Berry: the secret corner of France where the Scots are always welcome
“Oh, my sainted aunt,” I muttered. I am easily overcome. The French lady accompanying me knew she was making me happy. We were in the former village school of Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, south of Bourges in the centre of France. The low-slung school, shut in 1991, had since been restored to its state of around 1900, for old time’s sake. Maps of the world shared wall space with posters about germination. Lines of wooden desks – black, sloping, inkwells at the top – filled the two rooms. The surroundings were thick with the fug of children long gone.
My companion, villager Marilyn Touzet, indicated the desk on the far-right of the front row. “This is where Alain-Fournier sat, right by the window,” she said. I briefly stopped breathing, then invoked my aunt. I couldn’t quite believe it. I was exactly where the fledgling Alain-Fournier had sat, the spot from where he had derived inspiration and a setting for Le Grand Meaulnes, the biggest-selling French novel of the 20th century. And maybe the best. The tale of boyhood, first love and adventure, of reality enhanced by longing, all “dressed… in a halo of mystery”, is irresistible. I am grateful beyond measure that they recreated the school as it had been in Alain-Fournier’s time. It was some moments before I spoke.
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Alain-Fournier readily conceded the semi-autobiographical nature of his book, published in 1913 when he was 27. The school and teachers – his own parents – are easily recognisable, as is the village (renamed Sainte-Agathe in the novel). The surrounding Berry region – deep, green and much bypassed – is present, too, exhaling a sense of lurking secrecy. On these foundations, the young writer erected a story rooted in the real but soaring towards the marvellous, as adolescent minds will. Thus it attains a sort of universality. It missed the 1913 Prix Goncourt – France’s Booker Prize – by one vote. Alain-Fournier was killed the following year, in the opening weeks of the Great War. His great novel was his first and last.
I had just reread it. It was time to return to the Berry. “You coming?” I asked my wife, mentioning lost villages, rustic ways and the sense of stepping two paces to the side of contemporary France.
“No,” she said. So I went alone. So she missed not only Alain-Fournier but also outstanding examples of the ancien régime, the only Scottish town in France (read on, referendum fans) and, first, the wines of Sancerre. These, it is said, “always delight the palate of an honest man”. This is correct. I like them very much. The town of Sancerre itself is a hill-topping labyrinth overlooking both the Loire and a well-ruffled landscape patchworked with vines. Its streets were created for peasants rather than Peugeots. I may have run down a pensioner or two.
What you need to know – the Maison-des-Sancerre in the middle of town will tell you – is that Sancerre is world HQ of sauvignon blanc, and that, 50 years ago, everyone was broke. Down the hill in the stone village of Chavignol is the Henri Bourgeois winery. On one wall is an early-Fifties photo of Mme Bourgeois. She is standing in an unmade, run-down village street, with her six goats. Elsewhere, she had a pig, a cow, some hens and rabbits and four acres of vines whose poor wine sold badly. These days, son Raymond has designer spectacles, a shiny winery, vintages exported everywhere and, with other family members, a vineyard in New Zealand.
“We moved from the middle ages to the 21st century in 40 years,” he said, pouring. Outside, the village was buffed with prosperity. The story was the same across the appellation, in Thauvenay. There, the Sancerre from the Eric Louis vineyard proved as good value as any. But… another thing to remember: avoid the subject of soil types. Wine-makers will go on about them until you pass out. Change the subject or leave. I did – for Aubigny-sur-Nère.
Here is a half-timbered French country town in a Caledonian cloak. The Saltire is ubiquitous, high-street shops have kilted blokes adorning their façades and there’s a three-metre monument to the Auld (Franco-Scots) Alliance outside the library. The place abounds in unexpected jockery, and has done, off and on, since the Hundred Years’ War. Around 1420, Charles VII was having terrible trouble with the invading English. His own nobles being unreliable, Charles called on the Scots for help.
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Predictably, they came hurtling across the sea, some 10,000 or so under John Stewart to rip into the Sassenachs at the Battle of Baugé. Following that victory, they remained mainstays of the French military for years. As the pope of the time said: “Verily, the Scots are well known as antidotes to the English.” (I offer the slogan to Ms Sturgeon – for free, as long as she keeps the “verily”.) Having no cash, Charles paid the Stewarts with the lordship of Aubigny. They stayed for only 250 years but the links remain. Aubigny has its own blue and green tartan, its own whisky, an annual Franco-Scottish festival (July 14-16 2017) and, Lord help us, a pipe band.
Also two Stewart castles. One is the town hall, the other, Château de la Verrerie, is out at Oizon. It’s the sort of estate you’d expect a Scot to create in France: towers, vast grounds, courtyard and gallery, lake, woodland and as much hunting as necessary. Count Béraud de Vogüé’s family took over 175 years ago, time enough to qualify the fellow to wear the bright green trousers tolerable only on the high-born. He’s an erudite, welcoming chap, and operates the château as a hotel. Book in if you’ve got from £143 a night to spare, and a longing to live like Marie-Antoinette (chateaudelaverrerie.com).
