very close attention to the progressive changes in the landscape which announce the approach of a city. Especially when traveling by train, I am on the lookout for those first signs of infiltration, eager to see how the city’s feelers stretch probingly into the countryside; and, if it happens to be a city where I like to live, I look upon them as a hand raised in welcome, waving from afar on friendly soil. Every year, on the way to Pornichet where we spent our summer vacation, I would catch a first glimpse of the town—just the crowns of a few isolated pine trees rising above tall hedges—while the train was still traveling through a dreary inland landscape; next came a few freshly painted fences, and then suddenly three or four villas, shockingly white against the trees, like Arab houses in a desert palm grove (today, it is quite difficult to imagine how French villages used to hide their silhouettes in those times; they barely made an impression on the eye before melting into a uniformly colored patch of gray like a flotilla camouflaged during the war). Although the moment I stepped off the train I immediately found myself in a more invigorating, livelier, and more festive world, in the midst of a well-dressed, suntanned, local crowd in wraparound skirts, beach dresses, and bright saris, the first, modest sign of arrival had been the view from the train, that welcoming wave of a hand raised for just a moment. Years later, arriving in New York from inland, nothing struck me more than the sight of a valley lying half under water, still in a state of almost total wilderness without a single house in sight, which the train crossed immediately south of the Palisades, less than two kilometers from the Pennsylvania train station located right in the heart of the city.
It is possible, even probable, that with the passage of time my interest in geography made me pay greater attention to how a city is anchored to its countryside, and to the complexity of exchanges it maintains with the milieu from which it originally drew its substance. Nantes, not my hometown, was first of all a city where I came to live for certain periods of time and then left again, every arrival and departure accompanied by feelings of violent alienation, liberation, or anguish. The whistles of the locomotives at the central train station, audible day and night from everywhere in the lycée, never let me forget it. Even when I lived there, the city remained more of a horizon than a milieu; to leave, and especially to return, was like a brief and stormy embarkation on a private odyssey: I could only think of Nantes as a city which, unlike any other, announced itself to me from afar in a powerful and sometimes oppressive way.
Because of the way it is situated, Nantes’ relationship with its hinterland, as well as with the surrounding countryside, is completely different from that of its sister-cities located at the other two deltas of the Atlantic Ocean, Rouen and Bordeaux. Every time I see Rouen from high up on the road along the coast of Sainte Catherine, I am struck by the unique character of its site because it looks like an emblematic shortcut of the entire Haute Normandy region. Every major feature of Normandy’s landscape is represented here, lined up on adjoining spaces: the river—the cliffs of chalk already visible at La Roche-Guyon and even at Meulan, rising on opposite sides of the river like a system of visual echos—the great forests down in the plains surrounded by the wide loops traced by the river—the star burst-like ravines of the little valleys once covered by cotton fields and dotted with red brick factories like beads on a string, valleys that reach deep into the suburbs to establish a foothold, like vines trying to put down roots or the trails of organic suckers, shoring up the city and draining toward it the riches of the plateau. In Bordeaux, even if a first glance at its site does not strike the visitor as being particularly impressive, the economic ties of the city to its rural environment are even more evident because of the storage facilities at the port, the warehouses of the great vineyards like the “châteaux” of the Médoc and the Pavé des Chartrons. Rouen, like Bordeaux, is an authentic regional metropolis that stands for and personifies its surrounding province; both are centers of worldwide exchanges, and almost a source of inspiration for a certain rhythm and lifestyle carefully cultivated and continuously renewed. Mauriac between Malagar and Bordeaux, just like Flaubert between Croisset, Yonville, and Rouen, could well be cited as examples illustrating the well-regulated traffic and smooth dynamics which here unite the country and the city into an all-inclusive, representative whole, like the owner’s residence to his estate.
