The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#2: Nancy

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The new TGV inaugurated in the summer hurtles east reaching over 320km/hr as we head to one of France's most important literary festivals of the autumn Le livre sur la place in Nancy. I'm expecting a pretty city but nothing prepares me for my sudden arrival into the dramatic place Stanislas after I check my luggage into the hotel and follow directions to le centre ville. With its gleaming gold highlights and its symmetric fountains, its paved central plaza and its open-air cafés it has me instantly in love.

A fountain at Place Stanislas

My publishers get me a last minute invitation to a luncheon hosted by Le Point, a national magazine with a lot of readers in these parts and a co-sponsor of the festival. We all find ourselves in the cave of a restaurant where the apéro is served. The basement has a damp odor that is somewhat intoxicating. Over warm crispy bread sticks I meet Le Point's marketing director Xavier who worked for many years as a professional magician. I'm hoping that before the salon is over I'll have a chance to see some of his sleights of hand. The lunch is given in honor of Michèle Lesbre the author of Le Canapé Rouge (ed. Sabine Wespieser). Her book has been chosen as the Coup de Coeur of this year's rentrée littéraire by Le Point (it is also shortlisted for the Goncourt). Despite the last minute arrangements there is a place marked for me at the table thanks to Marie-Claude and the restaurant dishes vegetarian versions of all four courses including a lavish pastry shell in the form a purse that is stuff with finely julienned vegetables and served with a delightful red sauce.

Franz-Olivier Giesbert who is the Director of Le Point speaks for a few minutes followed by the mayor of Nancy André Rossinot who has held his office since 1983. In a short but touching speaks he talks of his vision of Nancy as a tolerant and diverse city two words one rarely hears in France where public discourse is not all that politically correct. After lunch we all head to the place Carrière where the festival is being held. Along the way I find out from Franz-Olivier that it was France 5 who chose to name his Saturday night talk show Chez F.O.G and that among other books he has written one called The American which was published in the US in February by Vintage. A journalist wants pictures of F.O.G in place Stanislas for the newspaper and he insists that Tatiana and I get in the photo.

The place Carrière is located just off of place Stanislas. Communicating tents have been pitched up with local booksellers hosting authors at their tables. I'm signing at the bookseller Le Hall du livre between Tatiana and Pierre Pelot both authors published by EHO. (Pelot is the author of over ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY books!) A couple of high school students come and quiz Tatiana for a school project. Minutes after they leave another gang arrives and wants to pose the same questions. With admirable patience she agrees. Tomorrow they will come for me.

At 5:30 I have a radio interview with Laurent Pilloni of France Bleu Sud Lorraine who is running his show live from a tent pitched at the entrance of the festival. He is very funny and we chat for a quarter of an hour about Babyji after which I return with the others to the hotel. There is an official dinner for the authors invited to Nancy (some 450). Tomorrow, Saturday, will be a busy day at the salon and we will all be exhausted (130000 visitors pass through the salon over the period of one short weekend) but tonight we are still enthusiastic.

The sit down dinner is held at L'Excelsior where I am happy that our table seats not just our own crowd (EHO authors and Héloïse & Gilles) but also two nancéiens Michel Vagner (who has interviewed me in Paris many months ago) and Patrick Germain who are both journalists in addition to Christopher Mory who has among other things written a biography of Molière. The Excelsior is the perfect venue for hearing from Michel and Patrick about some of Nancy's art nouveau tradition and the école de Nancy because the brasserie itself is a work of art boasting Jacques Grüber's glasswork and chandeliers from Majorelle (in two days I will know more about this following a visit to the Villa Majorelle). They convince me as I snap some quick pictures of the mirrors and the ceiling that I must make time for the museum devoted to Nancy's golden age.

The interior of the Excelsior

The official dinner for authors that marks each of the literary festivals I am attending has already become familiar. Some of the same authors are invited to Nancy as Besançon but the big gossip tonight is that four (or is it five?) members of the jury for the Goncourt are present. When Dephine De Vigan who is shortlisted for the Goncourt walks by our table and says hello I decide to investigate the table of honor with my camera where in addition to the mayor and his wife the jury is said to be seated.

