HELL ON EARTH seems to be a fair enough description of Pont Royal En Provence, the UK's "Most Exclusive Country Club", according to the advertisements appearing in British newspapers.
Pont Royal En Provence is a golf club and sports amenity centre with homes attached, with membership ranging from £50,000 to £500,000, but it is not in Britain. It is, as its name suggests, in Provence.
How enchanting; for half a million pounds you can buy a little spread in the south of the greatest country on the face of this Earth and surround yourself with the sort of golf playing Brits who think that the ideal thing to do with the entity called abroad is to turn it into Milton Keynes.
In truth, half a million pounds seems a reasonable sum pay to get away from such a hideous concept, and cheap at the price, too.
For what is the point in going to France if, when you are there, you are surrounded by foreigners? Some people do not like the French - but that is ignorant prejudice.
There is no such thing as the French. They are the most varied people in Europe. The people of Picardy have nothing in common with the inhabitants of Languedoc or Bordeaux not even, historically speaking, language. At the time of the French Revolution, only 40 per cent of the population of France spoke French. The non French speakers spoke German, Italian Spanish, Flemish, Breton and indigenous languages - such as Languedoc - which have all but disappeared. They were not dialects - they were separate languages which denoted separate peoples.
Racial Harmony
Some of us talk nostalgically about the racial harmony which existed in the old Europe of the empires, when it was possible to pass from the Baltic to the Adriatic without a single passport official to examine your documents. The notion that each ethnic identity should have its own state, and its own security forces to embody that identity is one of the tiresome heresies of the 19th century.
The old empires might have been irritatingly imperial and reactionary; but they barely recognised racial differences. Croat could prosper in the Hapsburg dynasty and reach the highest position in the empire. The much abused Ottoman Empire was, in fact, one of the miracles of multi racial tolerance; Turk and Kurd, Armenian and Bulgar, Palestinian and Greek, Rumanian and Serb lived in extraordinary harmony. The Ottoman Empire was not Turkish; it was dynastic, and some of the most powerful people within it, were not Muslim at all, but Greek.
We have forgotten all that in the aftermath of Versailles. It was the idiocy of Versailles which started parcelling out states in middle Europe where no national boundaries existed, merely to please President Wood row Wilson. The nation state concept could mean little or nothing in the vastly complex heterogeneous population mix in central Europe. Nonetheless it was imposed, with catastrophic results. Romania doesn't consist of Romanians; Yugoslavia we know about, but we still forget the vast amount of Hungarians and Albanians locked within its frontiers; Czechs and Slovaks hated one another from the moment of their first embrace, and at the first opportunities have separated.
Ethnic Cleansing
And everywhere there were Germans, who are conveniently forgotten today largely because they were massacred in 1945 - hundreds of thousands of them in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland. Finally, the ethnic state in the cast is coming into existence simply because of repeated experiments in ethnic cleansing. But in western Europe the general mood is now towards the dissolution of the ethnic state. In Ireland, our laws are subordinate to European laws; full independence of this ethnic state did not, in fact, last a single generation.
All of which is a long diversion from the truth about the French the are the living proof of how different ethnos, can co exist within the one state. That they virtually a speak French these days do not conceal the vast difference which remain between the constituent people's vast as the climate differences between the bocaged and orcharded fields of Normandy and the mini arctic of the Alps.
France was the one dynastic multi racial, polyglot empire; which converted itself into modern, democratic, pseud ethnic state. But it is not any thing of the kind. It is the linguistic racial and cultural diversity of France which makes the country the most fascinating in Europe and enables it to possess the most dazzling cuisine and incomparably wide varieties of indigenous drinks.
Elegant Profusion
We are proud of our whiskeys; but think how the French have cognacs, armagnacs and calvadoses in vast and elegant profusion before we even begin to contemplate the thousands of liqueurs, aperitifs and still and sparkling wines.
Which is why I modestly welcome yet another restaurant to Temple Bar in Dublin, and without any axe to grind other than a frank desire to enjoy more French cuisine at reasonable prices. Vigneron, at the back of the Central Bank, is dedicated to the proposition that we pay too much for our wines. We do and we have all been fooled into buying overpriced, thin burgundies and nondescript clarets at wickedly high prices. Vigneron's policy has been to recruit many of its wines from one of the great under exploited, low priced regions in the world, the Languedoc. Its dishes come from all over France. All I have sampled there was the French onion soup - classically simple, classically classy - and the saucisson chaud Lyonnais, which was quite wonderful, to be mopped up with potato and bread simultaneously. In French country cuisine, ample use is, of course, made of the bread.
It is unlikely in this world that you will be able to enjoy again an offer such as Vigneron is making today fifteen of its wines are on sale at £1 a glass, and there is a plat vigneron, containing samples of the restaurant's dishes, for £2. Possibly the glass is the size of an ant's thimble and the plot as big as its forehead. I somehow don't think so, but I won't be there to find out. I'm getting married.