Nantes’ relationship with its hinterland is entirely different. History represents a first stumbling block. Rouen, Caen, and Normandy were solidly behind la Gironde in 1793, just like Bordeaux and the rest of its département—whereas the city of the Loire unanimously took up arms against its rebellious rural population. In May 1968, the spontaneous, reciprocal hostility arose once again, as strong as ever: surveillance posts were put in place at the entrance points to the city in order to monitor entry and exit movements: a historical reflex, and an age-old reminiscence. These are also signs of a radical incompatibility of disposition, caused by the very poor representation of the centrally located regulatory bodies in the provinces. Though once the capital of the former dukes, Nantes had been deeply humiliated by Rennes at the time of the monarchy, which looked down on it from atop its Parliament and its Etats de Bretagne; around 1920 it was no longer the seat of any truly prestigious institutions of provincial power: there was no academy, no appellate court, no archbishopric. Only the restructuring of the university and the creation of regional prefectures have, very recently, lifted it to some degree out of that deminutio capitis.
This disgrace was caused largely by natural forces. There is no unity in the adjoining regions which Nantes could influence; ignorance and even open mistrust permeate the constitutive elements of their mosaic. The metropolis, very recently elevated to capital of the “pays de Loire,” does not rule its river. Starting at Le Cellier and La Varenne, fifteen kilometers upstream, the Loire becomes a lifeless canyon traveled only five or six times a week by a solitary tanker carrying fuel up to Angers; it looks like a narrow valley kept under surveillance by a row of “high and ancient villages” looking down from the summit of their hills, settlements Vidal de la Blache considered to be “troublesome like a barrier.” During the war of the Vendee, the river here carried gunboats, but traffic has never been completely restored since then; it already languished during the last century. Downstream, all along its estuary, components of Nantes’ contingent of factories are scattered into clusters which continue to proliferate anarchically: it is an industrial, feebly condensed nebula still infiltrated to a large extent by the countryside. Although they face each other from opposite sides of the city, the Loire of the oil refineries and the Loire of the eel fishermen turn their backs on each other, ignore each other: traveling from Saint-Florent to the beach at Pornichet at the beginning of summer vacation, I was always surprised to see the juxtaposition of the estuary’s building sites and factories with the old rural burgs which kept to themselves, clustered around their obese village churches like women gathering their skirts against the splashes of puddles. The huge mountains of dirt, the trenches and gaping craters dug by bulldozers which today have become an integral part of life in the countryside, were a most unusual sight then (a time when everyone was still unaccustomed to changes), reminiscent of a settlers’ revolt. The short trip took me from a sort of rather dark, shaded valley reminiscent of those surrounding Tours, where willows and riverbanks succeed each other in a bucolic parade, to a delta resembling those of the North Sea, under a low sky, and fouled by yellow and gray smoke. The Loire does not really have a proper mouth; it resembles a flat, flared Baltic fjord kept under lock and key upstream by Nantes’ bridges and landfills, a stream cautiously colonized by industry which grows in spurts, and moves ahead by maneuvering around the old villages through the remaining free spaces.
Going in the other direction, from north of the Loire to the south, even though one remains in the land of limestone and farmlands criss-crossed by hedges and trees, one has the impression of entering another country: the sudden passage from slate to tile roofs is accompanied by a less spectacular change in gradation, but which completely alters within a distance of a few kilometers not only the use and allocation of the land, but also the choice of crops, the looks of the houses in the villages, and even their occupants’ lifestyle and way of thinking. I have already spoken of the wine country on the other side of Saint-Sébastien where vineyards contemplate each other across the river Sèvre, of its villages awash with sunlight between cool, shady areas underneath their trellises, tiled roofs, and fig trees, a region where one is immediately attuned to the native ambiance of a genuine, naïve joie de vivre; long ago, Charette’s Paydraits, his soldiers recruited from the Pays de Retz beyond Lake Grandlieu, had already scandalized the devout population in Angers and the plain of Mauges by their bawdiness and fondness for dancing and merrymaking. The Loire-Atlantique’s southern region, along the banks of the Sèvre or the Vallet and Mouzillon vineyards, is for Nantes—whose spires and towers can be glimpsed from here—a first, timid sign on the horizon of France’s south, the Midi; a vision briefly evoked also by the Italian atmosphere of the mirror-like waters, Roman tiles, brickwork, and arcades in the small town of Clisson. But up north, right after crossing the river, everything changes. It is rare to find an open country as incurably gray and bleak, and as