A Fortnight in France

Kenneth Rower

1996

I. FROM BRIE TO BRESSE

T A CERTAIN MOMENT during the night flight from Boston, while I sat translating Daniel Allaire’s guidebook to our A forthcoming bicycle trip a few days hence, I re alized that it had been nearly thirty years since I was last in Paris, in fact at Orly, where we were bound. I thought about things that were then, the things that were done, the many more things not done, and surrendered to the tears properly called lacrimae rerum . But I was very happy to be reentering France. I had been invited to join Le Grupetto des Fléchards Gastronomes du Bouquet Garni, a small circle of amateur cyclists in the Paris region, on their annual ride from a point near Paris to a three-star restaurant somewhere in the countryside. The Grupetto took their name from the term for weaker cyclists who group together during the Tour de France to finish a stage just in time not to be disqualified from riding the next. The members of the Grupetto considered the bouquet garni of the kitchen a more likely prize than the bouquet fleuri given to victors of the bicycle race. Put another way, they “venerated the table fork equally with the bicycle fork.” This August their destination was the celebrated restaurant of Georges Blanc, in Vonnas, between Mâcon and Bourg-en- Bresse, not far from Lyon. At Orly at six in the morning, the customs officers struck me as young and variegated. Once, they had all seemed tall and uniformly powerful, extremely formal, but these young men were more concerned with themselves and their private conversation than with any esprit de corps, or with me. The Air France cadres, however, had kept a lot of the old style, and swept through the concourse with panache, men and women both. The children calling out in French to each other and to their parents were the most enchanting, as always. Outside, the sky changed from gray and rose to gray alone as Mercedes and Peugeot taxis cruised past and I awaited my host, Avery, an American friend who had lived and worked in France for thirty years, and a devoted cyclist who had twice done the 1,200km Paris –Brest –Paris endurance race. Avery appeared at half past seven. We made our way down to the catacombs under the airport to get to his Renault diesel coupe, which neatly accepted my bicycle box through the rear hatch. Once out of Orly, we sped off under fog through miles and miles of commercial- in dustrial sprawl. Then, suddenly, we were among the low hills and fields of the Brie. The fog lifted. The broad roads became narrow and then single-track. Finally we turned into a gravel lane, and in a moment we were parked before Avery’s house at Segrez. This structure appeared first behind a high hedge as tall, tiled gables and chimneys, and soon revealed itself as a modest country house with garage and studio, of in determinate style, built some time earlier in this century on a generous lot with plenty of flowers, shrubs and trees. From the telephone line on the lane, countless swallows watched us unload. Inside the house I found a large vestibule filled with various kinds of bikes, and I unpacked my own to add to the family. By mid-morning we were ready for a ride. Under the gaze of Rozay- en-Brie, a wheat town with silos sitting on a rise a few kilometers distant over low fields, we set out across an arboreal divide, a deeply shaded main road lined with magnificent sycamores in full leaf. We rode through open country of flat or rolling fields, seeing distant farms and villages, with occasional passages through one of the villages. Not much was old—a church here, an isolated farmhouse there. But the country - side was benign under spacious skies, with narrow, quiet roads whose motorists seemed unsurprised to find cyclists riding two abreast, and who slipped by us unruffled. The road surface was generally coarser than ours, made up of larger aggregate, apparently the latest method in rural France, and much to the distaste of long-time cyclists. (The problem was noticeably greater rolling friction, accompanied by vibration in the frame of the bicycle.) We paused from time to time, to examine a stone- built windmill with rotating roof and sweep and, later, a recently built timber-framed market pavilion. We passed through a stretch of roadside linden trees pruned for maximum shade on the road, yet with minimum obstruction to high vehicles passing and minimum infringement on ad - jacent fields. These trees were pruned parallel to the road on both sides,

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 4 with nothing taken from between the crowns, thus forming a kind of hedge on posts, nor bad-looking. We rode until satisfied and returned via a back route to Rozay, riding through the market square and then out toward Segrez along the shaded avenue of sycamores we had originally crossed. The first part of the next day, Saturday, I spent on foot, first visiting a nearby village, a prosperous little place on a hill with no visible reason for its good fortune, and then, with Robert, Avery’s quite independent but loyal retainer, studying the trees on the property and in his books. I knew chêne and frêne (oak and ash), érable and châtaignier (maple and chestnut); remembered noyer (walnut); learned marronnier (horse chest - nut), merisier and hêtre (cherry and beech), sorbier (mountain ash) and saule , especially saule pleureur (willow, weeping willow). We also found noisetier (hazelnut), bouleau (birch) and aubépine (hawthorne). The conifers were at first incomprehensible. Robert called them all sapin . Eventually we established sapin cigaguë (hemlock), sapin du Canada (fir), épicéa (spruce). Robert, in his seventies, was enthusiastic about trees but pessimistic about the future of life in France. —The young people have their studies, their fine studies, he said, but after? I waited. —And there is no longer love, he continued bitterly. One does hoo- ha-ha at the disco, and one hour later, pft , it’s done. This is not love.

ON THE RIDE late that afternoon with Avery, I saw one roadside un - conventionally planted with cherry, others with ash, still surprising but not so improbable, and others yet with oak. The older plantings were monocultures of sycamore (platane ) or linden ( tilleu l), the newer ones usually of mixed species. The linden, which we also call basswood and the English call lime, was the tree I saw most often during my sojourn, often pollarded for compactness in the village squares, sometimes left to develop naturally to immense heights and girths. When we visited the gate of Vaux-le-Vicomte, after gazing in at this extravagant brick precursor of Versailles (still privately owned), we rode up and down its bordering half-mile avenue of mature sycamores, which must be eighty feet tall. These stood about thirty feet apart, closely flanking a dead- straight roadway twenty feet wide. The view from the end of this avenue was extraordinary, a colonnade of bones.

5 We also cycled to the château-fort a few kilometers away at Blandy. After the conspicuous and rambling seventeeth-century splendor of Vaux, this simple and concentrated structure from the fourteenth cen - tury seemed digniﬁed and thoroughly functional. Here we sat on the terrace of the adjacent café, gazing at the moat and the tall walls, under reconstruction, and took our Vichy-menthe s (the amateur French cy - clist’s energy drink, apparently). In the center of the terrace was a pol - larded tree that puzzled me: the leaves were ash, the form was not; its bark was not ridged like that of an American ash but smooth, more like a beech. Yet the tree was indeed an ash, as the proprietor averred when I went inside to inquire, and had been topped to provide dense shade over a small area. French arboriculture is mercilessly intellectual. We pushed on and ﬁnished our architectural tour by examining a beautiful small manor house at Vermeil, perhaps from the eighteenth century, do - mesticated and serene, where one could imagine actually residing.

ON SUNDAY, Avery left early to take a car to the village between Mâcon and Lyon where we would finish our cycling with the group. He planned to return later by train to Paris, whence he could get a lift home. For my part, I visited Provins, a rather wonderful place about 60 km away that my Michelin guide reported had been much busier in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with ten thousand inhabitants and frequent fairs that brought traders from the Low Countries and Italy. In the coolness of the summer morning, Provins offered a fine, simple church, short streets of pleasant houses, plenty of greenery and, above all, an excellent twelfth-century tower (Tour César) commanding the center of the once-walled town that now looked out over the mod - ern town on the plain below. The tower was in very good condition, including its small forest of oak roof framing and a later, seventeenth- century bell frame. A substantial part of the broad town wall was intact, showing the original pattern of frequent entrances at grade (from the town side, of course), with internal stairways to the ramparts above. Robert had driven me to Provins, taking along his two dogs and my bicycle, in his roaring Mercedes camper-van. After he and I together examined the tower, the older houses, the market square and some of the ramparts (which he referred to as les rem-paaarrrr ), he returned in the camper via main roads and I cycled back on byways. The Brie

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 6 seemed one kind of cyclist’s heaven: so many narrow, little-traveled roads, mostly in the open with long views, the occasional stretch of sycamore or linden for a patch of shade, or, rarely, a small forest, and villages about five miles apart. France appeared prosperous here, with nothing dilapidated and plenty of new, reasonably sturdy construction, if without the grace of the old work. Then, feeling hungry, I stopped in Gastins and innocently entered a café that turned out to be filled with the worst sort of plastic and metal furniture, posters on the walls offering ready-made soups and iced tea, plenty of miscellaneous debris on the floor, a couple of gaming machines toward the rear and, at the very back, almost in the dark, a large me dieval- style fireplace. The shelves behind the bar were mostly empty (as was the café). The young, good-natured bartender couldn’t give me Vichy- menthe but could, after some reflection, give me Perrier-cassis. With that beverage and peanuts from a machine on the bar I made up my lunch. So much for the prosperity of the Brie! Once outside in the bright sun, it was back to clean roads and firm stone buildings. Avery returned late in the afternoon with Jean-Claude and Jacqueline, who had brought him from Paris and would reappear the following day along with Daniel, Élisabeth and Bernard. We would form a party of six cyclists, and Jacqueline would drive the large Renault that carried our picnics and luggage, and generally perform l’intendance . How, I wondered, would she amuse herself, since, wherever we went, she would get there much sooner?

ON MONDAY MORNING, we seven left ceremoniously as Robert snapped pictures. Well-wishers who had made earlier journeys with the Grupetto added to the merriment. Taking an easy pace, for Daniel and Élisabeth had had little time to train this summer, we cycled south-south - east from Segrez to Pommerats, near Saint-Florentin, in the Yonne, for a total distance of 106km. If the cycling was modest, our early-afternoon lunch, taken after about 60km in a shaded clearing at the edge of some roadside woods, was entirely the opposite. Beginning with a spicy gaz - pacho, we consumed course after course on an Iberian theme, accom - panied by draughts of Côtes Roannaises (a Gamay from the part of the Loire valley just to the west of the Beaujolais) and, for a little while, something in an entirely different class, the bottle of Caymus cabernet

7 sauvignon that I had brought from home. For several of the company, this was their first taste of vin de Californie , and I was asked to introduce the wine. I did so by proposing that well-made California Cabernet is generally more forward and fruity than French presentations, differently balanced and without thought-provoking obstacles, the latter traits of good Bordeaux and reflective of the French world view, which is not optimistic. This speculation was not dismissed out of hand, and the company praised the Caymus, but politely, so that I could not really judge their reaction. It took two hours to consume the feast. Most of us spent another half hour sleeping in the mid-afternoon heat before setting off again on our bicycles. At Pommerats that night, we slept at a logis made from an old mill and its outbuildings, ﬁrst dining under a sort of canopy, itself under large trees, on the candlelit, gravel terrace. We sampled more Gamays, a Cote d’Irancy and a Coulanges, decent little wines, and I dined happily on a plate of salmon followed by a baron d’agneau . We made very merry conversation, sustaining a long visit from la patronne , who wanted to talk endlessly about this and that, and who then failed to deliver our coffee order to the kitchen (I did, eventually). I went to dreamless sleep in our motel-like room, which, among its sheetrock and polyester, showed bits of ancient beams here and there, souvenirs.

