French Lessons (13 page)

The music was developing
into a pitched battle: a traditional accordion medley coming from one stand,
versus Abba’s greatest hits coming from another, with occasional
fusillades of drumming booming up from the far end of the street. In a tiny
garden behind one of the stands, an old lady sat on a cane chair, tapping her
stick and nodding her head in time with the beat, a faint smile on her face,
her slippered foot twitching. She seemed to know everybody passing by. In fact,
everybody seemed to know everybody passing by, stopping for a chat, a slap on
the back, a pinch of the cheek. It was more like the reunion of an enormous
family than a public fête.

Leaving the mattresses behind, I came
to a bucolic merry-go-round that might have come straight out of the Middle
Ages. Four tiny ponies, no bigger than Great Danes, were clopping around in
docile, patient circles, each with an apprehensive child clinging to the reins,
the mane, or, in one case, a long-suffering ear. Indifferent to the noise, the
heat, and their escort of flies, the ponies seemed lost in their thoughts, like
reluctant commuters on their way to work.

When I finally caught sight
of Madame Gérard in the crowd, it was obvious from her smiling face that
the problems of yesterday had been resolved. She introduced me to her mother,
and they steered me to the end of the street so that I could take in every
detail of the official opening ceremonies. It was important, so I was told, to
observe the cutting of the ribbon and the forming up of the brass band,
composed of Martigny’s most accomplished musicians. And there they were,
dressed in their best, with peaked hats, sky blue jackets, and white trousers.
Almost hidden among the forest of legs was France’s tiniest trumpeter, a
boy who barely came up to the drummer’s waist, his eager face several
sizes too small for his peaked hat. I felt sure it would slip down over his
ears as soon as he took his first energetic toot.

A nudge from Madame
Gérard’s mother.
Attention!
The mayor arrives,
avec
son entourage.

They provided an interesting study in sartorial
styles. The mayor in his suit and tie, Miss Coquille and her two runners-up
with pale flashes of midriff showing above low-slung, snug-fitting jeans, and a
clown named Pipo putting them all in the shade with his outfit of vibrant plaid
trousers, plaid shoulder bag, and shiny red shoes that exactly matched his
shiny red nose. He was limbering up with a few preliminary capers, when the
band’s fanfare exploded in my ears, obliterating Abba’s greatest
hits, and the mayor stepped forward to cut the traditional tricolor ribbon
stretched across the street.

The band snapped smartly into a military
refrain—the march of the escargots—and we set off up the street,
Pipo in the lead, capering his heart out, followed by the band, followed by the
mayor and his entourage, followed by Madame Gérard’s mother and
me. Madame Gérard’s mother, naturally, knew everyone. This slowed
us down a little, and we came to a complete stop while she persuaded her own
mother to leave her garden and join the parade.

It was getting close to
noon, and the warmth of the morning had turned into heat. As we made our way at
a gastropod’s pace up the street, I found myself taking a more than
passing interest in the dim, cool rooms I could see behind the
stands—rooms decorated with banners bearing pictures of smiling escargots
and that eternally inviting word,
dégustation.
In the gloom, I
was able to make out figures holding glasses. They reminded me of my
mission—to meet and to eat some of the finest snails in France. Duty was
calling, and it was time to get down to work.

With a final bray of
brass and ruffle of drums, the procession ended at the top of the street.
Making my way back, I walked into a perfumed breeze, a quiver of warm,
garlic-scented air, and my nose led me to one of the
salles de
dégustation.
It had probably once served as a stable, but now it
had been converted into a simple restaurant and bar—the walls
whitewashed, the blackened tile floor polished, long wooden trestle tables and
benches, a temporary kitchen set up in an alcove at the back. The menu was
scrawled on a blackboard: You could have snails, snails, or snails, prepared
according to your preference, with or without
frites.
There was
Gewürztraminer, chilled and spicy, to drink by the glass, by the carafe,
and probably by the barrel. I couldn’t imagine a more pleasant working
environment.

A great advantage of long tables and communal eating is
enforced companionship. You might sit down alone, but solitude won’t last
longer than the time it takes to say
bonjour.
And, following the
familiar pattern, once I admitted to being anxious for guidance and advice,
someone was happy to come to my assistance.

