French Lessons (12 page)

We moved on to what
our new friend behind the bar called “the reason God created
apples.” Calvados of varying ages—from
jeune homme
to
grand-pèr
e—
was poured, inhaled, sipped, and, I
must confess, swallowed. Strangely enough, I had no problem at all drinking
84-proof alcohol before midday; no wincing, no shakes, no burning sensations.
Perhaps last night’s cheese was still protecting my vital organs with a
layer of insulation. We decided to buy a couple of bottles of Calvados to take
home for future reference, and then Lulu very wisely suggested more
coffee.

Our arrival at the café coincided with the first musical
interlude of the day. The official Livarot cheese fair band was snaking down
the main street, playing very accomplished jazz, led by the
chef
d’orchestre,
a large man with an impressively supple touch on the
trumpet—ornamental riffs worthy of Miles Davis.

The band came to
a stop in the square and put aside jazz to reach deep into its repertoire for
something completely different. They began to play. Unless my ears were
deceiving me, the first few notes sounded exactly like the start of
“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” which is somehow not what you
would expect to hear in rural France. And yet that’s what it turned out
to be. Naturally, the performance had been given a little Norman je ne sais
quoi, and it was, appropriately, a long way from the conventional rendition I
remembered from my boyhood. The instrumental arrangement, with its jaunty
swoops and flourishes, reminded me more of New Orleans than of a military
march. And the band sang the words, giving a completely new sound to the
destination:
“Eets a longwhy to
Teeppairairee …”
The crowd loved it; encores were
demanded, and in the course of the next few hours, we were to hear the song
several more times.

A cheese stand opposite the café had
appeared on Sadler’s radar screen, luring him away for a swift, decisive
visit to buy supplies to take back to Paris. He returned to the café
looking thoughtful. The sight of a panorama of Livarot spread across the stand
had reminded him of the afternoon’s competition. How do you get ready for
something like that?

We tried to imagine the regime of self-denial, the
months of struggle and sacrifice, the preparations required to bring a
competitor to peak condition before a concentrated onslaught of cheese and
cider. Fasting? Calisthenics? Jogging around town? Meditation? Colonic
irrigation? Stomach massage? In the end, Lulu’s suggestion—the
French answer to circuit training—was probably the one followed by most
of the competitors. “Lunch,” she said, “but only a light
lunch.”

“What a good idea,” said Sadler.

Three o’clock, and a long table had been set up on
the platform in the place Pasteur. As a warm-up act before the featured
competition, some twisted genius had devised a special contest for the younger
gourmet. Children were lined up at the table in teams of two, one sitting, one
standing behind. The one standing behind (the feeder) had to spoon yogurt into
the mouth of his or her seated teammate (the eater). Simple enough, except that
the feeders all had black plastic bags over their heads, and so had to locate
the eaters’ mouths blind: by touch, trial, and messy error. The
animateur,
a young man with a microphone, a breathless line of nonstop
patter, and an acrobatic ability to dodge flying gobs of yogurt, supervised the
proceedings. After ten minutes, all the children and most of the table had been
covered with a coating of white goo. Everyone agreed that the event had been an
outstanding success.

After some swabbing down by the hygiene squad,
table and chairs were ready for the
grands mangeurs.
One by one, these
Olympians of gluttony—nine of them—went up to take their places.
There was much applause from the crowd, particularly for the favorite, a
surprisingly slim man. And a real ovation for the Japanese dark horse from
Clermont-Ferrand, Mademoiselle Iku, a small, slender young lady who looked as
though she would have difficulty dealing with a baguette, let alone a couple of
pounds of Livarot. The
animateur
asked her how she felt. She giggled
and waved to the crowd. “She’s confident, that one,” said
someone behind me. “She has
beaucoup d’élan.
But
does she have the stomach for cheese?”

The
animateur
explained the rules. There was a time limit of fifteen minutes, during which
contestants had to eat their way through two entire cheeses. Each cheese
weighed nine hundred grams, or about two pounds. Liquid assistance was
available in the form of bottles of cider. Any attempts to secrete cheese in
the clothing would be punished by disqualification. May the best mouth
win.