St. named after the Goncourts

Saturday is lost in a whirl of people. I sign books in the morning and briefly stop by the Hôtel de Ville of Nancy at lunchtime where a luncheon buffet is organized. The salon has been so packed and noisy that I need to decompress. I order a large tart à la mode on one of the terrasses and read (in English!). Most of the afternoon is taken up by a café littéraire hosted by Sarah Pollaci. I only know one of the authors at the round table Alex Taylor an Englishman who writes in French; he has been signing beside Tatiana at our stand. Next to me is Jakuta Alikavazovic, beside her Dorothée Janin followed by Gérald Bronner. It is a hard group to unite together but Sarah Pollaci manages to pose us all specific questions as well as ones that can be answered by the entire group. Alex has written a shocking memoir of his life as a homosexual and believes it is his first and last book (he lived in Nancy and worked in television and continues to be a journalist), Gérald's book is a kind of fantasy novel while the three of us women seem to be authors of literary fiction. Alex turns the tables on the audience and invites an old lady who has been smiling at him to speak up. She tells us she is 90 and that she's seen a lot of tomfoolery in her times; there is nothing that Alex or anyone else can say in their book that is going to shock her! You can see her hold forth right here!

We return to the tables where the booksellers have us set up and sign some more. The salon is hectic and a public announcement calls for security guards to control the flow of people in and out of the tents. Repeated announcements ask visitors to frequently step out of the tents and get fresh air. Sitting cramped behind tables we are hardly able to move. In certain moments the flow of humanity ahead of us has been in such volume that no one can actually look at the books, as people jostle and heave we try talking above our usual volume to the readers who manage to resist the momentum and stop to ask questions. Two high-schoolers ask me why I write, when I first wrote, how I write etc for their assignment. The young booksellers helping the bookshop and selling our books have been standing on their feet all day. They offer us authors coffee and tea and water. At 7 I go back to the hotel exhausted. I have an hour of much needed silence sitting on the bed with a book. Later I meet up with Tatiana and Richard Andrieux. A musician by training he has just brought out his first novel José to much critical acclaim. The salon has been taxing for him as well and we each realize we've had to talk ourselves into freshening up and making it to dinner.

If the food in Nancy has been fabulous so far it has yet to reach its peak. Les Agaves is the very sommet of my gastronomic experience this weekend. The savory millefeuille with tomato and fresh goat cheese is crispy, the risotto with morels one of the best I’ve ever had. At dinner I meet Patrick Besson who delivers all his lines with deadpan humor and can never pass up the opportunity for playing a word game or saying something caustic. I wish my French were better so I could catch all of it. He wrote his first novel when he was just seventeen, it also happened to be the year when I was born. Stéphanie Janicot who I have met many times before is also there.

Sunday is a light day for me because the bookseller runs out of my books. I make the most of it by going to the Musée d’école de Nancy and the Villa Majorelle. The museum boasts many beautiful pieces in wood and glass by Emile Gallé the most important figure of the art nouveau movement of the école. Majorelle was his rival and the villa he built is from outside to inside, tip to toe, is a work of art. It was, also at the time it was constructed, a fantastic commercial showcase for Majorelle. Visits to the villa are only by appointment with a guide who tells us that everything from the tiles on the outside of the villa (an orchid design) to furniture inside was available for sale in both popular and “lux” versions for buyers. Majorelle also had the items photographed in their respective rooms and put them in a catalog that was sent out to customers.

The most exhilarating aspect of both the museum and the villa Majorelle is that one can see how expansive the art nouveau moment was in its golden age. It touched every kind of object and medium from glass to furniture and tiles to paintings. One reason for the incredible flourishing of this period was that Nancy in the late eighteen-hundreds became home to many of the French who fled parts of Alsace and Lorraine in the aftermath of the Prussian war. There was thus a gathering of important men of wealth in the town. Industry boomed as did glasswork and the iron foundry of Louis Majorelle. In more modern times nancéiens have remained independent of Paris boasting their own wonderful boutiques and gourmet restaurants because of the lack of a TGV. Until the inauguration of the high speed line in June it took some four hours to get to Nancy from the capital. Now however the life of the city is going to change. Patrick told me at dinner he already knows of someone who does a daily commute to Paris for work and lives in Nancy. For someone like me coming from the other direction however it is a boon. It’s not unthinkable to just hop on the train one day on a whim and have lunch, take in another museum and make it back for dinner to 75005.

The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#1: Besançon

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The heart of the town of Besançon in the Franche-Comté is circled by the river Doubs. The Doubs only leaves a small neck of land as it goes around the town and this was corked for the fortification of the town by a citadel in the seventeenth century. I now forget if Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic (briefly home of Egon Schiele and now the site of the Egon Schiele Art Centrum) has a similar citadel that blocks off its neck of land but the Vltava and the Doubs form rather similar horseshoe shapes as you can see from the Google Earth maps below.


Besançon, France Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

I am in Besançon for the annual literary festival sponsored by the town and organized by Pierre Défendini who lives in the south of France and organizes such festivals all over the country. It is the first of four-five long weekends that will be spent discovering la France profonde as everyone has been telling me.