THE NEXT DAY, we rode entirely in the Yonne, one of the four département s that made up the ancient dukedom of Burgundy, and whose most famous town was Chablis. If it was true that this name had been debased for Americans by decades of misuse in California, the vivid sight of vine yards, winemakers’ well-marked premises and the French town’s busy, prosperous center quickly restored the authentic - ity of the name for me. Once we had had a good look around Chablis in late morning, Jean- Claude suggested playfully that we pause for a good bottle of the vin du pays . From here, we had fewer than 50km to go for our day’s journey, and évidemment there was no reason to hurry. We found a café right in the center of town, an excellent little place with marble-topped tables and good woodwork. The waitress, a matter - of-fact woman in her forties, brought a sandwich jambon , which Daniel cut into short sections for each of us, lest we become too affected by the wine that came next, a bottle of J.C. Davissat 1990 Vaulignot

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 8 Chablis, which we all liked a good deal, but which surprised me by its softness. The first sensation was of weight and unctuousness, then it de - veloped into fruit flavors and finished well with a lingering impression of good acidity. Trained by my reading to expect the taste of flint and steel from a Chablis true to its terroir , I wondered if Davissat was fol - lowing his own path or if Chablis’s reputation had simply been overtaken by newer styles. Certainly it was a satisfying bottle on its own merits. It seemed to be not more than an hour or two later, at Vincelottes (next door to Irancy, which had supplied one of last night’s bottles), that we fell to our second distinguished picnic. We had arrived at a bridge over the river Yonne in the middle of Vincelottes, crossed to the far side, ridden back through the trees along the bank and settled in a clearing. Here a car full of food awaited us, provided by a short, rotund, hearty f ellow named Jean (once a professional caterer, as it happened), accompanied by his vivacious Jamaican wife, Jany, both old friends of the cyclists. Jean began the ceremonies by pouring out kirs and Com munards , the latter cassis with red wine rather than white, and then set out so much food—I remember best a dense quiche and a partic - ularly beautiful pâté de campagne —that at the end, Jacqueline and Élisa beth were able to salvage enough for our lunch the next day. Throughout the meal, Jean cut his excellent bread for us with swift strokes of a substantial, beechwood-handled folding knife, and eventu - ally I admired it. He explained that it was an Opinel—“very famous, comes in all sizes.” Then he simply folded it up and gave it to me, over - riding my protests by insisting he could easily get another. Jean also ex plained to us the difference between a porc and a cochon , important to know if you were in the trade, or seeking the precise insult: above 100 kilos, the beast was a cochon . In late afternoon, we bade good-bye to the generous and high-spirited Jean and Jany, and set out under threatening skies for Leugny, our destination for the night, not very far away, but over hill (281m and 359m near Ouanne) and down dale. We gave only a passing glance to Coulanges-la-Vineuse, the source of last night’s second bottle, and at Leugny the sky was nearly black and the first large drops were beginning to fall as we turned into a narrow lane and climbed briefly alongside a stone wall, to arrive at a formal gate. It was now about six o’clock. Our leisurely day, spent with as much the table fork as the bicycle fork, had gained us 76km.

9 Inside the gate was a domestic paradise, a sixteenth-century house (at least in part) with barns, a courtyard, lawns and gardens at slightly different levels separated by steps and, among other magnificent trees, a linden so large and complicated that I did not at first recognize it. At the house, called La Borde, we were welcomed into the kitchen by a slender, smiling young woman wearing jeans, who gave us initial refresh - ments and then showed us to our rooms across the court. What may once have been a barn was now a luxurious dormitory, with the best sort of plumbing fixtures and fittings, modern lighting, well-thought- out textile colors, decent country furniture and few false historical touches. After washing and changing, we all returned to the house, supposing that we might have dinner within the hour, but this was not to be. Fran çois, the young proprietor and our host, was now in the kitchen, just beginning, in a most leisurely fashion, to prepare the dinner, and he plied us with interesting things to drink while he moved slowly about the kitchen, commenting on our conversation. The others found his comments amusing. I could not understand most of them and became unpleasantly obsessed with his sharp, nervous laughter, which regularly followed his sallies. It was nine o’clock when we were called in from the wet gardens, where we had gone strolling to fill the time and where I had managed to step in the most remarkably sticky mud. We sat down again at the table, now laid for dinner. The meal that followed I found wanting, even allowing for my unreceptive mood. Poor bread and a good pâté were succeeded by what our host called osso buco, which, in addition to a huge bone, comprised rough-cut hunks of lamb (agneau à la paysanne? ) awash in a thin, red herbal sauce, then a fair board of cheeses and a de cent fruit tart, the whole accompanied by an unlabeled house wine, which bore some resemblance to a Beaujolais but was, I felt, hardly worth asking about. Afterward we consumed several distinctive eaux-de-vie , and these cheered me somewhat. With us through most of the meal we had, as well as François and his wife, a timorous English couple who seemed, on the evidence of their speech, to be from widely separated social classes, and, on the same evidence, to be frightened of each other and of us. Perhaps they had met through correspondence, then agreed, sight

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 10 unseen, to take a trip abroad, and were now working out the conse - quences. Those of us who spoke English tried to put them at ease, but they were inconsolable.

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, after a cheerful breakfast with our hosts, but absent les anglais , we returned to Ouanne and set our course, which had wandered yesterday, distinctly east-southeast for the back country of the Côte d’Or. After a cloudy morning’s ride, we had a rel - atively modest lunch on leftovers in Guillon, at the bottom of a very long, winding hill, where we found a convenient picnic table under a cluster of lindens next to the river. We took no nap today, for, after our 74km journey from Leugny that morning, we had another 62 to go, including hills, before reaching our next meal and bed at Châteauneuf. At the next town, Toutry, we passed from the department of the Yonne to that of the Côte d’Or, and shortly after that rolled through Époisses, the home of a most excellent soft cheese, distinct from Camembert and Brie (though I did not discover its surprising virtues until that evening). Bunched and hustling through narrow, twisting village streets en peloton never ceased to be exciting, recalling the vainglory of showing off on bikes in front of girls in school, even if our observers were here actually old men laughing and calling, —Faster, faster! You’ll never beat Indurain at this rate! One more such village passed, and we were suddenly climb - ing the steep, winding entrance road to Semur-en-Auxois, a large town that presented itself to the west as a gigantic wall. Moreover, the road was still cobbled with pavés , and for a kilometer or two I learned how really fatiguing and bone-jarring it is simply to pedal over these smoothly rounded granite stones, leaving aside any question of racing or turning in the wet. At Saint Thibault, a circular hamlet built on a sudden small rise and possessed of a singular little church, we stopped for a Vichy-menthe at a cafe so local that it was marked only by a solitary white table and chair sitting outside the door. Madame, inside, was nev - ertheless able to offer a choice of Vichy and Perrier to leaven the mint, as well as un Coca for Jean-Claude, who believed in its restorative properties. After climbing to Pouilly-en-Auxois (324m), accompanied by the re turn of full sunshine, we swept down open roads onto a great plain and rode toward Châteauneuf, which rose up in the distance on a soli - tary hill, commanding the countryside for many leagues around. When

11 we reached that hill some time later, only two of us managed to pedal up the sixteen percent grade to reach the castle at 475m—Bernard, whose regular cadence varied little whatever the terrain, and Avery, whom I had never seen mettre le pied , as the French call dismounting in such circumstances. I happened to be riding with Daniel, and at the first turn on the way up, we looked at each other and decided to walk, plenty of exercise itself. As we ascended, the plain spread out below us and we could look back to see the gently meandering course of the Bur - gundy Canal, opened in 1832 to link the basins of the Rhone and the Seine, and a conduit of Burgundy wine to the Paris market. The narrow canal seemed no intrusion on the landscape, but the broad autoroute that ran alongside and carried bright flashes of glass and chrome made Daniel unhappy. He called it “a sword lanced at the heart of Burgundy,” and we returned our gaze to the immense castle looming above. I told Daniel that I frankly had no wish to attack this particular castle, and he burst out laughing, but my half-serious comment included puzzle - ment at how ordinary logistics were carried out to provision the town. When we gained the top, it became apparent that the town is much more easily reached by a gentle ascent from a different direction, hidden from us earlier by woods. Toward this approach, the castle offers a moat and drawbridge. Despite plenty of visitors in its steep, tiny streets, Châteauneuf felt authentic to me . History had preserved its stones, which may no longer have had any pressing purpose, but ordinary peo - ple lived and worked here. There were walled gardens at the northern edge of the village; there was a pharmacy; there was a house being reroofed. When I asked jokingly where the old castle had been, Bernard took me up to this populous end of the village and we prowled about until dark. We stayed the night at the Hostellerie du Château, hard by the castle and comfortable enough, following an excellent dinner full of jokes and merriment in the hotel dining room, where there were fresh flowers and obliging waitresses. All was bright, and the gleam of glass and polished metal was now to our greater pleasure. I began with a duck confit and followed with (my now habitual) lamb, which was even better than the first time on the terrace at Pommerats. We drank a Bourgogne Aligoté and then two bottles of Côte-de-Nuits, all quite good, though in my carefree state I omitted to note their labels. I tried and liked fromage

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 12 avec crème fraîche , tried and adored the unknown Époisses and ﬁnished with peaches. This dinner was as much a thorough pleasure as last night’s had been a trial.

IN THE MORNING, we left Châteauneuf in a steady rain, with en - couragement from the proprietors and the clients, who thought we were brave to be riding in these conditions. It struck me that what we were doing was privileged in the first place, and any discomforts we sustained were entirely voluntary, in the service of our own amusement, and so perhaps we did not deserve the praise. But our difficulties soon multi - plied. The others had gone ahead and I had followed Élisabeth, who preferred to descend carefully, down the steep hill. It seemed to me that the rear wheel of her bicycle was not running true. At the bottom I could see the wheel worsening rapidly and overtook her, persuading her to stop while I rode ahead to get Daniel. Everyone came back. Daniel and Bernard pulled the wheel, which turned out to have two broken spokes. The bike had been fine on arrival the night before. Had the spokes broken overnight in the rarefied atmosphere of Châteauneuf? Well, it hardly mattered as we stood and wondered in the rain. Avery had extra spokes taped to his chainstay, and they fit. Daniel and Bernard soon had the tire off, the rim and hub fitted with the new spokes, the tire remounted and the wheel back on the bike. With a spoke wrench, Bernard then swiftly trued the wheel to a standard I would not have achieved on a dry sunny day with all the time in the world. Then we were on our way again, capes and slickers flapping in the wind. Today’s destination was Tournus, 101km distant, over some 500m hills early on and later over something called a col , a word that seemed to me to have disturbing associations with mountaineering. It rained all morning as we crossed and recrossed the river Ouche and made our way over the big hills near Santosse and Nolay. Though the rain began to lift toward midday, we decided to dine at a restaurant, since no place out of doors would be dry enough to serve as a picnic site. I believe it was at Charrecey that we stopped at a roadside estab - lishment called, oddly enough, Au Petit Blanc, which I took as a pre - cursor of our eventual destination, which might reasonably be called Au Grand Blanc. The highway that we were following connected the important towns of Chalon and Autun and doubtless had once been a

