has always been my town without first stating the reasons why Angers is not, and never has been. In spite of the fact that everything—the conveniences, the distance, the administrative services, family and business relationships—linked the Saint-Florent of my childhood to Angers, the official regional capital, where my father and mother went to secondary school, as did all the children of the noteworthy, or semi-noteworthy Florentines. The route, the railroad stations along the line leading to Angers, interrupted midway by a stop in Champtocé (birthplace of my mother and home base of the entire Belliard clan) became familiar to me at an early age: like a yardstick for measuring fabric, I still use them to calculate traveling distances. One of my most vivid memories dating back to the First World War is the local night train serving that route: smell of wet coal, hot-water bottles, pale light cast by small, yellowish lamps, mirrors forever trembling inside their shaking wooden frames while the rain outside cuts swaths through the darkness, stops during nights drowsy with sleep where a voice repeatedly calls out the name of some station impossible to understand before fading into the fog. What I always enjoyed—and still enjoy now, whenever I travel there in the daytime—is the trail of residential suburbs, stretched out along the banks of the Loire, from la Possonnière to Béhuard, and from Béhuard to Bouchemaine, three stations signaling the approach of the town. Scattered over a tapestry of gently sloping vineyards, goat paths that climb steep hills between the remnants of stone walls, stumpy blocks of limestone and gray slate, patches of scrub brush burned by the summer sun, there beckons an array of country houses ranging from the Turkish-Hindu pavilion to the imitation Trianon villa, buildings set in the hillsides overlooking the Loire reminiscent of the half-baroque, half-fantastic architectural style of seaside resorts popular during the Belle Epoque. Even today, I love to see that parade of summer homes along the railroad track—the sharp angles of their little towers and gables jutting into the bright yellow summer sun just setting on the horizon—a succession of follys spread out next to the river like the long, shimmering train of a gown, indicative of a city’s importance and creativity: two promises that town has never kept. I always thought that the genius of Angers—if there ever was a genius—must be confinement: the choice of its location, a stingy, unattractive site on the banks of a minor tributary away from the great river, brings to mind those narrow-minded souls who are afraid to build a settlement in the midst of open spaces, and crowd their houses and churches into an inconspicuous corner of the planner’s drawing board. All of the city’s alliances and exchanges—a provincial capital late to become industrialized—are of limited scope; throughout my childhood, they never went beyond the regional level. There was the local gentry who spent the winter in their town houses in the rue des Arènes and then returned to their manors in the farmlands criss-crossed by hedges and trees, villagers—with long lists of errands to run—on shopping trips, notaries and other country folk in town to take care of legal matters, black-robed priests and wimpled nuns of a province rich in teaching, charitable, and other religious orders making their rounds of ad limina visits. A stranger wandering the streets of Angers is likely to sense its shortcomings almost immediately, especially if he ventures into the deserted neighborhood around the cathedral and walks through its narrow, empty streets with their sleeping cats and potted geraniums where, in years past, one might catch a glimpse of a priest’s robe silently swaying in the distance. I always thought that Angers, with its well-hidden intrigues, its unmistakable odor of social withdrawal, its stagnating, miserly, bickering micro-societies, was the true homeland of Le Curé de Tours, rather than the city chosen by Balzac. Certainly more Balzacian than Nantes, when presented in this light: Balzac is the novelist who best analyzes pockets of social stagnation—with the exception of those he found in Paris, scandalous in his eyes because he thought of that city as a cancerous implant in the weak vascular fabric of rural France—places where the air is stifling, where the physical environment and the lack of oxygen become so oppressive they generate waves of debilitating radiation, like those released by the house of Usher on its last owners. Maurice Fourré’s entertaining novels remind me of the particular way people settle and put down roots in Angers; he knew and celebrated Angers as well as Nantes, but his heart belongs to the former. Whether his fiction is set in Paris, Richelieu, or Brittany, I always detect the playful, talkative farniente of the Angers bourgeois who divides his time between the shop in the rue des Lices, the little farm house built of tuffeau stone, and the vineyard with its summer storage cave on one of the Loire’s hillsides, who goes fishing on Sundays or gathers in some leafy bower with his fellow boules de fort players, a special game of odd-shaped balls men played barefoot around the turn of the century. Hardly overburdened as an administrative center, home to more notaries than businessmen, a discrete digestive organ of income derived from real estate holdings—but also neat and clean, flower-bedecked, inviting, its heartbeat slightly lowered, as if local working days had been infused with, lightened by supplementary leisure time—the city on the banks of the Maine has taken measures to secure for itself a more than comfortable retirement life, and to avoid American-type stress. It seems to me that even as a child, I was already dimly aware that revenue collected from tenant farmers was accumulating right here in the city where it circulated still in its raw form, undisguised, not yet converted or invested like elsewhere, accentuating in my mind the image of a clumsy town with mud still sticking to its shoes, a town not yet completely segregated from its farmlands.
