Normandy brings out an unlikely quality in Parisians — self-discipline.
Impossible though it may sound, the capital-dwellers, who are famous for
smoking into other people’s lunch and pretending they don’t know how a queue
works, become models of self-control when they get to Normandy.
As they charge northwest towards the coast, they resist a thousand and one
temptations to stray off the A13 motorway. Every couple of miles, there is a
sepia road sign depicting the Château de this and Abbaye de that, but the
Parisian drivers grit their teeth and press on with their stampede to the
sea.
More fool them. Because if you do get off the main drag and explore its back
roads, Normandy is as full of treats as a patisserie’s window display.
Just a few miles from the motorway or inland from the coastal resorts, you are
in what Parisians call “la France profonde”, deepest France, which they view
much as Victorians saw 19th-century Uganda — full of heathens with no
fashion sense.
The minor roads are lined with tumbledown mud barns, lily-coated duck ponds
and more thatched cottages than a coffee-table guide to the Cotswolds. Here,
the Normans do have a thing or two to learn, because many of the thatched
cottages have a row of irises planted along the ridge of the roof. The local
hospitals must be full of careless iris-waterers.
There are also, among the farming hamlets, some of France’s most beautiful
chateaux. The 17th-century Beaumesnil (pronounced “bow-men-eel”) calls
itself “the Norman Versailles”. This does it an injustice, because it’s a
bit like saying “the Essex Buckingham Palace”. What’s more, whereas the real
Versailles is a honeypot for tourist coaches, and so gigantic that you
realise why the French felt like beheading their royal family, the car park
at Beaumesnil on this summer’s day is a largely empty lawn.
Beaumesnil is a gloriously blowsy mini chateau, surrounded by a lake and a
tiny French classical garden with hedges trimmed as precisely as sashimi. As
we cross the moat, the chateau’s windows seem to glow. This is not the
lumière half of a son et lumière — it’s because the building is only one
room deep and the sun shines through from the other side. Yes, it’s a
see-through chateau, which is just as sexy as it sounds. You can imagine
Louis XIV’s courtiers nipping out here for naughty Norman weekends. Its
spell seems to be working as well as ever today, because looking out from
the chateau’s library, we see a young couple trot past the lake and scamper
into the woods. I don’t think they are impatient butterfly-spotters.
After a barefoot wander across the soft lawns, we go in search of culinary
pleasures. Normandy, like the whole of France, is dotted with places to
taste and buy local foods, the specialities here being soft cheese and
apple-based booze. Personally, whenever I eat a really ripe camembert or its
square cousin, Pont l’Evêque, I can’t help picturing a urine-soaked sock, so
we steer clear of the dairies and look for a calvados distillery.
Calva, as the French affectionately call it, is basically the result of some
medieval Norman saying, “Hey, lads, if you boil cider, you get even more
pissed” — but, of course, the Distillerie Busnel, in the little town of
Cormeilles, can’t admit that. The French are experts at turning hedonism
into art, so the distillery’s short film tries to convince you that the
steam given off during distillation is “letting the angels know that man has
fulfilled his mission”. Of course, the French concept of heaven has to
include alcohol.
The 90-minute tour of the distillery is much more down to earth, being divided
up into an hour of getting woozy among the fermentation tanks and barrels,
then a full 30 minutes of tasting.
“Won’t this incite visitors to drink and drive?” I ask one of the guides.
“Oh no,” she says, “we don’t give you neat calvados. We mix you a pommeau,
which is one-third calva, two-thirds apple juice.” So alcohol becomes less
alcoholic when disguised by apple juice? I try to memorise this argument in
case I meet a gendarme during my subsequent meandering around the lanes.
If you make the mistake of visiting a distillery before lunch, you can either
soak up the alcohol at the nearest auberge or — more fun in summer — find a
food stall at one of the many weekend foires à tout,
“everything fairs”. In the larger villages, “everything” can include bumper
cars, a flea market, local crafts and, if you’re really unlucky,
“distractions” such as a DJ playing excruciating French hits from the 1970s,
when the country’s male singers all sounded like a cross between Cliff
Richard, Boney M and a sexually aroused chicken.
Today, at Beaumont-le-Roger, there are people selling Tour de France T-shirts,
Pernod water jugs, the metal tops off champagne corks and old French
greetings cards showing men with waxed moustaches kissing women with bulging
bustles.
There are also lots of sausage stands, grilling either spicy North African merguez
or obscenely shaped torpedoes that suggest the region’s donkeys are
probably braying in falsetto. I settle for a camembert baguette, a bolet (cup)
of chilled cider deadening my tongue to the sock aftershock.
The browsing crowds are as typically French as the stalls, and I am reminded
that in la France profonde, unlike Paris, it is perfectly normal
for men to have tight denim shorts, a big moustache and a wife.
Heading east, we cross the crowded motorway and drop down into the Vallée de
la Seine. Missing out on the valley is probably the Parisians’ biggest
mistake as they speed for the seaside. The river runs past their doorstep,
but they tend to ignore everything between the Eiffel Tower and Le Havre.
