This Week in Francophilia

One of the unanticipated effects of writing these Historiae - or, to be more accurate, one of the unanticipated effects of thinking about writing the Historiae – is that I now find myself thinking more about what makes my experiences this year particularly Beauvaisien as opposed to particularly French.  This habit of mind would probably alarm my French friends and acquaintances who, despite being internal exiles themselves, all immediately wonder why I’ve come to Bellovacum (their relief at learning that I didn’t choose Bellovacum is quickly tempered by dismay that I did ask to be sent to Picardy).

Yet, at risk of becoming simply another Anglophone pedlar of clichés, this year continues to have many distinctly French pleasures.  Parisian newsstands advertise prominently serious popular history magazines alongside their pornographic offerings.  While once-great English broadsheets fall over themselves to fuel popular outrage over voting irregularities on BBC talent shows, the French papers remain pleasingly and unabashedly serious.  Libération responded to Eric Rohmer’s death last week by devoting the first seven pages of its Tuesday edition to discussions of the director, including both a full-fledged obituary and a four-page critical consideration of the aesthetics and development of Rohmer’s filmmaking.  The unselfconscious intellectualism of public discourse extends even to the museum programs designed for small French children: the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie is presently putting on a special exhibition, “Bon Appétit: l’Alimentation dans Tous les Sens,” which promises to use a mechanical model of the human digestive system to lead 9 year-olds to “la découverte de l’Autre à travers sa nourriture et ses habitudes alimentaires.”

These discoveries serve mainly to confirm my own imaginings of a France where responsible critical theorists have rehabilitated the concept of Truth.  My most recent pleasant French experience, in contrast, took place in countryside reminiscent of the other half of the Keatsian equation.  Along with some friends, I took a day trip to Picardy’s Channel coast.  Arriving at a village dominated by spired brick houses twice as tall as they were either long or broad, with names like L’Esperance, we picnicked above a small cove, where the spectacular white cliffs descended on each side towards la Manche.  Fed, we climbed to an overlook, from where we could survey the line of cliffs; the spot in the middle distance where they crumpled down like crushed corrugated cardboard; and, farther off, the town of Ault, to which we walked over the fields, under a huge blue sky that seemed taken from a painted landscape.  Ault, weathered by the spray and pale in the bright January sunshine, was almost deserted, its houses shuttered up for the winter.  We descended and climbed through empty sea- and cliff-front parking lots, before finding a tiny one room bar, attached to the barman’s house.  We were the only customers, and as he poured our drinks, the proprietor lovingly described the properties of each of his Belgian beers; jazz guitar played on the hi-fi.  It was a perfect afternoon.