The Stranger

50 years ago today, Albert Camus, 46, journalist, novelist, playwright, and Resistance hero, died — or, as the French say, ‘disappeared’ — in what Paris Match called “a banal highway accident.” And yet Camus, a bi-cultural symbol of hope and unity in fractious times that pitted the country of his birth, Algeria, against that of his blood, France, is more present than ever in today’s France and Europe. Not because president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to move him to the Pantheon, where repose the great men (and one great woman, Marie Curie) of France, but because, in an apparent attempt to change the subject, ahead of regional elections, from fear of daily survival to fear of the Other, Sarkozy, himself the son of immigrants, has launched a nationwide ‘debate’ on ‘national identity.’ At a time when neighboring Switzerland has just voted to ban the Muslim minaret, perhaps we should be thinking not of where Camus’s remains rest but of what remains of his personal example, that of someone whose final battle was to reconcile his two cultures. Coming from the United States and growing up in San Francisco, I see not the danger of the Other, but the beauty of the mosaic; how the base culture — which I treasure, it’s why I’m here — is not threatened, but enhanced by the ‘foreign’ or ’strange’ cultures it assimilates. (In the French original, Camus’s novel “The Stranger” — in which the protagonist is ostracized not for killing an Arab but for not crying at his mother’s funeral — is called “L’etranger,” which also means “the foreigner.”) Take the example of the pumpkin flan I served my French guests for Thanksgiving-Christmas-Chanuka dinner the other night.

After eight+ years in France, I’ve given up on having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving. The first year was fine. Taking advantage of the fact that the butcher on the corner of my street in the 13eme district of Paris always displayed birds complete with their feathers in his window, I decided to buy a turkey with feathers for the first time in my life. “Can you pluck him?” I asked, or rather mimed — I hadn’t been here long, and my French was feeble — “But then give me the feathers afterwards?” I wanted to use them as a centerpiece. After burning one pecan pie in the strange French oven, before I started the turkey I returned to the butcher’s with a napkin on which I’d drawn pictures of the two dials on my oven, one with weird symbols, the others with numbers, and asked him to indicate the proper settings for the turkey. The turkey came out great, as did the second pecan pie, but of all the items I served, the hit of the party was the candied yams covered with pineapples and roasted marshmellows, a recipe of my late dear friend, Annette Clark. (Ironically, I had trouble getting around the concept this time, as the only marshmellows I could find were muti-colored. Melted green glop on top of your sweet potatoes, or yams, does not exactly make them appetizing.)

For this year’s Thanksgiving-Chanuka-Noel party, I’d initially been planning to serve raclettes. This is kind of like fondue, but better. Instead of sitting around a fondue pot in which the fondue gradually turns into glop over the course of a long evening, with raclettes, you make your individual serving whenever you’re ready for it: Each person has a little pan, which fits neatly into a slot under the burning coil, on top of which is a hot surface to keep the potatoes warm. (The raclette apparatus has slots for 6 – 8 pans, so the dining is communal and convivial.)Onto the pan you place your slice of raclette cheese, ideally over a thin slice of raw ham or other meat, until it melts, then you pour it over your potatoes. Raclette describes both the cheese and the device with which, back in the day, and perhaps still today up in the Alps or Savoie where the dish originated, you peeled off the slices after melting a big wedge of cheese over a fire. For raclette to be good, though, it really has to come from the mountains — and not from the shelves of a super-market, where the concept ‘raclette’ is usually taken to mean simply ‘it melts’ and does not promise the cheese in question will taste like anything, let alone its crust. (The first time I bought raclette at my favorite Parisian fromagerie — on the rue Montorgueil, where it came in three flavors, smoked, natural, and pepper — when I asked the cheeseman if it was okay to eat the crust, he cheesily answered, “As long as you have a toilet nearby.” In fact, with raclette as with rebluchon — another melting mountain cheese, the basis for tartiflette — it’s the crust that gives the taste.)

But getting back to my Thanksgiving-Chanukah-Noel party: My plans to make use of my raclette set were foiled by my inability to find any kind of really authentic raclette cheese throughout my county of the Dordogne here in southwest France, which is more known for pre-historical caves and cave paintings and for duck products than cow cheese. (Goat and sheep’s cheese are another story.)

This is the point at which the Thanksgiving party melded into the annual Chanuka-Noel party, as I still had half of a sack of potatoes left and voila, latkes!

For the aperitif I served fresh pissenlit which I’d picked that morning — dandelion leaves to you, bub — and made up like a spinach dip, as well as tartines of fresh walnuts (the paths are paved with them here) and melted blue next-to-Savoy/Alpes cheese. (I mentioned real raclette is impossible to find here. In fact, up to about three weeks ago the Savoy cheese market around here was a bit of a racket. The stands that popped up at area outdoor markets sold the cow cheese for up to 50 Euros a kilogram. Well, apparently this was such a scandal that the t.v. news did a segment on it, which was seen by a big cow cheese maker in the Savoy, who sent his brother here to sell his specialty at reasonable prices. The blue was on sale for 4.90 a kilo. The tome de Savoy injected with penicillin was also cheap, at 8.90. Unfortunately, the one exception was the… raclette! Fairly priced at $10/kilo but with a taste just like monterey jack. “It’s from Italy,” the brother told me.)

Getting back to my aperitifs: Amazingly enough, even though it was the one thing I thought my guests wouldn’t like, as it came out tasting bitter — I told them it was an experiment and I wouldn’t be offended if they didn’t like it — the pissenlit dip was a hit. (Later, one of the guests, learning that I’d picked the pissenlit from the hill between his house and the road, said his dog droopy loved pissenlit and that’s probably the reason it was bitter.) For the apero part of the apero — the drink — I made vin chaud or mulled wine. (A couple of cloves, peel of tangerines and then their juice, lots of sugar, cinnamon, and wine — which can be cheap wine, in my case 1.50 a bottle plus some leftover cheap beaujolais nouveau.) To keep it hot — as I was serving in the upstairs bedroom/salon, where the fire is, and not the cold kitchen/dining room downstairs — I hit upon the idea of plugging in the raclette set and using it effectively as a hot plate, putting the pot of wine where the potatoes usually were. (When my guests said they smelled something burning, I explained that it was just old embedded raclette cheese.)

