My heart is in Ireland and yet sometimes it longs for the lovely land of France. There, it seems to me, is a happy fusion of old and new, with an assured sense of permanence and stability under that ripening sun. It is fruit and food and an old unique culture.
We may walk a bright busy street which might be in a modern town or city anywhere, except for language and other small differences that we become aware of gradually and that make for a certain style which the French seem able to achieve effortlessly and instinctively. Turn into a narrow, shadowed side-street. An arched doorway, and we are in an ancient church, dim but not gloomy. It is minded, flowered, a pleasant place. A brass tells us it was built for his peasants by a great local landowner, an aristocrat, long swept away in bloody revolution. A good man, in his way, with thought for his people, though we may surmise that it was his people who really paid. Well, so did he, ultimately. The brass speaks in French only. But of course, why should it be otherwise? They are confident in being themselves, in being different.
The street dips towards the river and now under our feet there are huge stone blocks, and we are brought to a stop by seeing at a street-corner the ruts made by Roman chariot-wheels. The building at the corner is made in its lower courses of the same massive shaped stones. We can put a hand on the stone and turn to each other and gossip, just as Roman citizens or soldiers did two thousand years ago. Careful of our toes, of course. We might discuss why they built so heavily, so practically, so grimly, with, it would seem, no ambition towards beauty; and yet in this same great country of so much variety and contrast, I have seen against the sky a thing of air that they created, of arch above arch above arch, built by an inspired plumber, functional indeed, and yet one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen.
Peaceful now, this land was not always so. Wars big and small, local or larger, have seldom ceased here, Visigoth, Frank and Hun, Huguenot and Cathar, Plantagenet and Sansculotte, Viking and Gauleiter. The last half-century has been the longest continuous peace they have known.
In a small sanded place with a tree or two for shade, a seat or two, they are playing a game of boules. I know nothing of the game – perhaps they were playing it before the Roman legions marched in through Provence – but I can watch it happily, if not in the flesh, at least in the mind’s eye. I see a black beret snatched off by its wearer and thrown on the ground, but that is the nearest thing to violence. A little money may change hands, no more, I hope, than the price of a glass of wine. Long may they continue to play this, when the other games of the world have been invaded, corrupted and destroyed by money.
James Elroy Flecker, a lover of things Eastern, loved France too. It was he who wrote, ‘I will go to France again and tramp the valley through.’ Nowhere is it more rewarding to tramp the valley through. The vines climb up the hillsides, row on row, vineyard on purple vineyard. They know how to live; they grow wheat and they make bread; they grow the grape. Who else know the grape as they do? Wine-making they learned from the Romans, who learned it from the Etruscans, and that was more than two millenniums ago, however you count it. Newcomers may make good wine and make money by it, but the lore and the love, how could they know that?
The vast forests, oak, pine, walnut, beech and sweet chestnut, with a glittering, sugared Alp showing beyond. Those magnificent rivers. The fields of grain, of fruit, of sunflower and lavender, in the perfumed sunshine. A fertile soil, tended and nurtured, loved and sometimes perhaps hated, by a resilient people, with a skill, care and passion that has outlasted the centuries, that has taken thousands of years of sustenance from the land and left it no poorer.
Tower on its sea-rock, guarded by the crawling tide. Château brooding on ancient glory. Nearer, more intimate things: shuttered noontime windows, café tables, sun-dappled.
Every inch of this country – should that be every centimetre? – is steeped in history, a history that flames in pageantry, in great names: Burgundy, Lorraine, Normandy, Aquitaine; Valois, Guise, Angevin, Bourbon. Names that are more than names because of their associations: Avignon, Chartres, Giverny, Languedoc, Somme, Orleans. Cities whose stories go back into mists beyond our seeing. Monarchs and dynasties. Heroes – and villains. Roland, Charlemagne, Napoleon. Epic triumphs and defeats. Poitiers, Azincourt, Waterloo, Moscow, Sedan and Austerlitz; far echoes of the barricades and fainter whispers of Roncesvalles.
Gallantry and infamy, halls hung with the banners of king and emperor, ‘their chariots, purples and splendours’. But now the many dukedoms, counties and viscounties, kingdoms and principalities that have gone to the making of this republic, having put their rivalries and hostilities aside, stand together at last to form that strong bastion of Europe, entre deux mers, centred on the luminous island on the Seine that shares its name with France.
And still I haven’t mentioned her thinkers and her artists: the troubadours, singers, poets and composers of music; her artisans and craftsmen in stone or clay or fabric; or those whose awareness of line and colour and creative response to that awareness, the beginnings of which are buried in caverns of time before history began, have made Paris pre-eminent and filled the galleries of the world with French art.
It is true that France, more perhaps than any other country, depends on nuclear energy. True also that France has a heavy share of responsibility for the wars that for centuries have torn Europe asunder, as also for an ignoble part in conquest and colonization, and that many of its citizens look across the Mediterranean towards Africa with feelings of regret, or of anger, or it may be, of guilt. The creaking of the tumbrils on the blood-spattered cobbles may still come faintly above the roar of Parisian traffic, or so I imagine, and sadly I know too that France is one among those former imperialists that by their armaments stimulate and maintain wars all over the world. Yes, I know some of the faults, but perhaps at this remove I may be allowed to ignore them, to see the bright colours and forget the shadows.