Volume 46, Number 13 · August 12, 1999
Always True to France
By Julian Barnes
Paris and Elsewhere
by Richard Cobb, edited and introduced by David Gilmour, by (Distributed in the US by Trafalgar Square)
London: John Murray, 276 pp., $45.00
The French and Their Revolution
by Richard Cobb, edited and introduced by David Gilmour
The New Press, 471 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Last year I was on a walking holiday in the Vercors, south of Grenoble. On a perfect May morning, two of us were traversing a high upland plateau just below the snowline. Turf impeccable enough to re-lay fairways at the Augusta Masters was crossed by thin, pure streams; here, in boastful profusion—Nature showing what it can do when left alone—were a billion gentians, edelweiss, dwarf narcissi, buttercups, and orchids; once or twice, against the melting snow, we glimpsed what was probably a small fox, depending on how big marmots grow. A padlocked shack denoted a seasonal human presence in what was otherwise a swathe of changeless France. In the late afternoon we descended into a small village, some forty buildings jammed between two hills. As the grass track gave way to semi-asphalt, we encountered another item from changeless France: a peasant pasturing his goats on the public hedgeside. He was ancient, rubicund, and toothless, accompanied by an automatically hostile dog of mixed ancestry, and as he told us the long story of his rheumatism he would, as punctuation, give the nearest goat a thwack with his stick.
Review, 3986 words
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