For a big time lifelong fan of stone like myself this city has much to offer. Most of it is built with pierre de Chailluz a stone quarried from nearby mines and made de rigeur in the sixteenth century to avoid the accident and larceny engendered by wooden constructions. The buildings therefore, despite their classic architecture, sometimes give the vibe of a modernist two-toned contrasting palette.

The book festival is packed with people and the weather is unexpectedly divine. The sun pours down on the tents at the Parc de la gare d’eau where the 3 day affair is organized. The salon is busy with visitors streaming in and stopping by authors, posing questions, asking for autographs. The stands are run by booksellers in the region who are warm and eager. But staying indoors all day with the constant hum of noise and the heat of hundreds of bodies can be fatiguing. So on Sunday morning I take off with my press-attaché Anne-Laure Clémént who grew up in Besançon. Her brother Max joins us. At fourteen he already knows he wants to be a chef. I tell him that he must create more gourmet French options for vegetarians but he’s already aware of the problem since one of his friends is off meat and fish. The previous evening at the end of the day’s festival I had already walked around through the pedestrian town center and gotten mildly lost. I had come back to the official author’s dinner through the park with its magnificent plane trees.

Today Anne-Laure and Max walk me through the Battant, a former communist neighborhood across from the Doubs river (or rather outside the circle) and show me some fine courtyards and spectacular views of the Jura.

The neighborhood has changed and there’s a lot of new development; the bousbots and bousbottes have been replaced by the more universal bobos (deriving from bourgeois-bohemian).

This literary festival (Les Mots Doubs) as most others, has its moments of discovery. I’m interviewed live over France Bleu Besançon the local radio that is covering the event and quizzing authors. Marie-Ange Pinelli breathlessly and enthusiastically poses one question after the other. I ask if I can hang out for a few minutes and catch the next author. Jeanne Labrune author of L’Obscur (her first novel) and a seasoned director answers questions on parallels between film and literature. Later I’m in a multiple author panel Génération…romans with more writers I don’t know: David Foenkinos, Jean Philippe Blondel, Dominique L. Pelegrin and Murielle Magellan. The panel is recorded and will be put online soon.

Besançon’s most literary call to fame is possibly its son Victor Hugo who was born there in 1802 and wrote the poem Ce siècle avait deux ans the first stanza of which reads:

Ce siècle avait deux ans ! Rome remplaçait Sparte,
Déjà Napoléon perçait sous Bonaparte,
Et du premier consul, déjà, par maint endroit,
Le front de l'empereur brisait le masque étroit.
Alors dans Besançon, vieille ville espagnole,
Jeté comme la graine au gré de l'air qui vole,
Naquit d'un sang breton et lorrain à la fois
Un enfant sans couleur, sans regard et sans voix ;
Si débile qu'il fut, ainsi qu'une chimère,
Abandonné de tous, excepté de sa mère,
Et que son cou ployé comme un frêle roseau
Fit faire en même temps sa bière et son berceau.
Cet enfant que la vie effaçait de son livre,
Et qui n'avait pas même un lendemain à vivre,
C'est moi. –

The century was two years old! Rome was replacing Sparta,
Napoléon was already drilling under Bonaparte,
Already in myriad locations from the first consultation,
The Emperor’s forehead was shattering under its mask.
So in Besançon, an old Spanish town,
Thrown like a seed in the blowing breeze,
Born from Breton and Lorraine blood alike
An infant without color, or eyes or voice
So frail he was almost a chimera,
Abandoned of everything but his mother,
His neck bent like a frail blade of grass
Had his coffin and his cradle made at the same time
This infant that life was wiping off its book
And who did not even have one tomorrow to live,
Is me.

(the quick and dirty translation is mine!)

Anne-Laure walks me by a bistro called 1802 in memory of Hugo’s poem but we don’t have time to stop. The bistro’s place settings apparently all carry his poem. The Bisontins and Bisontines have a sense of history that is no doubt accentuated by the fact that the city has been making watches since the late 1700s. Wikipedia puts the number of watchmakers at 1000 in 1795.

A year before I was born Besançon’s major watchmaker LIP threatened by globalization and sinking profits risked a shut down. Anne-Laure tells me that the workers at that point took matters in their own hand and decided to continue making watches and going around the world personally to sell them. The film Les Lip, imagination au pouvoir is a documentary about the events. It is now on my list of films to watch. There seem to be a series of books on the subject too but their academic tone has me hesitating. They include Lip des heures à conter, Comment j'ai sauvé LIP, andL’affaire Lip et les catholiques de Franche-Comté. I would welcome any suggestions on films or books that treat this in an engaging way. You can surf LIP designs from the historic to the modern and buy their watches online.

At the risk of having lost all but the most patient readers of this blog I will end here. The next stop is Nancy in Lorraine, the birth place of Edmond de Goncourt and Eric Rohmer.