13 busier road, and our restaurant still had the air of a café routier , though the clientele was now all sorts. Clean, well-lighted, crowded (with the wine list—all subsidiary Burgundies priced between one hundred and two hundred francs chalked neatly on a blackboard), this was the sort of restaurant the French call honnête . Daniel and Avery had glasses of another Aligoté, this time from Bouzeron, and which they reported had plenty of mineral character. Then Daniel ordered two bottles of red, a 1992 Mercurey and a 1993 Rully, both from the Côte Chalonnaise, of which the latter was better structured and more interesting. But I must say that so far the outstanding red wine of this journey had been the Caymus. The Côte-de-Nuits of last night, though comparatively good against the Gamays we had been drinking, was unbalanced toward the tannic and short of finish. Here, I was happy enough with the Rully and particularly pleased with my terrine de volaille followed by a Provençale stew, with profiteroles for dessert. Although, excluding the wine, our menus were priced at sixty-five francs, I would recommend Au Petit Blanc to persons with the means to pay much more. Our cycling that afternoon had its remarkable moments. The sky cleared, and there were sudden openings in the countryside, as well as long stretches of wooded terrain. I felt quite at home in these environs. The vineyards were very orderly places, and the Burgundian architecture of the Côte d’Or and the Saône-et-Loire was somewhat different from what we had been seeing since the Brie—the big houses here were spec - tacular and usually featured distinctive round towers at the corners, with conical slate roofs. Jean-Claude had a flat (“I have collapsed” would be the translation of his announcement) and then discovered he had cut the tire, too, so borrowed a spare from Daniel. At the next large town we all stopped while they bought a replacement. Jean-Claude decided to mount the new tire and return Daniel’s. Within a couple of kilome - ters, while he rode just ahead of me, Jean-Claude had a blowout (there is no particular translation for his announcement on this occasion) and, for the third time in an hour, the rear wheel had to come off his bicycle. We had all had such runs of luck and no one demeaned Jean-Claude’s fate by joking about it. Then we came to the Col de Navois. Beginning at low-lying Sully, we had climbed steadily to Corlay, Jean-Claude powering on ahead, Élisabeth, Daniel and Bernard taking a slower cadence behind Avery

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 14 and me. At Corlay we dropped down slightly, turned right and the real ascent began. After a couple of kilometers, two young men stepped out from a roadside cafe to shout, — Allez, allez! I nodded and kept pedal - ing. Soon thereafter I put my head down, resigned myself to my twenty- eight-tooth rear cog (last one), regretting having no climbing gear up front, and just pedaled, looking up only to check for turns or other problems in the road. In the circumstances, I wondered if I might come upon a crevasse. There were no crevasses but plenty of turns, and after each one, more hill. Avery stayed a few meters ahead. I reached a state of promising my - self to get off if I could just make the stretch to the next turn, and re - peated the promise at each new turn. This continued for some time. A long time after that, I looked up and saw at the end of the next stretch not a turn but a gift from le bon Dieu , the road disappearing over a little rise. We crested the col , and I drew abreast of Avery and reached over to shake his hand. As we stopped in triumph, two mountain bikers ap - peared out of the woods, having descended a trail to where we now stood, reminding me that whatever you have done, there is more to do. Even so, our swift drop down to Mancey was sweet indeed, and the next dif - ficult hill before Tournus seemed anticlimactic, despite being marked on the Michelin map with two chevrons, indicating a grade between nine and thirteen percent. I finished the day by racing a car down a long, gradual descent on the outskirts of the city, where I could hold 50kph. At the railway hotel in Tournus, we had a drink in the salon, hand - somely fitted out with turn-of-the-century woodwork and brass. We were joined by a late-middle-aged couple called Pépé and Danièle, sweet-natured cycling veterans who had come over from their village in the Côtes Roannaises to ride with us tomorrow morning on the last leg of our journey to Vonnas, and dine with us at Georges Blanc. Before dinner, Avery and I found time for a walk in Tournus’s old town, which had plenty of interesting buildings still commercially alive. In the great hotel dining room, whose unexpected pièce de résistance was a remark - able decorated pipe organ with carved animated figures, we consumed a variety of correct dishes, though I recall in particular only the excellent snails at the beginning and the beautifully done oeufs à la neige avec crème anglaise at the end. We drank Moulin-à-Vent from Georges de Boeuf (though not the better, estate-bottled sort) and with dessert a

15 middling sort of Hugel Gewürztraminer under an unfamiliar (perhaps France-only) label. We heard a brief, astounding organ recital. During the night, all the heavy trucks in France roared past the hotel on one side and all the trains in France whooshed past on the other. I know because I heard each one. I decided that Tournus was the center of all French ground transport.

ON FRIDAY MORNING under benevolent skies, we set out for Von nas, which lay off main roads about equidistant from Bourg-en-Bresse and Mâcon, and whose most famous citizen was native son Georges Blanc, the restaurateur who had inherited property and a tradition of cooking from his family and in recent decades had earned three-star status for the restaurant, established an integral hotel and bakery, and inspired civic improvements in the town center. I began by spinning along easily with our new companions, Pépé and Danièle, and finished by veritably racing with Daniel, Avery and Jean-Claude along the flat, shaded roads of the Ain, exchanging draft positions in order to rest or pull ahead. I think I came in third. About halfway to Vonnas, while we were crossing a bridge over a railway, I was startled by a sort of sonic boom, but there was nothing in the sky. The source turned out to be a Train à Grande Vitesse belting toward Mâcon in the cut below us. Jean-Claude said the TGV usually ran at about 350kph and was capable of 500kph. We arrived in full sunshine after the 50km run from Tournus. Vonnas was too large to be called a village, perhaps not quite large enough to be called a town in the French sense. Most of the buildings were from the nineteenth century. Flowers were everywhere, with plenty of shade trees; a watercourse (the Veyle) ran through the middle and passed right next to Georges Blanc’s establishment, which included a cantilevered glassed-in walkway over the water. A smartly dressed clerk patrolling the entrance took time out from carrying golf clubs and parking large cars to operate a succession of our cameras as we stood for group-portraits- with-cycles, thoroughly blocking the sidewalk. He was patient and cheerful. We were shown to a substantial, steel-gated garage around the corner (also part of the Blanc domaine) that usually held a collection of antique coachwork but was at that moment nearly empty. After stowing our bikes, we returned to the hotel to change for lunch. We were given the use of a small, utterly luxurious guest room with bath to wash and

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 16 change, and did so in groups of two and three. Élisabeth and Daniel and I were one such group; Élisabeth, in an eyeblink, transformed her - self from “la Mouflotte” of the bicycle to an elegant w oman ready for a splendid lunch. While awaiting the others in the lobby, I was able to examine a wall full of thank-you notes from important persons to Georges and Jacque line Blanc, praising the welcome and the cuisine. These person - nages comprised many sorts, from French film stars to United States senators. I found the display puzzling. Was it simply promotion, or the human side of the business? Once assembled, we were ushered toward the dining rooms, which took us past the reception and out along the glassed-in gangway that overhung the canal running alongside the building. This passage, about six feet wide and fifty feet long, allowed us to look in on the kitchen, which was busy and full of people, yet uncrowded, and to glance briefly at posted photographs of several generations of la famille Blanc shown at memorable moments. From the passage we regained the main structure, entering a spacious anteroom with handsome flagged floor, styl ishly furnished with fine old brown wood pieces, well polished, a small bar in one corner and a suite of chairs arranged around a large, low table, with additional seating in an alcove beyond in case of a second or an even larger party (we were nine). Nearby, a wine-press screw frag - ment, about ten inches in diameter and five feet long, stood on end, mounted on a decorated stone pedestal and finished with a fanciful cap - ital. Elsewhere stood stone columns, mortared up of short drums. Openings in the plastered walls were finished with large pieces of dressed stone. The true nature of the building, whatever it might be, was entirely obscured by a skilled decorator’s tour de force. We sat down around the low table and were offered an apéritif made from crème de cassis and a Crémant de Bourgogne, which categorically would be called a kir, but which no kir of my experience had very closely resembled. Though the cassis, a Burgundian specialty, was doubtless made of the best blackcurrants, the genius was in the choice of the gen - tly sparkling crémant instead of a still white wine, or even a too-bubbly Champagne as in a kir royale. Numer ous young men in black served us these drinks, together with delicious little nothings of mysterious origin, and we were to become accustomed through the afternoon to the arrival

17 of a squadron of servers at every change of plate. The staff-client ratio appeared to be one to two, or two to three, and after includ ing the un - seen staff, the true ratio may well have been nearer one to one. I found the food and drink to be relaxing, and this was fortunate be - cause, when the sommelier arrived, list clamped firmly under one arm, the entire company said not a word but looked expectantly at me. I had not minded this role at the railway hotel in Tournus the night before, where the list included many wines familiar in Vermont and where the young waitresses took the wine order, but now I had before me a tall, stern, cool gentleman who presumably knew exactly the flavors and tex - tures of the menu, as well as all the possibilities of the accompanying forfait Bourgogne, the general group of wines that Daniel had chosen for us in advance when reserving. I decided to speak to this man as a trusted counselor. —I prefer, I said, a wine with a striking bouquet, frankly animal, and which opens in the mouth, full of fruit, acid and tannin, and which finishes with subtle flavors of a long duration. Marcel Périnet (for that was his name; he, too, was famous) gazed down at me and replied: —Sir, you speak of red wine. —But yes. —Ah, sir, the first two courses require white wine. In that case, I replied, I have complete confidence that you will guide us well. White Burgundy is generally thought to be the most important white wine in the world, after Champagne, but the few examples I had en - countered had not struck me with the force of the remarkable white wines of the Loire, certain bottles of luscious Vouvray moelleux or aus - tere, granitic Savennières, to take examples at opposite ends of a range, or of really smoky Pouilly-Fumé—not to mention the power of aged Riesling from Alsace, So I truly had no preference. But in the dining room a few minutes later, to accompany the first course, the croustillant de fois gras de canard avec salade potagère , Marcel Périnet served us a Pouilly-Fuissé of such great character that I surren - dered immediately and now knew what the fuss could be about for this appellation that had always puzzled me by its reputation. In place of a light, acidic, unhappy chardonnay, here was a fat, smoky, concentrated