The favorite could be seen warming up, flexing his jaw muscles and
rolling his shoulders, eyeing his opponents, taking the cap off his bottle of
cider. He was asked what he had done that day in the way of last-minute
training. As Lulu had predicted, he said he had made do with a light lunch.
Next question: How often did he eat cheese? Once a year, he said. End of
interview. He refused to be drawn out, clearly saving himself for the supreme
effort to come.

And they’re off! All nine of them make a strong
start, tearing at their cheese like dogs savaging a postman’s trousers.
It’s a brutal pace. It can’t possibly last; this is a marathon, not
a sprint. After two or three minutes, the contestants settle down to a less
frenzied rhythm, and the differences in their techniques begin to show
themselves. You can tell the first-time competitors by the uneven size of their
mouthfuls, a certain lack of smoothness in their arm movements, and their
tendency to glance sideways to see how their opponents are doing. A great
mistake, or so we are informed by an expert standing close by, the
cheese-eating equivalent of taking your eye off the ball.

Two different
and distinctly superior styles are now apparent. There is the zen of
Mademoiselle Iku, her gaze focused on some inspirational sight in the far
distance as she chews and swallows at a steady pace, wiping her lips delicately
between mouthfuls with a paper napkin, taking ladylike sips of cider. If there
were a special prize for the most graceful consumption of an indecent amount of
Livarot, she would walk away with it.

By way of contrast, there are the
no-holds-barred tactics of the champ. He takes double bites, double mouthfuls,
stuffing one mouthful in each cheek, leaving just enough space in the middle of
his mouth to allow the passage of a torrent of cider that swills the cheese
down his gullet. The man is like a machine, eating rind and all, mopping his
brow, signaling for another bottle of cider. There can be no doubt about it. We
are in the presence of cheese-eating greatness here.
“Quel
mec!”
cries one of his fans.
“Il est
formidable.”
What a guy. And what a digestive system.

With a
final double mouthful, a last huge swig of cider, and a well-earned belch, the
favorite finishes, raising both arms in a victory salute. He has eaten four
pounds of cheese and drunk one and a half liters of cider in twelve minutes
flat. This may be a world record. Sweating profusely, he stands up—in
itself a small miracle—to be interviewed by the
animateur.

“Congratulations! How does it feel to win again?”

“
Génial.
No more cheese for a year.”

End of interview. The champion is a man of few words. Or perhaps he has a
surfeit of Livarot wrapped around his vocal cords.

The
animateur
moves on to Mademoiselle Iku, who has acquitted herself with
considerable distinction, having consumed two pounds of cheese and a bottle of
cider without any visible distress. In between giggles, she tells us that she
loves cheese, and that Livarot is ten times more expensive in Tokyo than it is
in France. She is presented with a special trophy for the best female
performance, and a replica, in chocolate, of a Livarot
colonel.

Other contestants show the strain of pushing their bodies to inhuman limits
in the cause of sporting endeavor. Some slump over the table, heads resting on
their arms, breathing heavily, barely this side of consciousness; others are
draped like sacks across the backs of their chairs, arms hanging down, faces as
pale as Camembert, glistening with sweat. And they say professional boxing is
tough; they should try competitive cheese eating.

We leave the
exhausted
mangeurs
to recover, and walk back toward the distant
strains of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” coming from the
main street.

What a grand time we’ve had. Rations, company,
entertainment, weather, the warmth of the Livarot welcome—everything has
conspired to make the weekend memorable. And it has reminded me that
there’s nobody—not even Régis—who is Sadler’s
equal with knife, fork, and glass. We must do it again.

A suitable
occasion suddenly occurs to me. I shall be going to Burgundy in November to
take a look at the Beaune wine auctions, and to attend the winegrowers’
lunch at the Château de Meursault. Perhaps, I say to Sadler, if he is
free, he’d like to come and hold my coat. I can tell the idea interests
him.

“A serious lunch, is it?”

“The lunch to
end all lunches,” I tell him. “A good five hours.”

“The finest of wines, no doubt?”