determined to wallow in the silence of a deep, rural sleep as those areas stretching from Nantes to Redon, from Nantes to Blain, from Nantes to Chateaubriant and to Segré: on that side, it seems as if an impenetrable barrier, an isolating border separates Nantes not only from the heart of Brittany, but even from the Gallo-Morbihan region, something which renders the of ten voiced claim for reattachment to the old Celtic province so inconvenient and problematic. Looking at those farmlands and hedges, at those dull, monotonous, lifeless pastures, a compacted, massive expanse of earth with no rivers, there is nothing left to do but observe, like René-Guy Cadou from his window in Louisfert, “the great rush of lands toward the end of the horizon”; a region where the town (coming from the north, one enters Louisfert almost unaware of having arrived) never was able to inject sparks of life into the surrounding countryside. It seems as if a curfew had been imposed during broad daylight on lands untilled and unplanted, forgotten by history and the economy; walking across it, one almost expects to see pigs rooting for acorns under the occasional, dreary stand of oak trees. But this is by no means an indigent province, far from it; its sleepy looks are deceiving. It has accomplished a tour de force by modernizing its economy without in the least altering its image of dreariness and pettiness. This is not one of France’s zones of poverty, it is a zone of lifelessness: it seems as if no excitement could ever provoke a reaction here, a land where all echoes die out. The insurrection of 1793, which in a few days set the entire department south of the Loire on fire, came to a halt at the river’s firewall, with barely a few burning cinders flying across it, which were quickly extinguished on the north bank.
Among all those regions surrounding Nantes, regions which almost ignore her, where her influence is almost nil, and from which she is alienated by a noticeable incompatibility of disposition, there is not a single one she can call home; there are no traces of long-established links of dependence and assistance, of exchanges of mutual services, no tracks of people coming and going which tie a domain to its master’s house. Aside from the floodplain at the lower Erdre, south of Nort, and the area around Lake Grandlieu, where one senses the city’s proximity, where its spires and towers are clearly visible on the horizon from the marshes’ flatlands, the Pays Nantais hardly exists. Aside from what is produced by the truck farms stretched around the beltways, the city draws very little from a region which is not without riches. Nantes drinks muscadet, the local wine, now raised to the rank of official national product, but never bothered much to promote it: cane sugar, cacao, rum from the Antilles, and bananas interested her far more. Surrounded by France’s most impenetrable lands, regions which care not in the least about what happens elsewhere but also resisted exterior influences for the longest time, the city, for more than three hundred years, has found no compelling argument to form a harmonious whole with her provinces; and although her citizens, just like everywhere else, came from the neighboring regions, they have kept the least amount of mud on their shoes. I once compared Nantes to a grand port culterreux—a great hicktown-by-the-sea, a city tenaciously infiltrated by the countryside, as confirmed by her character which is much more plebian than aristocratic. As a matter of fact, throughout the nineteen-twenties, the drawn-out accent of the Vendee farmlands and the peasant-like slowness of gestures encountered in Nantes’ inner suburbs more than once indicated a very recent transplantation. But there was no trace of the recent arrivals’ former condition and mores: nothing to remind one of the downcast resignation of the peasant population who still lived almost like serfs out in the farming communities. As in a medieval town, “the air of the city”—here more than elsewhere—is known to “emancipate”; drawing from human stock in the surrounding communities, one could say that the city had risen, taken shape long ago to rebel against them, fight their traditional values and sedentary virtues. It is that implant in a great maritime and commercial city surrounded by rural communities fast asleep, getting by on an agriculture of subsistence as would a city of Greece’s Golden Age besieged by indigenous malevolence, which confers on Nantes the cutting autonomy, the air of boldness and independence which fills her streets, easy to perceive but difficult to define. Among the neighboring cities, Rennes and Angers have for too long a time slumbered in the opulence of landownership, and done little to build up or nourish such an ambiance; La Rochelle is not sufficiently populated. I have tried, by this rather long preamble, to describe the air of freedom, just like the breeze that fills the sails of a ship, which filled my lungs on the city’s streets, and which I still breathe there today. When I lived there as a youth, I knew that my stay was only temporary and therefore had little desire to develop any attachments; but no other city was better suited to uproot a young life at an early age, to unfold and take apart the world’s partitions before one’s eyes: all the journeys imaginable—far beyond those described by Jules Verne—found their ideal point of departure in that adventurous city.