Before serving the latkes — we’d moved downstairs to the kitchen — I explained why the Jews cooked them on Chanuka: Besieged in their temple, the Jews only had a bit of oil with which they had to keep their lamps going for eight days while they waited for re-enforcements. Miraculously, the bit of oil lasted for eight days. Then I ladled the batter into much more than a bit of oil.

While my neighbors from the north Marie-Jeanne and Christian — young retirees from Lille — had promised to bring a cake for desert, in the market that morning a few freshly cut slices of potiron — like pumpkin — caught my eye. Then I spotted the condensed milk prominently displayed across from the check-out aisle. Pumpkin pie! As my oven isn’t deep enough for pies, I instead poured the filling (to the pumpkin and condensed milk — I used a medium-sized can, with enough left over for my 20-something Siamese — I added two eggs and some freshly grated nutmeg) into individual ceramic custard pots with birds on the bottom, that neatly fit into their own rack that neatly fits into the oven. Towards the end I gave each a freshly cracked walnut morsel.

I was a bit disappointed when no one ate my dessert, instead preferring to go for seconds of the bakery-bought raspberry cake. I even thought I might have committed a faux pas, in making a second desert when Christian and Marie-Jeanne had said they would bring a cake. Mostly to mollify me, Christian asked if he could take one of the custard pots home with him to eat later.

When I went by their place up the hill this morning after picking fresh pissenlit (or, as the French joke, piss en lit/piss in bed), Marie-Jeanne handed me the pot and said she was glad I’d come by as the custard was fantastic and she had to have the recipe to serve tonight to guests. “We’re from the north, so this is all new to us,” she said, showing me various orange, yellow, and orange-green squashes and pumpkins a guy brings by for her once a week.

A native French person had not just complemented my cooking — of something from my culture — but asked for the recipe. I gave it to her, stranger no more — at least for a day.

Identité Nationale: Déja vu

C’est typique. Quand les choses vas pas bien, voila que les diregeants veut qu’on change le sujet. It’s typical: When things aren’t going well, political leaders try to change the subject. And too often, this amounts to trying to re-direct our attention from themselves to ‘them’ — the foreigner. Voila que three major figures from the governing UMP party find themselves either sentenced to prison (Charles Pasqua, senator and former interior minister), awaiting a verdict (former prime minister Dominique Villepin) or soon to be tried (former president Jacques Chirac) — and just four months before regional elections in which the UMP would like to take at least some of the regions (20 of 22 of which are currently controlled by the Socialists) — and President Sarkozy… tries to change the subject. And the national, government-run media more or less complies, notwithstanding a few commentators who question his motives. Of course, we have learned some things since 1940, so we no longer say, “Look at them, they’re different” (well, except in the case of the bourka), but frame the question as “What does it mean to be French?” or “Identité national,” the implication being that some of us foreigners identify more with the countries we came from than the one that — graciously, it needs to be said — has welcomed us.

I’m not against valuing French traditions and values — indeed they are the main reason I’m here. Even the main reason I stay here. And I’m not just talking about the French cultural icons in film, music, literature and art many of whom I’ve worshipped all my life, but basic political, social, and moral values and practices.
Just to give you one example: In the last major elections here, for the European Parliament, 26 parties contested for the French vote. 26! And they all had more or less equal access to the public. For each election, metal panels go up before schools and other public places, each of which features a poster from from a party. So in the European Parliamentary elections, the anti-Zionist party was placed on equal footing with the UMP. Olivier Besancenot, leader of the New Anti-capitalist Party, is regularly included in televised debates. (It’s no accident that in the last presidential election, disputed among 11 parties — 11 parties! — Besancenot got 5 percent of the vote. In the U.S., by contrast, the two main parties, and their allies in the corporate controlled media, do everything they can to exclude other parties from the debate. Some television networks even exclude too liberal Democratic candidates from presidential and senatorial debates. So in contrast to Besancenot, U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader — hardly a radical by even U.S. standards — got 1 percent after effectively being blocked from the national corporate-controlled media.

So I absolutely agree that those who come here should prize French tradition, language, culture, lifestyle, and values. I don’t even disagree that a reasoned debate on what it means to be French, and to live in France, and French values, would be useful. That’s not the question. I return to motive, timing, and historical context. When political leaders start talking about national identity — a conversation a subset of which is usually ‘they’re not like us’ — during a time when things aren’t going well, we need to be alarmed. And in France, there’s an additional particularity: I would argue that a knowledge of French history includes awareness of the chapter of that history in which the Vichy government, in the name of France, did what no other occupied country did in not just allowing the Germans to round up Jews and deport them to the death camp, but in many times taking the initiative in IDENTIFYING who was Jewish and having the French police do the rounding up. What made this easier for them to do was the idea that, “Well, they’re not French anyway. They are the other. They act different. They look different.”

This past Saturday in Perigueux, the highlight of the second Salon régional Memoire Résistance et Deportation was a projection and debate, featuring the live participation of Holocaust survivor Marie-José Chambart de Lauwe, who was deported to Ravensbruck, and the film “La deportation des Femmes.” Most of the stories were horrible: Chambart de Lauwe recalled that sometimes new arrivals were marched directly from the train to the gas chambers, without any ’selection,’ and that each morning, the women had to race from their sleeping quarters outside the camp to the gates of the camp. Any that fell were bludgeoned to death immediately. Newborns were simply thrown against the wall until they were dead. But at least one of the stories was inspirational — and, in the current context, instructive. One of the markers of national identity suggested by some has been the obligatory daily singing of the Marseillaise in schools. In the film shown Saturday, one of the deported women recalled that when her group arrived at Auschwitz — after, no doubt, being localised by French Vichy authorities and rounded up by French policemen, many of whom no doubt justified their actions because ‘they’re not French, anyway’ — as they were entering the camp the women spontaneously broke out in the Marseillaise. France had sent them to their deaths, but they still sang for France — and as Frenchwomen.