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 18 wine worth pondering, made by Michel Forest in Vergisson, apparently from a single vineyard, Les Crays, in 1993. Even the label was a pleasure to examine, showing a ridge gently rising from right to left, ending in an escarpment like New Hampshire’s Old Man in the Mountain, with vineyards on the slopes below and the steeple of a village church appearing at the lower edge of the pen-and-ink drawing. I had the sense of having discovered a secret. The second wine, of greater reputation, proved to be of quite differ - ent character, less striking, but unctuous in texture and distinctly min - eral in flavor, in counterpoint. This bottle was a 1991 Meursault Genevrières from François Jobard. The Genevrières vineyard is one of the three first-growth vineyards of the appellation. Robert Parker, in his 1990 book, Burgundy , says, “It produces wines that are midway between the more profound and compelling style of Les Perrières and the more obvious, forward style of Les Charmes” and credits Jobard as one of the two winemakers who give it its best expression, “of leanness and re - straint.” Though I did not find it lean, I certainly could not question the usefulness of the clearly-stated Meursault with the second course of our meal, les deux farcis terre et mer au ménage d’épices , which I found a beautiful mise-en-scène impossible to unravel, a dish from another planet that nevertheless tasted of home. Daniel later explained to me that we had consumed a metamorphosed tomato stuffed with mushrooms and small vegetables (the farci terre ) and a cabbage leaf sheltering the bounty of the sea (the farci mer ) under a white wine sauce made aromatic with curry and saffron, set off by both beurre blanc and beurre monté . Monsieur Périnet next proposed another bottle from 1991, a Cham - bolle first-growth Les Sentiers made by Robert Groffier in the adjacent Côte-de-Nuits village of Morey. This wine had the right elements of a younger red Burgundy, on the nose and in the mouth, forward, supple, enough fruit. It made a happy companion to our third course, filets de rouget grillé à l’huile d’olive , no mise-en-scène this, but a quite simple presentation of red mullet in particularly fragrant oil. At the next course, I nearly fell into error. Monsieur Périnet suggested a Chorey-les-Beaune, which, as made by the firm Tollot-Beaut, I knew as an excellent, stylish red wine, yet modest enough to stay in the back - ground. I agreed to the suggestion even though M. Perinet shook his head at my query about the maker. The bottle that his assistant brought,

19 a 1993 from Domaine Germain (an equally respected maker, as I dis - covered later), raised a central issue of wine service in a restaurant. When I tasted it, I could find no fault with it, such as sulfur, vinegar or cork, but I could find no virtue in it either. To me it was without interest, without bouquet, without typicity, an anonymous red wine that nonetheless could not be called bad. I said so and asked Daniel, at the other end of the table, to taste it as well. Monsieur Perinet and his as sistant meanwhile stood by unmoved. Daniel declared the wine bon and looked at me with curiosity. Swiftly calculating the cost of resistance in terms of the pleasure of the whole table, I nodded to the assistant sommelier that he might proceed to serve the others. Although I do not regret accepting the wine for the sake of social harmony, the question remains in my mind: did I have the right as a client to refuse the wine because it did not meet my expectations? In the beauty of the food, it was possible to forget this question, and the wine, its one charm a wonderful etching of the Château de Chorey- les-Beaune on the label, certainly stayed in the background of its ac - companying dish, la raviole de truffe sauce vigneronne , a little jewel comprising leaves of winter and summer truffles over a fresh pasta ravi - ole with a filling made with truffle juice, the whole under a wine sauce. Monsieur Perinet, with or without intention to please me especially, but unquestionably to accompany the homard à la coque et mêlée de haricots verts, beurre noisette et basilic , brought out for the final bottle, a wine of - great character that made all well, a 1990 Clos des Réas produced by Do maine Jean Gros in Vosne. I was able to taste mint and pepper, accents in a rich composition of fruit. The lobster (cooked in the shell but con - siderately removed before serving) was here the simple, central flavor, the browned butter and basil the accents, permitting the generous red wine its hour on the stage. In fact, it lasted into the cheese course that followed. The cheese board was no less than a meter wide, and no easy burden for the young man who held it while we chose and another waiter smartly cut off portions with a long, sharp knife. Each cheese appeared plump, suffused with life, and no doubt I missed some interesting things, but with the marvelous wine I kept, with one exception, to the goat cheeses, which (perhaps against custom) I find supremely compli - mentary to intricate red wine. The one exception was, of course, Époisses, which I now found irresistible.

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 20 After the entremets, which here were called les pré-desserts , we were well into our third hour when we were to choose from the Composition des Desserts du Moment au Choix . Marcel Périnet announced that, to ac - company our desserts, each of us would be served a glass of 1990 Coteaux du Layon, a notable vintage of the vin moelleux from the Loire valley. I studied the list of twelve dessert choices, which mentioned chocolate, cream, basil, ginger, apples, vanilla, caramel, apricots, citrus, fruits of the season, green lemon, sherbet, ice cream, banana, honey, butter, Banyuls, red fruits, zests, Amaretto, mascarpone, coffee, rasp - berries, almonds and seven kinds of pastry. Bewildered, I asked the as - sistant sommelier to find out which desserts might be less sweet than the Coteaux du Layon, and he returned suggesting the corne d’abon - dance aux fruits de saison et gelée de citron vert . Here I certainly made the right decision. The generous, cool and almost tart assemblage of fresh fruit proved a boon companion to the acidic, sweet wine as well as a refreshing finish to the long meal. Daniel, who had looked alarmed at the mention of the Coteaux du Layon, was surprised when he came to taste it. Later he said that particular glass had “reconciled” him with Coteaux du Layon. We had coffee out front, around the low table again, and discussed the meal quietly, in a mood of détente. A young man presented Daniel with the lengthy bill, and he, Jean-Claude and Jacqueline, our treasurer for the journey, discussed it briefly and added a small, symbolic tip to express our satisfaction. Divided evenly, my ninth came to one thou - sand, one hundred eighty-nine francs. Of the people we met at this establishment, two, at different extremes of the hierarchy, shone brightly for their human qualities. The first was Georges Blanc himself, still boyish-faced in his fifties, who visited our table halfway through the meal and suffered flashlit snapshots without a trace of resentment, meanwhile talking quietly with Pépé and Daniel at the other end of the table. He knew a little about cycling and appre - ciated our combination of interests, made us feel quite welcome and did not ask us to praise the food. Calm, open and friendly, he was gentle of voice and manner, and respectful of the fact that for us, these were ex - ceptional circumstances. Without prompting, he offered to sign menus for everyone and arranged with Marcel Périnet that I would receive the wine labels. No doubt these gestures were rehearsed, but they were not

21 thereby rendered insincere. Such was the charm of Geor ges Blanc. I was equally charmed by the young man who took us on a tour of the wine cellar after we had ﬁnished coffee and paid the bill. If Marcel Périnet had been declared (perhaps more than once) Best Sommelier of France, if his knowledge of wines was encyclopedic, it remained possible to wonder if he really liked the stuff, and with whom he might display that affection. But our young guide spoke warmly of individual bottles, of makers whose wine he was learning. Here was someone who loved wine and who might be able not only to inform his clients but also to give them the pleasure of a mutual enthusiasm. The cave was really not beneath the restaurant but rather behind it, and fully enclosed in ironwork as well as set off by glass panels to main - tain an independent atmosphere. Certain proprietors, Hugel for exam - ple, I recognized; most I did not. There were a few bottles from California. In all, I was told, there were normally 65,000 bottles on hand, of which 15,000 left each year and were replaced. Although Vonnas was much closer to Burgundy than to Bordeaux, the latter region was as strongly represented in red wines. The Alsace department, rather a distant third, was at the far end of the cave, and there may have been distinct sections for Loire and Rhône wines, although in the presence of so much wine, all beautifully laid down, I found it impossible to be systematic in observation. I was in Aladdin’s cave. Before leaving the premises, we strolled back along the cantilevered walkway over the canal and emerged in the back garden of the hotel, where we found a swimming pool and plenty of lounge chairs where we settled ourselves. Aging, well-tanned Europeans sunned themselves at the edge of the pool. We were now deﬁnitely out of the world of haute cuisine and into a new world, faintly corrupt, of luxury resort. Daniel had a curious reaction to the new setting: murmuring sardonic remarks I could not interpret, he began to strip off his clothes as we watched, dumbfounded, and only when reduced to a pair of French briefs did he cease and seem to hear Élisabeth calling anxiously: —Mais non, c’est pas vrai! Finally Daniel laughed good-humoredly and the air cleared. He dressed and we left. In the shaded parking lot across the road from the restaurant, all was merry again. We had recovered our bicycles from the garage, and in

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 22 plain view (Daniel having shown us the way) we changed back into cy cling costume and set out with surprising alacrity for the chambres d’hôte where we would spend the night and where cars had been left days earlier for our return to Paris. Once out of Vonnas, no one showed an interest in racing, and we took our leisurely way for a few miles through the Bressane countryside, winding through intimate little hills and vales, until we reached our destination, Bourdonnel, a strange, huge, too-tall, symmetrical house in a modest setting. The house appeared to be eighteenth-century, but as we moved through it on our way to the top story where we slept, certain details made it seem more ancient. From the proprietor, a silent sort who we eventually decided was Swiss (we were not far from Switzerland here, and other guests that night were Swiss), I discovered that the house had been built in the sixteenth cen - tury and then completely redone in the eighteenth, with new stairways and interior woodwork on the lower floors. It was now perhaps time for a second renovation. Our sojourn here was ill-defined. We arrived earlier than usual and, having ridden less than half our customary distance for the day, we were a bit restless, as well because we had spent nearly a week focused on a common goal and now we were turning our thoughts to individual plans. Dinner comprised unadorned chicken and boiled potatoes, accompanied by acidic wine poured from an unlabeled bottle, all served by candlelight at a gigantic table in the heroically proportioned dining room, plunged in shadows, the curtains drawn and the walls covered (ineptly) with red plush. The proprietress, learning that we had dined earlier not far away at Georges Blanc, apologized for her cooking. Pépé reassured her that her food was perfectly good, and indeed we probably could not have sustained another artistic meal that day. But we had exchanged extremes. Breakfast was more encouraging psychologically, with light streaming into the lofty dining room through tall windows. We had a humorous prize ceremony and took our leave, bicycles now fixed to racks on the cars.

II. BURGUNDY

IX OF US headed for Mâcon and the Maison du Vin, the show - place restaurant for a cooperative, and noted for its selection of SMâconnais and Beaujolais wines. The Mâcon that we saw was a 23 busy industrial town with heavy morning traffic. The House of Wine served us, with agonizing slowness, a fair meal and, with perfect irony, a truly bad bottle of wine, a Saint Amour from the Beaujolais. After agreeing that the wine was terrible, my French companions made no objection to the hard-to-find waitress. I think they felt exhausted by the circumstances, and so I kept still as well. (And I had had my first an douillettes , and found the tripe very good.) But the biggest surprise was at the end of the meal, when two of us ordered glace and the waitress brought us cardboard cups with peel-back covers, stamped with factory numbers and dates, containing ice cream that would be considered mediocre in England. Bad wine, bad ice cream! In France! Avery and I bade our companions good-bye and headed west over small roads for Cluny, which was busy and crowded with people on hol - iday. The famous abbey, founded in 910 and, like Cîteaux, influential in propagating the vine, is now largely imaginary, having been bought in the nineteenth century by a businessman who had most of it pulled down t o sell the building stone. But the site and the hilly town re - mained in teresting to stroll about in, and we found some good prospects from the top. We then took the wine road straight north to Buxy, the beginning of the Côte Chalonnaise, and on a course for Beaune. Drenched in slanting late-afternoon sunlight, we rolled through Givry and Rully, both handsome towns, missing Mercurey, which lies between them but to the west, and then on impulse we left the main road to thread our way over the hill to Bouzeron, a hamlet the sight of which tugged at me and where I wish we had had the patience to stop and ask for lodging. We got a bit lost in Chagny, briefly considered going to Santenay, then found our way out to Chassagne, the begin- nings of the Côte-d’Or proper, and more particularly the Côte-de- Beaune, its southern half. We had thought to stay in Chassagne, but we had a change of heart right there in the car. The place described in the book of tables d’hôte turned out to be a suburban ranch house (yes, a suburb of Chassagne, and, yes, a ranch house) on the flat land on the east side of the highway—that is, well away from the interesting slopes. So we returned to the route des vins and drove on over the hill whose fortunate exposition and soil chemistry have allowed the evolution of the several precious Montrachet vineyards, to Puligny, a much posher-

