With it unlikely I’ll be biking around France this summer for the first time since 2004, I have turned to the world of books for my annual French immersion during this time of immobilization. It was no problem that libraries are in hibernation with the rest of us, as ebooks abound and Amazon had just offered me a free month trial of its kindle unlimited program, which includes a vast reservoir of books on France, many of them self-published and not available in libraries.
Once I established myself as a reader of “living-and-traveling-in-France” books, kindle bombarded me with suggestions of more and more such books, nearly a lifetime’s worth. It was staggering what Peter Mayle had wrought. It seemed as if anyone who has spent time in France felt compelled to write a book about their experience. There is definitely a market for them, as many are unleashed upon the public by genuine publishing houses.
Who reads all these books, I keep asking myself, people who long for such an experience, or people such as me, who have been to France and wish to relive the experience and have it expanded upon? No matter the quality of the writing, I take pleasure in having my memories stirred. All it takes is mention of any of the elements that define France, such as plane trees or men playing pétanque, to trigger a rush of fond memories and transport me back to that land that Thomas Jefferson described as everyone’s second country (“Every man has two countries: his own and France.”).
Though the writing in these books is often uneven, their subject matter has enough appeal to keep me reading, nearly one a day with not much else to do. I made a bicycling in France book, “The Valley of Heaven and Hell” by Susie Kelly, my first foray into my frenzy of French reading. It is the account of a 500-mile bicycle trip by a British couple in their fifties retracing the escape-and-return route of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from Paris to Varennes in 1791, where they were apprehended and sent back to Paris for their trials, which led to the guillotine for the both of them.
The author rode an electric bike, but still was challenged to keep up with her husband, as cycling was not something she ordinarily engaged in. They were drawn to this adventure as material for a book, as Kelly had established herself as an author with books about walking across France (“Best Foot Forward”) and another about living in France after buying a house and turning it into a B&B.
She’s not so sure she made the right choice, as shortly after they set out from Versailles she seethes with fury when her husband rides on ahead and loses her, the first of several tiffs in the days to come. She has to acknowledge, “Not only am I a really crap cyclist, but I need to lose weight.” Nor is she happy about wearing Lycra or a helmet. But she endures and comes to take pleasure in the riding despite cold and rainy weather that force them to upgrade their tent. At least they are adventuristic enough to camp most nights.
When she undertook her walk across France, a solitary endeavor much more ambitious than this bike ride, she had never camped before. She adapted to it with ease and came to greatly appreciate the experience, so much so that when she and her husband take a 6,000 mile drive around France a year after their bike ride for her next book (“Travels with Tinkerbelle”) they camp most of the time searching out municipal campgrounds.
Along with these three travel-in-France books, she also wrote three books on living in France (“In Foreign Fields,” “La Vie in Rose,” and “Swallows and Robins”). All six books are injected with insightful observations on the French, though unlike Mayle, most of the quirky characters she writes about are fellow ex-pat Brits in the Dordogne, known by some as Dordogneshire.
She has an eye for distinct features of French life, such as the flamboyant mustache. Just as a handful of devotees keep alive the classic French car, the Deux Chevaux, there is a strain of French men that cling to the tradition of letting one’s hair on their upper lip flourish into works of art and become their identity. More than most writers Kelly makes mention of a mustache of distinction. She is as descriptive of them as some authors are of sunsets. She reaches into her arsenal of adjectives to describe them as “spectacular” and “imposing” and “ferocious” and “walrussy” and says of one that it needed mowing.
A “luxuriantly beautifully groomed” mustache she spotted had a “rotund gentleman attached to it.” She has such a strong mustache consciousness that after a hard day of riding she longed to “spend an evening watching elderly gents with mustaches dining their young mistresses.” Many of the French books I read in this blitz were likewise struck by a magnificent mustache, but none with as much appreciation as Kelly.
She has a lesser eye for the bicycle. Despite an entire book devoted to the bike, there are minimal bicycle references in her other books, though there is one gem that stood out like a comet tearing across the sky. It was a bicycle-related expression for someone who isn’t all there, who we might say “has a screw lose.” The French say of such a person that “he has a little bicycle going around in his head.” It is such a doozy, she could have easily included it in each of her books to describe someone she encounters, but she parcels it out to just “In Foreign Fields.” It’s not as if she’s adverse to repeating herself, as in two of her books she mentions the French expression of “window licking” for “window shopping.” And she manages to make reference to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in three of her books.
No book on France is complete without an author mentioning some such unique French expression, such as “il y a du monde au balcon” (the balcony is crowded) to describe a big-bosomed woman, but regretfully not all comply. It’s often because the author hasn’t fully submerged himself into the culture.
Any book receives extra points for a mention of Johnny Hallyday, the much revered musical icon who recently died, even if it’s not one of admiration, such as David Prothero in “A Garden in Sarlat,” who wrote, “I apologize to all our French friends, but I can’t take Johnny Hallyday seriously.” Steven Herrick earned a point even though he spelled his name with an “i” rather than a “y.”
Richard Cobb in “Tour de France,” not a book on The Race, but rather a collection of his book reviews on France mostly from the ‘70s, doesn’t mention Hallyday, but he does bring him to mind when he makes reference to Victor Hugo’s historic funeral procession on the Champs Élysées that went on for six hours and attracted two million people. Hallyday’s recent grand funeral that drew France's last three presidents drew comparison to Hugo’s, though there were no reports of a delirium of sexual activity in the gardens along the Champs as Cobb mentioned happened at Hugo’s.