Journalist has heart attack while turning turn-of-the-century wine mill

When we last left our hero, he’d just finished the vendange, filling four of Mr. Marty’s colorful plastic barrels with grapes, most red, with a few exceptionally sweet green grapes he’d found high up in Mr. Marty’s vines thrown in, plus a few drunk bees and scattered weeds. That was Thursday, October 22. The next steps, Mr. Marty said, were to turn the grapes in the mill and then leave them to ferment in the big square blue bath-tub in the barn.

I started to get worried when Bernard told me, a week later, that the grapes would rot if Mr. Marty left them in the barrels too long, so I’ve been bugging him since then to get them into the mill, always adding that I’d do the heavy lifting. I felt a little guilty about practically harassing him, but didn’t want the sweat I’d put into the vendange to go to waste. (Plus, okay, I was looking forward to tasting the cru.)

So finally today, when I knocked on his door around one after returning from the village, he said to come by in an hour. I had a quick lunch of the butcher’s house-made pate mixed with some of my apples cooked up and walnuts toasted up, plus a little mustard, all blended with my ’60s-era ‘mixer-baby’ and served over country tourte bread from the Boulangerie Margot.

“I’m not sure if I have the cork,” Mr. Marty said doubtfully, looking at the broken cork that was stopping up the sky blue fermenting vat, when I came by after lunch. “I have some wine bottle corks,” I suggested, helpfully I thought, but he explained that for this he required a special, pointed cork. He went to look for it and emerged from his home a few minutes later.

“Une petite gout, our remontre le morale?” he asked with a petite twinkle in his eye. Far be it from me to say no to a ‘petite gout’ of Mr. Marty’s eau de vie and it did indeed re-mount my morale. It also helped that he’d found a pointed cork.

Fortified by the eau de vie, I helped Mr. Marty wheel out the wooden mill — which looked like it might date from the turn of the last century, at the latest — and put it on top of one of the barrels. It looks like a wheel-barrel, except that what would be the levers protrude from the bottom of the barrel. Inside it are two cylinders through which the grapes pass, ad on the side is the wheel with lever which turns the cylinders. First we emptied one barrel into the mill and, with Mr. Marty pressing its grapes down and I turning the wheel, squeezed the grapes. We repeated this three times. Some of the juice had already naturally come out of the raisons and that fell easily through the two cylinders. For the rest, the pressing was tough — a real work out. I had to take a pause after two, and couldn’t help seeing the headline, “Journalist has heart attack making wine in southwest France.”

After each barrel-full was pressed through the mill into another barrel, we lifted it and emptied it into the blue vat. When we finished, Mr. Marty urged me, “Get a glass and taste it!” I ran home across the path and got a couple of my ’50s-vintage Pastis 51 glasses, lifting them to show Mr. Marty, but he said, “No, just for you!” We waited for the grapes to settle in the last barrel before I dipped my glass in, scooping up some raisons with the juice. Here goes! It was dense and sour — reminding me of fermented plums I’d once tasted on a Mandarin class field-trip to a Chinese movie theater in junior high which surprised me with there salty sour taste.

“Kind of lemony,” I said, my lips puckered, to Mr. Marty. I had to ask if it would taste like that once it was done, but he said the taste would go away once the wine fermented. “Usually you leave it for 15 days, but because it’s so little, eight will do.” Afterwards, as we sat on his stone border wall talking about the day when the neighborhood was full of vines and everyone made their own eau de vie, I started feeling nauseous. N’impeche que I didn’t say no when he offered me to come in for another ‘petite gout.’ I also asked for some of the lemon soda he poured for himself, and that helped the stomach, but at the first trés petit gout I felt the wine coming up again. “Would it derange you if I saved this for later?” “Pas du tout!”

Tch-tch-tchin!

Sour Grapes: Time to stop my whining and start making wine

Much as I’m hankering to be back in a city and resume my search (I almost wrote ‘cherche’; thinking in French, translating into English) for la femme de ma vie, I’m at least conscience that for many Americans (and even some French city denizens) the idea of a guy living in a medieval stone house in the south of France surrounded by green pastures, 100 yards from a river, and looking up at magnificent limestone cliffs dotted with pre-historic caves trying to get out of there might seem a bit *fou.* And I hate not living in the present. So, where I can, I try to take advantage of what’s unique and and typique in my experience, be it that of living in the country, living in the country in France, living among (to a degree) paysans, living in duck country, or other unique aspects of this milieu. (Never been much on pre-history, so that I’m writing you 300 yards from the first cro-mag discoveries, made back in 1860 when they were building the railroad bridge that crosses the river, is wasted on me.)

Saturday night, it was the hunting. Not me hunting — I cringe even hearing the rifle fire resound off the cliffs, or, worse, seeing a hunter toting a rifle over his shoulders in my backyard — but the booty of my pal Stephan’s hunting. The crisp autumnal day was already heading towards perfect. I’d been bugging Bernard to bring his electric saw over and cut up the long branch I’d extracted from the petit woods in the ‘yard.’ (More than a yard, really a field, and which used to house a roof tile factory, ergo the terra cotta fragments that encrust the soil, and the name of my ‘hood, le Tuilerie, not to be confused with one of my favorite endroits in Paris, le jardin des Tuileries.) Of course, being Bernard, after he’d swiftly disposed of the branch on the terrace, he insisted we tramp down to the woods and cut up some more wood. After Bernard had reduced about a dozen branches into logs, he commanded me, “Now clear them out!” In the process, I spotted what looked like a sort of lever peering out of the ground. Removing some of the dirt around it, I found a small semi-oval steering wheel. When I yanked at the lever, they separated. Feeling around the ground, I discerned what seemed like the rusted carcass of some sort of metal apparatus — perhaps a mill for grinding up corn? It turned out to be what looked like a child’s car, complete with pedals and engine.

