Song of the south

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

It had been a bleak winter and a bleaker spring in England, and I was not willing to wait for any Chaucerian spring. I had hoped for daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty, but as we landed at Calais and as we drove south, there was no sign of daffodils, though plenty of signs of the winds of March. It was quite a long time since I had driven through northern France, and I had forgotten how re- pulsively ugly the department of the Nord is. On the whole, I think it is more repulsive than south Lancashire or the Middle Ward of Lan- arkshire; and there was the same proliferation of atrocious nineteenth-century churches, again possibly worse than anything in England or even in Scotland.

But after all, were not my wife and I driving into 'the warm south,' away from the fringes of Europe on which we had been barely existing? 'Kennst du das Land' I murmured to myself more than once, looking forward to the moment when, south of Paris, we were on our way to 'dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth.' True, it seemed far enough away as we contemplated the vast floods in the valley of the SaOne. There were places where the Saone looked as wide as the Mississippi at St Louis. Of course, it was not as deep as the Mississippi at St Louis. Trees peeping above the floods sug- gested there was land beneath; but the chilly spirit in which I, at any rate, had left Britain was not modified even by the very good hotel at Chalon-sur-Saone, and was only slightly modified as we drove through and under Lyons and out on to the Autoroute du Sud.

We had, in fact, joined it near Versailles (with some difficulty owing to the ambiguity of the map provided by the AA). I had not seen the neighbourhood of Versailles since they started building skyscrapers round it, and I wondered how much of the majesty of the Château and the pare would survive the French fashion for skyscrapers which was already alter- ing the Paris. skyline. But it was not only the surroundings of Versailles that were being altered. Quite small towns were going in for skyscrapers for reasons that I cannot under- stand, aesthetically or economically. But then I cannot understand skyscrapers in Glasgow either.

My wife and I were struck by the excellence and expense of the hotels we stayed at, and my %life was delighted in handling her Land-Rover, lasing the Autoroute du Sud that she had used before it was as excellent as it is today. Cer- tainly no road I have driven over in Britain in recent years is half as good. True, there is nothing equivalent to the road from New York to Chicago where you can drive 800 miles with- out a traffic light; nor are there any eight-lane. not to speak of sixteen-lane, roads, I am glad to say. There are two drawbacks to the Auto- route du Sud. One is that you are cut off from yery attractive towns that you pass by but see ally at a distance. Thus, you have to leave the Autoroute- to spend the night in a place like Chalon-sur-Saone and you have to leave it to get a meal near a place called Valence, cele- brated for the Hermitage vineyard, and for other things as well. But on the Autoroute, I saw a sign of Americanisation which I report on without comment : the only drink you could get at the service stations, apart from some dreadful coffee from a machine, was non- alcoholic beer. I have not tasted this fluid since tne remote days of Prohibition : then, at any rate, it was made drinkable by the addition of .pure alcohol : it was 'spiked.' In France, you have to drink near beer when it is merely near.

I cannot recommend it.

We also suddenly realised that France is much more expensive that we had thought, be- cause we had been forgetting that the franc is a little less than twelve to the £1. We had quite a good meal at an equivalent of a roadside 'caff' which we thought was a bargain at twelve francs a head : but twelve francs a bead was £1 a head. It was worth that but it was hardly cheap. On the other hand, we could not have got it at all on an equivalent English road.

Marseilles, of course, was as charming as ever. I first knew it in 1928 when it was totally untainted by modernity. I have often told my right-wing American friends that they don't know what a free enterprise system is unless they knew Marseilles in 1928, for then, on the Cannebiere, there were rival public conveni- ences offering their services at different fees de- pending on whether they offered paper, soap, hot water or, indeed, modern contort. This was real laissez-faire. Then the. Vieux Port has gone. It was doomed for removal anyway, but the Germans cleared out a great deal of it as a military precaution, and thanks to the Ger- mans and to the development of Marseilles from being a mere port to being a great industrial centre, a great deal of old Marseilles has been removed, and still older Marseilles, Greek Mas- silia, is being excavated.

