France is not all Roussillon sunshine, purple grape harvests, lovely Pyrenean foothills and so on, implies a friend who writes of high life in a few days in Normandy. "Lovely part of the world, agreed, but with a climate too like our own." Anyway, he stays in a chateau which is not to be found in all the hotel guides.
The Count, he says, offers a splendid table: sorrel soup, oysters from a friend on the coast, lamb from his own farm and apple and pear compote from his orchard. "And not a dollop of Normandy cream to be seen - the influence of his health conscious Mediterranean wife. The bats flicker around the courtyard at dusk and the Count ("who is too modest", writes our friend, "to be known by his title") tells that while the bats are still around, they no longer hang in the cellars where he goes down to choose the wine for dinner.
No explanation, but many regrets.
Next morning, at dawn, the Count and our friend take the modern mechanism - the mountain bicycle - to tour the estate. Years ago they would be on his horses, but he no longer has the patience to catch and saddle them. They reach a forest, part of his estate, where he has discovered a huge number of foxholes - the military kind - where the Germans hid, two by two, lying in wait for the Americans. The Allies bombarded the area intensely, and many Germans died. Our friend wrote that, as he and his host stumbled from foxhole to foxhole, it all seemed so immediate.
The foresters were busy felling oaks and chestnuts, and, not surprisingly they had a local problem: the chainsaws kept hitting against shrapnel buried deep in the trunks. "Two deer race away, leaping over the foxholes." Goering once occupied the chateau, which is many centuries old, romantically turreted and rose stoned. A solid and enduring landmark of the Normandy landscape.
"Then back to croissants and coffee in front of a blazing log fire, on the mantlepiece of which stand the photographs of the children, Marie Victoire and Henri Louis, under portraits of their ancestors."
Our friend has been known to appreciate the local Calvados, or apple brandy. Not unlike, in some ways, our own poitin, in that it is so often home made. A Frenchman, who taught in Dublin for many years, used to swear that no Normandy farm worker would think of going out of a winter morning without first downing a slug of Calvados. Breakfast came later.