“The very
finest. Dozens of them.”

“Done,” says Sadler.
“I’ll wear my medal.”

It is rare
for me to return home after one of these celebrations without a few accidental
souvenirs decorating my clothes. This time, my wife pointed out that in the
heat of the moment I seemed to have sat on, or in, some Livarot. My trousers
had suffered. In fact, I doubted they would ever recover.

Fortunately,
madame who presides over the dry cleaner’s shop in Apt is a true artist.
Wine, sauce, gravy, oil, butter—none of these has ever resisted her
attentions. But even she was impressed by the smears of well-entrenched cheese.
Too polite to inquire exactly how they had come to be there, she asked instead
what kind of cheese it was. When told it was Livarot, she nodded thoughtfully
and offered to clean the trousers for nothing. It was a challenge to her
professionalism, she said. Moral: Only sit on the very best cheeses.

Slow Food

An adult snail in prime condition has a top speed of
just over four yards per hour. He is a gastropod, making his stately progress
through life on a single muscular, self-lubricating foot. He has two sets of
horns; the upper set equipped with eyes, the lower with a sense of smell. He
(or just as often she) is also a hermaphrodite, having the remarkable and
doubtless useful ability to change sex as the occasion demands. The snail is a
curious but harmless creature; its great misfortune, in France at least, is to
be considered a delicacy.

I found these basic facts in a book, an
elderly copy of
L’Escargot
Comestible.
It is a slim,
no-nonsense volume brought out by La Maison Rustique, whose other titles
include such gems as
How
to
Tan
the
Skins
of
Small
Animals,
Practical
Salmon
Raising,
and
The
Capture
and
Destruction
of
Moles.
I think it would
be fair to describe the people at La Maison Rustique as fringe publishers.

My wife had found the book on a bric-a-brac stand at one of the local
markets. Knowing my fascination for the snail, she bought it for me, and I
spent an afternoon going through its musty, damp-stained pages. The
illustrations were sparse—a couple of anatomical drawings and some faded
black-and-white photographs of the snail in two classic poses: hidden inside
the shell, or protruding from it. The text was scholarly in tone, and there
were no unnecessary typographical flourishes. In other words, it was a serious
piece of work, designed to inform students and breeders of the mollusk, rather
than entertain snail dilettantes like me.

But, serious work though it
was, a Frenchman had written it. And so, inevitably, there was a recipe
section:
escargots à la sauce bourguignonne, à la sauce
poulette, à la provençale, à l’espagnole,
farçi
s—
all set out in the same dry, precise,
professorial style that had been used to describe the snail’s mating
habits, sleep patterns, and robust digestive system.

It happened that
the book arrived at the perfect moment, just after I had received an invitation
to the twenty-eighth annual Foire aux Escargots at Martigny-les-Bains. The fair
is now sufficiently well established to have its own official stationery, and
my invitation was decorated with a life-size pair of snails—looking, I
thought, rather uncomfortable. The illustrator had dressed them for the
occasion in collars and ties, and they had that faintly embarrassed expression
one sees on dogs that have been obliged by their owners to wear little tartan
raincoats.

As for the program of events, many diversions were promised
at Martigny—edible, musical, and commercial, as well as the beauty
contest that is an essential part of these celebrations. Here, the organizers
had clearly run up against the problem of what title to give the winner. At the
frog fair I went to in Vittel, the prettiest girl was elected Miss Grenouille,
which was somehow quite flattering, as frogs are renowned for their long legs
and delectable thighs. But Miss Snail? What does that bring to mind? Two pairs
of horns, a single muscular foot, and a gelatinous undercarriage—hardly
the stuff of which beauty queens are made. Well then, how about Miss Mollusk?
No, perhaps not. And Miss Hermaphrodite was absolutely out of the question. The
day was eventually saved by choosing to give the winner the title of Miss
Coquille. Translated into the prosaic English word
shell,
it might be
said to lack glamour, but the French word has a certain saucy sound about it.
And besides, even if you can’t eat the shell, it is probably the
snail’s single most attractive feature. So Miss Coquille it was.

