Europe @ 2.4 km/h (36 page)

Saturday evening, in a local brasserie, it’s do or die for France and England — this time at the Stade de Paris rather than Hastings. Old men with red, white and blue warpaint on their faces will not be enough to toss the English this time round.

Near the end of the match I catch a young man hurrying towards the exit. From the camera he has been using, it is easy to guess a local journalist is on the job. ‘I think I have a story for you,’ I shout above the din. The civic air is thick with news, no doubt of that, but I don’t want to talk about rugby or the Day of the Pig. It’s M. Bacon I wish to focus on. In the next issue of the town’s newspaper, an article by Yann Scavarda appears under the headline (again translated) ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible here’.
³⁰

On reading the article, which it is pointless to quote here since you already have ‘the guts’ of it, I did discover one thing I hadn’t known: in French, ‘to hang up’ the phone, as M. Bacon did, is to
brutalement raccrocher
the device.
Oui, oui, oui,
I squeal, all the way home
.
That’s much more like what happened.

1083 km

I was sleeping when John Howard announced the election date. Presumably Kevin Rudd wasn’t, but it is still hard to believe the wily old campaigner won’t rescue his increasingly cracked chestnut from the fire.

1089-1090 km

Angers, 7 km from the Loire, is a pleasant enough town. But its best vantage point is nowhere in its charming lanes or well-stocked shops, but above it all — from the chateau that shares its name. This acropolis, first occupied by the Gauls, was later controlled by the Counts of Anjou — who organised resistance in the ninth century to Breton and, subsequently, Norsemen invaders.

Seated beneath one of the chateau’s time-ravaged bastions — and there are many to choose from — your overwhelming impression is that the Anjous didn’t like visitors calling unannounced. ‘Seventeen towers built on a rocky promontory made Angers the best defended fortress of St Louis’ kingdom,’ a brochure confirms. ‘In the 12th century the Anjou dynasty, under the more familiar name of the Plantagenets, reigned from the Pyrenees to Scotland.’

If that power was on the wane, the process must have been imperceptible. In the mid-15th century, King Rene reigned over Hungary, the Two Sicilies and Jerusalem as well as his dukedoms of Anjou, Bar and Lorraine. Talk about plans to dominate Europe: these counts were nothing if not ambitious. ‘The dukes of those times were enlightened princes and art lovers, and developed a dazzling court life. The many periods they spent in Naples influenced both their lifestyle and their conception of architecture.’ And so Europe, considered as a volatile compound of Northern and Southern elements, is seen to have a distinguished pedigree. The love of indulgence, the so-called Mediterranean view of the world, is kept in balance by the cool-headed austerity of the Northerner. Or so the theory goes.

An inexpert group of railwaymen deputed to lift my chair from the train at Ste Pierre des Cours, near Tours, managed to warp the tyre so that it would no longer roll straight. Fortunately, one of their colleagues at Tours station escorted me to a nearby bike shop where the warp was straightened out.

1097-1105 km

Tours is right up there with Freiburg and Bremen as one of my favourite European cities. Easy to get around, a hotel close to the station — and the Loire undeniably picturesque with houseboats scattered along its banks and broad bridges spanning them.

On an autumnal morning in the park, I sit under a broad-leaved tree of impressive stature — an old lady walking her dog in the park tells me it is a
platane
, a plane tree over 100 years old — and wonder who thought it was a compliment to call this city a mini-Paris.
Au
contraire
, Tours is clean and relaxed, what Paris aspires to be but can never be, because of its congestion and ‘superior’ attitude.

Embarrassing moments tonight in Tours’ sedate Brasserie de l’Univers. My weary frame was resting on the banquette in the dining hall under a splendrous stained-glass ceiling from the late 19th century when the braying of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi’ was heard from the front terrace. Shrinking mouse-like into the red plush, I nibbled at my double-scoop strawberry
glace
. Chauvinist rantings were suddenly drowned by a bull’s roar, ‘Helen, don’t give the mongrel a thing!’ Just when I thought this immature party — average age probably 60 — were incapable of outdoing this outrage, a full-throated chorus issued forth. Boozily off-key and unidentifiable to start with, it soon morphed into a version of
The
Road to Gundagai
at 150 decibels. I crept out, doing nothing to let on that I was their compatriot. And you know what? In many ways, I didn’t feel like one.

1108-1113 km

In Martyr’s Square, Orleans, stands a statue of Joan of Arc, who grew up here and delivered the town from English besiegers in 1429. Damaged in World War II, the statue was restored to the citizens of Old Orléans through the generosity of those in the New.