I had strongly hoped that the atrocious nine- teenth-century cathedral was being removed as well—it has none of the rich badness of the Sacre-Coeur. This, alas, was not to be. But walk- ing where the old streets of the Vieux Port had been, I remembered a famous Oxford episode. The great Dr George B. Grundy of Corpus (Oxford), of which I was then a fellow, on learning that I had just come back from Mar- seilles, told me he remembered it well. When, as a young man, he had gone there with a very 'senior man,' this `senior man' had insisted on going to see the 'view porr.' Grundy knew it was dangerous, so he got two gendarmes, 'and we went into the View Porr. Within two minutes we were surrounded by naked women. I turned to Bishop Stubbs, and said, "This is no place for us." ' Many years later, I found -Sir-Reginald Stubbs, an old Corpus man and then Governor of Ceylon, beside me at dinner, and told him the story. He said 'My father never told me that. Of course, now I come to think of it, he wouldn't!' But the long series of 'double takes' by which G. B. Grundy delighted Oxford is a theme for another piece.

Coming back to Paris was to see from the train how very big France was when the Romans entered it. Cisalpine Gaul was very much bigger than any of the plains in the Italy the Romans knew, and Transalpine Gaul was a world on a scale of which they had no real idea. In the north we passed through vast, open, well- farmed fields. In the south we had passed though patches of badly farmed as well as well- farmed land, now going through a great econo- mic transformation with all its usual pains.

I ought to be able to report a great deal of political excitement in Paris. I cannot. The French are now a very religious people and were busily celebrating Lent by going off to various holiday resorts or to their country cottages or their ancestral villages. The proposed referen- dum puzzled people more than it excited people, though a great deal of even moderately intelli- gent opposition to the General's proposals had an odd echo of 1964. M Mitterand seemed to me to be talking about taking over 'the corn- at earlier struggles. In the year 1834 a long series of games was played between the 'Irishman Alexander McDonnel (1798-1835) and Louis Charles Mahe de la Bourdonnais (1797-1840); De la Bourdonnais won 44, McDonnell 28, drawn 13. While one could not call this a world cham- pionship match (such a concept did not then exist) it was certainly a match between two of the finest players of the day and it is therefore not unfair to compare it with championship matches today.

One cannot play through the games without being struck by the enormous advance that chess has made; these games—though very entertaining—are well below modern master standard, let alone world

championship, in everything except tactical in- genuity. Here is one of the most famous, 'the im- mortal fiftieth,' to enable readers to judge for themselves.

manding heights of the economy'; he never used the word `abrasive,' but otherwise it was quite like the Wilson campaign of that year This was not encouraging.

But I was struck by two things: first, the great general sense of loss caused by the death of President Eisenhower. One popular though not very impressive journal, a right-wing oppo- nent of General de Gaulle, announced the news under a banner heading, 'The Liberator of France is dead.' This, of course, was a rebuke to the claims of the General to having been the real liberator and it also expressed a very general French feeling for Eisenhower. When it was learned that we were to be represented by Lord Mountbatten and by Mr Healey or, rather, when it was learned that we were not to be represented by anybody the French had ever heard of, there was a considerable feeling, even among the most bitter enemies of the General, that "He" will steal the show again.'-I was also struck by the habit of referring to the President of the Republic as 'He.' I understand that this was a custom in Stalinist Russia: where it was not necessary to distinguish between 'He' and God.

But I had the feeling that if the French are tired of the General, they are still more tired of his opponents. I suspect that the general slack- ness and irritation felt by the people I met, in- cluding some of the most irritating imbeciles of the French bourgeoisie of the right, will be much less serious now that the sun has appeared again. At any rate, as a member of a very great French dynasty of the HSP (the Haute Societe Protestante) and an enemy of the General said bitterly to me, 'He is the only great man left. When you think of the rest of them' (naming, I regret to say, our Prime Minister), 'it is im- possible to take them seriously.' This may be unjust, but to a great many Frenchmen, and to some of the Americans I met in Paris during the weekend that Ike died, it seemed significant that President de Gaulle was in Washington and that, in any serious sense, we were not.