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 24 seeming village, with nicely pollarded trees in the square and a starred hotel at the lower end. The hotelier was haughty. —Plein, m’sieur , he declared with evident satisfaction. I inquired about Meursault, the next commune north. —Meursault is full, everything’s full tonight, there is a big wedding, you’ll have to go straight to Beaune. But Meursault was not full. The Hôtel des Arts, right in the center, had several rooms (and a locked courtyard for our bicycles), although as a condition of the booking I had to agree that we would dine there. Before dinner, at the colorful little hotel bar across the street, we had a very good glass of Aliigoté, not from Bouzeron but recommended by the patronne , and then we came back for what turned out to be a mediocre dinner at our own hotel. I saw nothing familiar or promising on the wine list and so refused to choose; Avery, more sanguine about these things, took a chance and lost. Walking about after dinner, we found Meursault a prosperous town of large private houses, with plenty of shops, a triangular center formed by intersecting roads, a surprisingly large and elaborately roofed Hôtel de Ville, a curiously shaped church and scores of tasting rooms, the whole offering a pleasing topographical variety. Each street had its own inspirations. We also discovered that Meursault was abundantly fur - nished with hotels of all sorts, and thus we needn’t have accepted the ﬁrst offer. But the hotelier in Puligny had not been simply malicious. Indeed, there was a wedding party that night, and the revelers kept us awake very late talking beneath our window and roaring through the village square on their motorbikes. I rose at seven in the morning to take pictures, but what had been dramatic yellow-washed and black-shadowed scenes under the house- mounted streetlights last night were now lifeless. It was too early, really, the light good only down on the plain and mostly blocked on the village streets. Nevertheless, a search produced a view of the village vineyards glowing in the morning sun and a telephoto glimpse of the richly tiled roof of the château. The light was generally good as we left town at nine, making one last stop at the village church (Saint Nicolas), with its cu - rious three transepts and excellent ﬂèche. Inside was a real working church with unusual furniture on the dais. The lectern and another piece were inlaid with fancy veneers, real marquetry work, but unframed

25 and in such totally abstract patterns that at ﬁrst I thought the lectern had been wrapped in multicolored paper. I regretted leaving Meursault. Avery thought we could come back easily. I knew better.

WE PROCEEDED TO BEAUNE, a town of a thousand picturesque scenes, and spent hours at the Hôtel Dieu, which was covered by an immense version of the polychrome tiled roofs I had seen in Meursault. Also called Hospices de Beaune (and known in the wine world for its annual charity auction of wine made from its donated vineyards), this grand pile was a working hospital for 500 years, fully replaced only in the 1970s, and now a museum of medical and social history. The vast, lofty main ward, with its continuous lines of enclosed beds along the sides and devotional space at one end, struck me most forcefully with the implied communality of late medieval life. The kitchen was full of practical equipment from the seventeenth to the nineteeth centuries, but the reputedly famous pharmacy I found lifeless. In the small, seventeenth - century Saint-Hugues ward, furnished with more enclosed beds, display cases of ancient medica l instruments, numerous walnut armoires and large allegorical frescoes, I stood softly reciting solemn advice for the afflicted, carved into stone panels high up on the walls. Outdoors, I paused several times at one end of the paved courtyard, drinking in the vast roofs of red, yellow, green and black glazed tiles, the timbered full gallery and the carved timber-framed dormers sur - mounted by ornamental metal finials. For all of this magnificent work in stone, wood, clay and metal, we should, after bowing to the craftsmen of the day, thank Guigone de Salins, the woman whose landed wealth and human sympathy for “les povres” made it practical for her more- famous husband, the Autun advocate and Duke Philippe-le-Bon’s chan - cellor, Nicolas Rolin, to cause the hospital to be built, and to endow it with vineyards and a saltworks. (According to Larousse , Rolin did not die in 1443, as Robert Parker reports in Burgundy , but lived on to 1462. Rather, the hospital was commenced in 1443.) We had lunch at a smart, compact café-restaurant, Chez Felix, in the center of the town. I had andouillettes (again), which were much more stylish than the first time in Mâcon, but declined wine since my nose was at that moment disabled by a Gallic allergen. Avery sampled glasses of Aligoté (unsuccessful, he said, not from Bouzeron) and a Hautes-

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 26 Côtes-de-Beaune (not much more interesting). At the next table, three children, supervised by their early-middle-aged parents, polished off plates of six escargots, and the youngest child promptly commanded a second half dozen. As we left after a sunshower, I grinned at the parents and congratulated the little girl on her gourmandise. I continued to be surprised at small children’s grasp of the French language. We found the Musée du Vin (actually the Hôtel des Ducs), a long, two-story galleried building, just off the square in front of the Notre- Dame church. Under a now-brilliant sun that brought wood and stone to life, we passed across a deserted court to a cobbled-together barn shel - tering a collection of ancient wine presses. These required study to un - derstand. Some used the action of a screw to apply pressure. Others used the screw merely to raise or release the weight of immense oak beams set on fulcrums. In the museum proper, a three-dimensional model of the Côte d’Or revealed the differing soils and solar expositions of the two parts of the côte , suggesting reasons why the Côte-de-Beaune is reputed chieﬂy for its white wine and the Côte-de-Nuits only for its red (regardless of the fact that a great deal of red wine, much of it ex - cellent, comes from the Côte-de-Beaune, but consistent with the fact that very little white wine is made in the Côte-de-Nuits). Many of the exhibits used evocative photographs and old tools to put the visitor in other times, or possessed an earnest, homemade quality that I found endearing and consistent with the unpretentiousness of the people whom I met in Burgundy. Rather than anything to do with gold, Côte d’Or does seem to be short for Cote-d’Orient , meaning east-facing slope, as Richard Olney stated ﬂatly in a remarkable short survey by region of the wines of France, included in his 1988 work, Ten Vineyard Lunches . We left Beaune in mid-afternoon and drove through Chorey and Ladoix, the northernmost villages of the Côte-de-Beaune, and then en tered the Côte-de-Nuits, passing the industrial area and quarries at Comblanchien, and returning to viniculture at Premaux-Prissey, just before the substantial town of Nuits-Saint-Georges. For sentimental reasons, I wanted to get to Fixin, at the top of the Côte near Dijon, and so we carried on, but lazily, through Vosne, Vougeot, Chambolle, Morey and Gevrey. As a strict constructionist, I say Vosne rather than Vosne- Romanée , or Gevrey rather than Gevrey-Chambertin , and so forth, to re -

27 call that these compound-named villages were not born with their hy - phens. Villages of the 1860s saw the commercial advantage of adding to their names the names of the renowned grand cru vineyards within their borders and today continue to produce wines that contain not a trace of their second-namesakes. A bottle marked “Puligny-Montrachet” is really a Puligny and need only be made from grapes that grow some - where in that commune, not from grapes that grow in the Montrachet vineyards on the hill between it and Chassagne. At Fixin, an unreconstructed country village north of Gevrey that never had a grand cru vineyard, and so never compounded its name, we looked about for a hotel and found one in the hamlet of Fixey (once its own commune and still with its own ancient little church). After settling into the Domaine Saint-Antoine, an old house and barn whose terrace backed right up to a vineyard and gave a prospect over most of Fixin, there was still plenty of light for a ride, and after two days off the bikes we were eager to go. We climbed past cliffs into the wooded back coun - try behind Gevrey as far as Chamboeuf, where the land opened up again and where Avery went on to Ternant, to climb a grade marked on the Michelin map with three chevrons (thirteen percent and steeper). I wanted to look at the wine villages and the vineyards from my bicycle, and so returned via a different road, emerging in Chambolle, then ped - aled between the Muisigny and Vougeot grand cru vineyards, which face each other across the lane, and on through the several Échezaux vineyards, into the village of Vosne. Here at a hilly corner I met a cyclist couple, a soft-spoken woman on a loaded touring bicycle, and her hus - band, installed in a recumbent, who were agreeably puzzled when I ad dressed them in French. They were in fact English, touring Europe and camping, and knew all about the States, where they had ridden be - fore and which they reported was much cheaper to tour than France. As for the recumbent bicycle, the man answered my queries surprising me—it was a poor climber, he said, quite comfortable on the level, but difﬁcult to control on the descent, and he wouldn’t tour on one again. We wished each other luck, and I returned toward Fixey, stopping for a good look at the superb Clos de Vougeot, sweeping vineyards sur - rounding an assemblage of nested roofs, something between a farm and a château, aglow in the nearly level rays of the end-of-day sun. All the vineyards I saw, most planted in pinot noir, one (Clos Blanc) in

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 28 chardonnay, seemed in excellent condition, with less than a month until harvest. In some pinot noir vineyards, clusters of early-ripened grapes lay on the clean, rocky ground where the workers had pruned them to improve the concentration and uniformity of the harvest. I sampled some of the berries and found them not sweet but of appealing ﬂavor, better without their skins. I dared not sample the growing grapes.

NEXT MORNING under lowering skies, we left the pretty little Do - maine Saint-Antoine in Fixey and set off to taste two streets away at Établissements Berthaut. Ignoring rather large signs on one side of the street announcing Dégustation and Clos Napoléon (but not Berthaut), we found on the other side the gate marked Berthaut, and knocked at the door of the nineteenth-century house in the courtyard, only to be told by a confident woman in her seventies that we should be across the street after all. There in a tall, airy shed we found a plump young woman tending a saucepan of hot red wax, preparing to seal corked bottles, and in a moment a youngish Denis Berthaut appeared from behind stacked wine casks. Wearing overalls and otherwise also seeming very much the farmer (immediately asking where I came from, he congratulated me on being from Vermont), Denis heard my account of having been in - troduced to Burgundy wine in Vermont by drinking Mongeard- Mugneret’s ’88 Fixin, and assured me in a humorous way that if I liked Mongeard’s wine, I would like his better. I think he would have been happy to talk further, but we were interrupted by the ring of a telephone and he was called away. In the small tasting room next door, really a tiny bar with numerous bottles on display at the back of the cave-like chamber, we sampled bottles of Berthaut’s ’91, ’92 and ’93 Fixin (the ’92 was definitely the least appealing) and the ’88, still available in half bottles. Avery, who had had plenty of experience with wine but little of it systematic, was pleased to have an opportunity to taste vertically and to take advantage of a crachoire , the spittoon that offers the best defense against getting tipsy. He bought a case of the full bottles. Thinking of my suitcase, the usefulness of half bottles and, most important, my warm feelings for ’88 Fixin, I chose the ’88. Denis Berthaut's assistant answered my questions about rendement and ﬁltration. After some consideration, she said the typical yield was around 35 hectoliters (about 235 cases) of wine per hectare (2.2 acres)

