The Discovery of France (44 page)

For the clean sheets, he probably had to thank his tutor Mme de Genlis, to judge by the section of her phrase book devoted to inns:

Until foreign tourists arrived with their money and expectations, most hotels were simple inns at staging posts. They offered meals at the common table and a spartan room, sometimes just a bunk bed in the kitchen or the dining room. The table was usually occupied by travelling salesmen who helped themselves to the stew before the ladies and appeared to need very little sleep.

Single bedrooms were usually available only in grand hotels. Many travellers found themselves climbing into bed with a member of the innkeeper’s family or one of the passengers from the stagecoach. A book on etiquette published in 1728 devoted several paragraphs to this delicate situation: ‘If poor lodging oblige one to sleep in the bedroom of a person to whom one owes respect’, allow the person to undress first, then slip into the bed and ‘sleep without making a sound’. In the morning, do not allow yourself to be seen naked, do not use a mirror and do not comb your hair, especially if the bed is in the kitchen, ‘where hair may fly into the plates’.

Away from the main roads, the ‘inn’ might be nothing more than a farmhouse whose owner had been asked for shelter so often that he had installed a few flea-infested beds in an outbuilding. Well into the nineteenth century, travellers were often forced to accept free food and hospitality and caused great offence if they tried to pay. Tourists – especially French tourists – in the wilder parts seem to have expected their adventurousness to be rewarded and complained bitterly about innkeepers who tried to make a profit. The ‘two friends’ who published an ‘artistic’ guide to the Pyrenees in 1835 warned against ‘typical mountain people, who are inquisitive, greedy, selfish, crude and ignorant’. To their disgust, the people of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan claimed to be too poor to take them in. The cobbler who kindly let them sleep on the floor of his shop must have
been surprised by the growing numbers of people who knocked at his door after the visit of the ‘two friends’: the guide gives his name and address in the list of hotels, along with Don Farlo at Panticosa, just across the Spanish border, who, ‘without exactly being an innkeeper, is generous and hospitable and asks only that visitors pay the cost of their board and lodging’.

When trade and tourism picked up after the fall of Napoleon, the number of tolerable hotels increased. Names such as Hôtel des Alliés, des Anglais or des Américains were usually a sign of comfort (the word ‘comfort’, in this sense, was borrowed from English). In the larger towns, hoteliers sent servants to meet the coach. As soon as they arrived in Auxerre in 1812, George Depping and his fellow passengers were surrounded by servants singing the praises of their respective hotels:

The innkeeper might also be the postmaster, wood merchant, tobacconist and mayor. Despite these monopolies, prices stabilized remarkably quickly throughout the country, to the irritation of French travellers whose money was worth much less than pounds or dollars. Victor Hugo defined the innkeeper’s duties in
Les Misérables
: ‘bleed the man, fleece the woman, skin the child’; ‘know how much wear and tear a shadow causes the mirror and fix a rate for it.’ The usual cost of dinner was three francs, including wine if the hotel was in a wine-growing region; full board was six to eight francs a day at a time when the average daily wage of a worker was one and a half francs.

American and British tourists rarely complained about the cost but were often appalled by the lack of hygiene. ‘Fail not to take a piece of soap with you’, advised Murray’s guide: ‘the provisions for personal ablution are very defective’. Meals were commonly served in the bedchamber, the walls and floor of which might be ‘black with the accumulated filth of years’ and teeming with fleas. Mrs Cradock’s
maid killed four hundred and eighty in a single room. Dogs were seen wrestling with intestines in the kitchen. In the courtyard of an inn near Lyon, Philip Thicknesse was surprised to see spinach being laid in a flat basket, apparently for the dogs to eat. Later that day, he saw the serving girl deliver it to his table. (‘I turned it, dish and all, upon her head.’)

