiled. “Perhaps he produced a hill out of nothing. It might have been one of his miracles—and quite enough, I would have thought, to get one canonised. You want a hill, dear people? Voilà!”

  “De trop, in fact,” muttered Paul.

  “Saints really are a bit much. Dreadful company, I imagine. One would be so tempt
ed to say to them, ‘You are so, so apocryphal!’ And so many of them are, you know. Some of these saints are distinctly apocryphal. I read the other day about a Corsican saint called Saint Baltazaru of Calvi, who performed the miracle of changing wild boar into sausages without benefit of a charcutier. Apparently, he just had to touch a wild boar and it would become sausages—just like that.”

  “A real miracle,” said Paul.

  “Yes,” said Chloe. “How comfortable it must be to believe in miracles, Paul. And to believe in saints and angels, too. The very idea that there is a community of benevolent figures watching over us, ready to intervene on our behalf.”

  A duck was crossing the road ahead of them, followed by an erratic line of ducklings. Chloe brought the car to a halt, and they watched the small procession.

  “Of course, there might be angels, for all we know,” said Chloe. “Why should we imagine that the only things that exist are the things we can see ourselves? Doesn’t that sound somewhat solipsistic to you?”

  Paul watched the ducks. The mother, anxious over the welfare of the stragglers, was urging her brood across the road.

  “Those ducks,” mused Chloe, “don’t know that Paris exists, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t.”

  “I’ve never really thought much about angels,” said Paul. “I know that some people are keen on them, but they don’t do much for me.”

  “That’s because Scotland is bereft of angels,” said Chloe, putting the car back into gear. “You haven’t been brought up with them. Angels inhabit southern climes, I imagine. Italy in particular. They love Italy. And France, I suppose—particularly southern France.”

  Paul said that he thought they might be indifferent to surroundings. “If you’re incorporeal, I’d have thought it didn’t matter all that much where you were.”

  “No,” said Chloe. “Saints are very sensitive to their milieu. They love gentle landscapes—hillsides covered with olive groves, canyons in mountains, where the air is scented with thyme and rosemary. Mountaintops in Greece.”