29 of vineyard, and the filtration was “traditional, with three plates.” I was unable to obtain from her details of the three plates. Having tasted bot - tled examples from four vintages and found them of noticeable charac - ter, and having seen the ends of two of the ’88s (after eight years, one had thrown sediment, the other had not), I supposed Berthaut’s filtra - tion to be judicious. We made our way through heavy late-morning rain to Chambolle. As we entered the village, I consulted Anthony Hanson’s 1995 book, Burgundy , to find out how to get to Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat, whose ’93 Chambolle-Musigny village wine we had enjoyed immensely in Ver mont. But this domaine was in fact not located in Chambolle, and so it was impulse that led us to turn left off the main road in the middle of Chambolle to seek out Domaine Barthod instead. It was run by a woman, and that sounded interesting. The side road headed for the fields, leading very quickly to the gates of the domaine, another large nineteenth-century house with substantial earlier barns adjacent and a later building at the far side of the courtyard. We drove into the court and parked uncertainly. No one was about in the rain, now beginning to let up. Perhaps we were intruding? My anxiety came to an end with the appearance of Ghislaine Barthod at the top of the steps at the front door of the house. She welcomed us immediately, acknowledging my hesitant request for a tasting, and as she crossed the court explained that she had a young child but this was by chance a good time to have ar rived—the fourteen-month-old was asleep. Ghislaine was perhaps thirty-eight, sturdily built and utterly direct of gaze and speech. She was the vigneronne , although Papa, who had run the estate before her, was, she said, very much in the picture as advisor. Wearing practical shoes, shorts and a black sweater (I was soon to regret not having such a sweater), Ghislaine led us to the cellars, down through a bulkhead at the base of the nearest barn. Simplicity ruled this cave. A clean gravel floor, stone walls and a plastered ceiling formed the main chamber. Beautifully built oak pièces , two high, were ranged on concrete rails. Ex - cept for the range of these 228-liter barrels and a crachoire against one wall, the room was empty. Ghislaine disappeared into an adjacent cham - ber at a higher level to find the bottles we wanted to taste, village wines from ’91 and ’93 and a premier cru from ’93, and brought them out to us. To me, the ’91 village wine had the most striking character, though

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 30 the ’93 first-growth was certainly rich in flavor and the most elegant. I remarked on the strongly tannic finish of the ’91, which I had not before encountered in a Burgundy. Ghislaine inquired: —Perhaps you know what happened here in ’91? We had severe hail and much of the crop was destroyed. What survived is very concen - trated. She suggested the ’91 could well be left to evolve further. Papa, neatly dressed, nimble and trim, now arrived in the cellar with a family mes - sage. Ghislaine introduced us and we discussed the three wines. He said: —It’s very personal, finally, taste in wine. Once I was asked to settle a question of winenaking style between father and son, but it was im - possible. They had completely different tastes in wine, father and son. Domaine Barthod, Ghislaine told us, did not filter their wines. In stead they fined with albumen if they saw that the wine needed it. But if it looked good, she said, they left it alone. It was time for Ghislaine to return to the house. She wrote down our order carefully. As we climbed out of the cellar into the noonday sun, we agreed to come back after lunch to pick it up—and, by the way, did she have a recommendation for a place to have lunch? She did, the Coté Cour out on the main highway in Gevrey. She said it was a new place operated by the Sangoy family, whose Les Millesimes restaurant in Gevrey proper was justly famed and expensive. The Coté Cour, housed in an intelligently converted light-industrial building, white, bright and airy inside, turned out to be exactly right for us. There was one other patron in the room, and we could see across an open court to another dining room, apparently empty. After studying the wine list, I inquired about the Aligoté de Bouzeron (maker unspec - ified, often the case on informal French lists). The well-knit young Frenchwoman who had seated us and who seemed to be in charge sug - gested I might know the Aligoté by Villaine (I did), and what she could offer us was equally good. The bottle, a Clos de la Fortune made by Chanzy Frères in Bouzeron, was in fact sharply focused and full of char - acter. I ordered my usual andouillettes , the most elegant yet, accompa - nied by dainty little things including a gherkin neatly cut and fanned. At the end of the meal, the woman returned to ask after our satisfaction and I said in careful French that she had told the truth about the wine, that all the food had been good and that, really, the only thing I could

31 not comprehend was why the place was empty. We never know, she said. It could be the weather, it could be the rentrée (from the national vacation month of August; it was now nearing the first of September). Last week, she finished, we had to turn people away. Then she grinned and broke into English to tell us she came from Portland, Oregon, had been coming to France for ten years as part of her former job and three or four years ago had met and married a Sangoy. He had his list at Les Millesimes and she, Melissa, had hers at Coté Cour. She had just taken her degree in oenology at Dijon and hoped to set up a special-order wine courier service between France and the U.S. Yes, she said, French wine prices were surprising: the wines were sold too cheaply to exporters, she believed, and thus to domestic consumers became more expensive than they really should be. We discussed Oregon pinot noir, still growing in reputation and popularity. (The winemakers seemed to be flocking to the town of Dundee; Domaine Drouhin, already established there, was now not the only mar que to be priced above many French Burgundies; Robert Parker’s brother was now making pinot noir at that level.) As we said goodbye to Melissa Sangoy, Avery mentioned that we were headed for Domaine Barthod, and Melissa said: —Oh, I’ll be seeing Ghislaine later this afternoon mysel f!

RETURNING TO CHAMBOLLE slightly early, we found Ghislaine striding toward the shipping shed where the bottles were labeled and the foil capsules applied. We watched her tend the latter process— achieved by a small machine that gripped and rolled the tin capsule, at first loose-fitting, tightly around the neck—and I reflected upon the pot of molten sealing wax in Berthaut’s shed, the other way to do the job. Ghislaine’s mother now appeared in the shed with a very healthy looking little boy in a stroller, exchanged pleasantries with all of us and continued on her walk, now in bright sunshine. As we packed the wine in Avery’s car, Ghislaine asked if I knew Neal Rosenthal, the New York importer. I said that knew of him as a serious person and had once suc - cessfully asked him a question by telephone. —Neal has been coming here to buy wine for sixteen years, she smiled. He can remember all the vintages! From Chambolle we drove back through Gevrey, whose center had

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 32 been improved by the latest in French paving design, which offered no distinction in height between roadway and walkway, with the result that pedestrians could feel falsely secure and motorists could wonder if they should really be driving over this stretch. We proceeded to Vosne, a ram - bling, hilly village still in an unimproved state, though at the center there was a large electriﬁed map (the buttons did not, however, illumi - nate the lamps) showing the locations of all the winemakers in town and their phone numbers. We found Domaine Mongeard-Mugneret listed at 14, rue de la Fontaine. We debated whether to call, decided just to take our chances and rolled down the hill, bearing left at the bot tom. This took us past the Clos des Réas, whence came the splendid Jean Gros wine we had had at Georges Blanc. But I must get to Jean Mon geard, and not even the sight of a plaque a little farther along read - ing “Domaine Leroy” was enough to divert me. Finally, a polished brass plate on the right announced Domaine Mongeard-Mugneret. Other people were arriving as we parked, and there was a muddle in the courtyard. From the house we could hear the sounds of a family lunch. A short, round woman, Madame Mongeard as I supposed she must be, emerged and took charge. She spoke to the other visitors, who appeared uncertain and tongue-tied, and then asked me if I had called ahead. I said no, we were just passing and hoped it was a good moment. She said brusquely that there was little time, but to come ahead to the tasting room, and we all trooped after her, past the large two-story house, through a gate, down some steps, across an alley and into a separate building. The tasting room was large and ele - gant. Dated racks of bottles lined the back wall. High up on the wall were poster-size blow-ups of tasting scenes. To the left was the opening into the darkened and silent chai , where the wine was vinified and bot tled in season. To the right was a packing area and, above it, a staircase leading up, with numerous framed certiﬁcates hanging on the face of the stair car - riage, one indicating Jean Mongeard ’s presidency of the Association des ’ Viticulteurs de la Côte d ’Or. At the center of the room was a large, black, round table, at which Madame Mongeard invited us to sit, hand - ing us a nicely made folder listing the domaine’s vineyards, vintages and retail prices (about the same as New Hampshire retail). We asked to taste recent successive vintages of the Fixin, a village wine, and a Vosne

33 Les Orveaux, a single vineyard first-growth. Madame Mongeard disap - peared behind us. When she returned with the bottles, I realized she had reappeared from an elevator. Avery found Mongeard ’s Fixin the best yet, and we both had the opinion that the Orveaux was of yet a different dimension. This was an affair of the nose and a succession of flavors in the mouth. Mrs. Mon - geard was sitting to my left, enjoying our evident pleasure, and now there seemed to be plenty of time to chat and ask about our origins. She observed brightly: —We send much wine to the United States! At this point, a vigorous man in his early forties, fair-haired and bespectacled, wearing knee-length athletic shorts imprinted with the Marl boro logo and a T-shirt bearing a Burgundy message that I couldn ’t make out, entered the tasting room and approached the table. This was evidently Jean Mongeard, and, without preliminaries, he cheerfully en gaged us in a discussion of the wine. Soon he offered to show us the working area. We left the table and, standing at the entrance next to a great rack of bottles, Mongeard talked to us for half an hour. The chai was a high room lined on two contiguous walls with quite tall, rectangular stainless steel tanks whose outer surfaces were patterned with a sort of large-scale engine-turning. The tanks were all linked by piping and control valves and surrounded the central handling area. In the distance I could see a parked fork-lift and at a further remove a large overhead door. Mon geard, passionate, erudite and in character, as he said of himself, a kind of explorer, had so much to say that I was grateful to have Avery with me, to translate the mysterious passages and to help me remember the ideas. In sum, Jean Mongeard said: We don ’t filter at all, but we do check for turbidity. The wine does not need filtering because we treat it very gently in the system you see before you. The rendemen t? Well, you can go as high as forty-five, let ’s say; after that it ’s certainly very risky, but - that isn ’t really the point, by itself. It ’s different each year and for each vineyard. The point is to have the roots of the vine go deep enough in the soil. Since 1982 when I graduated, I have avoided chemical fertilizer because it encourages surface feeding. At first the others thought I was crazy. No longer. We have twenty-five hectares and twelve paid help. It

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 34 gives them mal au coeur to have to go in and cut the early-ripening grapes. I only allow a man four hours a day for that. We have vineyards in different places. What I feared most at the beginning was uniformity in the wines, a loss of typicity. Our methods seem to have worked out fairly well to preserve the differences. As we said our good-byes, I asked Mongeard about the upraised hand that appears at the center of the domaine’s herald, wondering whether it was their own design. —Yes, it ’s ours, he replied. It ’s because most of our work is done with the hand.