Martigny-les-Bains is almost as far northeast as you can go without leaving
France. As the names of the villages suggest, it’s a watery region.
References to baths and springs are everywhere, from Puits-des-Fées (the
fairies’ well) to Plombières-les-Bains, Grandrupt-de-Bains,
and—the ultimate liquid village—Bains-les-Bains.

The
complexion of the landscape on that sunny day in May was a testament to the
cosmetic benefits of abundant water. It had been a particularly dry and dusty
spell in Provence, with two days of rain in three months, and I found the
lushness of the northern countryside almost shocking. I must have driven past a
hundred shades of green, dark rows of conifers in the distance contrasting with
the glowing, luminous bursts of new growth that follow a wet spring.
Cream-colored cows were sunbathing in the fields, lying down, so that only
their heads were visible above the rich green waves of grass. The ditches on
either side of the road overflowed with green. I stopped to check the map. Even
most of that was colored green.

I reached Martigny in the late
afternoon. It was hot and quiet, with no obvious indication of the celebrations
to come. No posters, no bunting, no strings of colored lights. For a moment, I
wondered if I had come to the right Martigny—there are eight or nine to
choose from in France—and then I saw what appeared to be a road sign. It
was large and triangular and extremely official-looking. But instead of a
warning to motorists, the red border framed two snails with their horns cocked,
displaying an air of jaunty well-being. As far as one can judge with snails,
they looked as though they hadn’t a care in the world.

The French
are not normally sentimental about their food, but they do like whatever it is
they are about to eat to look happy. (It is, as these fortunate creatures
should realize, a great compliment that a Frenchman would consider them worthy
of consumption.) Thus, in butchers’ shops and market stands, on posters
and wrapping paper, you will see anthropomorphic expressions applied to the
most unlikely faces. Chickens smile, cows laugh, pigs beam, rabbits wink, and
fish smirk. All of them seem to be thrilled that they will be making an
important contribution to dinner.

The sign of the snails led me into
the main street of Martigny, and I felt the current of curiosity that I’m
sure all strangers feel as they walk for the first time through a small French
village. Lace curtains flicker in windows, revealing a bright and inquisitive
eye that follows you up the street. Conversations stop. Heads turn to inspect
someone so obviously from somewhere else. There’s nothing unfriendly
about it, but you can’t help feeling like a sore thumb.

I was
looking for Madame Gérard, one of the organizers of the fair, who had
given me the rue des Vosges as a meeting point. Seeing three ladies of the
village who were taking a break from gossip to stare at me, I asked them for
directions.

“I’m looking for the rue des
Vosges.”

One of the ladies looked at me over the top of her
glasses. “You’re standing in it, monsieur.”

“Ah. Then perhaps you could tell me where I could find Madame
Gérard?”

One shrug. Two shrugs. Three shrugs. And then, as
a car came down the empty street:
“Voilà! Elle
arrive.”

But Madame Gérard was preoccupied. There
were problems. These affairs are not without their complications, and she
couldn’t stop to talk. Later, maybe we could meet at the Hotel
International. And off she went, leaving me with the three ladies. Naturally,
they were fascinated. What was a stranger—even more bizarre, a foreign
stranger—doing here? Was I as lost as I appeared to be? Was I part of
tomorrow’s festivities?

I told them I had come to admire the
snails, and I was sorry to hear that there were problems. An intake of breath
and a shaking of the head from one of the ladies. Let us hope, she said, that
they are not as grave as the catastrophe of a few years ago, when the truck
bringing snails to Martigny met with an accident and overturned. Two thousand
dozen snails! Scattered all over the road! It was
très
dramatique,
and only superhuman efforts by the village butcher to arrange
a supply of reinforcements saved the fair from disaster. Imagine a snail fair
without snails. The thought of it reduced the ladies to silence.

