Les Canards de Nanard

Bonne Année, Bon Antidote?

Bernard Nicolleau contemplates the New Year coucher de soleil.

5.13 pm on 1st of January 2018. The second storm of the winter blew through during the night, and had been christened « Tempête Eleanor » by France Météo.

Bernard looks at the broken tuiles tige de botte on the grey gravel in front of his farmhouse, and experiences the uncomfortable feeling all climate-change deniers have when directly confronted with the evidence. 

The Experts call this feeling "Cognitive Dissonance".

Nanard does not care much for "La Dissonance Cognitive". 

Instead he mutters a soothingly simple explanation to himself in his Vendée patois inner voice, which translates roughly as :

« It’s all been a bloody sight worse since those smart-arse city-folk weather experts started giving women’s names-especially bloody Anglo-Saxon ones; what was wrong with Aliénor?- to the bloody storms »

Like storm Eleanor, the hangover from yesterday’s  réveillon is receding, and Bernard, known as Nanard to his long-suffering wife Célestine « Titine » Nicolleau , his seven offspring, their  eighteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, as well as to everyone else in La Commune,  has  L’Antidote in the ample  right-hand pocket of his sheep-stained bleu de travail.

It is Nanard’s eighty-sixth premier de l’an.

He leans on his walking-stick.  The last rays of the setting Western France sun glint through L’ Antidote, sending purple hues upwards to underlight  a ruddy, weather-beaten face.

He hears the unmistakeable sound of a Deux-Chevaux engine ;  two cylinders whine-roaring their way up the lane from the village below, then pauses to glance backwards.

From behind the Citroën’s flat, narrow windscreen, its driver squints against the blood-orange sky,  seeing Nanard  starkly  in silhouette,  outlined black against the asbestos cladding of his son's agro-industrial foie-gras shed.

 L’ Antidote projects one last glint of sunshine,  a fuchsian  laser beam, towards La Deuche and through the wiper-scratched windscreen glass. Through  some prismatic miracle of God or physics, or conceivably both, the beam becomes an array of colours unseen since the Star Gate scene of Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001, A Space Odyssey.

The little car pulls up alongside Nanard, who looks at the driver, winks, opens the passenger door and pulls The Antidote from its pocket.

« Tu prends un verre ? »

Grape harvest, Sainte-Cécile 2016...

Comes the inevitable invitation, as a one-litre plastic bottle marked « Freeway Cola », salvaged from Titine’s monthly excursion to LIDL and  containing the venerable vigneron’s home-produced wine, is brandished through the open door.

The driver laughs aloud with amicable resignation, and nods.

Nanard lowers himself into the passenger seat, leans his stick against the dashboard billiard ball gearknob, and holds out a calloused hand the size of a small pumpkin.

« Bonne Année cher voisin »

The two shake hands .

Nanard pushes his scratched, steel-rimmed specs  onto his  forehead, and smiles.

He leans towards the door , and farts loudly.

The sound is not unlike the mating call of a mallard.

He shrugs and then employs the usual excuse of blaming the white butter  beans, known locally as « mogettes ». (1) 

Nanard knows that the ivory-coloured Deux-Chevaux in which he is presently seated is also known in the locality, couleur oblige, as...

"Mogette La Coquette".

"Elle est belle, ta Deudeuche"

Remarks Nanard, before reminiscing:

« Titine always serves mogettes on new year’s day. For sixty-five years I’ve been greeting  the new year like this ! Only for two years did I miss out, when I was au régiment  in Algérie. Scared? You bloody bet I was. My sphincter used to twitch like this when the Fellujah were about"

He shapes his pumpkin fingers and thumb into a pulsating  pucker, 

"Know what I mean?"

The driver raises one eyebrow.

Nanard pursues.

"In our régiment we had a bloke who could fart the first line of La Marseillaise. Pitch bloody perfect, the bugger. His nickname was Le Pétomane. All I ever managed was the Donald Duck impersonation. Must have been the twitch. They called me  Nanard le Canard, naturellement. »

The Antidote is pulled from its pocket, and wedged horizontally  into the capacious parcel shelf.

The driver lifts the upward-opening window, and clips it into the fart-evacuation position. (2) 

He  twists and pulls the gearshift into synchro second, then into non-synchro first. The centrifugal clutch gives its charcteristic screech, and the car bounces away towards Nanard’s sheep shed.