THAT NIGHT, we found a perfect hotel in a quiet village (even though a highway village) in the Morvan, the western part of the Burgundy region . We arrived here at the Auberge Fleuri in Chissey-en-Morvan, halfway from Autun to Saulieu, after giving up on finding accommo - dations in Autun, a curiously uncomfortable town—Avery called it triste after a half hour in its confines—and striking out on the road in the general direction of Planay, where Avery’s old friend and colleague Annie lived. We had gone to Autun in the first place because of my curiosity to see the sculptures of Gislebertus at the cathedral, which did prove rewarding, but then we found ourselves stymied by the character of the town and decided to push on. The Morvan we passed through before dark was different from the rest of Burgundy—not wine but cattle country, and not obviously prosperous. But Chissey ’s old-fashioned, comfortable Auberge Fleuri served us well. For dinner, we had an excellent bottle of Mercurey ’89, entrecôte , a new cheese (Soumaintrain), oeufs à la neige and, to go back to the be - ginning of the meal, the best escargots so far. The waitress was a pretty, humorous girl who seemed surprised when Avery asked if she was from the area. Certainly not, she laughed. She had merely answered a notice offering summer work and would soon be returning home to ﬁnish her baccalaureat. Madame Bessière, a woman of sixty who directed us where to put our bicycles for the night (but no one takes anything here, any - way, she said), who advised us on the wine (which she had obviously purchased herself), and who was thoroughly in charge of this authentic little corner of France, seemed a person it would be safe to cross the At - lantic with. Monsieur I only met the following noon when I paid the

35 bill. He was as calm as the hills behind the hotel. Avery and I spent the morning riding in these hills, past hardscrabble farms and through sub - dued villages that, accepting the difference between stone and wood, reminded me of Vermont.

WE ARRIVED chez Annie in the middle of the afternoon. Her estab - lishment really was an auberge fleurie , a compound of buildings and flowers in a village north of the Morvan, near Montbard and a few min - utes from Fontenay Abbey. But the village of Planay was not fleuri . The building on the corner of Annie’s lane had lost its windows and most of its front door. Around the corner was an establishment of Compagnons d’Emmaüs, the French equivalent of Goodwill Industries, but here was a group of down-and-out people who appeared completely demoralized and who wandered among old plumbing fixtures, furniture and other cast-off goods that more fortunate people had given them to sell. The village had lost its future, there were no shops, the farmers had mostly disappeared and there were no children to be seen. Annie ’s compound had one large building and several smaller ones, with garages and gardens and a pool or two. A thirty-seven-year-old horse wandered through the property and, behind the main house, a splendid walnut tree grew. (From such trees must have been made the armoires we saw at the Hôtel Dieu in Beaune.) Annie ’s mother lived in a small house twenty or thirty paces from her own and a daughter and husband lived in another house fifty paces in the other direction. All the houses shared the same cul-de-sac, which started out as a lane off the village street, passed between a couple of unrelated buildings, then led to a tenant ’s house, the mother ’s house (with a garage across the lane), bent at a right angle at Annie ’s house, which was large, two-story and itself bent to follow the lane, and then straightened to lead to the daughter ’s house, where it ended. Annie ’s quarters were on the first and second floors of her raised house, the ground level being devoted to stor - age and utility rooms, a good arrangement for the gray and damp weather of our visit. She heated with tall, cylindrical wood stoves though there were hot-water radiators as well. The interiors were somber, with dark walls and ceilings, and packed with things, though the effect was of warmth rather than gloom. A handsome young cat and a self-possessed poodle ruled the floors; subordinate to them was a small, anxious mutt

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 36 called Bill, I believe after the president of the United States. Annie was a French painter of childlike scenes, in the style of an enamelist who happened to work on paper (she agreed with this sug - gestion and said she had in fact done designs for crockery). Her blues and purples were compelling. When she wasn't in her studio, Annie seemed to spend her time helping others to get out of various kinds of trouble. There were the ever-changing needs of her nearby family and pets, and then there were the people who called on the telephone. Her husband had died twenty years ago when not yet forty. Annie was now fifty-four. She got along by designing wrapping paper and greeting cards and until recently had had an interesting contract with the Burgundy publicity people. From time to time she sold paintings. We went for a drink at her friends ’ house in the next village. Annie drove us there at high speed in her very solid Citroën diesel, over an ab solutely clean road that turned gently this way and that. We saw the clouds part to admit powerful shafts of light pouring out of a huge sky onto the slightly curved Earth. Annie said: —I always imagine God sitting in his chair with the rays of light coming from the fingers of his hand pointing down. When we arrived, Annie ’s friends were playing pool in a large open room with exposed beams. At the near end of the room were chairs, a sofa, a coffee table, a fireplace. We sat down to Champagne and Aligoté, Several people took cigarettes. Immediately began a discussion of work, the rhythms thereof, the truth thereof. —One does what one can do. —Worse, one does what one thinks one ought to do. —Yes, and it’s easy to deceive oneself there. I found it possible to speak slowly and clearly and to contribute ideas to this company; Pascal, the novelist, rather full-featured, with specta - cles, black sweater, jeans; his deeply tanned, short-haired, boyish, tall, well-built, chain-smoking amused wife; Yves, master of the house, tired, slight, self-deprecating, a working painter; his tired and friendly wife, soft-edged, agreeable; their children from eighteen to thirty-five years old. The eighteen-year-old girl had a nose ornament and smoked; the twenty-seven-year-old boy was almost silent, apparently never fully hav - ing come back from a terrible motorcycle accident ten years ago; the thirty-five-year-old was not present but remained a topic of conversation

37 since he was just about to get married, for the first time, When Pascal talked about the different tactics he used to produce short pieces or to get through longer efforts, I listened carefully. We returned to Annie ’s house for dinner. I provided a bottle of 1990 Chimney Rock Cabernet I had brought from Vermont and a 1989 Gelin’s Fixin Clos du Chapitre I had bought in Fixey. We began with the cabernet (I adore California wine, Annie had said), which I found a lot less interesting (and said so) than the Caymus we had had on the first day ’s picnic. Avery found it better and Annie said it was agreeable. I was all the more frustrated by the Fixin, from the most reputed vine - yard in the appellation and a successful year, when it proved to have no bo uquet and no goût du terroir at all. But the others were untroubled. It’s a pleasant wine all the same, Annie said. This issue of wine that was unspoiled but without distinct character led to a discussion of the sim - ilarly disappointing bottle of Chorey-les-Beaune at Georges Blanc, and then to my questions about the whole three-star (or, as Daniel had called it, the three-macaroon) experience there. I confessed doubts about the elaborate commercial enterprise sur - rounding the serving of distinguished food and wine. The restaurant was only the center of a much larger physical establishment, a luxury hotel complete with swimming pool, and one had the sense of being caught up in a machine, though at a very high level. The decor was so complicated and full of references that one wasn't sure where one was— an ancient building renovated? Or a new building fitted out by an in - terior designer? As the meal had proceeded, my strongest impression had been of a rehearsed performance, a polished dance in black and white, the dancers filling and refilling our glasses and changing the plates, accented by the occasional swift flash of a corkscrew or, later, dazzling knifework at the cheese board. I wondered about the extraor - dinary food, also beautifully executed to a pattern. If Georges Blanc could easily chat with the clients, was it not so that others were prepar - ing the food, and thus that Georges, like an intelligent furniture de - signer, say, had figured out the designs and taught the others how to produce them? This, while difficult to do, was a bit different from mak - ing something personally—even if so evanescent as a meal—for the client. Avery was close to anger as he attacked my lack of appreciation for

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 38 Georges Blanc’s genius. It was normal, he said, for the great chefs nowa - days to surround themselves with calculated publicity and other enter - prises than food. He reminded me what we had seen earlier that day as we passed briefly through Saulieu—the shop windows of a boutique displaying bathrobes and other garments, all the enterprise of Bernard Loiseau, an - other three-star chef. Profits from the food and the wine, the argument went, could not cover the costs of maintaining the physical luxury stan - dards required by Michelin to keep the ranking. What was one to do? Annie then said: — The genius of Georges Blanc is the confluence of five or six talents in one person. That seemed to both of us incontrovertible and we left it there.

III. PARIS

E RETURNED TO SEGREZ the next day via Arnay-le- duc and Noyer, old towns both, but Arnay relatively prim - W itive with an old tower at its center, and Noyer (the r was sounded) relatively prosperous with its busy marketplace, old timbered houses and surrounding cultivated ﬁelds. At the top of the town we met an old woman emerging from her house who was able to tell us why so many corner buildings down in the center were ﬁtted with metal-doored compartments surmounted by hollow shafts, a question no one in Noyer’s shops had been able to answer. The compartments, she ex - plained, were for lamp oil, and the shafts for wicks, a street lighting sys - tem she personally remembered. That was our history lesson before rushing toward Paris on the auto route. With a cycling rally scheduled for Sunday morning, followed by a grand afternoon meal at Segrez and my departure early Monday, I chose to spend Saturday in Paris, and in the mid-afternoon sunshine of that day found myself sitting in a little park, notebook in hand, at the corner of rue de l’Abbaye and rue Bonaparte (Square Laurent Prache by name), cheek by jowl with l’Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés: iron mesh swing gates, a public water tap, benches ranged in an ellipse surrounding a lit - tle plot of grass on which sported two young lovers. What had I done today?

39 One, accompanied Avery to one of his business meetings, this one with a contractor in Livery Gagnon (whose main street was the noisiest place in France, after Tournus) to discuss repairs to the timber-trussed roof of a light industrial building. Large roof panels had been missing above the exposed rafters for two years. If it rained, well, the place just got wet. After examining the premises, we had retired to a rather dirty corner café across the street. The contractor, who was called Boucher, was quite well-informed. No one wants to work on buildings anymore, he said. If they have the slightest intelligence, they want to do something with computers, or they submit themselves to a big organization like the hypermarketers Carrefour. Fifteen hundred skilled workers were needed right now in the Paris region. For every ten that retired, one or two entered the trades. The result was that many people who worked on buildings came from the bottom of the barrel. If something was un peu compliqué , they called in a skilled, retired craftsman who then worked half-time and drew full pay (to get around the pay-scale rules). Boucher had done all sorts of work, new and old, and knew where slate came from and where to obtain chestnut timber, which he said was preferred for French traditional work and was actually in good sup - ply. He had worked on Vaux-le-Vicomte, the remarkable seventeenth- century manor house we had seen early in my visit, and agreed with my proposal that the roof framing must be worth a look. But he said the owner (the house, though vast, remained in private hands) was not the sort of person who would view such a special request with interest or sympathy. Avery was very thorough with Boucher, going over each item in the estimate until they arrived at a clear mutual understanding. Two, after Metroing in from a porte I could not recall ever using before (Bagnolet), where Avery had dropped me in order to take the Boulevard Périphérique to his next meeting on the west side of Paris, I made my way on foot from the Gare de l’Est (unchanged, I think) to 63, rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, where I had inhabited the top- floor studio apartment, with a balcony facing east off the galley kitchen, and a broad French window facing west in the main chamber, so that I could look out over the roofs of much of Paris’s right bank. The faubourg had not changed much since I had lived there thirty years be - fore. On this sentimental visit I was more aware of the furriers in the district. I couldn ’t find the little restaurant where I first had steack tartare