“Vient voir!” I urged Mr. Marty, the retired farmer who lives across the path. “I think I found Bernard’s first car!” He was impressed. “C’est un vraie antiquité! Tu peut le vendre!” I couldn’t wait to show Bernard, who’d said he’d return in the evening to see how I’d progressed on the wood. I was lying around listening to “Our Miss Brooks” when he drove up at around 7 with Stephan. “I have a surprise for you!” I announced. “I found your first car.” “Mais oui, c’est ca,” he confirmed, but all it provoked was a smile, no marvel, and he was not interested in taking it with him; he only laughed when I proposed he show it to his daughter Mathilde. Bernard and Stephan had other business; they’d brought over deer liver and heart from a deer Stephan had shot that morning.

I hadn’t had venison since we lived in the country in Northern California in the late ’60s, and the taste lingered still; I was salivating already. Mr. Marty rushed over to see Stephan, whose matrimonial future he continues to worry over. (“Mais, quand est-ce que il vas se marrier?!”)

“Got garlic?!” asked Bernard.

“Mais oui!”

“Chop it up and let it cook first before you add the meat.”

“I have even better!,” I said, pulling out the grater.

“Pepper?!”

“Bien sur!”

If you’ve seen the kitchen/dining room, most of which is taken up by a mahogany picnic table and benches, the rest by a large armoire set on cinder blocks (to protect its contents from the annual flood), a long counter, an over-stuffed easy chair, a range, a bicycle, and half of a huge two-piece late ’50s era rose and off-white formica cabinet-armoire (40 Euros at the Emaus ((or Salvation Army)) in Perigueux, later spotted in the identical model for 400 Euros at a Menilmontant brocante), you’d know that adding four people to this space, running excitedly around, two cooking, two commenting on the cooking, makes for a bit of an obstacle course, but to me it felt festive).

After the liver had started already started cooking, Bernard, taking in the dozens of apples strewn over the picnic table (more local booty, along with the walnuts strewn in even more quantity) and the 1/2 of the ’50s cabinet suddenly said, “Ah, I should have said, add apples!”

“I’ll add them now!”

“And if you have panaché…” Bernard said hopefully, referring to the beer lemonade which is the only liquor he can drink… Unfortunately I’d drunk up my last bottles. “Mais…offer Stephan something!” I offered wine all around but none of the (French) men were into it.

Usually, the French undercook (by my standards) meat. In the case of the liver, though, whenever I’d ask Stephan if it was time to take it out, he answered, “Pas encore. Laisse!”

Finally, when the meat — and, as important, the garlic and the apples — was nice and crispy and dark brown, it was ready, and Bernard, Stephan, and Mr. Marty stood around watching me eat. (None wanted to join me.) It was succulent — perfect. And it was as much the apples taking in the juice of the liver that made it as opposed to the other way around. (Of course, I had to ask if they’d mind if I added ketchup, and Bernard grimaced.) A perfect cap to a perfect day.

Before Mr. Marty left, I’d wrassled him into accepting that I’d do the vendange Monday. I’ve been pestering him about this for weeks, always with the proviso that I’d do the work, he’d just need to direct me. Mr. Marty — as is his right; he is, after all, retired — has sort of let the vines in back of and next to his house go. While he did clear out the sarmantine — dead branches — from last year, he only half cleared the weeds. But as this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me — yes I know, there’s supposedly a vineyard in the Belleville neighborhood of somewhere, but I’ve never found it, nor that in Montmartre — I’ve permitted myself to insist. (I also think it will make me feel less guilty when I ask for a third bottle of his famous eau de vie, made from previous harvests, this winter.)

The moment finally arrived Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Marty found four barrels, and his sharp clipper, and I set to working my way through the seven rows, clipping the grapes and tossing them into a red plastic basket. It was harder going that I’d anticipated. Because the branches were lower than me, with many bunches of the fruit close to the ground, I did a lot of bending and, then, sitting, and I wasn’t starting out with a back in full form. I’d also assumed — remembering a previous experience with sour new wine — that I should pick only the sweet grapes, so I did a lot of taste-testing. After four hours without pause (and without getting stung; my desire to make wine in the Bordeaux region tromped even my phobia of bees) (contrary to what you may have heard, the bees are not disappearing, they’ve all become grape tasters in the southwest of France), I’d amassed close to three (medium) barrels full, in each of which swarmed about half a dozen bees. Physically tired as I was, I was ready to continue to get it all done in one coupe (I had three rows left), but Mr. Marty appeared at the base of the fields and said, “Time to stop for today Paul.” As tired as my dogs were, the physical work had also left me exhilarated, so, rather than turn in chez moi, and taking courage from Boo-bah, the Belgium shepherd — collie followiing me, I decided to walk to the railroad bridge, stopping to collect walnuts from Bernard’s trees. The stark grey autumn evening sky and the magnificent setting of the valley surrounding me, the crisp air made for another perfect ending to another perfect day. Until the night anxiety of the solitaire set in, anyway.

I resumed the vendange yesterday. This time what threatened to do me in was the taste-testing. I must have tasted from at least one bunch of every little grape tree, and as about half seemed to be sour, I was starting to get nauseous. After close to three hours, I’d pushed it to three barrels and was, I thought, finished. But when I checked in with Mr. Marty an hour later, he indicated the heights of the rows and said, “There are still grapes to pick.” I explained that all those that were left were sour. “Mais, c’est rien! C’est l’eau!” (It had been raining more or less constantly since the previous night.) Just to be sure, I picked a bunch with some sour grapes, and asked him to taste one to verify. “Mais c’est bon!” In effect, I could pick all. Now that I also know that I don’t need to taste them, I’m all right with this.

On Tuesday, Mr. Marty had offered me some of his eggs after I finished working. These are farm eggs, of course, and are the yellowist eggs you’ve ever seen and fluffiest I’ve ever tasted. Yesterday, and for the first time in the two years we’ve been neighbors, after he’d straightened me out on the grapes he proposed, with a glint in his eyes, “Un petit Ricard?” “Avec plaisir!” said I. Later, when I noted that one of the things I liked about pastis was that, “It’s natural,” he reposted, without missing a beat, and indicating the bottle of cold water, “Except for the water!”

The lights are on but nobody’s home, or, le lumiere est la mais tous les etages ne sont pas illuminé or reason #1,677 why I hate Brussels

What if you woke up one morning and none of your light-bulbs fit? And on top of that, they were all fluorescent. You would either a) be having a nightmare or b)be living in Europe in 2010.

