1870 and all that (ii): Metz

November 2, 2013March 21, 2015 / travelneville / Leave a comment

I stood in the lobby of a French hotel in a German building, in the German district of a French city, chatting in my Belgian-accented French with the receptionist, who replied in German.

Welcome to Metz. Alles klar? Avez-vous compris?

I’m fascinated by the cultural and linguistic shatterland between French and German Europe, which extends all the way from Charlemagne’s Aachen in the north to the Matterhorn in the south. Here, bier faces off against baguette and sauerkraut becomes ineffably French by the simple expedient of changing its name. On old maps German Aachen resurfaces as Francophone Aix-la-Chapelle and French Thionville as the thoroughly German-sounding Diedenhofen. In the midst of all this the people of Luxembourg converse in their own High Germanic language and the good folk of Neutral Moresnet mourn the loss of their quasi-independent statelet, which once drove a microscopic wedge between Belgium and Germany. Or perhaps not, since it disappeared in the redrawing of boundaries that followed World War One and there is no obvious clamour for its return.

Nowadays these are the most convincingly European of all European regions, where crossing from one country to another involves nothing more than a slower speed limit and a brief glimpse of abandoned buildings. A hotel receptionist in Saarbrücken will advise you to wait until Luxembourg before filling up with fuel, because it’s cheaper there. The shatterland is now the land of Schengen, a village on the Moselle at the point where France, Germany and Luxembourg meet. It gave its name to the treaty that opened borders and, more than this, opened minds.

The shatterland wasn’t always quite so at ease with itself, which brings me from Schengen the short distance upstream to Metz. The city’s history, like that of so many places in this part of the world, is a study in ambiguity. Once part of Roman Gaul, it was later a Merovingian capital and later still a free city within the Holy Roman Empire. It first become French in 1552, but its citizens were independent-minded and its Frenchness wasn’t finally confirmed until the Treaty of Münster, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Metz became one of the most heavily fortified towns in France. And then came the nineteenth century, the rise of nationalism as a political force and with it the rise of Prussia, the most powerful of the German states. Bismarck’s telegraphic mischief and the French overreaction to it brought war in the summer of 1870, and by the end of October the besiged city fell to Prussia. It would remain part of the German Empire for almost half a century. Unable to bear the thought of German rule, many left the city.

The long imperial summer was time enough for the city on the Moselle to be transformed. The old medieval fortifications were dispensed with and a new district, nowadays known as the Imperial Quarter, laid out to the south of the historic centre, with a palatial railway station as its focus. If Metz was not willingly German, its German interlude at least left it modernized and improved, for the imperial impulse motivated Metz’s German architects to build handsomely and well, and the Jugendstil villas and historicist apartment buildings of the nineteenth century city are very fine indeed, the equal of anything in the more exclusive bits of Wiesbaden or Dresden. The areas around railway stations are so often a city’s seediest quarter that it comes as a surprise to discover the Quartier Impérial is quite the most elegant in Metz.

A walk north from this Germanic townscape peels back the layers of Metz’s history. The public buildings ranged around the giant Place de la République have the chilly hauteur of Parisian officialdom, as assertively French as the railway station is bombastically German. The public gardens fringing the river Moselle are quite ravishing; the historic city beyond them is where Metz’s various identities meet and mingle. A shopfront as foppishly Art Nouveau as a Parisian metro station is juxtaposed with steeply Germanic rooflines; the oldest opera house in France stands in glacial Neoclassical contrast to a protestant church of purest Rhineland Romanesque.

Only the older buildings refuse to take sides. The medieval cathedral is an architectural wonder, with stained glass by Marc Chagall and one of the highest naves in the world. The arcaded place Saint Louis dates from Metz’s medieval zenith and was influenced by the architecture of Italy, though it reminded me of the main square in the Austrian city of Linz. Just like Linz’s Hauptplatz, it’s the setting for an annual Christmas market. Everywhere, the creamy local Jaumont limestone adds the harmony that its history denied Metz for so long.

