Well, I finally hobbled onto Eurostar on Saturday morning after a long night on the autoroute, toute seule, and ten glorious days at Bardies getting ready for our Alistair Sawday inspection [more excitement on this to follow in the next post!]. My only incentive for driving back was the urgent need to replace our ancient rattling lawn mower and recently deceased hedge cutter. With over thirty metres of ancient box hedging to contain after the spring rains and early summer sunshine, and a still decidedly unfavourable exchange rate, I decided to hit the road in pursuit of UK bargains rather than prop up the profits of our local 'Briconautes' yet again. French prices before the nose dive of the pound were horrendous. Now they look like someone put the decimal point in the wrong place.
Driving through France is always a voyage of discovery. At Easter, we detoured 'en famille' to Oradour-sur-Glanne in the Haute Vienne department not far from Limoges. I had wanted to visit this remarkable testament to the horrors of war since seeing the Jeremy Isaac's award winning 1973 series 'The World at War'. Thirty six years later, the image of Dr Desourteaux's abandoned car, amongst many others, still remained with me. Everything is as it was left on Saturday 10th June 1944, when one of the worst civilian atrocities in France was perpetrated on the innocent people of Oradour by the Der Fuhrer Regiment of 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich. 642 men, women and children were brutally murdered, the majority being burnt alive beyond recognition in the church. A visit to Oradour is a pilgrimage rather than a voyage, a 'must' for children studying the history of the Second World War. We were all deeply moved by the experience. 'Souviens-toi'.
Returning home after Easter, sans enfants who had flown home with their dad, I went via Caen-Ouistreham, another reminder of those dark days. A month after the horrors of Oradour, on 9th July 1944, seventy five per cent of the city of Caen was destroyed by allied bombers as part of the back up for the D-Day landings. There were more than 2000 casualties. Anthony Beevor, controversially, recently said in an interview that the bombing of Caen was close to a war crime. I found myself wondering if an atrocity is easier to conduct if you cannot see your victims. Did the people of Caen suffer the torment of their burns with less pain than those in the little church in Oradour? Having also been to Dresden, I find this to be an essential moral question.
On a cheerier note, with almost a day to spare, I indulged myself beforehand with a seafood lunch in Deauville-sur-mer, as 'Great Gatsby'ish' today as it ever was, only bigger and richer. Taking a post-prandial walk along the seafront afterwards, I came across a plaque to Claude Lelouche's 1966 film, 'Un Homme et Une Femme', which won the coveted Cannes 'Grand Prix' and was partly filmed in Deauville. My first ever serious boyfriend, who was called Michael, was obsessed with Anouk Aimee and we saw it at least three times. I was in the sixth form, not doing French 'A' level, but from that moment I knew I had made a big mistake. Until then, French, like Latin, had been a chore, studied only because they were compulsory subjects at GCE for aspiring historians. We saw ourselves as the lovers in the story, French of course, and my love affair with all things French began in earnest.
I picked up my French again at the Alliance Francaise, where I finally learnt to speak the language, rather than rote learn irregular verbs and schoolgirl vocabulary. My French improved considerably, albeit only to the level of a seven year old. Then, over ten years ago, I watched a BBC TV documentary called 'The Language Master', where the polyglot Michel Thomas taught a disparate group of sixth formers in a London comprehensive how to speak passable French in just five days. I was gob-smacked. There were no books, no blackboards, no little notebooks of vocabulary and no homework. He got and kept their cynical attention for long enough to teach them the basic structure and ability to use the language. I immediately went out and bought his French course, and we've never looked back. As I drove into Calais last Saturday, I listened to the very last CD of his advanced course and finally learnt the elusive subjunctive tenses. Twelve years later, I finally feel that I'm getting there.
Just over a hundred years ago French was a foreign language to the majority of the population. In 1880, just over a fifth of the population felt comfortable speaking French, so I am not so far behind. In 1863, down where we are in the Ariege, virtually none of the communes was French speaking. Some cynics say that this is still the case. It's certainly true that the Ariegois 'twang' is difficult on the ear but getting oneself understood is as big a problem now as it was to Racine and his fellow metropolitan travellers in previous centuries. So much misunderstanding of French culture and custom derives from this essential fact. For a real insight, I thoroughly recommend Graham Robb's scholarly 2007 book, 'The Discovery of France', which I am currently engrossed in.
The rebranding of the France in 1790, with the formation of uniformly sized 'departements' named after rivers and other geographical permanences and the deliberate attempt to obliterate the Oil, Oc, Franco-Provencal and gypsy Basque and Catalan Calo languages, separated the language, customs, culture and superstitions of the traditional 'pays' from the demands of the new order. This mis-match continues today as we are all taught the highly codified and formal foreign language known as French. We struggle with our genders, pronouns and irregular verbs yet none of us speaks the language correctly. It's a consolation to know that this is just as true for the average French person too. We have a number of recognised minor dialects in everyday use not so far from Bardies. They include Ariegois, Fuxien, Luchonnais, Capcinais, Andorrais, Puigcerda, Roussillonais, as well as the major dialects of Couseranais, Commingeois, Catalan, Bigourdan and Languedocien.......and I worry about the accuracy of my French? Everything in France is a voyage of discovery, and long may it last too.
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