France is where they go to die? Oh they wish!
They all have this dream of dying in a lovely 15th century stone cottage. Like mine here in Barat-Sophie. Four solid rooms, not counting kitchen and bathroom, high above those salty shores of Cannes and Antibes (fifteen clicks to the south, but in another universe entirely; practically on the Moon). All mod cons here, particularly the SansFil™ WiFi router that I’ll be posting this through in a while, when I file it, with any luck tonight, so you fine people can all read it.
Yes, they dream of it, but I’ve got it. And I didn’t really set out to get it, it just dropped into my lap because a couple of people died, followed by two who just didn’t want it. Imagine inconveniencing yourself just so you can be further inconvenienced: that’s the thinking of a lot of people, and it’s sound, as far as it goes, but regardless, it’s how these things happen. Meanwhile others still dream for what they can’t have. They should change their dreams. Just pick something else at random. Shouldn’t be hard. They’re getting their material desires third-hand as it is, so it’s not like they have personal integrity to deal with.
Anyway, as I said, I’ve got this one, you find your own! 2020 would have been a good year to buy. They were going at fire-sale prices for the first few years after Brexit, when all those Sunny Jims at the Daily Boot who’d bored everyone in Canada Square for years and years with tiresome recitations of their non-adventures in “Provence” (as they called the area hereabouts)—e.g., “You can’t imagine the crusty rolls they have at the Franprix Boulangerie down the road…really crusty!…and they’re fresh every morning, not just baked from ready-made dough out of a Waitrose bag! Oooh-là-là!”—got their comeuppance! Oh yes indeed they surely got their comeuppance, and no mistake!
Here they were all imagining they’d die in bed in their remodeled 14th century abattoir or their 13th century oubliette with the skylight; or whatever they got chivvied into buying by their wives and husbands and especially the kids.
All had too many kids, by the way, but fortunately, having whelped this many proved to be a reliable prophylactic against talking about your kids all the time. And building your whole lives around them—I mean the way people do when they have just one or two. Adults will be going to the cinema to see a Christopher Nolan picture or maybe something called The Aldershot Mayhem (I just made that up, but it sounds pretty good) or even I Am Curious Yellow: The Remake. But people who are basing their taste in entertainment on the presumed preference of a four-year-old will be making a beeline for Mrs. Bunny and the Bad Witch.
I assume it’s the same as having cats; when you have six or seven you seldom mention them. If you have one cat you can’t stop talking about it, unless and until you realize that this is an extemely boring and selfish cat.
I had a cat once but not now. Meantime my internet and cable here are almost free. You have to rent some equipment from the local company and you’re required to change your router at least every five years, and there’s another installation charge for that. But in terms of monthly usage charges, I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than €27 a month. If we had more subscribers that cost would go down, but we’ve pretty much topped out around 12 or 13 (maybe 26 houses total in the village) and that €27 mainly goes to pay the old guys who work part-time installing things and opening shipping boxes.
Although the village postmistress controls more than half the shares [1], Barat-Sophie Telecom ownership is shared with the Barat-Sophie village council (which operates other local utilities and street maintenance) and also with the Lefebvre House friars who are well known for operating the Tombola concession during our summer fêtes on the village green. They also celebrate the only Tridentine Mass you can find on Sundays within 50 miles of the Côte. I use the word “celebrate” advisedly here, as I heartily commend the friars’ framboise-tinctured amber ale, generously offered in 250ml cups as you exit the vestibule. Ite, Missa est. Deo gratias. Indeed!
The upload speed here is incredible, though I’m now so used to it I hardly ever talk about it anymore. Not like 25 years ago when I had that Reuters gig in Paris and was always checking out various cafés and bistrots to find new places to hang out through the afternoon with my Mac Pismo with Firewire. (Now there’s a Boomer Edition trivia question: Whatever happened to Firewire?)
Alsatian joints down in le cinquième were the best, I found. Lovely frosty mugs of beer you could spin out for an hour, served by chuckly sandy-haired German waiters who’d arrange a buy-back for you, when they saw the tank was running low on your second. I once made the mistake of hi-signing for that third half-liter before I’d been there a half-hour! Naughty me! I was already primed to piss like a racehorse. And I was supposed to judge a dance recital that evening, because Owen the Photographer asked me to, as his daughter asked him to bring a lot of people, particularly old people, because they needed some grownups there to be judges. It sounded something like The Gong Show, crossed with one of those Come Dancing-type TV contests, and was apparently in a grand auditorium down in the 13th, basically Chinatown, and there was nothing for it now but to switch to espresso doubles so I wouldn’t fall asleep in my nasty little wicker seat while at salle de bal.