Metz is a garrison town still, and on Sunday afternoon the military threw open the gates of the military governor’s palace to visitors. It was an odd place to be exposed to the gloire of the French armed forces, for the gabled mansion still looks as though the Kaiser might pop by at any time. The soldiers were smart but very young and not particularly fierce; they looked like the sort of French boys who should be showing off to the girls with their first motorbike, their first cigarettes, their first leather jacket.

Afterwards, I returned to the railway station and chanced upon the memorial to the railway workers who had died fighting for France in the second of the twentieth century’s world wars. Their names gave human form to Metz’s unique identity: Boyon following Boehler; Gebhardt preceded by Galleron.

Of all Metz’s architectural landmarks only the newest of them disappointed me a little, for the Centre Pompidou south of the railway station has a strangely makeshift air, as though it had been run up for some expo or other and would be dismantled again when the show was over. Like many of the more expressive modern buildings it strains a little too hard to be an icon, its undulating form intended to resemble a floppy hat. I’d rather it looked like an art gallery. Posters advertised an exhibition of work by the German artist Hans Richter, who through his long career collaborated with Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Mies van der Rohe. I liked the sense of Franco-German common enterprise better than I did the Pompidou’s slightly lumpy looks.

The Rough Guide to France describes Metz as an undiscovered gem, and as a contributor to that book I wouldn’t wish to argue. The old jibe that France is ‘Paris and the French desert’ has always struck me as untrue, for provincial cities are one of the things that French culture does best. In Metz as in Aix-en-Provence or Bordeaux the urbs is urbane. You’ll eat well; there’s quiche Lorraine but also pork and delicious, scented little Mirabelle plums. The wine flows, the coffee is strong; you’ll scarcely feel the need for Paris. Or for Berlin either, for that matter.

Tourist information: http://tourisme.metz.fr/en/

Centre Pompidou Metz: http://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/en/welcome

Getting there is half the fun: Dover to the Continent

October 29, 2013November 5, 2013 / travelneville / 4 Comments

Few things have changed the mental geography of Britain more profoundly than the Channel Tunnel. The act of boring twin tunnels beneath the English Channel freed the island nation from the vagaries of the weather and rendered the famous headline ‘Fog in Channel – Continent cut off’ forever obsolete. Nowadays, if I’m travelling to Paris from London I do so by train. In comparison with a comfortable train ride barely long enough to finish a magazine, any other means of making the journey seems almost wilfully perverse. Only a masochist with time on his hands would fly.

I’m less convinced of the charms of the Shuttle. True, it’s quick – but only if your timing is precise and you manage to arrive at check-in just before boarding. And time won by spending half an hour sat in your car sealed in a railway carriage is time lost again if you have to stop for a meal break once you get to the other side.

My scepticism is not purely practical. In an age when getting from A to B increasingly means being herded and processed in sealed metal tubes, the Shuttle lacks something rather more profound. There is no sense of occasion to the journey. You shuttle from car park to autoroute with neither the élan of the Eurostar nor the drama of a sea crossing. Which is why, if I’m taking the car, I will always opt for the ferry. Crossing the Straits of Dover is, after all, the traditional means of exit and entry to England from continental Europe. Historians believe that in 55BC Julius Caesar’s armies embarked for England from the pretty bay of Wissant between Boulogne and Calais; William the Conqueror’s fleet assembled amid the flat horizons and big skies of St Valéry sur Somme, well to the south. Starting in the nineteenth century it was from beneath Dover’s White Cliffs and its superlative Norman castle that regular steamship services took increasing numbers of travellers to and from the nearest continental ports. The early ships were either passenger or train carriers, but from the 1930s the first rudimentary car ferries came into service and the rest is history, or at least a neverending fuss of boarding cards, stick-on headlamp adapters and bing-bong messages on the tannoy.