The city has changed since my childhood days. It has become more lively; the old, almost peasant-like nonchalance has been bartered for a businesslike ambiance that lacks a solid infrastructure, so that many a walk around town turns out to be a disappointment. Nevertheless, I like to spend the time between trains (Angers has been for a long time, and still is, as far as I am concerned, a city “between two trains”—ever since that wintry day when, sitting on a bench, I had cut open the pages of The Cliffs of Marble) at the castle, walking on the right side of the moat all the way up to the mall squeezed into a narrow space that comes to a dead end, high above the Maine municipal gardens laid out down below along the riverbank where once stood a row of ancient, ugly houses. The castle, firmly planted on its spot like the solid mold of a child’s sand pail turned upside down, is for me—together with the cathedral of Albi—the most beautiful, massive work of masonry I have ever seen in France; the dark gray stone set in cement has a pleasing effect on the eye, a combination of materials also used successfully in the construction of the snack bar at the new railroad station. Looking straight down into the castle’s shadowy moat, carpeted in a shade of green reminiscent of pre-Raphaelite paintings, offers a charming, almost magical surprise—the sight of a herd of spotted deer peacefully grazing. I am saving the exploration of the rue de Létenduère for a day of leisurely walks; its gentle slope from the train station down to the housing developments along the Loire invites and intrigues me: I would like to see how, at this late date, the city has finally joined the stream which had intimidated it for such a long time. Listening to comments by first-time visitors who find Nantes repulsive and Angers enchanting, I sometimes have the impression of being unfair. But there is this persistent feeling, stronger than any other, that nothing will ever attract me to Angers: an attitude just as cutting and unjust as the indifference shown by a man who decides, after just a momentary glance at a woman, that nothing about her will ever appeal to him.
Moreover, since the adult’s conception of the world is indebted to ideas formed during childhood, there are two other reasons why I never could, and still cannot, consider Angers a full-fledged city. The first concerns statistics. Since I lived in a very small provincial town, my viewpoint was essentially bookish, and based on numbers. In those times, when elitism had not yet become the object of an efficient counteroffensive, manuals ranked French cities the same way our seating assignments were decided at school, that is, according to our compositions’ order of excellence as reflected in the number of points obtained. Or, I then was of the opinion that a genuine city, a city teeming with life, the city of one’s dreams, did not reach a level of excellence comparable to that of a perfectly executed writing assignment (then graded as brutally as an exam) unless it went beyond a certain threshold where quantity abruptly transformed itself into quality, something that became fixed in my mind once and for all by a six-figure digit: one hundred thousand inhabitants. At that time, a census had left Angers languishing ingloriously at around eighty thousand: it shared, and still shares, to a lesser degree—together with Amiens, Montpellier, Besançon, and Grenoble—the disgrace afflicting those students whose quarterly report cards indicate cause for concern by reminding them that they need to improve, and who later on, as civil servants, one sees stagnate eternally in subordinate positions.
The other reason concerned the question of tramways, then an item of my personal mythology.
Until I was fifteen, and even beyond that age, one of my bedside books—together with the periodical Le Chasseur français, whose descriptions of itineraries for bicycle tourists I devoured—was an old Michelin Guide found in the attic next to a collection of the Vermot Almanac, sustenance for more than one afternoon of enforced fasting when I had run out of Jules Verne, as well as Fenimore Cooper. Even today, when I reopen the considerably heftier Michelin Guide, its size having steadily increased over the years so that now it looks like a small telephone book, I can get carried away for an hour or two just looking, fascinated, comparing and superimposing in my imagination the tracings of those pink city maps which long ago were just about the only halfway accurate images I had of France. But then I only had eyes for a few of them: if the plan did not show the dotted lines illustrating a network of electric tramways, I lost all interest and turned the page; there was nothing to do but move on.