There, the driver suspects, they will  discuss  President Macron’s first end-of-year address to his compatriotes, the falling price of  foie-gras, Le Brexit,  the latent madness of Donald Trump and other challenges lining up for 2018.

The driver knows that Nanard will have suggested solutions to all of the above défis socio-politiques before the level of wine falls below the Freeway Cola label.

And with luck, there’d be no more quacking from Nanard le Canard.

As the Deuche parks itself next to the rusty sheep shed door, neither Nanard or the driver suspect that their Bonne Année Antidote will be interrupted when  neighbour Marie-Joseph turns up…With happy news about Nanard’s motoculteur, bad news about two of the sheep, and a very French solution to a very American problem…

Stay tuned...

Click on Mogette for a 2-minute immersion...

More stories from Mogette’s own blog HERE.

(1)     Experts believe that the name « Mogettes » could be a lexical import from the Spanish/Catalonian  Monjetta. This would be logical as these beans came from South America, crossing the Atlantic with  maize, plundered gold, potatoes, coca leaves, tomatoes and tobacco in the 16th century.  In the Western France département of Vendée, where our story is set, mogettes  remain a traditional staple food,  the most well-known dish being  « jambon mogettes ». One variety, Lingot de Vendée, now enjoys  « Origine Contrôlée » protection.  When Nanard was a child, a favourite snack was « grillés de mogettes » : beans on toast with local salty butter. Some older consumers still maintain that by mashing the cooked haricots blancs prior to consumption, they are de-fused, and the flatulent after-effects are diminished. Nanard insists (with appropriate respect for his spouse Titine) that this is an Old Wive’s Tale.

(2) Upwardly-opening front-door-only windows were one of the peasant-friendly design features etched into Deux-Chevaux DNA back in the 1930's...As with many of the 2CV's seemingly-simplistic-but less-truly-is-more solutions, these windows were a mouth-watering example of "original thinking" for any techno-nerd: ease of hand-signalling; increased elbow-room; fresh air for lower face whilst avoiding béret blow-away; flick-away facility for Gauloise ash; rapid fart removal.

AB  January 2018

Saintes Glaces, Lune Rousse

"Attention aux pommes de terre, la lune rousse n'est pas passée encore"
Marie-Joseph is full of bonhomie this May morning, keeping out of the wind and out of Camille's way, having a crafty smoke and feeding the three token sheep in his makeshift paddock.
He is giving me a lesson on the russet moon, the first one after Easter. The one which threatens frosts, especially in the middle of May at Les Saints de Glace.
"Quand la lune rousse est passée
On ne craint plus la gelée..."
M-J pulls out a dicton de circonstance. He does this at frequent intervals to show his expertise.
Every year it's the same. A week or two of glorious weather in Sainte-Cécile, then the icy, Midnight Cowboy blast from the north-east.
Marie-Jo shuffles to the back corner of the shed, and pulls a hidden bottle of red from between a half-eaten haybale and a multi-recycled sheet of once-upon-a-time galvanized iron.
While he pours a single glass and downs it in one before refilling and offering it, there is just time to register the irony of my friend's name. For someone with a girl's moniker, he is the most un-feminine person I know. Except for the lady down the road who used to keep the goat, but she died back in the late eighties so doesn't count.
"De toute façon, il ne faut pas être pressé pour semer les patates, mon vieux. Camille est peut-être forte en goule, mais c'est moi l'expert du jardin..."
And this seems to be as good a reason as any for him to do as little as possible today. I leave him to his bottle, then jump in the 2CV and cast around for something to take away the taste of vinegar, Gitane sans filtre and sheep shit.
Lexique (Il y en a beaucoup aujourd'hui); Rousse; Roux au féminin. Cf blond/blonde: brun/brune...
Pomme de terre = patate
La gelée; Quand il fait froid la nuit, le lendemain matin il peut y avoir des gelées. C'est dangereux pour les jeunes plantes tendres. Surtout les patates, les tomates ou des fruits en formation.
Forte en goule; On adore! C'est du patois vendéen = une femme qui parle beaucoup. Goule = bouche (ou visage)
Pensez aux lunes; Lune rousse, lune bleu, lune de miel...
Dicton; proverbe populaire.
Saints de Glace; Tradition/superstition folklo-catholique. Le 11, 12 et 13 mai. Regardez sur Wikipédia.