Indeed, when I looked for light-bulbs at the supermarket in the village today to replace a couple that had gone out, both in small snug fixtures, I looked and looked where the manager had told me to and saw nothing. Then he came over and explained that those ugly oblong white things — they look kind of like miniature sky-scrapers — were light-bulbs, and I remembered that a handful of bureaucrats in Brussels had decided that what was good enough for Edison and has been good enough for the rest of us the last hundred plus years was no longer good enough for the 450 million citizens they supposedly represented, and decreed that as of October 1, the luminescent round bulbs would be replaced by ugly, white, rectangular fluorescent bulbs. And when I say replaced, I don’t mean that we would be able to choose them, I mean that all the old bulbs would be removed from the shelves and we would have no choice. The supposed reason is that they are more efficient. In energy, maybe, but in cost, no; first, where the old lighbulbs cost 1.20 Euros for two, this new thing costs 2.02 for one. Second, because they are so big — long — with a new base added on top of the screw base to boot, they won’t fit into the narrow lighting chambers of just about any spot — and spots are big here in Europe — nor under any lighting globe. So hundreds of millions of Europeans will have to spend money to replace their lighting fixtures, and more money on their light-bulbs, in a time when, thanks partly to lack of foresight by Brussels, most of us have less of it, but Brussels doesn’t care because someone had a cool idea. The rest of us, as unusual, pay the consequences. And for those of us that get headaches from fluorescent lighting? No one asked us, we don’t count. And if we complain, they call us ‘anti-European.’ No, I’m not anti-European. I just say that what the EU about is not what was promised — making it easier for its citizens — but strictly about making it easier for the big capitalists. No matter if Brussels’s decisions create complications for the rest of us — the EU bureaucrats couldn’t care less. And if we vote down a constitution they’re trying to shove down or throats that does nothing to rectify this and whose soul goal is to make it even easier for big business, no problem; they’ll re-name it a treaty and say they don’t need to have a vote. Or, if we insist on a vote on the treaty and vote it down — as Ireland did — they’ll just make us vote again after scaring us a little.

David Koch, meet Robert Badinter

“Every time I hear France described as the birthplace of the Rights of Man, I get a little tic,” Robert Badinter, Francois Mitterand’s justice minister from 1981 to 1986, confided to a crowd, including 450 high school students, who had gathered Friday on a typically balmy late fall afternoon in southwest France on the esplanade of Perigueux’s Odyssey Theater to rename it the Robert Badinter Esplanade. The country is more accurately described as the birthplace of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, he said — not the same thing. But if it’s true that the French sometimes exaggerate their moral primacy, the decision by this city of less than 30,000 to become the first to name a public space after the man almost singularly responsible for the abolition of the death penalty in France 28 years ago this month is clear proof that when it comes to naming public spaces, the French could give a lesson to Americans. Just compare the case of Robert Badinter and the city of Perigueux with the case of David Koch and Lincoln Center.

Koch essentially bought the right to have the New York State Theater re-named after him last fall, by giving $100 million to Lincoln Center for its renovation. The checkered history of his company, Koch Industries, was not an issue. (Among other things, in January 2000 Koch Industries agreed to pay a $30 million civil penalty, according to the Justice Department “the largest civil penalty ever imposed against a single company for violations of an environmental law,” to, the department said, “resolve claims under the Clean Water Act related to more than 300 illegal oil spills from Koch’s pipelines and oil facilities resulting in the release of some three million gallons of oil and related products into ponds, rivers, lakes, and shorelines in six States.”)

In the case of Robert Badinter, by contrast, it was not the power of his wallet but the power of his moral example that inspired Mayor Michel Morland and the city council to give his name to the esplanade of the Odyssey Theater — appropriately located, as Morland pointed out Friday, right off the rue President Wilson, and where international dance artists Josef Nadj and Blanca Li will perform this season. After defending death penalty cases as a lawyer in the 1970s, Badinter became Mitterand’s justice minister with his election in the spring of 1981 and, just months later, convinced the assembly and senate to make France the 35th country in the world (and the last in Europe) to abolish the death penalty. And he’s not resting on his laurels. His battle today, to which he devoted much of his speech Friday, is to reform France’s notorious prison system. (And regarding the death penalty, he’s irremediably optimistic; “I can say with absolute confidence that very soon the U.S. will join the camp of abolition,” he prognosticated Friday.)

If those attending the David Koch Theater — including young people — will think,”This is what money buys,” those traversing the Robert Badinter Esplanade will, as Badinter put it, “think that there are durable moral victories, the abolition of the death penalty being one. There are still others to win. To the young generation to carry them.”

The Big Prune

When I tried to get my Parisian bouquiniste (Seine bookseller) pote Luc to come down here this summer, one of the excuses he gave me was, “Ah, you know, down there, in the country, they eat mostly meat.” (Sounds better in French: “Ah, tu sais, la-bas, c’est que le viande qu’on mange.”) Luc is a vegetarian. (Though definitely not a vegan, judging by his predilection for the camembert Le Petit; he even saves the red cartons.) (Camembert secret: Open the box — yes, in the supermarket — and press down on the cheese. If it bounces back, don’t buy it. Unless of course you’re planning on using it for the eight-day Simenon diet.) Okay, c’est vrais que the great southwest of France, surtout the Dordogne, is known as the capital of foie gras. And, yes, my neighbor Mr. Marty did just knock on my door this morning with a big bloody chunk of raw sanglier (wild boar) meat. And I’m certainly not complaining. Nor did I say no when Bernard and Stephan came by one night and asked, “Are you in the mood to eat sanglier?,” and we cooked up the meat Stephan had brought from the sanglier he caught the day before on the converted half water heater Bernard made into a grill, after gathering wood by the river. (The succulent flavor was no doubt helped by the sarmant or dead wine branches from Mr. Marty’s vines.) So what if the morsel that lodged in the ruins that are my teeth is still there two weeks and a couple of dozen ibuprofen tablets later? I will still cook up Mr. Marty’s sanglier with relish. I will cook it up for ten hours and pulverize it, but I will still cook and eat it with relish.