It is difficult for me to say how this bizarre prejudice had come about. Unaware of the rationale of transport systems, I probably thought that a city without tramways was the equivalent of a country without trains: not a consequence of size, but an indication of a civilization’s staggering lack of progress. I am not sure, but there might have been other reasons: the prestige of miniatures like model trains, which in my opinion also included the local railway system, whose placid, nonchalant cars parading by looked like intermediaries between a real train and a toy—as well as the impression of riding on a finely tuned merry-goround that turned on its tracks in a limited space, a conveyance perhaps more entertaining than utilitarian, so that every time I boarded a tramway I felt as if on holiday, free to enjoy a day off work. I must admit that several cities with less than one hundred thousand inhabitants found grace in my eyes because of their tramways. But not Angers. Small, skimpy, high up on their wheels, serving only a limited number of routes, the angevine tramways never impressed me: those of Nantes were longer, more streamlined, of a pleasing, buttery color, they cleared the road with an arrogant, authoritarian clang, inviting an immediate comparison between a sleek, rapid locomotive and those rumbling old battered engines about to finish their career by pushing railroad cars on the tracks of a switchyard. Moreover, at the onset of summer, visitors were pleasantly surprised to see a completely open trolley called a baladeuse hooked up behind the engine, a wagon with neither windows nor partitions between the seats and without the customary entry and exit spaces, sitting low on the tracks, immediately accessible right from the road, and as easy to board and leave as an escalator. These charming vehicles, wide open to the wind and the sun, announced summer in the streets of Nantes as ritually as the cuckoo announces springtime. Although they disappeared more than a quarter of a century ago, their memory has kept my secret attraction to Boris Vian’s novel Autumn in Peking alive, where a tramway full of passengers has escaped from its dull urban route like a planet gone astray, and continues traveling up and down the countryside without ever coming to a stop. For my part, I would have gladly gone to explore the highways and byways of France aboard one of Nantes’ seductive baladeuses; every ride was an adventure, just as if I were playing hooky. Isn’t that what happened also to travelers in one of my favorite novels by Jules Verne, aboard The House of Steam which roamed the roads of India?
However, while I am writing these lines tinged with regret, a local newspaper publishes surprising news: the tramways of Nantes are coming back! The last city to have done away with them, but enlightened since by who knows what oracular council, will be reactivating its lost talisman…. News quite appropriate to confirm my idea, ever present while I write these pages, that time is reversible, that it is possible to resurrect Nantes’ past, where the unequal paving stones which once covered its streets do not guarantee the rise of the immense edifice of memory, but where those years of exalted anticipation still maintain a dialogue with present and future times. That certain period of my past, those seven years spent mostly dreaming rather than living, is only half asleep: whatever remained unaccomplished during a life half-cloistered continues its subterranean burrowing deep inside of me, like rhizomes which from time to time unexpectedly grow a shoot that thrusts upward and breaks through the earth in the form of a green stalk.
At first, and for a long time thereafter, Nantes was only a simple stopover on our way to the seashore where we spent our summer vacation. The train, which then crossed the heart of the city at the speed of a river barge, ran alongside one of the Loire’s eddies, and stopped at the stations Nantes-Orléans, Bourse, and Chantenay. It slowed down traffic; but the curious traveler, drawn to the train compartment’s window by the din of the streets and the dockside, was rewarded by getting an unusually close look. Instead of offering the usual views of empty lots, scrap metal warehouses, inner courtyards of buildings with their garbage cans and gardening tools, the train suddenly split the inner city right down the middle before the surprised traveler, like an anthill bisected by the blow of a spade, amidst teeming traffic that coagulated along the railroad tracks into instantaneous clots at every train crossing. Twenty years later, this long-forgotten childhood impression surfaced again quite unexpectedly in one of Lille’s suburbs—it could have been Menin—where the train taking us back from Holland had stopped for a moment, at the end of May 1940, in the midst of the great collapse. Refugees on their way south had gathered outside the railroad crossing; on the opposite side of the track, northbound refugees were on their way home after fleeing the Somme, where the Germans had already begun to cut off the passage. I was overcome by that same feeling of mounting agitation, of activity gone out of control I had experienced as a child while crossing Nantes; it brought into focus, rendered specific the shade of malaise and dizziness that had colored my first contact with the big city. More than once, an inner turmoil, at first incomprehensible, is a sign that a certain encounter will be decisive for us; but the compass needle, panic-stricken, will keep on spinning for quite a while before pointing to the metallic mass that has upset it.