The Château Gaillard is a great lookout point down the Seine. The majestic
12th-century ruins sit on a hilltop and, before the owners got slack with
the maintenance, the castle gave Richard the Lionheart, the English usurper,
a perfect view along a bend in the river lined with white cliffs that Dover
would be proud of.
The castle has a violent, and very French, history. Richard and the rightful
king, Philippe Auguste, agreed that the hill was too strategic for either to
build a castle there. Sly Richard promptly slapped a mighty fortress on top
of it. Instead of reacting immediately, French Philippe Auguste let his
resentment smoulder until Richard’s death, at which point the castle was
besieged and many of its inhabitants starved to death. It’s a warning to all
Brits settling in France today — beware of moving into a house built without
planning permission.
Further up the valley is an attraction that is ignored by Parisians but nobody
else — Claude Monet’s house at Giverny. If he were alive today, old Claude
wouldn’t be famous as a painter at all — he’d be the star of a TV show
called Gardening in a Floppy Hat. People don’t come here to see his
paintings (which is lucky, because there aren’t any) but to ogle his
flowers.
And why not? If you went to Leonardo da Vinci’s house, you wouldn’t be able to
meet Mona Lisa’s grinning descendants, but here you can see the
great-grandchildren of the very lilies that inspired Monet. Visitors wander
the gardens in ecstasy, digital cameras immortalising their own miniature
Monets. All they need is a de-focus button to create that impressionist
effect.
The souvenir shop is practically as big as the house itself and, contrary to
the Geneva Convention on tourism, you visit it both on the way in and on the
way out. Here you can buy Monet-style gardening implements, seeds and floppy
hats, and lilies printed on every material known to man, except perhaps
plutonium. There are lily-patterned aprons, ties, mugs, bags, bracelets,
even teddy bears.
The house is not just for plant-lovers, though. The only artwork that the
Monet Foundation has been able to hang on to is Claude’s fantastic
collection of about 200 Japanese prints, some of them more than 300 years
old. It includes superb geishas, tsunamis, stylised animals and lots of
caricatures of Europeans. It does seem slightly suspicious, though, that
Claude, being such a bon vivant, didn’t have any risqué etchings. I counted
only one naked geisha’s breast in the whole collection, and, believe me, I
searched.
The coaches leaving Giverny head straight for the motorway to join the
Parisian rush, which is their final mistake. Driving back towards Paris
along the Seine, you can get within a few miles of the city’s notorious
banlieues and still feel as if you’re in another century.
The village of La Roche- Guyon, just 10 miles downriver from the misnamed
Paris suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie (“Pretty” Mantes), has a chateau that is a
startling mix of styles, with a classical wing, a Renaissance centrepiece
and, on the hill, a 12th-century tower with secret rooms and passageways cut
into the rock. I’ve lived in Paris for 13 years and nobody has ever
mentioned its existence to me.
Enjoying a cool drink at the riverside hotel below the chateau, we watch a
sand barge gliding sedately towards Paris. It is probably moving faster than
the traffic jammed on the motorway just to our west. We’re sorely tempted to
hitch a lift back to the capital. We’d probably get to the city centre
quicker by barge. And we’d be able to sample some more of that calva without
fear of crashing into a gendarme.
Stephen Clarke is the author of A Year in the Merde and Merde
Actually (both Black Swan paperbacks). His new book, Talk to the
Snail, is published on October 9 by Bantam Press
Travel brief
Getting there: Ferry companies offering sailings between the
UK and Normandy include Brittany Ferries (0870 366 5333,
www.brittany-ferries. com), to Cherbourg and Caen; Transmanche Ferries (0800
917 1201, www.transmancheferries. com), to Dieppe; LD Lines (0870 428 4335,
www.ldlines. co.uk), to Le Havre; and Condor Ferries (0870 243 5140,
www.condorferries.co.uk), also to Cherbourg. Expect to pay about £200 for a
car and passengers.
Where to stay: in Les Andelys, the three-star La Chaîne d’Or
hotel (25-27 Rue Grande; 00 33-2 32 54 00 31, www.hotel-lachainedor.com) is
a converted toll house with doubles from £50. In the fishing harbour of
Honfleur, the Hôtel des Loges (18 Rue Brûlée; 02 31 89 38 26,
www.hoteldesloges.com) has a subtly boutiquey feel; doubles from £65. Visit
www.gites-de-france.fr for other accommodation options in the départements
of Calvados and Eure.
Where to eat: in Honfleur, La Tortue (36 Rue de
l’Homme-de-Bois; 02 31 89 04 93) has a Norman menu — apple soup with
cinnamon and calvados, melted camembert salad, hake in cider sauce and
filo-pastry apple turnovers with caramel sauce. A five-course lunch costs
£10.50.
What to visit: tours of the Distillerie Busnel, in Cormeilles
(02 32 57 38 80), cost £1.30 (children free). Entry to the gardens and house
at Château de Beaumesnil (02 32 44 40 09, www.chateaubeaumesnil.com) costs
£4.50.
Claude Monet’s house in Giverny (02 32 51 28 21. www.fondation-monet.com) is
best visited early in the morning to avoid the crowds. It’s open April
1-October 31, 9.30am-6pm, Tuesday-Sunday. Entry costs £3.75.