I recall I used Lycos to search for good sans-fils at other likely spots, mostly ones not too far from this little corner of Alsace they whimsically call the Brasserie Twickenham. There is no Café Strasbourg or Brasserie Metz in this town, owing to some legendary curse. Much the same way we keep calling that famous Shakespeare tragedy “The Scottish Play.” (Someone should knock out a light feature about all that. Just 1200 or 1300 words, hardly more than a Spectator column. With some low-effort accompanying cartoon by Steve Appleby or Michael Heath.) Strangely enough the Twick itself wasn’t even mentioned in this list of refreshment houses, most of which were new to me although I certainly knew the nearest, just up the road by the Rue Soufflot.
I was now inspired to jot down my own top ten favorites drinking spots with wifi. But soon saw, as one always does, that I’d have to stop at six. I’d only been to five shops worth mentioning. But there was still over an hour left before my cruel Boris Lermontov eye had to pass judgment over a gaggle of unlikely dancing girls. More than enough time, I said to myself, to stroll over to that L’Ancien Regime place near L’Odeon. I grabbed my imaginary hat and lit out for the territory.
Bad move! It took me twenty minutes to get there, and when I got there the wifi was on the fritz. This was shaping up into one very bad-luck evening. I just knew, dollars to doughnuts, that one of those ballerinas—and by the way, how old were they? sixteen? six? Owen Franken wasn’t one to disclose personal information about family members) would break her leg before the night was through. And then maybe Owen’s daughter would get to go on in her stead. Well that would be okay then. Ever the optimist, I felt my mood suddenly rise, like a cork in the Salton Sea. Where I have never been.
I now observed that this ineptly run wifi-desert was a perky little place. And looky thar, framed caricatures on the back wall ! Oh my, we got Fernandel, and we got yer Bardot, and Arletty, and Gabin, and even Eddie Constantine and that’s Jack Lescoulie… Those were the ones I could recognize from a distance, anyway. Color drawings, ink and pastels, just like at Sardi’s…and these are likewise signed by the artiste! The famous person it’s supposed to be a drawing of, I mean, not the caricaturist. Because this one, like so many in that racket, the Sardi’s guy for example, managed to make these people look cuter in flat cartoony form than they ever did in real life. Take that one of Fernandel— I mean, if you squinted, it could be a drawing of Alain Delon made up to look like Fernandel. In a remake of The Eddy Duchin Story, maybe. And look at this: I just noticed that the great Fernandel did not even sign this purported caricature. Tells you what he really thought. But wait, didn’t Fernandel die a while back? Yeah, I’m sure he croaked. Donkey’s ages ago. That could be the reason we have no John Henry here from poor old Ferd. The whole thing is poignant, really.
But I hadn’t thought of Jack Lescoulie in years. He had that famous bit part in the French heist movie, Le Cercle Rouge, as the drunken American tourist who gets dragged out of his car and curb-stomped in front of the Madeleine. (Spoiler alert!) This is after he drives up in a flashy white Citroën DS and yells at one of the hoods to stop hitting some young woman there, who as it turns out is his moll. The hood’s moll. But we don’t know that yet. Great scene.
Then we see the hood with a couple of his gang, and they’re in a dive so lowlife it seems a different century. They’re relaxing with their Pastis, or Ricard, or whatever sludge it is those lads drink. Then we see the moll’s there too, and she’s laughing and carrying on, about how they smashed the face of rich American driving French car, merde! he think he President de Gaulle ho ho! Then they all take turns reenacting the kicking and face-smashing, only with chairs and bottles. And as we pan back over to the woman we get to see one side of her face is all bandaged up. But she’s laughing so hard that the bandages are slipping off, just hanging there…and now we dolly in on that side of her face, which is now just a grotesque, swollen, bloody mass…and still she’s laughing away.
We don’t see Jack Lescoulie again in the film but he must look a fright. It was just a cameo part but the French critics loved him. The story went around that he was a minor film noir actor in the late 40s who “never really broke out.” He was was ze B-movie Dan Duryea, but now he ees on cover of Cahiers du Cinema.