If Luc is still reading after that little eloge to viande, I want to tell him that I have never eaten as much fruit in my life as I have eaten the last two months — peaches (from Mr. Marty’s grove), apples (mostly from the tree in the backyard, near the river). And above all plums. It started with Mr. Marty inviting me to bring a basket over and pick some of the tiny red plums from the tree behind the chicken coop — “Otherwise they’ll be wasted and that would be dommage!” — then progressed down the route to Le Bugue, the village where I do my marketing, and along which I scored green, red, and a whole lotta yellow or mirabelle plums. (The rule here is that if the branch is hanging over the road you have the right to pick the fruit. And for fruit on the ground, it’s safe if it’s not punctured.) There’s even a bush of mirabelles right before you turn into the train station. In Le Buisson, where I go to get the medicine for Sonia, my 20-something part-wolf Alaskan Siamese, I took a different route to get to the river after picking up the meds and trampled upon a field of prune plums — probably the best I’ve found. And in the cute medieval vllage of Belves a couple of weeks ago, finding myself stranded at the train station for two hours (the wine festival I was there for was over by the time I arrived), I was reduced to picking very hot, almost prunified plums below a little red-leafed tree next to the abandoned gare.

But The Big Prune Show — that’s what it’s called — took place last weekend in Agen, after California the largest producer of prunes in the world.

If there’s one great food divide between Americans and the French, it may be our different perspectives on the noble prune.

In the States — even in California, the world’s largest producer of prunes — prunes and above all prune juice are something for very old people. And they are diaretics, which is exactly the reason I avoided them for 40 years. I actually like the taste, so it was more a protective measure. (Even in the popular culture, prunes get a bad rap, e.g. the villain character of Pruneface in the Dick Tracy comic.)

France has totally changed my perspective on prunes.

First, they don’t give me diarrhea here.

That out of the way, I’ve been able to indulge.

Besides being succulent tout seule as a fruit (generally speaking they’re not so dried up here), they’re fantastic in yogurt. I’ve also had them wrapped with bacon and have made my own aperitif recipe involving spreading creme de canard (or foie gras if you’re rich enough) and a single (pitted) prune on a grainy bread, preferably toasted. Soaked and stewed with lamb, tajine-style, they’re sublime and make the lamb sublime. Then there are prune tarts. This region is also known for ‘prune,’ which doesn’t actually mean ‘prune’ but eau de vie a la prune. (The eau de vie Mr. Marty supplies me with is actually made from his grapes. Not that he makes it; he no longer has the right. The problem when he, and other paysans, made it on their own is the government couldn’t tax it. Now, if he wants to have eau de vie from his own grapes he has to pay a man who comes around once per year to collect the harvest and turn it into ‘fin.’ It costs him as much as if he were to buy a bottle in a liquor store. The best way to consume eau de vie, btw, is a la ‘canard.’ which does not mean getting a duck drunk with the liquor and then killing it for the barbecue, but rather dipping a sugar cube into the eau de vie and then sucking on it. The best eau de vie I ever tasted was fig, which is illegal, perhaps because the alcohol content is too high.)

So last weekend I decided to take the Perigeux-Agen regional train to the end of the line in Agen, a 90-minute to two-hour ride depending on how many stops you make. Later I learned, watching a television documentary on French concentration camps, that if I were taking that same train in about 1944 I probably would have had to get off in Penn, where I’d have been interned before being shipped off to Auschwitz.

Fortunately, this being 2009, my French hosts permitted me to stay on the train until the terminus (of the train), where San Francisco pals Renee and Alvin were waiting for me. I know Alvin peripherally, because he used to run a jazz cafe across the street from me in San Francisco’s Mission District, Cafe Babar. They were installed having a glass of blanc and tea at the buffet I was a bit impatient. “Where’s the prune giveaway?” I pressed them. We started with a walk through an alley where local producers were selling regional wine and liquor specialties. Here I had a great reunion with an aperitif called the floc of Gascon. The red variety kind of tastes like bitter strawberries, and goes well with chocolate. I also discovered that I was not quite as finished with rosé as I thought I was after a summer of going through three three-litre cartons (of a very red and dry Lot variety) and one 5-litre box (from St. Emillion). The one I tried in Agen was fruity and actually had a nose, rare for a rosé. (With a nose like that, it probably also would have found itself type-cast and sent to Penn by France, er, Vichy, during the Occupaton. ‘Free Zone’ mon oeil.)

After the tastings, Renee and Alvin lead me to a tour of the old city, starting with the Street of Jews. (Talk about making it easy for the French, er, Vichy police. “Eh les flics! Nous-sommes la!”) (If I keep digressing to this subject, it’s because this week, finally, after years of films in which everyone in France seemed to be resisting the Nazis and/or hiding the Jews, the public television is finally focusing on the collabos. On Tuesday, France 2 broadcast a fictional film in which Marthe Keller discovers that the granddaughter she thought was shipped to the camps and her death was actually kidnapped by one of the French militians who arrested her family, and is now a pupil in her class. This was followed by a documentary on Drancy and the other French camps that focused on the role of the French police and gendarmes in rounding up the Jews, and reminded us that it was the French, er, Vichy government that volunteered to do so before the Germans, er, Nazis could ask them to — the only country where this happened. Then the last two nights, a documentary on Jacques Chirac replayed — twice — the landmark speech he made, shortly after being elected in 1995, in which 50 years after the fact, a French chief of state finally acknowledged the culpability of the state of France in the deportations and deaths of the Jews.)

But where were we? Oh yes: In the old city of Agen. Which is pretty breathtaking, with the buildings a sort of melange of the sandstone found around these parts and Spanish-Toulousian red brick. (Agen is an hour away from Toulouse by train and, in the other direction, the same from Bordeaux. It has a real Mediterranean, luminous feel, not surprising, I guess, as it also hosts the canal deux mers, which runs from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, more or less.) Later, when Alvin and Renee decided to take a pause for lunch, I left them at the resto and took my picnic kit and lunch to the white-stony banks of the broad and vast Garonne. This is fast becoming one of my favorite French rivers, after the Seine. (In the moving van that brought me here two years ago, trying to make conversation, I asked the French girl who was doing the driving what her favorite dream was. I guess I must have said ‘rive’ instead of ‘riviere’ and she must have heard it as ‘reve’ because she answered, “A fragment of Roland Barthes.” Even when I do manage to connect with a French woman on a serious topic it’s by accident.) It may be just my imagination, because I’m aware that the Garonne feeds into the Atlantic, but I could swear it was almost blue and that my lunch was accompanied by a briny aroma.