I didn’t discover Cobb’s book on kindle but rather on the Internet Archive, a vast depository of mostly academic books that was made available for free during the pandemic. I was hoping to find some rare cycling books, and thought this might be one. It did include several paragraphs on The Tour de France, with references to Poulidor and Merckx, but it wasn’t the cycling book I had hoped it would be. Still it was a good antidote to the many lightweight, non-cerebral books that comprised the bulk of my diet.
Several of the authors I read after Kelly had also had enough success with one book to encourage them to write more. Beth Haslam has produced a series of four books on searching for a house in France and then renovating it, all with the same title (“Fat Dogs and French Estates”), broken into Parts I through IV. It is short on Franceabilia, but it’s smooth writing and humor drew me back for all but the final volume.
As with most writers on the French, Haslam praises their great warmth and hospitality, calling the image of the French as unwelcoming and surly a myth, other than Parisians, who her loudmouth husband considers “In-Seine.” She is continually trying to restrain him and having to apologize for his frank, borderline boorish behavior. He is a corporate executive who has little tolerance for trivialities such as shopping and small talk. When they are in final negotiations to buy an estate, he grows impatient with the process and points out the nonsense of some of the terms. One of the real estate agents present asks in fractured English, “So Monsieur, you have this education legal?”
He replies, “No, but I have had the misfortune to have met many lawyers.”
All but three of the twenty-some books I’ve read in this splurge were by Brits and were largely attempts at being filed in the humor category as well as travel. Two of the non-Brits, a Kiwi and an American, wrote straightforward commentaries, shying away from humor as they describe their process of acquiring a place to live and then what it was like living in France. The Kiwi, Jennifer Andrewes, gives a very nuts-and-bolts rendition of her two stints of trying to find a house to live in for several months with her husband and two sons, who she must find a school for as well. She titled it “Parallel Lives,” as where they choose to live is on the fringe of the Pyrenees at the same latitude north as the latitude south where they live in New Zealand.
The American, Roseann Knorr, fittingly titles her book “Gone with the Wine,” as she and her husband are from Georgia. Her subtitle of “Living the Dream of...” could be applied to most of these books. They select the Loire Valley as a place to retire to. Her book offers much commentary on the ways of the French, including a lesson from a group of women at a party of how to perform the multiple cheek kiss. She has to learn not to peck but to just miss the cheek as if going “poof, poof.”
Neal Atherton concocted a pun of a title too, “Thyme for Provence,” for his barely edited journal of his many trips to Provence over the years. Amongst all the drivel was the revelation of a plaza in Grasse, perfume capital of the world, that has small pipes attached to grand old houses surrounding it dispensing a spray of perfume. I have cycled through Grasse, just north of Cannes, several times, and was unaware of this. This I have to see, and smell.
One can count on the mention of baguettes and cheese in every book, with cheese always outnumbering the many recurring elements of life in France authors can’t help but mention—mistral, truffles, Joan of Arc, the bureaucracy, Napoleon, beret, the Gallic shrug, Dreyfus, pastis, Piaf, and the expression “bon courage,” which one of the books took for its title—“Bon Courage, the Anglais,” by the British couple Peter and Christine Wakefield about their four years in France before returning home for medical reasons.
Olga Swan mined two books (“Pensioners in Paradis” and “From Paradis to Perdition”) from her twelve years of retirement in France with her husband before also returning to the UK when their health began to decline. As hinted by the subtitle (”Notes from a broad”) of the first book, one can expect it to be laced with humor. Some is relevant and some is just jokes randomly tossed in, such as going into a record store and asking if there is anything by the Doors. They are told, “Yes, a fire extinguisher.”
Along with mustaches and Johnny Hallyday and the eating of horse and vide greniers, another measure of how well an author knows France is if they comment on that phenomenon of men pissing in bushes along the road, what Peter Mayle describes as a “pipi rustique.” The prim and proper English can’t help but be struck by this act of public urination that is quite commonplace, so it turns up in many of these books, if only as aside. Paul Burnett in “Poppies,” another book with “dream” in its subtitle, “Chasing the dream of building a house in France,” describes a man along the road with “both hands occupied, one managing an incoming call on his mobile phone and the other hand managing an outgoing call of nature.” Kelly in her walk across France observes a cyclist “relieving himself against a hedge in that particularly French way they have.”
All these authors rave about the quality of French food. Two mention buying fruit in the market, one a melon and the other an avocado, with the vendor asking when they intend to eat it, so he can select them something that will be at optimum ripeness for the time. When one replied he planned to eat it that day, the seller wanted to know if for lunch or dinner. The American Knorr said a friend back in the States warned her to be careful what she ate in France knowing she would be eating unpackaged market food. Knorr just laughed at her concerns, wanting to reply, “Right, it’s something called fresh.” Knorr considers herself an adventuristic eater, but when it comes to horse, which the French can buy from butchers who sell nothing else, she “nayed.”
When my thirty-day trial of kindle unlimited expired and I went to cancel it thinking I was all read out, I was offered another thirty days for free. I couldn’t resist, as I had just come upon a series of cycling in France and Europe books, seven in all, by an Australian, Steven Herrick. So those will keep me busy for a spell.
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