Europe @ 2.4 km/h (37 page)

Of de Gaulle M. Faure says, ‘He led the Resistance from England’. It could be he is praising the Free French leader; it could be he is damning him. Then, allaying any suspicion that he has grown
faux
nostalgic about the Occupation, he says, rheumy-eyed, ‘They were like this in our house’ (and at this recollection he points an imaginary sub-machine gun).

Did different soldiers treat him differently? Were there ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Gestapo? A pause, then, ‘There were good ones, there were bad ones. But they were in
our
house!’

No one could fairly accuse Vichy of whitewashing its history, yet … General de Gaulle’s call to arms, ‘
A Tous Les Français
’, issued from his London exile, is a common sight in public places nationwide even today. Only here do I see it consigned to obscurity behind a bush. At another public site I spot a remarkable historical error in a name plate on Avenue General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was not the
Chef des Armees Alliés
, 1939-45, as it says. America didn’t enter the war until Pearl Harbor. Surely even a Vichy schoolchild would know that.

1127 km

At the entrance to a dogs’ sandpit beside Vichy’s Grand Marché is this catchy little sign: NOS TROTTOIRS NE SONT PAS DES CROTTOIRS.
Merci de
les respecter.
Or, in cultivated English, OUR PAVEMENTS ARE NOT SHITHOUSES.
Thank you for respecting
them
.

1131-1137 km

One train takes me to Clermont-Ferrand, a second to Lyons, and a third — delayed 40 minutes by the erratic strike action — delivers me to Grenoble in the late afternoon. Tonight is the World Cup rugby final.

In bistros and brasseries France has been tuned in for weeks — up in the north for the international cachet, here in the South with genuine enthusiasm. Just as I’d envisaged, Grenoble in the shadow of the Alps — home of the 1968 Winter Olympics and a sports-loving city
par
excellence
— has plenty of big screens up for the occasion. A street-corner brasserie becomes my grandstand of choice.

Twenty seconds after kick-off, a group of youths swarm in — half-interested in the game since it is the
grand finale
, but if the French themselves had been playing they would undoubtedly have been three times as numerous, ten times as raucous.

An intense first half — what else would you expect from South Africa and defending champions England, who beat Australia in Sydney back in ’03? — but rugby players routinely ascribe victory to special inspiration and, in the end, the physical presence of Gordon Brown at the Stade de France is no match for Nelson Mandela’s pre-match video address to his national squad.

Spot on half-time a three-pointer puts
l’Afrique du Sud
on 9 against
Angleterre
on 3. After the break the Springboks pronk their way to an emphatic 15-6 victory. In the bar the Frenchmen promptly rediscover their passion for the game, the ancient enemy having been conquered again. Oh, and this will be the furthest thing from their minds right now, but what does that say about European unity?

1139-1149 km

It’s a strange sort of railway strike when the staff turn up for work — and do work — but, when some of the trains arrive an hour or two late, and at short notice, they are spurred into short bursts of activity and work much more quickly than usual.

This is a day of contrasts in my dealings with the SNCF. The departure from Grenoble was fraught, with ‘assistance staff’ temporarily mislaying my luggage (it turned up in the stationmaster’s office) but the rest of the team, boarding me and then inspecting my Eurail pass, nothing short of professionalism personified. At Valence TGV — a three-year-old station as grand as a medium-size airport, standing in splendid isolation near the foothills of the French Alps — I had to wait 75 minutes for the connection to Nice. And it was here I experienced the contrast.

Valence’s ‘
bonne équipe
‘ (good team) treated me like a VIP customer, beginning with that oft-forgotten word, ‘Welcome’; being resourceful instead of bureaucratic — when one of the lifts refused to come they unlocked the one normally reserved for staff — and ending, or so I thought, with a complimentary coffee plus a ham-and-cheese baguette. But customer service officer Said, originally from Casablanca, still had an ace up his sleeve. Ten minutes before the TGV — Very Fast Train — from Paris arrived, he upgraded me to a first-class seat on the silver bullet to the coast — a dream that the need for thrift had forced me to abandon.

Just after a quarter past four this Sunday afternoon the TGV emerges from a tunnel and there, unheralded, is the Mediterranean Sea, filling the picture window, glistening in the autumn sun. I have returned to the ‘centre of the Earth’.

I note with quiet satisfaction that it has taken 144 days, almost five months, to cross Europe from north to south — from Gamvik to Marseilles, whence the train will continue on to Nice. If my French fellow passengers appear indifferent to this epic achievement —
Can’t
they tell from my
appearance?
— at least the folks back home should have been suitably in awe. In Grenoble this morning I phoned home. (A partial transcript follows.)