These things – the background noise of a crossing – have become routine for me; I cross the Channel this way at least four times a year. And yet however often the experience is repeated, there’s always a modest thrill to that moment when everything is stowed or locked that has to be, all physical links with the shore are cast adrift and the massive, metal-walled ship begins to move. A walk on deck is all it takes to turn a routine crossing into a maritime spectacle: push past the huddled smokers to reach the open deck at the stern and watch as England recedes, France advances and giant container ships follow the sea lanes to Rotterdam or Hamburg. It’s wonderful on a fine day but even better – more elemental and impressive – when the wind is up.

Cliffs define the Straits on both the French and English sides. On the French side the breezy heights of Cap Blanc Nez and Cap Gris-Nez are mirror images of Dover’s cliffs, peppered with old German fortifications that underline just how physically close World War Two came to England. The place in British national mythology occupied by the White Cliffs of Dover is odd but undeniable, though whatever Vera Lynn sang no bluebird ever flew over them. I am always inexplicably stirred by the first sight of them when I come back from holiday or an extended research trip, as if there were ever the slightest doubt they’d still be there, as dramatic yet disappointingly off-white as ever. I once spent a blustery autumn researching a guidebook in the Pas de Calais, a little fed up of my own company after the first couple of weeks. It was a strange sensation to be homesick within plain sight of home, that unmistakable line of chalk picked out by the watery October sunshine and forming the horizon as I looked across the Channel from the Boulogne seafront. It might just have been my imagination, but every time I looked the weather seemed brighter on the English side.

I crossed from Dover to Dunkerque aboard DFDS Seaways’ Dunkerque Seaways early in the spring of this year, on an unseasonally dismal morning in the school holidays. The sky was leaden and threatened the day with rain; as we cleared the harbour, the wind whipped the Channel into a lively swell that got steadily worse as we headed into mid-channel. The ship was close to capacity, and in the bars and restaurants there was barely a free seat to be had. Never have I been more grateful for the modest retreat of first class, where there were comfy chairs in which to stretch out and floor to ceiling windows from which to observe the simmering sea.

The rolling and pitching were nothing to disturb anyone who has spent time on a yacht but quite bad enough to upset some of the younger and more delicate stomachs on board, with predictably smelly results by the time we reached Dunkerque.

Not even an enthusiastic seafarer like me can talk up the experience of arriving in that French port. It is of course more famous for departures than arrivals: the 1940 evacuations took place from the spectacular sandy beaches on the eastern side of the city – a coast as epic in its scale as the events that took place there, menaced these days by sand yachts instead of Stukas. Alas, the ferry terminal is rather less memorably located on the industrial, western side of Dunkerque, with vistas of cranes and containers in place of belfries, promenades or seaside hotels.

Drama was reserved instead for the return trip, on a pitch-black April night three weeks later. Just before Dover the captain made an announcement: ‘As you will see, we are in thick fog.’ But there was in truth nothing whatsoever to be seen. Fog at sea is an entirely different experience to fog on land; there are no landmarks, however indistinct, to be made out. No streetlights or buildings, parked cars or hedgerows guide the way. It was easy in this muffling blanket of nothingness to understand how large, well-equipped ships succumb to the calm yet lethal effects of fog, slicing into each other with disastrous consequences for simple want of anything to see. I thought of the Empress of Ireland, and of the Andrea Doria.

Nothing so terrible as the fate of those unlucky ships happened that night, but the end of the voyage was haunting in its own way. All at once the lights of the harbour’s eastern entrance emerged from the fog, blurred and dim but welcome and unmistakable; of the harbour wall to which they were attached there was, however, no sign. Once beyond the harbour entrance all hint of land vanished once more; with the harbour lights astern of us the blackness descended again with impressive completeness and we might have been far out to sea instead of a few hundred metres from the town, waiting for our allotted berth. Docking was achieved not by sight, but with technology, patience and sound, as melancholy yet benign sirens lured the ship to shore. Not to meet its doom, but to connect with the loading ramp.