He had a nice long run over there for a little while. Then one of the gals from Madame Arthur’s nightclub started pushing an amazing story that Jack Lescoulie was really a woman! The rumor was ridiculous, since Jack was supposed to be a married man with four or six or eight kids, but it was too good to drop. Le Canard Enchainé ran a comic strip about the il/elle «Jacqui» for nearly a year, its last episode ending with the protagonist driving up in a Citroën DS followed by a huge battle tank that proceeds to blast away everyone on the pavement.
By now another story had come out, about how Jack Lescoulie had gone on a date with the Madame Arthur’s floozy and it all just went horribly wrong. And the floozy wanted revenge. But the rumor had grown a pair of excellent legs, and wings, and now it was said Jack Lescoulie was going through a bunch of operations with Dr. Burou in Casablanca. This did not hurt his fan club one bit, however much it bothered Jack Lescoulie. Huge crowds would gather near the runway at Orly when Jack Lescoulie’s plane was landing. “Jackee Lez!” the crowds shouted, waving placards. “Welcome back Jackee Lez!” Then one day the fans and cineastes noticed they hadn’t seen Jack Lescoulie in a new film in two or three years.
Remembering all this, after all these years! All in all, L’Ancien Regime’s hangings and other decor almost made up for the wifi-outage. I noticed it was almost empty this evening and asked the barman if this were normal. He said it was usually fairly crowded but tonight, sans-fil ne marche pas. Aha! I decided L’Ancien Regime wouldn’t be last in my rankings, but probably fourth or fifth.
And now to rank, to judge, somebody’s terpsichorean beauty and passion. The grand auditorium I was expecting turned out to be in a somewhat battered lycée near Sinorama, that amazing Chinese restaurant that middle-aged performers from the Comedie used to take me to, toward midnight, back in the days when my finances were so fragile I wouldn’t have had the metro or bus fare to take me home if no one offered to drive me. Fortunately my friends paid for our late Chinese supper as well.
I remember sitting down with two strangers, one of them Chinese, at a small table draped with brown cloth. Were we the judges? There was no sign there. We had no microphones or scoring machines. I saw no instructions about what judges were to do, but I imagined an emcee would step out presently and tell out how this competition worked. Then suddenly the lights went down, and someone began to play rather circusy music on a piano. The dancers trouped out, short and tall, adolescent, child and barely more than toddler. Fifteen of them, I think. I believe all of them were female but at this point it didn’t matter because they were all dressed androgynously, white tights and a kind of toga garment. First they queued up in a conga line, gripping the waist of the one ahead. Then shuffled slowly, in a wide circle, gradually gaining speed. Finally they all let out a tremendous TOOT-TOOT-WOO-WOO and at last it came to me that they were a train.
The rest of the little dance recital was surprisingly pleasant, more comedy than avant-garde, with the girls doing a medley of routines from around the world. We had a thirty-second Riverdance parody, a foot-stomping “Cloggies” turn from the old Bill Tidy Programme, the Lightsabre Dance from Star Wars, and some French TV thing (I think) I didn’t recognize. They did the Macarena only briefly, but long enough to make me think of Al Gore and Mad Cow Disease and then Margaux Hemingway killing herself [2]. Summer of 1996 was pretty terrible. But then arrived a nice palate-cleanser, from the America of My Early Childhood. A finale number where the troupe danced and sang and mimed one of the very first songs most of us ever learned back in those carefree barefoot days, in the sleepy hamlet of Daylesford, Pennsylvania:
“I’m a little tea-pot
Short and stout,
Here is my handle,
Here is my spout…”
They sang it straight through to the end, and I mean sang it straight. No jokey ending where one girl who can’t keep up, maybe she’s a bit spastic, has both hands on her hips, and the music suddenly stops and she bursts into tears and cries out despairingly, “I’m a SUGAR BOWL!”
Sometimes you meet a nasty person from back home, and you bring up a nostalgic song like that, maybe sing a few bars, because you think it’s probably a shared memory, even if such a silly or embarrassing one that they try to deny it at first. And then you just have to pry it out of them. Buy them another drink, two more drinks, make them admit it. Threaten to tickle ’em on the tummy. That’s when they give in, finally. If they are good people. Good people will either not remember it, scout’s honor, but say they do, just to keep the peace; or they’ll laugh and say of course they do, they just wanted to see how far you wanted to take this idiotic game you were playing, but now since everyone’s well lubricated they’ll admit it and get up with you on the stage (now that the awful “live music” performer has gone home, it being way after eleven) and do the whole teapot dance, which I find is a favorite of late-night drunks.