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 40 and survived, but the little hardware store was still across the street. There was now a very large parking garage, taking up the space of a dozen ordinary houses, at the corner of rue Bleu and the Cité de Trévise, where the rubbish men (four of them) had once lifted up my little car and set it on the sidewalk so they could get through. The beautiful cul- de-sac at the far end seemed still intact. But this garage troubled me. I didn’t remember it, yet its style would put it in my period of residence. I almost remembered it. An unsatisfactory sensation. The garage was now in process of conversion to apartments, which, in more elegant form, had been torn down to make room for it. Irony is deﬁned by example. I walked straight down to the river by my old route, Poissonnière becoming Montorgueil, then Baltard, which used to pass right through the center of Les Halles, emerging in the rue du Pont Neuf to point you across the river at the Square du Vert Galant at the end of Île de la Cité. One of my landmarks (though I had never stepped inside), the expen - sive restaurant L’Escargot, with its notable gilded snail hanging out front, had not withered. I was prepared to ﬁnd Les Halles gone but not prepared for the oddities that had replaced it, which I found unnatural, verging on the unpleasant, even in full sun and with children in the pet - ting zoo. The punctured topography was disturbing. The little iron ref - erences to the fretwork of the demolished structures were simply irritating. I didn’t visit the art museum. For the male flâneur in Paris, there were no more pissoirs . An impor - tant amenity removed, I gathered, by decree of an earlier President of the Republic. Instead, the streets provided the occasional (quite rare, actually) fully enclosed free-standing unisex toilette , which looked solid enough to be a bomb shelter, cost money to use and displayed a bolt-of- lightning symbol at one end. I found myself unable to enter these pos - sibly dangerous devices and used cafés instead, once without consuming anything and once surrendering to a posted customers-only demand by ordering a glass of red wine at the bar. It came out of a bottle marked Côtes-du-Rhône, and it was wretched. I visited the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville in search of a requested piece of enamelware, then continued my search at Samaritaine. I used to buy hardware here in the bricolage or do-it-yourself section in the basement and never, I think, went upstairs to take in the splendid exposed iron frame of the building, which I learned about later from photographs.

41 There was an equally surprising glass roof over the whole. This was merely a department store. I crossed the river via Pont Neuf (which had been getting some stonework recently that really was neuf ) and went straight up rue Dauphine, its racket undiminished during my long absence, to the Café Conti in Carrefour Buci. I did not believe the proprietor could be the same man who had had the place thirty years ago, but he certainly had the same look about him, able to handle anything that might come up, legal or illegal, humorous or violent, in that teeming crossroads of the Latin Quarter. I decided not to ask. I had a coffee at the bar, found the telephone was still in the alcove by the WC and the WC was still the French kind, and left. I took the rue de Buci to the rue de Seine and descended as far as the rue des Beaux-Arts, where I turned left into cool shadows and near silence, past quiet galleries, private houses, small hotels. I could see a little in advance of my arrival at the corner that the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts was most certainly still right there, and in - deed the proprietors were just outside the front door, locking the place between lunch and dinner. I did actually recognize the tall and still- beautiful Madame Bargeau. (In 1966, she ran the front, Monsieur was in the kitchen.) At ﬁrst they ignored me as I gazed at the windows and pretended to study the posted menu, then as they were about to go down rue Bonaparte toward the river, Monsieur Bargeau turned and caught my eye and asked if I needed renseignements . I said: —Thirty years ago I had the habit of eating here. —Then you must come in and take a look, he replied immediately. As you can see, we are still here! As he put the keys back in the locks, Madame Bargeau asked what I had been doing in Paris at the time, and had I been in France all this time? I said I had worked for the Herald Tribune , which she recognized, and that no, on the contrary, I had been out of France all this time. For that instant I was ashamed of the fact. Once inside, M. Bargeau men - tioned the one change in the dining room that he could remember mak - ing since ’66. I was struck by the sight of the stairway to the salle above, which I had entirely forgotten. I mentioned eating well at ten francs and he said: —Well, it’s seventy-ﬁve now, so you see it’s still not expensive.

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 42 And that was true. I walked up the rue Bonaparte to arrive here at the little park, and after I had written these notes, a bag lady arrived to wash and drink at the water spigot, which happened to be next to my bench, at the other end of which she set her sacks. She was talking, but I think to herself. I would like to have given her all the money I had, but since that was not done, I gave her nothing, which was also wrong. Not looking at the woman, I gazed across the road at the corner café, and reflected on the long-ago evening when I took affront at the price of something there and spoke rudely to the barman, and later my com - panion of the moment told me it was important to remain polite in public. Even if offended. Out of consideration for those around you. And what was it about? Was it about value or was it about my not hav - ing enough money to be in that café? Paris certainly did not look so in - triguing to me now. Had I died or grown? There were still parisiennes but fewer of them, I think, caught my notice. The lady next to me now seemed more significant. I risked a direct look. But it was too late. Or she never was talking to me anyway. After a visit (my first) to the famous église next to my little park, I made a long peregrination on Boulevard Saint-Germain, in the length- ening shadows under the abundant trees, and then across half of the river to Île de la Cité, not omitting to admire the flank of Notre-Dame while passing, and so discovering the park behind it, which had a num - ber of labeled trees. I traversed the little bridge to Île Saint Louis and strolled up and down. All the hotels were three-star now, including the one that claimed the last extant jeu-de-paume (early handball) court in Paris. I paused before a tall narrow house advertising itself as a restaurant and emphasizing a visit to its cellar to choose one’s wine for dinner. Through the open door I could glimpse the corner of a bar and the first treads of a stairway leading up. I then heard voices raised boisterously in a cappella singing, along the lines of a college fraternity song (but this was in French, and incomprehensible), and this sent me on my way across the other half of the river to the Marais, where I was to meet Avery at a restaurant called Au Bourguignon. I had plenty of time and so examined many of the streets between rue Saint-Antoine and the Seine, while it grew steadily cooler as evening approached. This part of the quarter was a mixture of large and small buildings, houses and schools, new and old, with plenty of shops and

43 cafés at the edges, and it gave the lie to my former impression of the Marais as a district of fine old houses with courtyards lately renovated by a rising young professional class. But there must have been some of that too, for, on the rue François Miron, a couple of shopfronts devoted to the ancient and modern history of the Marais displayed, with anxious commentary, exempla of radical architectural conversions concealed be - hind conventional accouterments. On a smaller street, another shop de - voted itself to Aids information. Separate posters in the window showed a young man and woman about to make love and two young men about to make love, each couple with the recommended protection, and each poster bore the same legend: it takes three to love. Au Bourgignon was a wide, shallow room that ran parallel to the street. There might have been ten tables. The kitchen was tucked behind partitions at the back to the left of center, and, at the extreme left, wine bottles were displayed on built-in racks. On the right side along the back wall, the stairway descended to the lavatories and the cellars. (When I went down, there was a stack of Domaine Mongeard-Mugneret cases next to the men’s room door.) On the wall over the stairs a large painted board advertised the many virtues of drinking Burgundy wine, the chief that it overcame sexual timidity. As I entered the restaurant I found Avery finishing a glass of white Chassagne with one of the chefs and the proprietor, a well-built, humorous man in his late thirties, wear - ing jeans. We were given a table at the far end next to the wine racks where Avery hoped (vainly, in the event) to avoid cigarette smoke, which was not yet forbidden, nor even unfashionable, in Paris restaurants. We had a very good dinner. The first course, a canard terrine , struck me as better focused than the course that followed. Of the duck, I re - member a clear flavor, an excellent texture and harmony with our red wine. The next course, langoustine , a French cousin of the lobster, was truly a mise-en-scène, served with disembodied head and claws sitting on a bed of spinach, confronting a scoop of apricot sherbet. The rest of the unfortunate animal had been removed from the shell, cut and shaped to look like shrimps and then ranged around the perimeter of the plate. Delicious certainly, but for me over-presented and on the sweet side, and not quite right with the wine. We did have an entirely successful, plump mirabelle tart for dessert, served with a sprig of white groseilles (these were tart!) for a witty contrast.

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 44 Did we mislead the proprietor by letting him promote the specials— a pavé de saumon and the langoustine —and only then telling him we wanted red wine? He was obviously prouder of the salmon. Perhaps he really wanted us to have that and with it probably a bottle of Meursault or Puligny. He was definitely uncomfortable with my asking which spe - cial would go better with red wine. Even if he gave the right answer, it was a stupid question on my part. We should have told him to pick a superb red wine and then find something on the menu to show it off. He did in fact pick a superb wine, the most remarkable bottle of my journey, a Domaine Leroy 1989 Nuits Saint-Georges Aux Vignerondes. One thousand, four hundred thirty-four bottles made at a rendement of twenty hectolitres per hectare, according to the label. (Hanson, how - ever, put the parcel at .38 ha., which implied twenty-eight hl/ha.) A hint of animal on the nose, not at all indicative of what was coming, and then in the mouth immediately open with a weight and strength that astonished; next the taste of something smoky, then a long, strong finish, full of acid, tannin and fruit. To find these sensations in strength, and all three distinct, at the end rather than the beginning, was alto - gether surprising. I was swept away. Avery was deeply pleased, and a good thing, too, since it was his treat. It proved A. J. Liebling’s obser - vation, quoted by Parker, that “Burgundy is a lovely thing when you can get anybody to buy it for you.”

OUR CYCLING RALLY the next day started at a schoolyard in Champs-sur-Marne. Hundreds of brightly dressed cyclists lined up in the cafeteria to pay their small inscriptions, choose their preferred length (100 or 120km) and obtain the printed itinerary and brevet , a ticket to ride that would be stamped at checkpoints. Once on the roads, we were often in the majority, compared with motorists, since ours was but one of several large rallies taking place that Sunday. At every junction we met cyclists from other rallies. I felt part of an invasion: the suburbs of Paris were ours! The pace was whatever one chose to make it. Our group sometimes ran along at 30kph for long stretches, sometimes dawdled to chat or joke. There was no very difﬁcult terrain here in the Île-de-France. Any - thing steep was also short. Jean-Claude and some new friends were with us, one couple in their ﬁfties, on their own machines, and another in

45 their forties, on a tandem. At checkpoints (easily identified some dis - tance in advance by lines of men standing at roadside with their backs to the road), we showed our brevets for stamping and were offered sim - ple food and drink. Women riders were rare, and not young. I wondered at this and was told it was normal. Numerous children rode with their fathers. Avery and I reached the second of three checkpoints, probably a bit more than 60km, before peeling off the charted route at Mormant and returning to Segrez to prepare the festive lunch. Of the food and wine at this final meal, I remember only the out - lines, despite my having cooked one of the dishes and chosen the bottles from Avery’s cellar. I do remember the ease and pleasure of the event, the cool, sunny weather in the green, green garden where we set out the tables, the frank conversation. Robert, master of the roast, donned a Vermont sweatshirt and tended the fire at some distance from the table. Avery gathered and mixed the salads and provided the bread and cheeses. I produced an unleavened pizza for the first course, and poured the wines. Jacqueline brought a tart. This gathering was not dedicated, but an ordinary celebration of ordinary lives, gently linked by a com - mon interest in cycling, and all the sweeter for yielding so much pleasure out of ordinary matters.

A FORTNIGHT IN FRANCE 46