On the way back to find Renee and Alvin, I crossed a long, green esplanade, with the requisite skate park and petanque players. I stopped to watch the petanque players, just so I could write that. Then finally, at about 3 p.m., we reached the prune give- away, where there was already a long line. Renee and Alvin left me there, with their sac, which gave me two. First I scored a big sac of wet, just prunified fruit — what looked like a prunifying machine was just behind the tables where the young men and women were handing out the sacs of prunes — and then, cleverly stuffing it into my bag, I moved to the next table and was handed a bag of the dried variety. Before leaving I found a Shopi in the covered market, where I scored a jar of brandade (great in crepes — thank you, Joe Liebling) and a bottle of Tariquet at an affordable price (4.20); then a second at an even more affordable price 3.70) at a food and wine boutique. (Tariquet is a white made from the same grape as armagnac. It’s kind of like Colombard, which one can find in the States, but better — fruity and with a bite. Goes great with fondue, tartiflette, and raclette, and can even be served as an aperitif.)

While my train was still in the station, a friendly-looking older man with a hearing aide sat down across from me. Noticing his umbrella, I said amiably, “Fortunately it didn’t rain today!” He explained that he’d just been getting the umbrella repaired for his grandchildren. I asked if he’d checked out the prune festival; he’d been busy visiting the church. “They were giving out free prunes!” I said, and invited him to try the wet ones. “Delicious!” he remarked, his whole face lighting up. As soon as I found out he was from Toulouse, I asked him if he found it polluted. Toulouse had been one of my candidate villes until I visited it last summer and discovered that on some streets you can actually see the pollution in front of you.. But for social reasons, I keep coming back to it. “No no,” he said, he didn’t find it polluted. As, doing the math, I figured he must have been close to 80, I thought this was a good sign. He added that public transport is FREE for those over 60. This is another thing I like about Toulouse, on paper anyway; it isn’t just that it offers a lot of cultural events, but that they’re free or close to. (For 80 Euros, you can see everything at the Cinematheque — a good one, with a strong Russian collection — for one year, which beats Paris (120) and Lyon (183, and you still have to pay for the special seances). He also said, brightening up even more, that in the park across from his home there’s lots of pissenlit (dandelion leaves) to pick, so we swapped recipes, mine for salad and his for a casserole with potatoes (the key is to cut the pissenlit up into tiny morsels). I guess I was friendly enough that the man, whose name was Marcel, asked me if I wanted a gold or a silver Virgin medal. I asked for the silver but he ended up giving me both. All I need to do to get benedicted is show it to a priest. (According to the documentary on the deportation camps, it was the albeit belated protests by the priests — notably the archbishop of Toulouse — that finally slowed the French, er, Vichy government down in its zeal to collect the Jews and deliver them to the Germans, er, Nazis.) On the trip, Marcel, a retired telecommunications specialist for the train company, explained to me how fragile the telecommunications lines for the train company used to be, made of glass.

Just before we passed the stone house where I live, from the train window I caught Bernard and Stephan harvesting Bernard’s potatoes. During the Occupation, according to Bernard, whose father lived those years here, the maquis used to sabotage the train tracks just above the stone house. They hid in the pre-historic caves I look up at when I take my apero on the terrace. The Germans once shot at Bernard’s father — for nothing. There were also collabos who told the Germans where to find the resistants and, not far from here, a whole village that was killed in reprisal by the Germans.

After dropping the prunes and Tariquet at the house, I walked down up to the potato fields. Bernard handed me a heart-shaped pair of Siamese potato twins and said, “You know what these are? Balls!” I unearthed a potato tinier than a prune. Holding up the one Bernard had given me I said, “These are American balls.” Then showing him the tiny one I added, “And these are French balls.”

For the prunes: The more aged ones are so hard — almost like hard candy — I decided to stew a few in a glass filled with Mr. Marty’s eau de vie. Perhaps I will have them for desert today if there’s any room left in my teeth after the sanglier gets through with them.

Simenon’s Maigret: A world ‘without hope’?

Well, I guess it’s no surprise that it took Georges Simenon to get me back to this journal; if he could write a book in nine days, I should be able to file one dispatch in one month. (When an interviewer asked if he ever took time out to relax, Simenon answered Mais oui; as it took him nine days to write a novel, if he wrote six in a year that left him with 311 days off.)

If I’ve been absorbed by France Culture radio’s ‘grand traversé’ dedicated to Simenon running every morning this week (click here to listen to the archived emissions), particularly the first hour, dedicated to archival interviews with the author, I’ve been disappointed by the relatively scant time devoted so far, in daily programming of 3.5 hours quand meme, to Simenon’s major creation, the Commissaire Maigret. And when Maigret does come up, as he did today in the discussion portion of the program, the ‘experts’ seem to fundamentally misunderstand his world.

According to this particular expert, the world of Maigret, or of the Maigret novels, is ’sans esperance” or without hope. While this quality might apply to the other major part of Simenon’s oeuvre, the ‘romans dur,’ in which the criminal himself is the protagonist, typically perpetrating the crime at the beginning of the book and then degenerating before our eyes for the rest of it, the Maigret series, in which the detective is the hero, seems to me more an ongoing love affair with and portrayal of the principal character — his manners and his way to explore new worlds, his typical mode of access for solving the crime being to immerse himself in the milieu in which it took place. In effect, he’s our reliable old friend, the narrator we identify with as we encounter these worlds and communities with him. We feel that we’re with him when he enters a bistro and cries out, “Une demi!,” when he’s lost and morose and doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere in his investigation, when he ‘bavards’ with his inspectors. The most minute details of how he interacts with the drama become more important than the mundane details of the crime itself — even the way he becomes involved. In one tale, Maigret is ready to turn away a man who’s fled a small coastal village, where he’s accused of murder, to come to Paris to ask for Maigret’s help — until, crossing the bridge St. Michel, he gets a whiff of air that evokes oysters and ‘petit blanc’ and decides to take the case. (When he gets there, he discovers that the oyster harvest has been held up because of tidal problems, so he has to content himself with the petit blanc for the duration of the investigation.)