Other times you meet a nasty person and the nasty person just wants an argument. Nasty person says, No I don’t remember that song at all I have no idea what you are talking about. And doubles down all the time: I don’t recall any songs at all, nobody sang anything until after I got back from the War.
I once heard:
We were too poor to have songs. Once we didn’t have anything to eat so Mumsy went down to the Relief Office and put the baby up for adoption.
Then we had a little to eat, and I heard about some kids down Yesler Way would stand out on the sidewalk and sing to perfect strangers and, you know, people would throw pennies and peanuts at them. So that sounded good but I did not know any songs. But there were people down the street who had a piano, and also a piano bench. And in the piano bench there were hundreds of songs. Sheet music. So l sneaked in their house while they were barbecuing steaks out back, and grabbed a big stack. I learned a couple songs that way, “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee.” I learned that one and another one I forget.
But when I tried to ask the music seller on Main Street what would be the very best song to sing, he said, “Show me what ya got.” And I gave him about a dozen of the songsheets, and he went, “Ah sonny, this is the real corker. Alexander’s Ragtime Band! A first edition! Almost perfect condition! Worth a million dollars! A thousand anyway! Go sit in the listening room and I’ll bring a recording in for the Victrola so you can learn it in jig time.” So I waited there ten minutes and then police arrived and took me to jail because the music seller said he caught me trying to steal HIS copy of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, which he says is a priceless collector’s item worth as much as a hundred dollars. And then they send me up the river for twenty years and when I get out the only job I can get is night watchman in an old building on Yesler Way.”
That was one pretty sad story, I must admit. And I always wondered how people became night watchmen, but now I finally know.
Finally there’s the stubborn-mule nasty person who tries to psyche you out by saying everyone he knew sang another song and it came out earlier. And then he tells you it’s “High Hopes,” and he learned it from Capt. Kangaroo. And then tries to sing it, which is a dead giveaway. He just makes up words, “Once there was a Nanny Old Goat, Tried to knock a hole in his boat.”
How many times can you be wrong in one breath?
The other “first childhood song” they’d try to sell me was “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” which is even newer than “High Hopes.”
THIS PART OF THE STORY DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK.
[1] That old postmistress, Mme. Dubose, started this service some years back when the ministry in Paris ordered every hamlet of 50 people or more to sign up for local fiber-optic broadband and cable access, so no locality need be without internet, or wifi, or online gaming, or cable television news, or thousands of streamable cinema classics, or even television series of questionable merit. Most importantly, everyone would now be able to watch, day or night, historic footage of such events as Yves Montand singing for the Telstar satellite for the first time; and France Gall winning Eurovision with her shocking yé-yé song, «I am just a doll filled with sawdust»; and Charles de Gaulle at long last getting to resign as President, and immediately running off to Sneem, Ireland, as he had wanted to do for seventy years. All these plot points of modern history used to be part of the standard school curriculum. But now the world is changing too fast and there is far too much to teach in the classroom, because France generally disapproves of homeschooling. As a result, the trend in recent years has been to offload all the old, important stuff they used to teach in school, onto cable TV and the internet. Reception among the populace at large has been “mixed,” which always means negative, but news reports say teachers are happier than ever.
In most small towns with 50 people or more, nobody wanted the responsibility of managing the local service. People asked why the government couldn’t do the work, since it was all their idea. With no other candidates, the role typically fell to the local postmaster or (more commonly) postmistress. In this part of France, this official was generally a taciturn, elderly person who remembered Marshal Pétain, could tell you what it was like when the town had five daily newspapers, and who pretty much knew everybody’s business, such as why their Uncle Dagobert had to leave town in 1922. Most importantly, the postmistress provided her fellow townspeople with a face of government they could see every day, and feel assured that she was looking after them.
Having received a responsibility that no one else would do or could do, Mme. Dubose of Barat-Sophie set up a limited-liability company in the long-shuttered cinema across the road, and hired an elderly, retired handyman and one-legged gardener to handle equipment installation and billing. So far, over half of Barat-Sophie’s 21 houses have cable television and hi-speed broadband.
[2] William Cash wrote a eulogy or obit on her, saying she’d changed her name to Margot because she thought it would help her stop drinking, since she was named after a wine, and Margot is nothing alcoholic. Reasonable minds may differ.