Gratitude comes in two kinds. First, there is the gratitude which we should all feel for what France has given the world. We should begin, perhaps, with its language. To those not French-born it will always be something of a challenge – the hardest by far of the Romance languages to learn and, heaven knows, to pronounce. (In fact, I have always believed that a slight accent is an advantage: we have no right to lay claim to a foreign tongue and pretend that it is our own. Thanks entirely to my mother’s insistence on lessons from the age of four, I barely remember the days before I spoke French pretty fluently; but I would never be taken for a Frenchman, nor would I have the right to be.) The rewards, on the other hand, are immense, and not only for the traveller but for the reader: however brilliant a translation, much of the flavour of the original is inevitably lost, in poetry even more than in prose. And I am thinking not only of the great writers – Ronsard and Racine, Balzac and Flaubert, de Musset and Victor Hugo;* I’m thinking also of Simenon and Maigret, of the ravishingly beautiful folk songs that I used to love to sing, and those glorious and totally untranslatable nightclub ballads of Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and the like, in the years when the best the British could offer was ‘Cruising Down the River (on a Sunday Afternoon)’. Unlike the British, too, the French are proud of their language. Fashionable anglicisms are bound to creep in (from ‘le weekend’ to ‘email’) but there is always the Académie Française to raise a warning finger if things are getting out of control.
And then there are the painters; here again the debt is immense. Claude Lorrain, so beloved of Turner, and Poussin go without saying, as do those two splendid portraitists represented in this book, Philippe de Champaigne and Hyacinthe Rigaud; but my own heart remains in the fifteenth century, with Jean Fouquet, the Limbourg brothers – creators of the Très riches heures du duc de Berry – and their equally dazzling contemporaries. Their work is also to be found in the preceding pages; and I only wish I could have found an excuse to include a favourite Impressionist or two.
Going on to the world of music, my own personal list would begin with Jean-Baptiste Lully, simply because I believe ‘Au clair de la lune’ to be one of the loveliest songs ever written. As for the nineteenth century, I would give first prize to Hector Berlioz, with Bizet, Fauré and Debussy as close runners-up. (Ravel is disqualified for that dreadful Boléro.) And that is not to mention the opera composers – Gounod, Massenet, Meyerbeer and Delibes for a start – whose work is all too seldom heard in England, largely I believe because relatively few English and American singers are happy with the French nasalised vowels and the almost ubiquitous feminine ending -e, which is a good deal trickier than it looks.
Where architecture is concerned I will mention only the great Romanesque churches – there are particularly lovely ones at Toulouse, Angoulême, Vézelay, Tournus and Le Puy – Chartres Cathedral and the châteaux of the Loire; this game could be continued almost ad infinitum; but here I am happy to rest my case, adding only the reminder that, to those in England, all this – and much more – is on our very doorstep.
The essence of France, however, is a thousand times more than all this; it seems, sometimes, to be in the very air we breathe. In 1964 I drove along the West African coast from Abidjan to Lagos. Though independence had come, it was still very much the colonial world: before reaching Nigeria I drove through the Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Ghana, Togo and Benin (then known as Dahomey). The difference between Ghana and Nigeria (formerly British) and the others (formerly French) was astonishing. In Abidjan and Lomé (Togo) I had delicious lunches of truite aux amandes, the trout having been flown in from Marseille the night before; there were delightful cafés, populated largely by the French who had stayed on, sipping Pernods and Camparis in their immaculately cut shirts and shorts. And how well I remember my spirits dipping as I approached the Nigerian frontier, staffed by an enormous Nigerian lady in bulging khaki uniform, sitting at a rickety wooden table ringed with circles left by brimming tankards – she was halfway through one herself – and doing the football pools. Oh dear, I thought, oh dear.
And that brings me to the second kind of gratitude – my own – for the France that I have known for more than eight years, living in everything from the grandeur of the British Embasy to a humble Strasbourg bedsitter. Looking back, the memories come crowding in: gypsy stilt-dancers in pre-war Aix-les-Bains; bicycling through Provence on the first anniversary of the Allied landings in the South; singing the old songs at the Lapin Agile in Montmartre, which will always be my favourite nightclub; or – particularly vivid half a century on – an al fresco dinner in Arles, during which a large white horse suddenly appeared from around the corner, bearing on its back a man and, behind him, a remarkably beautiful girl, both in full Provençal costume. For all these memories I am grateful, and for many thousands more. And that sort of gratitude is more than gratitude: it is love.
* It was André Gide who, when asked who was the greatest of French poets, replied, ‘Victor Hugo, hélas!’ (Victor Hugo, alas!)