Like so many others I’m forever drawn to France, the most visited country in the world. Few other places have the power to summon up such tantalising images – rolling hills, gastronomy, buzzing markets and core feelings of dizzy delights. So there was little searching for inspiration when choosing the subject of my first travel memoir, France, the Soul of a Journey.
To capture the charm I tried to draw the multiple qualities that make France French. I wanted to bring the reader along for the ride, to share in the sense of discovery of myself and my three journeying friends. So I went through the layers of history from crusaders, Normans, kings and queens to medieval monks and revolutionaries. They were our “tour guides” as we went by villages, chateaux and holy mounts. As well as a physical excursion, the book is about the parallel journey of the four travellers and the quirkiness that a holiday brings out – the good and bad humour, struggling with the language, the lively conversations and the people we came across along the way but, most of all, the raw delight and sharpened sensitivity that comes when you’re on holidays and outside the lulling habit of daily routine.
We travelled slowly at the insistence of one member of the group (she has a name for swift point-to-point travel – “arrivalism”), along by the procession of spires of the north, from Bayeux and Mont Saint Michel south to Chartres, Europe’s proudest example of Gothic architecture. Life sure has changed from the deep religious fervour of the Middle Ages to today’s strident secularism. No matter. The French still revere their religious sites.
The addiction to pilgrimage went from king to peasant and they came to Mont St Michel in their droves on the feast of St Michael. They even fixed the Battle of Hastings to be fought on his feast day, October 16th. They would have done nothing then without enlisting his help, no matter how rough the venture.
Turning south towards the Loire Valley we passed by rolling landscape, vast cornfields and the necklace of chateaux along the banks of the last of France’s wild rivers. If fear of God worried them in the north, here they had well got over it when the king made these parts his home in the sixteenth century. It became the seat of Renaissance vanity, heady delights, courtiers, flamboyance, hunting, prowess in battle and gilded ambience. It was from here France’s refining moment and notions of the great civilisation took off, as the treasures of Renaissance Italy – the spoils of war – were unpacked on the banks of the Loire. This region still exhales France’s great love of leisure and the feeling is catching. Here the traveller can enjoy what makes France so French – their pride in the past, their inability to resist a barricade, their interest in equality, their literature.
The bocage of Vendée is an antidote to the highflying Loire valley. It has stayed more rustic than elsewhere and its patchwork of fields represents the kind of rural life and small-scale farming that make French hearts sing. No one values their farmers, their gastronomy, their buzzing markets with the same zest as the French and they describe their rural interior in the most idyllic of phrases – la France profonde.
A visit to Poitiers brought us to what once a cultural powerhouse, the seat of the Dukes of Aquitaine, where the first echoes of Europe’s lyric poetry in the vernacular were heard and nurtured under Duke Troubadour’s patronage. The last representative of the House of Aquitaine was the flamboyant Aliénor, whom no one can rival in legend, except maybe her son, Richard the Lionheart. In a gush of exuberance she arrived at the court of Paris to marry the king of France but left him in an equally gushing getaway to marry Henry Plantagenet. She was twice queen – of France and of England – and the mother of two kings.
Morvan was, for me, the region where ethereal France exhaled at its most potent. On a hill sat the distant village of Vézelay, a lighthouse of Christianity in its day, where the body of Mary Magdalene drew in the pilgrims each year, on July 22nd (though another church further south claimed to have her body too). It was an assembly point for pilgrims from the east and north of Europe on their way to the shrine of Saint Jacques-de-Compostela and the hill which Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterand chose to climb as a gesture of reconciliation between their countries.
No trip to France is complete without a visit to a salon de thé. The French infuse them with the idyllic, arranging them sweetly to match the towering standard of their pâtisserie. It was a moment to revere as our conversations took off into the forgotten treasures of childhood, memories of being brought to tea with your mother, or better still, your grandmother, who was a lot more deft at breaking the rules and treating you to as many cakes as you liked.
Woven into the story is the interaction between the four travellers – the weaving of minds and the regular calls for defusing differences that travelling in a group requires. Compromise was the most wonderful thing: at times it saved us from the full blasts of our own personality. The people we met along the way spiced up the journey; some were funny, some annoying, some eccentric, even more eccentric than ourselves.
[ France, the Soul of a Journey by RJ O’Donnell is published by MatadorOpens in new window ]