Neville Walker travelled as a guest of DFDS Seaways.

What is it about French discos?

October 26, 2012November 4, 2013 / travelneville / 1 Comment

The modern discothèque was invented in Paris in the early fifties, when Régine installed coloured lights and twin turntables in a place called Whisky a Go Go.

France’s contribution to dance music did not end there. Daft Punk are French. Voyage were among the classiest Eurodisco acts of the late seventies and they were French, though they recorded their oeuvre in Soho. I’m reasonably certain Amanda Lear is French too, though ‘I’m reasonably certain’ is not a phrase commonly associated with Ms Lear.

Without Ottowan, would we have ever known how to spell D.I.S.C.O?

I’m getting that out of the way now because the rest of this may not be as relentlessly positive as the lovely people at Maison de France would like.

I spent much of the summer on the Riviera researching the upcoming edition of the Rough Guide to Provence and the Côte d’Azur – a hardship posting, to be sure – and once again found myself pondering what it is that makes French nightclubs so very, very odd.

Go anywhere else in the western world and you know pretty much what to expect: a gaunt, slightly tatty vastness in a redundant cinema or factory, ear-splitting volume, iffy loos and a doorman with the physique (and capacity for self-deprecation) of an armoire.

There are individual national characteristics, of course. In San Francisco they loved my accent. In Sydney they regarded drug taking as a competitive sport, and were tireless in their efforts to snort harder, party longer and fly higher. In Germany they take a redundant factory, replace it with a bigger, newer, shinier, more profitable one, then fill the old place with an electronic approximation of men hammering on pipes. In Spain, it’s compulsory to have a skinny tranny dancing on a box. In platform boots.

And then there’s France.

French discos want to be restaurants when they grow up. Most – in the south of France at least – are already more than halfway there, with elegant dining sections in shades of white and more white that are light years from a sweaty German techno hangar. The French seem to believe the perfect preparation for a night of throwing shapes is to wash down three courses of foie gras, truffles and tournedos Rossini with a cheeky bottle of Cheval Blanc ’82.

Why this should be so is not entirely clear.

Dancing and eating are odd bedfellows. Strobe lighting does not flatter your food. And the food in the average discothèque – even the average French discothèque – does not enjoy the best of reputations. Even if Alain Ducasse peeled the potatoes, there’s an obvious mismatch between stuffing your face and strutting your stuff. Does it matter how refined the food is, if you crown your night of Riviera fun by hurling expensively over your shoes?

In part, the intention is surely to intimidate. If you’re worrying about a little thing like the APR on that Cheval Blanc you’re clearly too impecunious for clubbing in Cannes or St Tropez. Spirits are priced by the bottle. It keeps the cheapskates at bay, while promoting the emetic effect of dancing on a full stomach.

Of course, I’m being disingenuous. The ideal customer is not a dancer at all, but a spender. Which explains the roués’ gallery that is the photo section of the club’s Facebook page, full of the sort of men who have known business or creative success, the joys of golf club membership and the tribulations of white loafers without socks. They may not dance ’til dawn, but their credit rating will keep them in €140 bottles of vodka a good deal longer.

I can see the business case for all this; I just can’t see what might make it enjoyable. If I want to eat out, I’ll go to a restaurant. If I want to dance, I’ll skip the foofy gastronomicals. The last people I want to bump into at five in the morning are Bono, Berlusconi or anyone who looks remotely like them in the dim light of a Caves du Roy dawn. And if I want the heady sensation of money sucking out of my account so fast I can hear the sloosh, I will give my bank details to a polite Nigerian businessman who just wants to deposit a few million in my account for a while. Or seek out one of Islington’s excitingly expensive parking spaces.

So sorry, France. I’m sitting this one out.

You probably haven’t heard of…Sanary-sur-Mer

October 25, 2012November 4, 2013 / travelneville / Leave a comment

Unless, that is, you’re a fan of Sybille Bedford.