For many tourists, the most harrowing expedition was not the crossing of an Alpine pass or a night-time ride on a bad road but the unavoidable visit to the
cabinet d’aisances
. British expectations gradually turned hotels into the efficient, impersonal establishments that the French found soulless and intimidating, but the results were not always to the liking of the foreigners. At Nîmes in 1763, Tobias Smollett found ‘the Temple of Cloacina’ ‘in a most shocking condition’:

Later tourists would be baffled by bidets and daunted by the porcelain foot-pads on either side of a small dark hole, but even in simpler days there were mysteries to solve. A traveller in Béarn in 1812 who slept on the third tier of a four-tier bunk bed was woken in the night by a smell and a noise of ropes and pulleys. A voice in the darkness whispered, ‘Don’t worry, sir, it’s just the vicar going up.’ ‘Vicaire’ turned out to be a local name for ‘chamber pot’. Little fuss was made about the matter in a country which still respects the right to relieve oneself, if necessary, in public. Anyone was welcome to use the designated corner of a farmyard. In villages, sheltered areas such as bridges and covered alleys were ‘the water closets of several generations, with the open air as disinfectant’ (‘Fosse d’aisances’,
Grand Dictionnaire universel
).

In towns, public facilities could be surprisingly pleasant. Richard’s 1828 guide to Paris made a special point of mentioning ‘the
cabinets d’aisances
that are most in vogue’. Some of these
cabinets
, like the
toilet at the entrance to the Louvre museum, were cleaner than toilets in private apartments and cost only fifteen centimes. One shining example, in the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, ‘[deserved] to be seen from a technical point of view’. Doors to conceal the occupant of the
cabinet
became increasingly common, often marked simply ‘100’ (from a feeble pun on ‘
cent
’ and ‘
sent
’, ‘smells’). In Provence, town dwellers sometimes opened a convenient little cubicle in the corner of the house and sold the contents to a manure collector. By the 1860s, this mutually profitable arrangement had spread along the stony roads around Nice, Antibes and Saint-Raphae¨l. Coach travellers who had once had to duck behind bushes found little huts adorned with climbing plants and notices written prettily in French or Nissard by peasants competing for fertilizer: ‘
Ici on est bien
’ (‘It’s nice here’), ‘
Ici on est mieux
’ (‘It’s nicer here’), or ‘
Ma questo è necessario
’.

*

T
HE OTHER MAIN NECESSITY
of life is such a vast subject that an encyclopedia would barely cover it. However, most of that encyclopedia would be devoted to rarities and exceptions. The standard fare was usually too dull to be mentioned, unless it was spectacularly bad, which is why, in early nineteenth-century novels, great meals are usually on a par with outstanding events like orgies, with which they often coincide.

Few people would have guessed that France would one day be the goal of gastro-tourists. Beyond the homes of the rich and a few restaurants, recipes were unusual. The word ‘
recette
’ referred primarily to the preparation of pharmaceutical remedies. Most popular ‘recipes’ were magical cures – ‘Slice a pigeon down the middle; remove the heart; place it on the child’s head’, etc. – or snippets of peasant wisdom. In Roussillon, ducks were thought to say ‘
Naps! Naps!
’ because they were best served with turnips (‘
nap
’ in Catalan). Interesting combinations of food appear not to have exercised the minds of people for whom the height of culinary pleasure was a full stomach. A story was told of four young men from Saint-Brieuc in Brittany discussing what they would eat if imagination was the only limit. One suggested an unusually long sausage, another imagined
‘beans the size of toes’ boiled with bacon, the third chose a sea of fat with a giant ladle to cream it off and the fourth complained that the others had ‘already picked all the good things’.