La Couleuvre, et le Docteur Pouce

"C'est une couleuvre, c'est inoffensif, tu sais...ça n'a pas de venin"

Marcel is by the jardin potager sharpening his croissant. He squints against the early morning April sunshine. He speaks slowly and works the stone against the blade with an easy, practised movement.

The grass-snake is more than a metre long, and, not yet warmed by the morning sun, it it slides lazily over our boots.

"Autrefois, il y avait des gens qui mangeaient ça. Le vieux Pompard, par exemple. On appelait ça l'anguille des broussailles".

Hedgerow eels indeed.

The real deal eels are a delicacy in the Marais Poitevin wetlands south of here, where they are cooked over smoky embers, and washed down with the crisp but unfortunately-named Vin de Pissotte.

I ask Marcel how he received his petit-nom sobriquet of "Docteur Pouce". I knew the answer, of course. He'd told me dozens of times over the years. As he nears eighty, I love to see the glint in his eye as he tells me of his talent.

Farmers used to come from far and wide to benefit from the healing properties of Marcel's thumb, and a very few still do. It is well-known locally that on one occasion, following an excursion to Brussels on the "La Thatcher à la mer" demo circa 1983, an agriculteur from Bournezeau turned up while Marcel and a dozen neighbours were grape picking. Le patient and Le Docteur retired behind the grape press, to emerge two minutes later both smiling. Marcel was fifty francs richer, and the relieved farmer's hémorroïdes [can't you spell it in English? Ed] were now back in a more comfortable location.

Our green and yellow grass-snake becomes a little too curious, and entwines itself in the strawberry netting. We spend a few minutes extricating the creature, my companion's legendary dexterity clearly extending to his fingers.

Tu prendras un verre, Alan?

He asks, and we retire to the cave to drink, as is customary here, alternately from the same Arcoroc glass. Marcel jokes that on that day the Bournezeau bloke turned up for thumb therapy, nobody wanted the glass after Le Docteur...

Lexique: Croissant; C'est bon au petit-déjeuner, et c'est aussi un outil pour couper l'herbe.
Jardin potager; On y cultive des légumes (carottes, tomates, pommes de terre...)
La Thatcher; Premier Ministre du Royaume Uni 1979 à 1991. Les agriculteurs en France ne l'aimaient pas beaucoup.
Cave; On y stocke le vin. Ce n'est pas une grotte.

Rossignol, Rossignol...

Click on Luscinia Megarhyncos/Rossignol Philomèle/Nightingale to hear the April night-time song of Sainte-Cécile.

"Philomèle: qui aime le chant. C'est du latin, du grec à l'origine..."

The last place you'd expect a dummy's guide to the classics is the zinc counter of the mobile bar at the village fête.

I'd just got the hang of serving Kronenbourg from a chilled chrome tap, and it was going down well at 11 am under the azure canopy of sky and the pracariously propped serving hatch which ran the whole length of the stretch-model Citroën HY truck. The hatch threatened to decapitate any drinker who slapped his francs down too hard, but it hadn't done so, yet.

Jean was our resident classicist. He'd spent four years in Hamburg during World War Two, where he worked in a bakery as a forced labourer, "un prisonnier"...There was little to do at night if you wanted, as he did, to minimise fraternization. So he studied Latin and Greek from two ageing text books which were in German...

His fingernails were long. He traced two circles on the zinc, one the size of a ping-pong ball, one that of a football.

"La RAF, quand ils bombardaient, ils détruisaient ça...Les Américains, ça". He described alternately the smaller and larger circle.

"...et les Mosquito de la RAF faisaient un passage avant le bombardement, à basse altitude, pour nous prévenir. Les Forteresses Volantes, jamais. Ils étaient trop hauts".

We chatted for half an hour that day, in the lead-up to lunchtime at the fête, as the barbecue smoke and odours of saucisses grillées started to drift across the lawn of La Salle Polyvalente towards Le Camping.

I told our former prisonnier des Nazis that I hadn't slept well because of the nightingale, and that was when I discovered Jean's knowledge of Latin and Greek.

So at 6 am this morning, as Lucinia Megarhyncos, who had sung non-stop all night, got the better of my struggle to ignore the panoply of phrases, I rose to write this.

And to picture Jean ten years ago, in the afternoons towards the end of his life, sitting on his bench in Le Camping, facing Le Petit Lay, rolling his smokes and running through the Latin names of the birdsong.