I took my place opposite a
stocky middle-aged man in a flat cap and faded shirt, his face gnarled and
seasoned by the weather. He nodded amiably and asked me if I was alone. Not
only was I alone, I said, but English.

“
Ah,
bon?”
He said he had never met an Englishman before, and he studied
this novelty in silence for a few moments with a faint air of surprise. I
don’t know what he was expecting—a soccer hooligan, perhaps, or
Major Thompson in his bowler hat—but he seemed reassured by what he saw.
He offered his hand and introduced himself as Maurin, Etienne, before leaning
back to take a pull at his tumbler of wine. “You like snails?”

“I think so,” I said, “but I haven’t had them very
often. I don’t know anything about them.”

“Start with
a dozen,” he said, “just with garlic and butter.” He looked
down at the heap of empty shells in front of him. “I’m ready for
some more myself.” He turned to call the waiter. “
Jeune
homme!
An Englishman dies of hunger here.” He ordered a dozen for
each of us, and a large carafe of what he called
“Gewürz.”

Our immediate neighbors at the table were a
young couple in an advanced state of romance. They were attempting the
impossible—to extract flesh from hot shells, gaze into each other’s
eyes, and hold hands at the same time, oblivious to everything around them.
They weren’t going to be much use in my quest for knowledge. I turned
back to my new companion and asked him to tell me what I should know about
snails.

It is a perfect arrangement: A Frenchman talks, you listen.
But, unlike his countrymen, you don’t argue with him. This is a major
social asset, and you are looked upon with a measure of sympathy. You are still
a foreigner, certainly, but a foreigner whose heart and stomach are in the
right place, willing to sit at the feet of a master and learn about civilized
matters. He, naturally, is delighted to share his superior knowledge and to air
his views, aperçus, prejudices, and anecdotes to an appreciative
audience.

Before Maurin had time to do much more than clear his throat
and arrange his thoughts, the waiter arrived. A basket of bread and a beaded
carafe were placed between us, the snails set before us, the blessing of
bon appétit
pronounced. Practical instruction could begin. Part
one: how to eat a snail.

We were in a no-frills establishment. My plate
was a rectangle of aluminum foil, marked with a dozen shallow indentations.
Snails nestled in each of the indentations, and I could feel the heat rising
from their shells. A paper napkin and a wooden toothpick completed the place
setting.

The smell was glorious and I was ravenous, but my first
attempt to pick up a shell ended in failure and singed fingertips. The
equipment didn’t run to a set of those miniature tongs supplied to
snail-eaters in more luxurious restaurants. I looked across at my companion to
see how he was dealing with the problem and saw an example of practical
ingenuity at work in the service of the stomach. Maurin had hollowed out a
slice of bread and was using the piece of crust like pincers, wrapping it
around each shell so that his fingertips were insulated from the heat. With the
other hand, its pinkie delicately cocked, he aimed his toothpick, stabbed, and,
with a half turn of the wrist, extracted the sizzling contents. Before putting
the shell down, he raised it to his mouth and sipped the last of the juice. It
all seemed terribly easy.

I imitated him as best I could, managing to
extract the first snail from its shell with only minor damage to my shirtfront
from an unexpected spurt of garlic butter. I looked at the object on the end of
my toothpick, a dark and wrinkled morsel, not immediately appetizing, and then
remembered something Régis had told me: One should eat snails through
the nose, not through the eyes. They certainly smell better than they
look.

The taste was better still. Snail critics—usually speaking
with the conviction that is informed by considerable ignorance—will tell
you to expect nothing but an aggressive rush of garlic and a mouthful of
rubber, but they haven’t eaten snails in Martigny. Garlic was there, of
course, but it was mild and buttery and well behaved. Nor was there any hint of
resistance in the flesh, which was as tender as prime steak. So far, so good. I
drank the juice from the shell, mopped my chin with a piece of bread, and
settled back to listen to Maurin.

He started with the nutritional news
that snails are good for you, low in fat and rich in nitrogen. But—a
warning finger was wagged under my nose—precautions need to be taken.
Snails can thrive on a diet that would put a man in hospital; they are partial
to deadly nightshade, equally deadly mushrooms, and hemlock. Not only that.
They can eat huge quantities of this fatal salad—the equivalent of half
their body weight in twenty-four hours.

