Mars envoie ses giboulées, March heralds April showers. I discover the rhyme in Comptes et Comptines, one of the children’s books that came with the house. Just when the chill of winter seems interminable, an endless sequence of damp, bleak days, the weather begins to change. I become aware that the days are lengthening. No longer do I have to draw the curtains and close the shutters at five. The sun makes an occasional appearance and even offers a promise of warmth. The children can play outside, especially after we erect the swing structure, complete with climbing ropes, that we found in the garage. At Rimberlieu, outdoor furniture suddenly appears on the south-facing terraces of houses that have been in hibernation for months.
By April, the forest reveals unmistakable signs of spring, little white anemones and pale yellow primroses responding to more hours of daylight and a rise in temperature. Clumps of crocuses pop up and flower in front lawns. The slender shoots of green that poke through the leaves of the forest floor and beneath the trees at the back of the house are, I discover, lilies of the valley, or muguet. Until now I have known lily of the valley only as a scent, as in the Roger & Gallet soap my mother occasionally uses, but here it is a wildflower and at Compiègne the first weekend of May is celebrated as the Fête du Muguet. In Paris, too, spring makes its presence felt. Trees blossom in the Jardin des Plantes, their low boughs covered in palest pink. The winter snow, now melted, swells the Seine which floods over its banks and rises so high that barges and bateaux-mouches cannot pass underneath the bridges.
With the weather more propitious for flying John buys a second second-car. This time it’s a Simca station wagon, dark blue. Simone de Beauvoir’s first car was a blue Simca, I recall, but hers was a Simca Aronde, an earlier model. Compared to the glamorous but temperamental DS, the plain, unpretentious Simca is practical and reliable. With these virtues it gradually usurps the role of the DS and becomes the family car.
Warmer days draw people out of their houses, and gardens are resurrected at Rimberlieu. Stands selling Vilmorin and Caillard seeds appear in the most unlikely of places—the village boulangerie, the corner tabac. I dig a patch at the back of the house, facing south-east for the sun, and sow 18-day radishes, chervil, cucumbers and lettuce. In the pots outside the French doors I plant multicoloured nasturtiums, and the nigella seeds I find in the garage are scattered over a narrow bed near the driveway.
Meanwhile the moles, roused from their winter slumber, start tunnelling beneath our lawn. Telltale piles of dirt indicate their meandering nightly progress. I have never seen a mole, not even at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. When he hears this, our neighbour Jean-Pierre Kernavez offers to lend us a trap, but we set it only one night; curiosity is outweighed by sympathy, and I prefer that they remain enigmatic and unseen. Our affection for moles is not shared by the aéroclub, where flying has to be cancelled for a week à cause des taupinières; the moles have burrowed under the airstrip and their molehills make it too dangerous for take-off and landing.
Spring brings the salons, trade shows. There’s one almost every week in Paris, some devoted to industry and manufacturing, such as the Salon de l’Automobile and Salon International de l’Aéronautique, others appealing to a more free-wheeling audience such as the Salon de Vivre Autrement, celebrating natural and organic foods and alternative lifestyles.
One of the first of the spring season is the Salon International de l’Agriculture, held in the Parc des Expositions, a vast exhibition centre just outside the Périphérique at the Porte de Versailles. A French counterpart to Sydney’s Royal Easter Show but without the sideshows and ring events, it brings to Paris thousands of farmers, their animals and their produce. On sait toujours quand c’est la semaine du Salon de l’Agriculture, says Claudie. On voit tous ces paysans dans le métro. She seems to resent sharing her metro with country bumpkins. I think it might be worth a visit.
The Royal Easter Show is big, but this is immense beyond my imagining. There’s no way I can see everything, so I focus on the animals, breeds unheard of in Australia with poetic names like Bleu de Maine, Rouge de l’Ouest, Charmoise and Berrichon du Cher, all of which are sheep. Their owners are unmistakably non-Parisian and comfortably at home among the rural smells of straw and hay and manure. With the pragmatic earthiness that characterises people of the land, they see no need to segregate the edible product from the animal that produced it. Fresh goat milk and goat cheeses are on sale right next to the goats, ham and charcuterie alongside a pen of lumbering Landrace pigs. Beribboned cattle quietly ruminate in full view of a refrigerated window displaying prize-winning carcases, and their owner proudly sells packets of succulent steaks along with advice on how to cook them.
It’s leisurely viewing in the animal pavilion but the gastronomic pavilion is very different. The Vins/Provinces de France hall is packed. It is impossible to penetrate the traffic, to see what delicacy has everyone crowded around a particular stall. The methodical plan I had formulated goes out the window and I resign myself to a catch-as-catch-can strategy. It’s obvious where the priorities of Parisians lie as they bypass the paddock and go straight to the plate. Or the glass. Tastings and samplings are offered from all sides, from all the regions of France, all with their distinctive foods and wines, from Jura to Jurançon, Bordeaux to Bourgueil.
To my disappointment there are no free samples of Brittany oysters, but Auvergnats in broad-brimmed black hats hold trays with cubes from an enormous 45-kilogram round of laguiole cheese. Their Provençal compatriots, red kerchiefs knotted around sweaty necks, compete for custom with thin slivers of saucisson d’Arles. With the taste of salty pork still on my palate I pass up on chestnut honey from the Cévennes but try the pain d’épices from Reims, persuaded by the stallholder who assures me that his fine-textured gingerbread, made with honey and rye flour, is totally authentic and absolutely the best. A small cup of vanilla-scented coffee from La Réunion is a perfect complement to a piece of Breton madeleine. But my stomach rebels before I complete the gastronomic tour de France. The tumult of the crowd and the cacophony of sounds and smells and tastes defeat me.
I find more leisurely pleasure in the local market. I abandoned the market in Compiègne in December when it was so cold that even the carrots froze, but now I can return. With the first of the new potatoes and the first petits pois, admittedly from Spain, spring is so much more inspirational than dull winter. Radishes shyly show their scrubbed pink-and-white virtue, spring onions are transparently honest. Spinach leaves are vivid green and beautifully young and tender. Salad greens increase in variety, and lettuce is no longer watery and insipid. The butcher retires his trays of bourguignon and pot-au-feu and gives the foreground to platters of pale pink veal and lamb. Spring lamb is juicy, surprisingly lean—and now, affordable.
Spring in the north of France is a real awakening. Seasonal transitions in Australia are more subtle, less dramatic. I could, if I chose the days carefully, swim every month of the year in Sydney. Here it’s as though I have at last been released from a dark, dank prison.