‘Later today I’ll have crossed Europe from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, Mum.’

‘That’s nice, Ken.’

‘Tonight I’ll be on the French Riviera, at Nice.’

‘That’s nice, Ken.’

‘No, not nice, Mum. Neece.’

Today, 21 October, I attain another traveller’s ‘milestone’. Counting up all my previous journeys outside Australia, today marks six years of my life spent on the overseas road.

A wise friend long ago christened me ‘an international vagrant’ and I really don’t mind, although to travel so far you need more money than a vagrant usually possesses. But, whatever country you go to, you are likely to run into other Antipodeans. Why are Australians and New Zealanders such inveterate globetrotters? I long ago concluded that it is at least partly because most of us have relatively recent European roots.

Excepting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, we Australians belong to families (the Desses were just one) that arrived in the Great South Land within the past few generations. We boast — or used to — of being multicultural. But our dominant culture is so homogeneous that it is natural for us, living on our island nation, to wonder, What is life like elsewhere?

With our many importations from Europe — from democracy to the cappuccino — it would be tempting to study the ways of foreigners through the prism of our own society, or from the comfort of a computer desk or armchair. But there is no substitute for being there — and I suspect that Aussie backpackers, and even more affluent travellers, feel this in their bones.

1149-1159 km

John Cage — whose silent musical ‘composition’,
4' 33"
, proved him a master at eloquently expressing nothing — is quoted, in translation, on a wall of Nice’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. ‘
Même quand il ne se passe rien, il se passe toujours quelque chose
.’ Which is to say, ‘Even when nothing is happening, something always happens’.

The truth of this paradox is one I keep encountering every day of the journey. Along with something else: anything that happens here happens with style. Call it
chic
, the French do. Paris may think it has a monopoly on
chic
— but when the time comes to let its tresses down where does
le tout Paris
prefer to holiday in style? The South — and, more specifically, the Côte d’Azur, that strip of Mediterranean glamour and leisure resorts, spiced with intrigue, that is perched on the coast running from the Italian border south-west to Toulon. Countless people who have never been there know the names Menton, Antibes, Cannes, St Tropez.

Even at this time of year, the Mediterranean has a reputation — not thoroughly deserved — of being ablaze with sunshine. If Paris
chic
happens to be a strapless dress, on the Riviera (poor things) they often go without.

Nice is a lushly flowering Garden of Eden, a paradise of pine and palm, where the knowledge of evil is often better advertised than the knowledge of good. Even so it’s literally on the side of the angels, or at least the bay of the same name (Baie des Anges).

Wandering along the Promenade des Anglais at night, seventeen beaches visible by day are lost to view. But behold a stupendous arc of light where humans have lived for 2000 years. The lights are brightest, the shadows darkest, in the Vieux Nice quarter, where at any moment you expect a gun battle to break out, or Graham Greene — despite having been dead nearly twenty years — to appear at his regular table. Not all the tales these walls could tell would be pretty, despite the surface sheen. All Nature runs wild in steamy Nice, human nature not excepted.

Overlooking the town is the ancient Roman city of Cemenelum, now home to Gallo-Roman ruins. Many Southern habitations are the longest-settled in France. (Whisper it not in Montmartre.) Overlooking the ruins, in a 17th-century Genovese villa, is a museum bequeathed to the city by the leading post-impressionist Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who began his painter’s life at exactly the same time as Picasso, and — like him — worked prolifically until the end. He ‘discovered’ Nice at age 47, but the museum brochure exaggerates in saying he ‘settled here for the rest of his life’. He certainly kept coming back, and regarded it as home, but to say Matisse ‘settled’ anywhere is to misunderstand the man. At the age of 60 he left Nice for Tahiti, where he saw out the Thirties. He would later muse aloud, ‘I had a great desire to appreciate the light on the other side of the Equator …’

In 1947 Matisse designed a Chapel of the Rosary for the Dominican community of Vence, a hill town not far from Nice. This followed his meeting with Monique Bourgeois —
Wait a minute,
could she have been a relative of the old lady in Père Lachaise
…? The Riviera and reverie, you see, are never far apart.

Matisse’s pencil sketches — such as his study of a geriatric,
Academie — Etude de Vieillard
, from the mid-1890s and obviously done from life — truly tantalise. As does the
Portrait de Madame
Matisse
(1915), which depicts her wearing a hat that prefigures the Sydney Opera House by more than half a century.