I returned to Aubigny and the Cutty Sark Scottish pub, hankering for haggis. I’d had one last time I’d passed through. Things had changed. The place still looked like a pub: wood everywhere, hard-worn carpet, bar service. But the menu bore no haggis. So I had a salad, which, as any Scotsman will confirm, is a dangerously unusual dinner.
Dining disappointments persisted in county capital Bourges. At issue was a €6.50 (£5.50) “cheese platter” bearing two pieces of cheese, one made of rubber, the other barely visible to the naked eye. They must have cost all of 30 cents. “That’s a 2,000 per cent markup,” I said, furious… not so much with the young waitress as with myself: 30 years in France and still as pluckable as a pigeon. Fortunately, the great 12th-century cathedral rose nearby, its five vast porches beautifully lit. Figures swirled around the upper arches, as on a fruit machine. Here was the power and the glory, rendering cheese platter protests suddenly silly.
Thus I wandered Bourges, from the monumental to the scurrying. Its wonky half-timbered streets needed but a toothless villein or two for medieval reality. In Alain-Fournier’s time, the alleys around the cathedral throbbed with brothels. Of one of his Bourges characters, he wrote: “She had almost every quality, except purity.” These days, I spotted only bookshops, bars and bistros – but may have missed the brothels. I always do.
So to Ainay-le-Vieil a village adrift amid farmland. Its 13th-century château rose as a seigneur among serfs, fighting face outwards, fancy Renaissance façade giving on to the courtyard. I approached the guide. She went off to find her boss. “Princesse?” she called. “Princesse?” Princesse Marie-Sol de la Tour d’Auvergne duly emerged, looking – as all mature princesses should – as if about to tackle the garden.
Princesse Marie-Sol de la Tour d’Auvergne duly emerged, looking – as all mature princesses should – as if about to tackle the garden
Her family had lived for six centuries in what is now a backwater. But the grammar of nations changes. Serious strands of French history ran through this place. The princess’ forebears included Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s senior minister; the governess to Marie-Antoinette’s children; and the officer who led the last French charge at Waterloo. We moved through magnificence and she matched heirlooms to ancestors: baptism presents from Bonaparte, the Waterloo officer’s uniform, the last letter from Marie-Antoinette to her children, on the eve of her execution. The stories were endlessly engrossing, the Renaissance gardens outstanding and Princesse Marie-Sol still mobilised. As we parted, she left to join a demo against wind turbines.
A couple of days later, I took midmorning mead with Count Jean d’Ogny in his château at La Chapelle-d’Angillon. Before a log fire, the count fulminated against “revolutionary bastards” (salauds de révolutionnaires) who, two centuries earlier, had wrecked his château’s Renaissance gallery. He had now, at last, had it restored. It cost him plenty. The count is markedly a man who prefers the way things were – monarchs, priests etc – to the way they are. In his 70s, he covers the ground in vigorous fashion.
We moved from Renaissance affairs to the count’s own escapades in Africa, and his friendship with Albanian royals. The performance romped on as we romped around his château. In a chamber up top, we bumped into an Alain-Fournier exhibition. The count is a fan and, as I should have mentioned already, La Chapelle-d’Angillon was the writer’s birthplace. That’s mainly why I was there. The château was a bonus.
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Frankly, though the château is terrific, the exhibition is only for those who know the book. Then again, if you’re coming here you need to read it, to make the most of the region. So I include you in. I now bobbed to the house of Alain-Fournier’s birth. It’s anonymous, shut and uncared-for. No one knows why, least of all the nice lady in the café opposite. I drove on. Fields and forest closed in. Alain-Fournier wrote: “You must pull aside the branches to discover this countryside” – a countryside he elsewhere described as “useless, taciturn and profound”. Easy to believe here that the fantastic and the rational were opposite sides of the same coin.
After following Le Grand Meaulnes round a few other villages – Méry-ès-Bois, Nançay – I leapt south to Epineuil and the school. Here, Alain-Fournier studied and lived in the schoolhouse with his teacher parents and handicapped sister. Here, in the book, Fournier’s fictional alter ego, narrator François Seurel, waited as Le Grand Meaulnes lit out for adventures which may or may not have shaded out of reality. Fictional and factual schools are identical. As mentioned, I was entranced, lost in someone else’s reverie. “Alain-Fournier was very keen on England,” said Marilyn Touzet. “Spent months in London as a clerk with the Sanderson wallpaper company. He particularly appreciated Chiswick.” The word, I believe, is bathos.
Getting there
Shortest rail trip from London to Bourges is 5hr 26min, from £85 return (0844 848 5848; voyages-sncf.com). You’ll need a car. Weekly rental deals in Bourges can be found at rentalcars.com (£106) and enterprise.fr (£113).
Staying there
In Chavignol, the Hotel La Côte des Mont Damnés is family run with both a posh restaurant and a bistro (montsdamnes.com; doubles from £93).
Best b&b around Aubigny is La Villa Stuart (villastuart.com; b&b doubles from £78).
In Bourges, go for the four-star Hotel-d’Angleterre (bestwestern-angleterre-bourges.com; doubles from £116).
Further information
All châteaux mentioned can, and should, be visited. Some English editions of Le Grand Meaulnes are titled The Lost Domain. It’s the same book.
