This month, oy bin
learnin' all aboot French histree, see. Actually, it was the end of April,
but since I seem to have spent the whole of May either mowing the lawn or
re-writing gibberish for a client, please pardon my poetic license. I had a
good dose of French history in 6th Form, specialising in the Revolution
and then studying on up to the Dreyfus affair and the horrors of Verdun. But as
for anything prior to the cake-eating and the Terror and the assassination of
Marat in his bath, I knew of nothing more than Versailles and the massacre of
the Huguenots. And as for post-Armageddon and Armistice, all those short-lived
republics passed me by as I buried my head instead in the films, see, of Carné,
Clouzot and Chabrol, and the novels of Camus.
In the words of soul songstress, Jean Carn, 'I got some
catchin' up to do...' And I caught up in Pau. Way down south in the Béarn,
overlooked by the mighty snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees. A long coming we
had of it, the Good Wife and I (riding shotgun with her camera for my magazine
assignment). Four hours or so of dreary, expensive motorway.
The Tourist Office lodged us for the Saturday night in a
Best Western hotel, which didn't sound that exciting – and we had a hell of a
job finding its subterranean garage, even with the aid of path-finding
technology – but it turned swan-like into the old Continental: a magnificent
belle époque hotel right slap bang in the middle of town. Our room was
modernised, of course, but the lobby and corridors retained an air of what it
must have been like in times more gracious than today. What with the whispering
automated lift announcer, I could have danced the continental right down the
length of the corridor to our fourth-floor bedroom.
Around that era, Pau was an important spa town. Word got out
that the air was good for respiratory problems, and a wave of well-heeled Brits
came here in the late 19th century to build the kind of so-Breeteesh mansions that the cheery
driver of the little tourist train pointed out during the half-hour excursion.
(A strange business, to ride in a train that doesn't run on rails.) Not that
British, though, Debs and I concluded. More like British ex-pats' attempts to
build in the vernacular. Not unlike today's reproductions in cement blocks of
local Lotois houses with pigeon
towers and gob-ons, they betray a lack of authenticity. If anything, they
reminded us of scaled-down versions of palaces built by the mega rich of the
Industrial Revolution in Newport, Rhode Island.
Pau is now in the process of trying to reinvent itself as
a centre for water sports and hi-tech boutique start-ups, and like those great
houses facing the distant mountains, the city seemed on Day 1 – in the immortal
words of Billy Liar – 'neither mickling nor muckling'.
But then, on the Sunday morning, it all fell into place.
The previous evening we'd walked down to the river and across the bridge to eat
some of the best genuine Vietnamese food I for one have ever tasted, in a small
but very busy little restaurant presided over by an overworked but remarkably
good-tempered factotum. He seemed a little bemused when I showed him a copy of France Magazine that I'd been carrying
around with me for just such an eventuality. Given the size of the
establishment, I didn't have the gall to try and blag a free meal, so I simply
suggested that I'd publish the details of his restaurant in the article. End of
story. But not quite. He brought us a pot of Vietnamese tea after the meal. On
the house. And when we were settling up at the counter, behind which two women continued
to cook flat out in their woks, he presented us with a packet of said tea.
On the way back, warmed by our host's touching gesture, the
spectral faces of historical dignitaries projected onto the vast wall of the Château
de Pau reminded us that this place was really important long before its
late 19th century renaissance. It was the capital of the joint
kingdom of Béarn and Navarre, whose most famous son would become the city's
resident spirit: the man on the equestrian statue... good king Henri Quatre.
Next morning, it was fresher and more overcast than the
previous scorcher. We waited in the courtyard of the chateau, surrounded by
architectural opulence. A door opened and a woman stepped out. I thought of Dr.
Prunesquallor's purblind sister, Irma, emerging from her Gormenghast apartment.
Pure fantasy. The charming woman did not have rooms in the chateau. She was
just a guide – but what a guide she turned out to be. She offered us our own
personal tour, so she could practise an impeccable English she'd picked up from
time spent in Milton Keynes. Of all places.
She took us into the old kitchens and there beganneth the
lesson – in front of a model of the chateau and the old town that nestled
around it. I'm a sucker for models; it must be something to do with my
unquenched hankering as a boy for not just a train set (which I had), but a pâpier maché landscape through which to
run it. I could have lingered long by the maquette, but there were
extraordinary tapestries to see and a dining room with a table on a series of
trestles long enough to run an Olympic sprint on its lacquered top, ante-rooms
and royal bedrooms and voids between the original stone walls and the later
wooden panelling that servants would use to effect magical appearances with
goblets of claret and steaming dishes of roast swan.
We even saw what I understood to be the legendary (giant)
tortoise shell that served as the infant Henri's cradle. He was born a Catholic
but raised a Protestant by his mother, which probably explained the pragmatism
that characterised his reign. In order to assume the throne of France, he gave
up his Huguenot faith (which almost got him massacred on St. Bartholomew's Day)
to revert to Catholicism – but then threw in the Edict of Nantes as a sop to
however many Huguenots survived the slaughter. The trouble was, for all his
popularity (which seemed to stem from a genuine concern for his people – as typified
by his wish that every peasant should have a chicken in his or her pot come
Sunday lunchtime), he couldn't please all of the people all of the time and,
after surviving previous assassination attempts, he was finally stabbed by the dagger
of a fanatical Catholic named Ravaillac.
We saw his helmet with the white plumes – or panache
(which gave me an aha! moment) – that was depicted in paintings as well as all
those equestrian statues. In one such painting, yer man – le vert gallant or Green Gallant – with the panache is seen on
horseback underneath the balcony of one of his many mistresses. Our guide told
us of another popular legend, that Henri Quatre had 'a bone for his sex', as
she so sweetly put it. In other words, he couldn't keep his pistol in his 16th
century equivalent of a pocket.
The legend lived on in the popular imagination. He sits
today astride his horse on the Pont Neuf in Paris (having been pushed off it
during the Revolution), and when the Bourbons were restored after the fall of
the house of Bonaparte, Louis-Philippe and co. created something of a cult
around the first of their kind. Part of which, if I got my facts right, were
the home improvements at Pau, which turned a rather monotone medieval chateau
into the fascinating bastardised chateau-of-many-styles that it has become.
And so endeth the lesson. Let us now praise famous men.
We returned whence we came after a quick visit to the new centre of water
sports, where the sportier aquatic Palois
were paddling for all their worth around a series of hurdles suspended from
rails that bridged the water, while the more bourgeois and leisured Palois surveyed them from the centre's
chi-chi restaurant. Yes, Pau is reinventing itself. Kayaking schmayaking,
personally. Being a history man at heart (and a poor swimmer), I'm more
attracted to its past.
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