Lexique: La Salle Polyvalente; Encore du latin et du grec: Polyvalent = multi-usages! C'est la grande salle des mariages, des fêtes et des manifestations de notre commune. Elle est construite en 1985.
Le Camping; Il se trouve entre la salle, et la rivière qui s'appelle Le Petit Lay.

Les Dessous des Cartes

There were no vapour-trails and not a cloud in the sky when I was driving home through Sainte-Cécile in the middle of Tuesday morning.
<Glycine/Wisteria Floribunda
I waved to Claude, who made the almost imperceptible Vendée nod of the head which signals "Arrête-toi une minute pour discuter un peu".


He commented on the volcano-induced chaos in the air-travel industry, then said;

"Il faut que je taille ma glycine, Alan. Sinon elle devient envahissante."

Claude stops his vélo level with the car. He has a box, which he made seventy-five years ago from four pieces of poplar, on the luggage rack. In the box there are two lettuces and a sizeable, fin-de-saison leek. The scent of the latter, more delicate than oignon, drifts past his front tyre, my nose and then on towards the Place de la Mairie.

Here in Vendée, the definition of "Une minute" allows for a generous degree of interpétation.

So an hour and a bit later, we are still in Claude's kitchen, with a 1933 road map, which I found on a nerds-R-us foray into a bookshop the previous afternoon, spread out on his table.

Neither of us has noticed the passing of time, as we emerge from the labyrinth of anecdotes which unfolded themselves along with La Carte Michelin.

"Quatre francs pour une carte; c'était beaucoup"...

Claude tells me that when he started work in 1933 at fourteen years old, he was paid 2 francs a day as an apprentice joiner.

"Par contre, j'étais nourri et logé", he adds, explaining that it was normal practice for young workers to receive board and lodging if they were some distance from home.

Claude's eyes are clear blue, and his immaculate pullover is the same colour. Since his wife died, ten years ago, he has kept his house in immaculate order. "C'est ainsi qu'elle aurait voulu que je fasse", he says. [using a conditional perfect and a subjunctive which is really going to stuff up the bilingual approach. Ed].

We look closer at the géographie.

"Ah. Le Petit Train. Il allait de Chantonnay, et passait par St Vincent, puis Sainte-Cécile et à travers champs jusqu'à LOie".

We trace the Tramway symbol along the N137 and across country, linking communes and communautés.

"Il y avait deux voitures à Sainte-Cécile quand je suis arrivé en 1923. Tout le monde prenait le Petit Train. Ce n'était pas trop confortable, avec des sièges en bois..."

Claude has lived in the village since he was 5, and well remembers the two cars of his childhood.

According to Claude, the charcutier had a van which was very difficult to start, requiring adjustment of the ignition via a lever on the steering wheel, much swearing and easy access to lard for damaged knuckles occasioned by the starting-handle.

"L'épicier possédait un véhicule qui démarrait mieux". But the grocer's van had a chain drive "Which had a big cog on the back axle, and a smaller one near the engine. Like a vélo, but back-to-front. Otherwise it would have gone too fast, we thought as boys."

"Les chaînes faisait un boucant incroyable. Et les vitres étaient en mica, une sorte de plastique mais pas très transparent. C'était dangereux"

<Le rêve de l'Epicier en 1933? Pour les Lingonerds: Le Michelin Man s'appelle Bibendum en français, du latin bibere/boire. "Le pneu Michelin boit l'obstacle..."(Publicité Michelin, début 20è siècle)

What was also dangereux, he said, was Le Petit Train which passed on its narrow-gauge through the village four or five times a day.

"Mon petit frère se prenait la roue de son vélo dans le rail, et il est tombé plusieurs fois"

Claude's little brother was more fortunate than the old lady who, one winter night around the time of La Grande Dépression, and because of the darkness and her deafness, failed to hear the train's warning bell outside where Docteur Maigre's surgery is now.

"Elle a été tuée sur le coup. Je m'en souviens très bien. J'étais gosse, j'avais neuf ou dix ans".

Claude's clock strikes eleven. We fold away the map, and go outside to trim the wisteria before sharing a glass of Muscat de Rivesaltes.

Lexique; Juste un peu de langage familier pour aujourd'hui.

Un gosse; C'est un enfant. On dit aussi un môme, et en Vendée, un drôle. Ce qui est amusant, non?

Un boucant; C'est un bruit fort et désagréable.

...et vous voudrez peut-être chercher envahissant dans le dictionnaire si vous n'arrivez pas à imaginer une glycine qui pousse très vite et qui passe partout.