It is
possible to walk from one end of Martigny to the other and back again in ten
minutes, which I did, keeping an eye open for the Hotel International, and
wondering how a hotel could survive in these quiet green depths of the French
countryside. Perhaps it had a clientele of snail-fanciers; possibly a steady
trickle of
héliciculteurs,
or snail breeders, coming from all
over the world to brush up on the latest reproduction techniques. To my
disappointment, I saw nothing resembling a hotel, let alone one with such a
grand name. But leaning against a van with their arms crossed were two men who
had watched me pass by and who were still watching when I came back. They would
know where I could find the Hotel International. I asked them, and for the
second time that afternoon, I felt like a complete bumpkin.

“You’re standing in front of it, monsieur.” They jerked
their heads at the long gray building behind them. It had once been handsome,
but now it was blind, its windows boarded up, its days as a hotel long since
over. Madame Gérard, still wrestling with her problems, was nowhere to
be seen. I asked the men when the fair was going to be set up, and one of them
looked at his watch. “Five in the morning,” he said, and winced,
shaking his hand as if he’d burned his fingers. And then it began to
rain. It seemed like a good moment to duck into a bar.

I was spending
the night a few kilometers away in Contrexéville. It is a town, like
Vittel, almost entirely dedicated to the benefits of drinking the local
springwater, and the mood of the place was appropriately sober. The sun came
out again, and from the café, I could see a few couples taking their
evening promenade, armed with umbrellas just in case, walking slowly and
carefully on the wet pavement. The streets were clean, the trees well tended.
Amazingly for France, there were none of the usual examples of imaginative
parking—no cars perched on the sidewalk or shoehorned into alleys. A
neat, quiet, orderly town, Contrexéville, the perfect setting for
visitors who come not for fun and games but for the solemn purpose of bathing
their innards in restorative waters.

Later, in the hotel restaurant, I
witnessed a sight not often seen. In fact, it was an extraordinary sight:
several dozen French couples sitting over dinner without a single bottle of
wine among them. Water, water everywhere (except at my table). I was reminded
of California.

The day of the fair began with a fine
warm morning. Nothing moved on the streets except a cat creeping home after a
disreputable night out. The rest of Contrexéville was still in bed.
Evidently, drinking a great deal of water is a tiring business. When I stopped
at the next village to have coffee in a sleepy café, it was a relief to
stand at the bar next to a man who was enjoying a thick slice of
saucisson
with his baguette and glass of red wine for breakfast. I
felt I was back in France.

I arrived in Martigny, to find that it had
been transformed overnight. The long, straight rue de l’Abbé
Thiebaut was packed with stands, throbbing with music, squirming with life.
Behind the stands were several examples of the French genius for squeezing very
large trucks into very small spaces, and from these trucks, all manner of
temptations had been unloaded: spicy
merguez
sausages, sugar-dusted
gaufres
(France’s answer to the waffle), cages of chicks,
breeding rabbits with impressive written credentials, ducks, hens, quail,
guinea fowl. A trio of goats elbowed one another in a cramped pen, their mad
pale eyes fixed with longing on a tantalizing display of garden plants, just
out of reach on the next stand. Kits of painless face jewelry were on
offer—nose studs, tongue trimmings, and ear ornaments that could be stuck
on, rather than surgically attached. There was a name I hadn’t seen
before on the fashion scene, Nixon Triple Force jeans. (Can Clinton Executive
Privilege Sportswear be far behind?) And, stacked high, their lurid colors
shimmering in the sun, piles and piles of mattresses.

This puzzled me.
I couldn’t imagine why they were there. Why would anyone in his right
mind come to a snail fair to buy a new mattress? Supposing he did, how would he
get it home? And yet, even more puzzling, the mattress merchants—there
were several of them competing for business—were attracting considerable
interest. Knots of people stood inspecting the mattresses, leaning forward to
prod them from time to time as if trying to awaken dormant animals. Braver
souls came forward to sit down and take a test bounce. One woman was lying full
length on a mattress, her shopping basket clutched to her bosom, a salesman
crooning in her ear. “Ten years of sweet dreams. Absolutely
guaranteed.” For those not won over by the promise of sweet dreams,
another mattress seller provided the living inducement of a reclining blonde,
tightly clad in black. The crowd around her was mostly male, and rather shy.
There were no prods and test bounces here.