Many towns now promote themselves with a ‘traditional’ speciality which, more often than not, is a form of
andouille
(‘charcuterie composed of pig or boar intestines, chopped, strongly spiced and enclosed in another intestine’). Most modern versions of the
andouille
, like the Scottish haggis, are deceptively refined versions of their rugged ancestors. The pungent
andouille
was a rare treat in any case. For tourists who ventured beyond Paris, the true taste of France was stale bread. The degree of staleness reflected the availability of fuel. A manual of rural architecture published in Toulouse in 1820 stated that the public oven should be large enough to allow the week’s bread to be baked in a single twenty-four-hour period. In the Alps, enough bread was produced in a single batch for a year and sometimes two or three years. It was baked, at least once, then hung above a smoky fire or dried in the sun. Sometimes, the ‘loaf’ was just a thin barley and bean-flour biscuit. To make it edible and to improve the colour, it was softened in buttermilk or whey. Rich people used white wine.

This was bread that had lived through the year with the people who baked it, as hard as stone, immune to the weather and able to travel great distances. The tougher varieties came out of storage as fossilized crisps that had to be smashed with a hammer, boiled five times with a few potatoes and perhaps flavoured with milk. Most travellers quailed at the thought of eating local bread and took their own supply of biscuits. In the Auvergne, rye flour mixed with bran produced a heavy black gloop that was helped down with water and whey. In the south-west, where maize gradually replaced millet, the dough was sliced and fried in fat or cooked under the ashes of a fire. With salted sardines or nettle soup, it was considered delicious, but only by people who ate it every day of their lives.

Tourists in the gastronomically impoverished provinces might have felt deprived as they wolfed down their rabbits and chickens, but they were usually enjoying a far richer diet than the natives. In many parts of France, meat was only for special occasions. A government fact-finding mission to Anjou in 1844 found that despite the tons of meat that were sent from there to Paris, the people of Anjou were
practically vegetarian. Dinner consisted of bread, soup (cabbage, potato or onion), a vegetable and a hard-boiled egg. The year’s menu might also include an occasional piece of cheese, a few nuts in winter and some salted lard on Sunday to change the taste of the bread.

Meat that was consumed locally did not always come from the farmyard or the paddock. The only large animal that was never eaten, except in times of famine, was wolf, which was known to be repulsive. In Burgundy, some people considered fox a delicacy, ‘provided that it be hung out in a garden, on a plum tree, for two weeks during the frosts’. Red squirrels – tame enough to be killed by an old person with a stick – were eaten in the Morvan and the Landes. In the Alps, marmots, which conveniently evacuate their bowels before hibernating, were tugged from their burrows, boiled and sometimes soaked in water for twenty-four hours to remove the musky smell. The flesh had an oily texture and tasted faintly of soot. The fat was rubbed into rheumatic limbs and the grease was burned in lamps. Bears in the Pyrenees sometimes ate humans but were not eaten themselves until tourists created a market for exotic meat. A guide to Toulouse and environs in 1834 advised that ‘occasionally, when a bear has been killed, one is served a
beefsteak
[sic] of this meat, which is very good’.

At first, it is hard to tell how anyone survived on the traditional diet. The socialist revolutionary Proudhon, who spent his childhood in Besançon, claims that his family grew ‘tall and strong’ on a diet of
gaudes
(roasted cornmeal), potatoes and vegetable soup, which would have left them short and sickly. Many diets described in memoirs or in the ‘
pensions alimentaires
’ of wills suggest a fatal lack of vitamins and proteins. In some cases, almost all the calories came from cereals in the form of bread. It turns out, however, that Proudhon also spent much of the day grazing like the cows he tended, filling himself with corn, poppy seeds, peas, rampion, salsify, cherries, grapes, rosehips, blackberries and sloes. In warmer parts of France, the informal diet could be even more nutritious. Near Avignon, Agricol Perdiguier (p. 158) gorged himself on peaches, grapes, apricots and figs, and more varieties of wild fruit than he could name in French. The fact that there were over three million beehives in France in 1862 (one for every thirteen inhabitants) shows that the diet was not always as dire as it sounds. In a plain culinary landscape, a quince crystallized
in honey and roasted in the embers of a fire could be an unforgettable feast.