On a walking tour through the Pyrenees, Bharati Motwani yearns for what might have been had the French, rather than the British, colonised us.
If you thought the south of France was this place where people drank wine all day, had meals that lasted three hours, smoked Gitanes moodily, and made love in the most romantic language on earth — you’re damned right. If ever there were a people who had it all — the Bordeaux, the beauty, the foie gras and the French kiss, the Cezannes and the scenery — it would be here. Besides, it’s hardly fair that a nation so preoccupied with food and drink should be so slender.
The Pau-Pyrenees, a small, sunlit, green county in the Aquitaine region, lies in the extreme south-west of France, in the corner between Spain and the Atlantic coast. It’s undiscovered, undefiled and innocent. And they clearly have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for as they now set about promoting the region to us Indians.
It boggles the mind to imagine a big fat Indian wedding at the rarified Palais in Biarritz, or the Gujarati clique colonising the bohemian bazaars of Saint Jean-de-Luz. Sacrilege is the word that comes to mind. But who is to argue with the lure of laissez faire? India is where the party is at, so they tell us. We are a rocking economy and the world’s biggest democracy, if democracy means that people vote. Yes, that they do.
At the ESC Pau Business School, they tell us that they are keen to have more Indian students rather than Chinese ones because Indians “share the same values”. The mistrust of communism and the inscrutable Oriental is a pervasive phenomenon across the First World. Willy-nilly, India has been kicked upstairs, even in Pau — it’s pronounced “Po” — this faraway slice of Eden we’d never even heard of before.
The legendary Anglo-French rivalry, the Entente Infernale, is possibly a little less palpable in these parts, as the region saw an influx of Englishmen during the early 19th century who came here to vacation at the seaside resort of Biarritz, or for horse racing, fox hunting, cricket and golf in Pau. These very English pastimes are still popular, and Pau has the oldest golf course in Europe, established in 1856.
Of course, it must be noted that paintings hung in the club house by an English artist of that period depict the French as dark-skinned, shabbily dressed caddies, a whole foot shorter than the tall and dashing English players. And certainly it is galling to the Gallic soul to have us presume that the world must speak English. So, brush up on your bonjours and your bisous (kisses), the very French way of greeting with a peck on each cheek.
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We rolled along on wine and a song through the countryside, stopping for five-course repasts at a wayside auberge du terroir (country inn) or at some tres chic restaurant with a name like Chez Germaine, where they bring it on and simply don’t stop. Aperitifs followed by table wines followed by digestifs; foie gras followed by roast wood-pigeon followed by fromage followed by crème brulee until you are swathed in an epiphany. No meditation, no church music will leave you as filled with goodwill towards all mankind as the pure happiness of a perfect meal. So civilised is this country that not once during our travels did we see hide or hair of such abominations as a McDonald’s or Taco Bell. But the days, I fear, are numbered.
Bearn, as the region is called, is like a small, exquisite painting, sometimes pointillist, sometimes impressionist, depending on the colours of the season, the sunlight and the amount of wine in your bloodstream. Distances are small, with the next destination just an hour’s drive from the last. Homes, cars, highways, people, even dogs are modestly sized and understated. Why, even Sarkozy is short and sexy.
Even the haute (high) Pyrenees never intimidate, allowing easy, level walks. Every now and then you come upon a statue of the Virgin on a hilltop, silhouetted against the snow, arms outstretched and enfolding. What does bring you to your knees is the beauty — here between the blue sky and the white snow, looking down into sun-shot, green piedmont valleys dressed in vivid autumn colours, stone houses with grey slate roofs, breathing pure air that clears your mind and chills your skin, hearing the sound of the angelus on the breeze. It is almost too much, and you must turn away. Or your heart will break into a hundred pieces.
And as we travel, beside us and never very far is the river Gave, ducking under stone bridges, streaking down slopes, shimmying through towns. At Saint-Sauveur, Claudie, our tour-manager, she of the infectious laugh, offers to stop by a bridge built by Napolean III so that we “can make ze Benjy”, but the Gave is too cold for a bungee jump.
We stop for yet another three-hour gourmet odyssey at Luz-Saint-Sauveur, a beautiful village in the upper Pyrenees. Opposite an old stone church here is the house where Paulo Coelho writes his bestselling, if dubious, literature. After dabbling in drugs in his misspent youth, Coelho is said to have had a “Road to Damascus” sort of religious experience while on a local medieval pilgrimage called the Santiago de Compostela. Out of this experience came the first book, The Pilgrimage. They gave him the Légion d’Honneur, and even named a drink after him, which is possibly an even higher honour.
We give ourselves up to the road which takes us to Salies de Bearn, a town built around warm salt springs, said to make women fertile. We are in French Basque country with the Spanish Basque across the mountains. Basque is a land apart, with its own culture, staunchly Catholic and with its own sense of nationalism. It has a language unrelated to any tongue on earth and a DNA fingerprint that is unique and mysterious. St Jean-de-Luz is a fishing village with timber-framed houses and window-boxes overlooking cobbled streets, fine old Moorish cathedrals and a hundred stories to tell of war and blood, whales and shipwrecks. After the Vatican, Lourdes is the axis mundi of Catholic believers across the world. Six million pilgrims come to Lourdes every year, and it has more hotels than Paris. This town grew around the visions of a 14-year-old peasant girl who believed she saw the Virgin in a grotto here. If ever there were an instance of thought becoming manifest reality, it must be here at Lourdes. We fill little bottles with the miraculous waters, watch a candlelight procession, and allow ourselves to be moved by things we do not understand.
Biarritz is the Riviera of these parts, stylish and pricey. It’s where the young and the fit come to surf, and the rich come to stay at the cream-and-gold stucco confection of the Palais Hotel, once the summer residence of Empress Eugenie and Napolean III, who hung out here with their friends Bismarck, Isabelle of Spain and Leopold II of Belgium... But if Lakshmi Mittal could do it at Versailles, then no place is sacrosanct, and an Indian wedding may well happen at the Palais with Shah Rukh Khan dancing at the sangeet.
Back in Pau we are treated to a faux fox-hunt where red-coated horsemen and packs of panting hounds go chasing after nostalgia for another time. In the dimming light they rode, o’er field and forest, as the master of the hunt sounded the horn; for who would we be, if we did not have our legends and our history? That evening I met a huntsman over dinner — he worked a nine-to-five shift at an office, and yes, he was very, very short.
Jurancon is the signature wine of the south-west of France, a clear honey gold when it is sweet, fresh and delicious when it is dry. You could drink it from morning to night and we very nearly did; we drank all the way on the flight back to Delhi, and then when we got home, we unpacked our cache and drank some more. The sort of thing that makes you realise with the deepest pang that if we’d been colonised by the French instead of the English, we’d be a country of wine-drinking aesthetes, speaking the most romantic language on earth…