The movement of this convoy as it progressed slowly, lazily through the very center of a big city to the ringing of bells at railroad crossings, the hurried clanging of tramways, and the concert of horns and whistles awakened in me the feeling that here, for the first time, I had come face to face with life lived on a large scale, a life full of violence, haste, and devilish jubilation. For a child growing up in the country, the city’s big surprise is not so much its physical impact, the unexpected scale of buildings and streets, and the profusion of unusual objects, but rather the overwhelming, completely new feeling of being suddenly submerged in a sea of seething humanity, something the slow-beating pulse of Angers had been incapable of communicating to me. A child growing up in the city is impervious to a moment like this when life goes to your head like strong wine, a sudden impact just as decisive, and as bewildering in its effect, as the onset of puberty. Nature’s protective, gently cradling and swaying rhythms that carry you along come to an abrupt halt when interrupted by an unexpected confrontation of recklessness, a premonition of the human jungle. Even if I tried, I know that I could never liberate myself from this ambivalence Nantes awakened inside of me, and which memories of Menin have since reinforced: whenever I find myself in the midst of unruly crowds, I am still the child clinging to the train compartment’s window, speechless and unable to move while watching, from up close, the violent agitation of a city cut in half like a worm.
We would stop in Nantes only long enough to change trains; but on the way back from our summer vacation, my parents would sometimes take advantage of the stopover and spend a few hours to place an order, or to visit a supplier. To this I owe the delightful memories of my very first tramway ride (whereas my first encounter with the railroad left a blank): first to Chantenay, to the offices of a soot-encrusted factory, and then a second ride to Pirmil, where my parents placed an order at the Bertin soap factory. I can still see the label that decorated one of its products: worthy, because of its name and wrapping, of the perfume shop in César Birotteau, and without doubt commemorative of the French victory at Agadir, since it was called Soap of the Princes of the Congo. We went on a guided tour of the soap factory, a building four or five stories high, whose windows looked out over one of the arms of the Loire; the noise, the commotion of the conveyor belts, the clean and well-lit assembly and packaging rooms, and the penetrating, slightly sweet odor of fresh laundry define my first contact with the world of industry: a contact neither repulsive nor depressing. I’ve never had the opportunity to get a closer look at mechanical, assembly-line work, and one may very well think that I am speaking of it lightly; but in fact there is nothing Dickens-like in the spontaneous image which comes to my mind, and which tends to join directly those bright and glossily painted factories of the nuclear age set on carpet like green lawns—taking a giant stride over the leprous era of coal dust and soot which was still very much a reality in my youth. All this happened during the war years of 1914-18; these images of the tramway, the soap factory, the glorious, majestic procession of the train alongside streets where nothing seemed amiss except a row of cheering spectators are my first memories of Nantes. If the picture darkens from time to time, it is because of shadows cast by so many tall buildings, or the cavernous aspect of streets, which surprised me. All things considered, what lingers on after that first, fleeting contact is—rising from its resonant, shaded, freshly washed streets teeming with life and laughter, from the crowded terraces of cafés in the summertime, refreshed by the misty scent of lemons, strawberries, and grenadine, smells inhaled while walking about in that city where life’s heartbeat was no longer the same and which has, since then, remained unforgettable—an unusual, daring perfume of modernity. For me, that perfume has been, and always will be, associated with a season, my favorite season, a time when all the secret, almost erotic powers of the city are released. Later on, I certainly have loved Nantes bundled up and locked inside heavy winter fogs, a time when vendors of roasted chestnuts and black wheat flatbread set up their stands at street corners, every hole of their perforated roasting pans glowing red-hot from the fire within. But summertime will always be for me, ever since my first contact with her, the fateful season of the city called Nantes la Grise. As soon as the pink and white candles of the chestnut trees start to light up the avenues, as soon as the leaves of the magnolia trees in the Botanical Gardens regain their brilliant sheen, these hardly noticeable signs of my favorite season go right to my head, setting in motion something which even a fully orchestrated explosion of springtime in the country could not make me feel: I sense a sudden softness in the air, the sensual warmth rising from a rumpled bed, flowing through the streets, for me alone.