It wasn’t the best moment
to hear this, as I was halfway through my first dozen. My laden toothpick
stopped in midair, and Maurin grinned. With these, he said, you risk nothing.
They are cultivated snails, raised in an enclosed park and unable to wander;
or, as he put it, to indulge their
humeur vagabonde.
Problems only
arise with wild snails, who can roam the fields at will, gorging on those
deadly pleasures, but even these creatures can be rendered safe and delicious.
All one has to do is starve them for fifteen days. At the end of the fast, each
snail is carefully examined for ominous signs, then washed three times in tepid
water before having its shell brushed in readiness for the oven. This is known
as the
toilette des escargots.

Surely, I said, they would be
well past their best, even dead, by that time. But no. The snail can live for
extended periods without food, and Maurin told me the story of a certain
Monsieur Locard to prove it. It seems that Locard had invited some friends to
his house for a snail feast, but he found himself with more than enough to go
around. He put the surplus snails away to eat later, and for some reason, which
even Maurin couldn’t explain, he stored them in the bottom of his
wardrobe.

Time passed, and the snails were forgotten. It was not until
eighteen months later that Locard, searching for something in his wardrobe,
discovered his pile of shells. You and I would probably have thrown them away.
Locard the optimist put them in a bucket of water and, to his astonishment,
they revived.

Inspired by this tale of survival against all odds,
Maurin and I ordered another dozen snails each. I was beginning to get the hang
of extracting the flesh from the shell with an anticlockwise twist of the
toothpick—not unlike taking the cork out of a bottle—but despite my
most careful efforts to control it, the juice remained a problem. My shirt was
now freckled with garlic butter, and for those of you faced with snails for the
first time, I can tell you that there are only two sure ways to keep your
clothes clean: nudity or a bib.

Possibly prompted by the sight of the
couple next to us, who were now exchanging long, investigative kisses between
snails, Maurin brought up the subject of sex. It was, as he said, the month of
May, the start of the mating season, when a hermaphrodite’s fancy turns
to thoughts of love. And like everything else in a snail’s life, this is
not something to be rushed.

Maurin’s hands sketched vague but
suggestive intimacies in the air, his fingers weaving and then joining
together, as he talked about “preliminaries.” These can apparently
last for several hours, and I couldn’t help thinking that this was
perhaps to give the participants time to decide on their respective genders. At
any rate, once the preliminaries are out of the way, the snails copulate.
Un bon moment,
according to Maurin. Ten to fifteen days later,
anything from sixty to one hundred eggs are laid. For the survivors, life
expectancy can extend to six or seven years.

Maurin paused to sip his
wine, and I asked the obvious question: How is it decided which of the
hermaphrodite partners is female and which is male? Telepathy? Scent? The
position of the moon? Discreet horn signals? It is, after all, the most basic
of the preliminaries, and if confusion occurs here, it could spoil a lovely
evening. Unfortunately, Maurin was unable to answer with any scientific
precision.
“Ils s’arrangent”
was the best he could
do. They arrange themselves.

The room was pleasantly cool. Through the
doorway, the street simmered in the afternoon heat. We persuaded each other to
stay inside and split another dozen. I was discovering that escargots are like
addictive snack food—one can always find room for some more. We were
eating
gros blancs,
or
escargots de Bourgogne,
one of the
best-known among hundreds of varieties that can be found in France. Another is
the smaller, less distinguished gray snail, the
petit gris,
and
mentioning this reminded Maurin of a wicked deception.

There is, he
told me, a criminal element at work in the snail world.
Tromperies,
or
frauds, have been known to dupe the unsuspecting consumer, and one of the
favorites is to disguise the small gray snail as his larger and more expensive
cousin. This is achieved by an imaginative system of recycling in which empty
shells, once inhabited by
escargots de Bourgogne,
are reused. Into
each capacious shell is placed a
petit gris,
with stuffing added to
take up the extra space.
Et voil
à—
the customer
pays for the biggest and the best, but he has been hoodwinked. It is a
veritable
scandale.
And as if this weren’t bad enough, one
should also be aware of the menace from the East, the Chinese Connection.
Maurin’s face became serious, and he shook his head at the enormity of it
all. Oriental mollusks, imported in industrial quantities and passed off as
honest French snails!