I climbed down from the train and found myself in Corbigny; the end of a
branch line. Dark; just one track, one light and the station building
against which a man leant, smoking a Gitane Mais. He was dressed in blue
overalls and beside him was a wooden trolley made of old boxes and bicycle
wheels. I was the only person to disembark, so he knew who I was. He threw
my case into the handcart and we set off for the big house on the square,
where I was to spend the next few months.
Henri Foulet was a wholesale grocer of such evil temper and vicious energy
that nobody could work with him; not son nor daughter. I did. I worked seven
to seven, seven days a week for seven months. I unloaded lorries, humping
sacks on my back. I weighed sugar and salt in kilo bags, washed bottles and
barrels and filled them with vinegar. Then once or twice a week I went out
on deliveries with Andre the driver, carting orders into the darkest and
most remote of the Morvan's grocery shops, those shops that were half cave,
half cafe, smelling of saucisson sec and cheese. In the end there was hardly
a grocer's in the hills I hadn't drunk rough wine in, raising the cheap
glasses and grinning, my teeth stained purple.
I had landed on the first page of a Balzac novel. M Foulet was a hard man and
allowed me little rest, but I learnt French and a lot of other things
besides. M Foulet had a cellar full of the finest burgundies and he wasn't
mean with them. His wife, Marie-Louise, was an exquisite cook and her
tomates farcies and her gnocchi are legends even now. After work I could sit
and talk to her, quiet in the garden; the gentlest of women, always dressed
in a faded wrap-round blue overall and a frayed, wide-brimmed straw hat.
When her husband went collecting orders, disappearing for a day, she and I
and Andre could spend long idle hours chatting, hours that were made more
sweet and precious by the knowledge that before long M Foulet would return
from the dark forests of the Morvan, angry, like an avenging god and bent on
destroying any vestige of pleasure that might be lingering in his house.
I came to love Corbigny and for a long while it meant all of France to me. It
was perfection of a sort, a perfection of that French provincial life which
up until then I had only read about or glimpsed in paintings. And the Morvan
too had been new; a region within a region, a bit of Burgundy but not
Burgundy; defined north and south by two wonderful churches Vezelay and
Autun, and in the west by Corbigny, last outpost of the Nivernais; and on
the eastern side by Saulieu, looking down into Burgundy proper.
That was 30-odd years ago and nothing much seemed to have changed when I drove
into Corbigny last summer. The sun still falls as warmly into the triangular
``square'' in front of the town hall, and there are still 130 shops and
businesses for about 1,800 inhabitants. M Foulet's house is empty now, huge
and full of ghosts, including his. His daughter took me once more through
the high 18th-century rooms and I picked over the debris of a busy life:
Marie-Louise's missal, cartons of wooden barrel taps, deck-scrubbers, an old
accordion, the boxes of string he made me unravel and the tins of nails he
made me straighten. And once again I saw him striding across the yard, in
and out between the stacked crates of empty bleach bottles, his long dust
coat floating behind him, held in the air by the speed of his movement,
hunting me to work ``C'est pas comme ca, mon pauvre Michel, c'est pas comme
ca.'' And I am sure that Marie-Louise was still hiding in the garden, hands
in the soil, with the broad brim of her hat tilting so that I might see her
smile as she raised her eyes to heaven.
Beyond Corbigny, out on the rolling plains of the Nivernais and along the
edges of the Morvan itself, great regiments of sunflowers quartered the
landscape, sharing the space with empty wheatfields, all burning hot in
yellow dust with the huge circular bales of straw rolled carelessly here and
there. On the hills were wooded knolls, and crickets and cicadas made the
quiet roads noisy. High up, from the terrace by the church at Lormes for
example, the countryside looked like the top of a cake, laid out with care
and good enough to eat in green and yellow marzipan.
Up in the heart of the Morvan it is different. The woods and forests bend
thick over the roads and keep them more cold than cool. And the country is
all laced with dark fast rivers where the libellules the dragonflies fly
greener than the sunlit leaves and more sapphire than the stones themselves.
Agriculturally the Morvan has always been a poor place, an area of small farms
where the ground was not rich and the main employment for a woman was as a
wet nurse. For the men there was logging, supplying timber to Paris, 500,000
stere annually, all floated down the rivers: the Chalaux and the Cousin
flowing into the Cure, the Cure into the Yonne and the Yonne into the Seine.
Then dams were built to control the flow of the waters and so the lakes
came: Pannesiere, the Chaumecon, the Lac de Crescent and the Lac des
Settons, this last being the favourite of the tourist.
Yet even in high season at Les Settons there was room to breathe and I had no
feeling of crowds around me. There was space under the stands of pine and
silver birch, and sand and turf to lie on. A few pedalos drifted by, but
most were moored to the shore, and the girl who hired them out read her book
steadily through the afternoon. ``The French don't come to the Morvan,''
said a Dutchman, and smiled craftily as if this one sentence explained why
he did.
The next day I went to Pannesiere and had a lake to myself with empty woods to
walk in, leading me down to the water's edge and little crescent beaches.
Eventually I did discover someone else; a man fishing while his women sat a
respectful three yards away, knitting and nattering Madame Defarge and her
sister on holiday. And two lovers, who had been invisible, arose from the
sand, still entwined in each other's sleep, and walked into the water till
it was up to their shoulders, standing close together a whole lake to fondle
in.
On the small and quiet roads driving remains a pleasure, motoring as they did
in the 1930s with a trunk on a grid at the back; grass growing up through
the thin Tarmac, the pink gravel of the Morvan speckled gold and green as
the sun rises, and the swallows skimming along beside the car like dolphins
playing alongside a boat at sea. Some of the signposts I saw were the old
ones, enamelled in white and blue, and in the hamlets the old men sat
against the warm walls, their skinny limbs still draped in the overalls of
their working life. They sat gazing at their winter's wood, piled high and
straight, wondering if there was enough for the cold months, or thinking
maybe they'd cut too much for the time they had left. And the next day they
sat in the same place, nor had the hens moved, and only the ears twitching
on the dog told me it wasn't a discarded carpet.
In the church of St-Pere, restful after the sun, the picnic and the burgundy,
the nave and the side aisles were white and cool and lines of straw-bottomed
chairs caught the light from the galleries and made it yellow. There were
only five tourists present and two girls selling tickets for a concert. The
pianist Claude Kahn, the poster said, was rehearsing Schumann, Chopin and
Liszt. That afternoon he played just for me, and his assistant moved about
the church on tip-toe, testing the acoustics. ``Le do est un peu dur,'' he
said.
