I am writing this as lunchtime looms in a typical bar in a typical Breton market town at the end of the week before Christmas. A lot of people would think it not a bad place and time to be in my shoes and seat. Especially with lunchtime as well as Christmas looming.
If I seem to have overused the word ‘typical’ it is because I can think of no better word to say what I mean and feel in this instance. I do not like it when people try to impose their stereotypes or prejudices or misconceptions on to others (and particularly me), but some things are so, well, typical that the use of the adjective is truly justified. My thesaurus offers plenty of alternative synonyms for the word, but I think ‘ordinary’, ‘unexceptional’ or ‘common’ would be an insult to the typical rural French institutions I am attempting to describe.
There must be tens of thousands of market towns in France, and all will be the same but different. The population will be numbered in a handful of hundreds to the early thousands, and the town will truly come to life on market day. People who could get the same goods at half the price from their local supermarket will descend on the market square to ingest the atmosphere, and to recall times long forgotten and never actually experienced by the modern French country dweller. Times have also changed in the nature of goods on sale, and nowadays you are much more likely to come away from a market with a set of hand carved African drums than a live sheep. But at some special markets, local farmers do still meet long before the stalls are built. There they will do their business and then retire to the nearest bar to pretend to be unhappy about the deals they have struck with farming friends and foes.
The bar in which I sit is not only the nearest bar to the action on market day; it is also a classic of its genre. The décor appears to have been modelled on or left untouched since the early 70s. This means that rather than an attempt at recreating ye olde country pub which never was or a garish imitation of what the owners think a trendy Paris bar would or should look like, the age of the tables and chairs and fixtures and fittings is about the same as the clothes of the oldest regular customers. Adverts will be of the same vintage, and feature drinks that are no longer available and cigarettes that may now not be smoked on the premises. To handle and make a modest profit from such a bar takes a firm hand, and I can see that this one is in the most firmest and capable of hands. They are as usual female. Madame is, like the advertising, of a past if indeterminate age, and it is possible she has looked and dressed as she does now for several decades. She floats effortlessly around the bar topping up glasses and taking orders and (especially) giving them to her husband, who is very much and very properly the support act. Madame is clearly in charge, but in no more a way than the wives of the exclusively male clientelle would be in charge at their homes.
At the moment, Madame’s attention is devoted to a large table surrounded by farmers who are obviously gathered for the après haggle session, and who represent a complete gamut of age and size variations. There are eight members of the clique in total, and they range from a downy-cheeked young man to a withered and frail oldster who must have spent at least eighty winters and summers working on the land with his now skeletal and shaking hands. All the men wear the all-season Breton farming uniform of peaked cap and bib and brace overalls under well-worn jackets, and you feel they would be unfamiliar if not unrecognizable to their closest friends if they wore civilian clothing. One of the men is the biggest Breton I have ever seen, and must weigh in at not much less than a slaughter-ready boar. Like so many hugely fat men, he is very precise and delicate in his movements, and lifts his thimble-sized glass to his lips with just two sausage-sized fingers. Madame is now circling the table, topping up glasses from the half-dozen bottles she effortlessly totes. As she reaches the end of the round, one of the farmers reaches for a small purse, unzips it, counts out some change and looks at the coins as if parting from a lover before handing them over. Her customers toast each other and the day, and it is good to see how the youngest man helps the veteran get to grips with his glass and makes a comforting remark when a dribble is spilled. It must be reassuring to know that in the still for him unimaginably distant future he too will be well looked after by the new members of this band of brothers.
Nodding to the group and acknowledging the incurious and not unfriendly looks, I seek out the toilet and find it to be as comfortingly dated as the rest of the premises. On return, I look through the plastic stripped curtain between passageway and kitchen, and see that the table is set for lunch. There are two plates skirted by knives and forks, a basket of bread and a bottle already opened and breathing in the delicious aroma of what is in the oven. Everything is so rigidly and somehow ceremonially in place and ready for the inviolable sacrament of lunch that is like looking at an altar piece set up for communion.
Back in the bar, the tables and chairs are emptying as customers take themselves off for their lunch at home. In Britain there would have been a call for last orders or a meaningful shuffling of chairs and clearing of tables, but here there has not been a word spoken. Everyone knows that Madame and her husband will be eating at precisely noon, and that they should be too.
As we pay our bill, I point out to my wife how the giant farmer is gently escorting the old man from the premises. I wonder if the big man is taking the little old man for lunch; my wife watches as the man mountain deposits the frail figure into the passenger seat of the battered van, then observes it might just be that the small man is the huge man’s lunch…