Low life
French bread
Jeffrey Bernard
Last weekend at Chantilly was a strange 0411dd to have a decent meal or two and the tion, and idiocy. I went there for the races „.--ci.drink and I took my 19-year-old niece, tirulnt have my decent meal thanks to ,a weekend with me to give her a little treat. The weekend was almost ruined because I chew n mouth ulcer and therefore couldn. t
Mixture of expense, elegance, perfec- u, and there's nothing to drink in France. Wine without food makes you smell like a drain, pastis is brain-damage material and spirits are too expensive. At the races on Sunday I ordered a Perrier water for Katie and a vodka and orange for me and got hit for £10. Gladiateur, who won our Derby in 1865, was known as the avenger of Waterloo but the prices at French racetrack bars have got to be the avengers of Trafalgar too. For lunch, if you wanted it, you got ripped off for £36 and
one brand of champagne cost £65 a bottle.
Most of us know that the French are pretty disgusting, what with their arro- gance and disinclination to assist the lin- guistically imperfect visitor. What I'd for- gotten about them though is just how smart-arsed and rich they are. It may not be fair to judge too many of them by the racing fraternity – the only French people I know – but what a fairly ghastly lot are the people who turn up in the members' enclosure at the French races. The women are fearfully elegant, French chic, and they obviously dress to attract men more than to please themselves. They also seem to me to mostly have extremely hard, tight and heavily made-up lips, which indicate to me that they know exactly where they're going and know perfectly well who's not going with them.
But what an amazing racecourse Chan- tilly is. It's picture-book stuff. Fairy-story stuff. At one end of the racecourse there is the magnificent château with its elegant ponds and gardens and opposite the grand- stand there is a fantastic stable built in the 18th century, larger and more opulent than Buckingham Palace, and behind the grand- stand there is the forest in which sand lanes have been cut for horses to gallop and be trained on. In the morning, whenever I've been there in the summer, there is always a dew on the grass, which keeps it crisp and fresh and good to race on, and then by 10 o'clock the sun has risen above the château and the dew has evaporated in a disappear- ing mist.
What amused me and gave me pleasure was to see how the whole business gave my niece so much pleasure. At one point, she was wedged, drink in hand, between Lord Churchill and an Arab prince. The next minute she was smiling delightedly at the fact that Willie Carson and I bumped into each other and said hello. I can't quite remember myself when I stopped being so impressed with these ordinary but nice people but I suppose fame is not just a spur but a strange sort of turn-on. The only people to mar the afternoon for me, apart from the Parison Gucci and Hermes set were of course the ubiquitous English yobs that usually confine their sweat, loud- mouthed vulgarity and psychopathic drunkenness to football matches. Nicely, the day ended on a quiet gentle note, having al fresco cocktails and then dinner with Charlie Millbank, an ex-patriot York- shireman good enough to have trained a French Derby winner and who's been in Chantilly so long that he's now got a French accent. And now, from the ridiculous to the sublime, I'm back where I belong, in Barnsley, where I've got to go and see a striking coal miner for a newspaper story. To get here in time I had to desert the boat and trains and fly from Paris at a cost of £180, the distance no further as the crow flies – which sadly it doesn't– than London to Barnsley. It's very down to earth here, I haven't seen one man on a picket line wearing Gucci shoes. Mind you, I haven't seen that many elegant women on the arms of geriatric millionaires whom they're hop- ing to drop dead quickly as possible.
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