It’s not that the crime is incidental, but that the center of the story is not its grisly details, not the violence of the culpable, but Maigret’s quest — as much a quest for the solution of the crime as for understanding the personages involved. And because his ‘method’ (in quotes because Maigret would vehemently deny he has one) is to infiltrate the world, the milieu where the crime took place — be it that encircling an ecluse or lock, a port, an upper-class household, a demi-monde, a boarding house — the stories become chants to these communities, in Maigret’s case a tour de France alternating with immersions in the neighborhoods and rhythm of Paris. (Even more fun for those who have lived there; Simenon often situates the crimes on specific streets or in specific places in the general area described by Montmartre and, below it, the 9th arrondisement, often Notre Dame de Lorette, a street I know well.)

The point is that where the ‘romans dur’ start from an already ‘black’ point — the crime, usually violent — and descend into an even darker universe as we get inside the mind of the culpable, the Maigret novels use the fait divers as a trigger for a search for understanding, and an excuse to return to the world of a sensitive hero, Maigret, whose encounters with Paris, France, and occasionally other places are elevated and rich, steeped in the culture of the particular place, as it was in the middle of the 20th century. (One of my favorite passages occurs when, sur place investigating a theft and murder in a suburb, Maigret ‘pique’s the lobster delivered to the local bar from the hapless Sgt. Lucas for his own dinner, and pauses to call HQ. “Stay there!” he says, then, “I’m talking to the lobster,” which is trying to escape.

Speaking of food, in one of the archival interviews Simenon offers a ‘how-to-survive when you have no money’ story that rivals Dolly Parton’s claims that when she first started out, she made ketchup soup to economize. The 20-year-old George Sims, just arrived in Paris (at the Gare du Nord in my old neighborhood, which still, 86 years later, fits Simenon’s description as ‘the endroit ‘le plus raid’ in Paris), had taken a chamber in a boarding house where it was forbidden to cook. Here’s his advice for surviving on very little: “You buy a round of camembert — not a good one but the cheapest you can find. You eat a little morsel, and then you put it in the cabinet. Every day it gets bigger.”

Military fire-starters in Marseille

Okay, so it seems pretty basic: If it’s 36 degrees (100 Farenheit) in the shade and the wind is blowing at Force 7, and you’re in a miliatary camp in the woods outside of Marseille, it’s probably not the ideal moment to start practicing your tracer firing. Yet this is exactly what happened yesterday at 2 in the afternoon at the military camp in Carpiagne, next to the Mount Latin, with the result that 1100 hectares were burned and it took 500 firemen/women to contain the fire, which is still being monitored this morning. Meanwhile, the soot is in the air in Marseille. The regional prefect, the appropriately named Michel Sappin (sapin = Christmas tree, sapinière = forest), speaking to Le Monde, deplored ‘the imbecilité of this act,” adding that “soldiers must abstain in these types of conditions. Last year, the same thing happened close to the Canjuers camp; it was the biggest fire of the summer. Today, it’s at Carpiagne. I have telephoned the military governor to tell him that it is inadmissable and scandalous that the soldiers, as if nothing had happened, continue their activities when there’s wind and the conditions are dangerous.” The good news is that there were no civilian victims, and just one sailor-fireman lightly burned, two more ligthtly intoxicated by the fumes as well as two police officers, Le Monde reported. Five houses burned down. The quartiers of Trois-Ponts and la Barasse were evacuated because of the noxious fumes.

For the errant soldiers, Marseille is also headquarters for the Foreign Legion; I suggest, send ‘em there! For next summer, well, it’s just for this reason — stupid humans — that parts of the Calanques, the rocky terrain on the outskirts of Marseille, are off-limits to people during certain periods of the year. If the military can’t exercise some common scents, I suggest the same rules for them.

Leçon raté or, one 40-year leap backwards for mankind

Until these last few days, the July 20/21 moon landing remained a local event for me. I watched it from Miami Beach, where after much pleading my grandparents had let my brother Aaron and I stay up late. I even remember the room we were in, their bedroom, the specific images of the astronauts on the moon, and the hour flashing across the bottom of the screen. It was local because Florida was also the home of Cape Canaveral. And of course I remember the planting of the American flag.

What’s striking about remembering the event from another country, France, is how, while giving the Americans their due, the achievement is regarded as all mankind’s, an accomplishment without borders. (That makes three American moonwalkers in three weeks who have received unprecedented French media attention.) Usually the French, or at least the French media, are quick to claim primacy, and even to exaggerate France’s role in a particular historical event. But here’s a feat which is not particularly theirs to claim, and yet the French media has been lavish in the media time accorded to Apollo’s acheivement. (Although I just couldn’t watch a docu-drama recreating the lives of Armstrong, Aldren, and Collins around that time in which their typically suburban circa 1960s American families all spoke French.) Radio and television has been saturated with coverage, to the point where I’ve got ‘magnificent desolation’ imprinted on the brain.

The most striking — and tragic — juxtaposition is that of the observation by one of the astronauts, Collins I think, of how tranquil the Earth seemed from up there with the turbulent reality we returned to shortly after that parenthetical instant of unity embraced in ‘mankind’ — too many small steps in reverse which added up to a giant leap backward for mankind. Vietnam was not the last war fueled by territorialism, by nations believing themselves more individual bands who need to protect what’s theirs because the other guy wants to take it than one ‘mankind.’ If today’s newscast began on the moon, it ended by reporting that British and Spanish boats are still squabbling over who owns Gibraltor. And that’s the way it is.

It’s enough to make a man resort to the sentiment expressed by another local hero from Miami, Jacky Gleason: To the moon, Alice, to the moon!