Finally, in my opinion, the lack of solid outside support has served Nantes well. Any attempt to link it to a territorial movement or provincial influences is an exercise in futility. As we have seen, Nantes is neither an integral part of Brittany, nor of the Vendée, and not even a city of the Loire, in spite of the artificial creation of the region labeled “Pays de Loire,” because she blocks off, rather than vitalizes, an inanimate river. This is an advantage because it has made Nantes—together with Lyon (although Lyon is infinitely better integrated within the general circulation of its territories) and especially Strasbourg—one of the least provincial great cities of France. Deprived of any real osmosis with the neighboring countryside, freed from the narrow economic constraints of a local market, I used to think of her as the city, a city more than any other independent of her natural supports, camped like a stranger in her own territory, without the least care about how to get along with it.
Some time ago, after rereading one of Mauriac’s early novels, Préséances, I realized to what extent Bordeaux had been for him the perfect setting for his life; an environment where, right from the beginning of his career, he found everything he needed. A self-sufficient setting which gently but firmly suggested to all those within earshot that it provided both the site and the modus operandi, that it lacked absolutely nothing of whatever was needed to assure and accomplish a life’s destiny. Leaving the city in order to look for fame and fortune elsewhere, such as the young Mauriac’s move to Paris, could only be an act against nature, a gesture of rupture, of sheer violence against the local, unwritten law and order of things which made Bordeaux the one and only adequate and necessary living space for its natives. This is a primary example of the archetypal castrating, possessive mother complex—a city obsessed by jealousy, just like the heroine of Mauriac’s Génitrix. Nantes was smaller, less populated, less monumental, not as strongly linked to her surrounding countryside, less ostensibly hierarchized in her society, and less grounded in her function as a provincial capital; a city which provided an immediate opening to the outside world since one did not have to pass through some intermediate territory. Thus the city’s function for me was not so much maternal, but rather that of a matrix: after my seven years of statutory incubation, she set me free to seek a larger horizon, without breaking my heart, and without drama; it was a separation, an expulsion that left no scars. As a matter of fact, that separation did not take place at the end of my last school year in Nantes during the ritual brouhaha of the annual distribution of prizes, an event which then only seemed to lead once again mechanically, as in previous years, to the customary two and a half months of annual vacation. It happened the following year when, after a year spent in Paris, I took a trip to London where I was supposed to perfect my English during summer vacation. It was the first time I had ever left France, a departure I clearly remember—and recalled when I wrote the beginning of Le Rivage des Syrtes. Since I planned to take an early train, the express Bordeaux-Dieppe which stopped in Nantes at the station Gare de l’Etat, I had asked my great-aunt, who had been the designated person into whose care I was released on alternate Sundays during all those years at the lycée, if I could spend once more the night at her house. When I shut the garden gate of the rue Haute-Roche for the last time behind me, the day was just beginning; it had that limpid, serene, peaceful air of a morning after early prayer service, when the only sound one hears are birds singing in the trees, an ambiance the title of a novel by André Dhôtel (which I have not read) never fails to evoke for me: Les rues dans l’aurore. An empty tramway rumbled down the route de Rennes, sounding like the isolated buzz of a lone bee in flight. The emptiness of the streets in the early morning hours, a vision never seen before, seemed magic; walking in the city, in the calm, fresh morning air, felt like strolling the dew-covered alleys of a garden while everyone in the house was still asleep. After reaching the Morand Bridge, I turned into the quai des Tanneurs and then continued down the quai d’Orleans; when I crossed Feydeau Island, a yellow-pink ray of sunshine reached over the top of the houses’ façades on my right. Street after street, the city took leave of me with a smile; the time had come to say good-bye, an adieu accompanied by a feeling of lightness without shadows. Our differences settled, we bid each other farewell, united in that carefree song of dawn. I had not been happy here, but neither did I feel that those years were something to be thrown overboard; I had absorbed, stored so much inside of me. My heart went out to these silent streets, those familiar, sinuous indentations inside that mold I was about to leave: it was not just a city where I had grown up, but a city where, at odds with and against her, according to her, but always with her, I had taken shape.