There is something magical about France. A woman in front of a perfumery on an Orleans pedestrian mall presses into my palm a brochure — and, after a perfunctory ‘
Merci, non
’ from me responds ‘
un petit cadeau, monsieur
’. It turns out to be a magnetic compass. Something useful for the journey — and from a complete stranger! Back in Martyrs’ Square the sun comes out and the merry-go-round cranks into life.
Oui
, there is something truly magical about France.

On 17 October, Day 170, I notch up 17,700 km while in Old Orléans and, by the time I depart Vierzon down the line — the connecting station almost in the centre of France — for the more luxuriant, more vibrant South, the total overall stands at 17,717. There is no time to consult a numerologist. I would prefer to buy a lottery ticket on the strength of it but can think of, oh, seventeen good reasons not to.

Here we are in the geographical centre of France, whizzing south. And what is my lasting French impression of the heartland? Grassland, in jarring shades of green, grazed by cattle that give our passing train the bovine equivalent of a Gallic shrug.

THE SOUTH OF FRANCE and MONACO

Time spent: 19 days

Distance covered: 2829 km

Distance pushed: 172.3 km

Average speed: 3.250 km

Journey distance to date (excluding Andorra): 20,953 km

1113-1117 km

The southbound train arrives in Vichy three hours ahead of a national rail strike, the first in a rolling series of
mises-en-grève
directed against President Sarkozy’s plan to swipe public servants’ early-retirement cushions from under them. I recall David, mein host in Bellerive, telling me, ‘In my next life I’m coming back as a French civil servant’. I, by contrast, strike it lucky. The first likely-looking hotel I call at happens to have a spacious ground-floor apartment flanking a courtyard, costing just over €30 (A$50) a night.

There is a delicate subject I am keen to broach with the good people of Vichy. ‘How does it feel to live in a city that capitulated to the Nazis?’ Obviously it will not be polite to ask straight out, yet I am not here long. To discover what Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Government may mean to the local populace these days is a puzzle with no clear solution. It will come to me.

1118-1124 km

At breakfast in the courtyard this morning the hotel’s co-owner, Annette, is not in the least put out by my prickly question. Mention the collaborators, she says, and young people will nod in recognition, but the choices of that era do not weigh on them. A common refrain runs, ‘
Pétain, il est mort
’. Their interest in the subject, she adds, is just as dead as the marshal himself. Their elders, of course, remember — but the town itself is neither haunted nor daunted by this chapter in its history. Famous Vichy water, Annette reminds me, springs from a source that is fast-flowing and cleansing, like the passage of decades.

Vichy is proud of its ‘beach’, a handsome strip of sand alongside the local Lac d’Allier. From a park above the strand I hear a distinctive clinking. Following a trail through the park I emerge opposite a grid of petanque rinks, or
clos
. It has been a quiet ambition of mine to encounter this pastime somewhere in France. Men spectate, their rangy arms on the metal fence demarcating the rink. A couple of them explain elements of
les boules
for the ignorant stranger’s benefit.

The differences from lawn bowls, a sport my father still plays in his late 80s, are obvious enough. For a start,
boules
are thrown, not bowled. Players’ stances express their individuality. One man waddles round like a duck, flapping his ‘wings’ before hurling the small, light (700 gram) silver bowl at the gravel surface. Reverse spin, I see, is not confined to cricket. Equivalent to the bowls jack is a small pip, or pivot, usually orange-coloured, called the
bouchon
, at which you aim your projectile.

After agreeing to show how it’s done (only to add some jollity to their afternoon), I retire — gracefully, I hope, but at any event backwards — to the ‘pavilion’, a club bar at a reasonably safe distance from the
clos
. There, at an outside table, a lifelong resident of Vichy is already enjoying a beer, something rare enough to be notable in wine-besotted France. Five months in a wheelchair after a recent accident (he now uses a walking stick) serves as an icebreaker.

Did I say the answer to my impertinent Vichy question might come to me? Well, it does now as Roget Faure — seeming to sense my purpose before I ask anything — starts to speak of what it was like to grow up with the Gestapo living in his house. Faure was only twelve when their jackboots marched into his home — ‘not my neighbour’s house,
my
house’, he emphasises, the indignity of it still rankling six-and-a-half decades on.

‘Pétain,’ he surprises me, ‘was not pro-German.’ Well, I observe, they removed his name from the Verdun Memorial after World War II, so someone must have thought he was. In the manner of wise old men whose opinion is impervious to arguments from those who were not there, he repeats, ‘
Pétain n’etait pas pour les allémands.
’ (‘Pétain wasn’t for the Germans.’)