I first came to Sanary in 2004, but it wasn’t until I read Sybille Bedford’s memoir ‘Quicksands’ that I opened my eyes to its literary past. Bedford – who died in 2006 – was, like Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of that vanishing generation of travel writers who lived a remarkable life, wrote beautiful prose and never had to drag a fridge anywhere to please a reluctant publisher. Her chaotic, bohemian childhood saw her wash up in Sanary in the interwar years, just as it became a place of refuge for writers and intellectuals fleeing the rise of fascism. You want names? Sanary’s interwar exiles are names to conjure with: Thomas Mann, his brother Heinrich, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig and Mahler’s window, Alma Mahler-Werfel. Not all the exiles were escaping Hitler: Aldous Huxley produced some of his greatest work while living at the Villa Huley close to La Gorguette beach. Bedford knew the Huxleys, and subsequently became his biographer. The dinner parties must have been intimidating.

War came and scattered the exiles to the four winds. Mann’s house fell victim to the Nazis, who demolished it to make way for coastal defences. But Huxley’s villa is still there, and is marked by a plaque. So too is Bedford’s much more modest house on chemin du Diable. Pick up some information from the tourist office by the port and you can spend an enjoyable afternoon chasing literary ghosts.

In the nicest possible way, Sanary is a little old-fashioned. Its architectural ensemble is unimprovable: there are no filing cabinet apartment blocks to spoil the harbour. Instead, it’s dominated by the church tower, the mairie and the venerable Hôtel de la Tour where Sybille Bedford spent her first night. There are yachts, of course – this is the south of France – but unlike its neighbour Bandol, Sanary doesn’t have a marina so big you can’t actually see the sea. There are foreign visitors, but no braying expats; tempting restaurants, but nothing bling enough to lure a St Tropez celebrity. There’s an old-fashioned bandstand by the port, and a pretty little cinema on the avenue Gallieni, as timeless and unmistakably French as Babar the elephant.

There are beaches: a brace of modest coves west of the port, and Huxley’s beach at La Gorguette, dominated now by a slick new hotel. Longer beaches are found east of town in Six-Fours-les-Plages, and if you’re a seeker after secret coves, the far side of Cap Sicié has some as charming and modest as any in the south of France.

I returned to Sanary this summer on a warm July night to find the harbour in full swing. From a live stage by the tourist office the rhythms of a Latin American band blared. On the quay a night market was busy with visitors, browsing contentedly for crafts.

I browsed too. Not for jewellery, but for dinner: picking my way from one menu to another until I found what I was looking for. I selected a table just back from the quay. The restaurant was tiny – little more than a pop-up, its interior all kitchen and its handful of tables teetering on the kerb, a little too close to the traffic. I didn’t particularly mind; no Mediterranean port is entirely complete without the drone of scooters or the faint threat of motorised death. The meal was simple: soupe de poissons, dark and fishy, served with rouille, croutons and creamy gruyère. A perfect glass of cool rosé. Fresh grilled fish with salt, lemon, a scattering of herbs and a little olive oil. A small salad. It was wonderful. What I paid would have bought no more than a scornful look in London.

Little ports in the south of France just don’t get much better than that.

Oh, I doubt it’ll ever be hot or happening. Sanary is on the ‘wrong’ side of Toulon, which is in turn – and in some respects unfairly – the most unfashionable city in the south of France. It’s not on the travel industry’s radar. But if that’s what it takes to save it from a fate worse than St Tropez, so be it. Perfection beats a glimpse of Simon Cowell any day.

Practicalities
Sanary lies on the coast of the Var département, a little west of Toulon http://www.sanarysurmer.com
Ryanair connects London Stansted with Toulon-Hyères airport in the summer months; otherwise, fly to Marseille and pick up a hire car.

Hôtel de la Tour (sanary-hoteldelatour.com; around €95) is the traditional choice, right on the port and with a good restaurant; Hostellerie La Farandole (hostellerielafarandole.com, from €235) is the luxury choice on Huxley’s beach.