Tom's Montreuil and a Question

The Citadel Ramparts this morning, after Bill Brandt

“Montrell is a strong walled towne, situate on a hill, having a very strong fortification on the toppe thereof, invironed with a strong wall. There are two gates at the entrance to the towne, at each whereof there is a guarde of souldiers that examined us before we came into the towne. The principall Church of the towne is our Ladies Church. Our Hostesse of Montrel prayed the Virgin Mary to blesse me, because she thought I was a Papist, but when shee understood I was a Protestant, shee seemed to pitty me.”

Tom is a polemicist for the Protestant way, and a geek for the Classics – he’s allowed, it was one of the big things then, Baroquely post-Renaissance and very Wiki-friendly. In a sense his Crudities do set a template for much travel writing: disengaged by nationalism, it arrives, takes and often makes a joke or two. Subjective superiority is all, damn the context. In Tom’s case his raw enthusiasm – which hasn’t emerged yet, five days in – overwhelms much of his observation, which makes it all quite lovely. For Tom literally everything was brand new, and definitely not viewable on Google Earth.

But I am aware that my kind of “knowing” project has severe responsibilities: to honesty at the very least. Tom’s view appears to be that of well-educated Jacobean Roast Beef, but I’m already nagged – have been for months – by what on earth he was really after on this journey. Others who travelled came for trade, diplomacy, education, even spying. But they would go home with glory (as long as they hadn’t turned Catholic, Gay, or Both), and their careers be made. Tom was “Betwixt” all that.

Tom got home, hummed and hawed, finally wrote up an account, invented modern travel writing, and then…left again.

What was it?

Very Easy Riders

In 1969 towards the end of her marriage to the French film director, Roger Vadim, Jana Fonda went with her father, Henry, to a screening of a new film her brother had just produced and co-written.

“My father didn’t know what to make of it but was awed that his son had co-written and produced it. I loved parts of it…but I secretly thought it would be too rough and far-out for most audiences. It was Vadim who understood that here was a no holes-barred cinematic breakthrough that would resonate immediately and become a classic.”

I’m with Fonda today in Montreuil because I’m reading her life story: Paris, Vadim, the Sixties, marriage, fame, radicalism: these are all areas I’ll consider in the coming weeks; Fonda and Vadim too. Fonda is 70 this year: that makes people like me think.

But now as I sit watching bikers at breakfast in Montreuil, chilling out over corn-flakes to the ambient Indian music that plays in a breakfast bar with light design out of a 1990s nightclub’s chill-out zone; and as I sat last night watching German bikers fidgeting over beer at dusk (literally: “ach so, Montreuil” the rest was silence); and considering the memories and memories to come of the many bikers at Jeannette’s hotel, I’m wondering how influential was that film?

One of the key ideas of this trip is to explore the technologies and artistic creations that changed the way we see the world. I’m going to see the places where printing, the web, surrealism, photo-journalism, the documentary, mirrors, even modern accounting got going. In Amiens – in a few days time – I can confront Jules Verne (and John Ruskin). Here in Montreuil there is Victor Hugo to come, but he must wait until I can write clearly. Instead I think about Easy Rider. A picaresque creation, like Coryat’s, or Sterne’s sentimental journey. Like Don Quixote, published three years before Tom’s trip; like Candide. Only with cocaine in the side pouch, and Steppenwolf on the soundtrack.

Did Easy Rider inspire all these roads to freedom that buzz past me? Now so many people can be high-speed road movies, after all, though I am not sure what is gained in passing through countries at 120 miles an hour other than the act of passing time itself. There are the sweaty pit-stops; the aching evenings, surely; the sense of having passed through but not committed. I will have to ask. It can only be a matter of time.



And the one that got away in fifth.

Not so miserable at all - sur mer...almost

At eleven this morning Montreuil resembles one of those perfect and utterly empty villages that The Avengers stumble across in black and white – sometime around 1965. In those old television shows everything was happening around the corner and underground, and Montreuil has the same sense. It is Sunday, after all: even if it is really Thursday.

Henry IV of France came here a few years before Thomas Coryat and declared the town Fidelissima Picardorum Natio, which means “quite nice”. Two years after Coryat was here Henry was assassinated on the same dateas Thomas and I set sail, but that is for Paris, perhaps.




High up and to the north west of the town on the Citadel, built in 1567, it is easy to feel content. There is a great view across the country; ramparts; sheep-flocks of people with audio guides; and even a Shell-Suit, though it is a rare sight in northern France these days, like an old Citroen DS or a George Sand novel. I can imagine Tom up here, checking out the cows.





From 1916 this was the British Army’s communications centre: its internet hub, only its wi-fi (if only) was more like wi-fly, as the major form of message-sending was carrier-pigeon. Douglas Haig who led the British forces lived a chateau a few miles away, but this was where plans were sent, and lives first lost.

Montreuil has pleasingly winding streets, and is high: thus its long-term military importance; once it was the northern most point of France. It wouldn’t be so great a surprise to see Binoche selling spicy chocolate here in a shop on the main square; no sign of Depp in bad Irish accent though, or Leslie Caron (of whom more soon). There are more bikers (ditto) in town, taking a pit-stop, and I’ve read that the Knights Templars made this a centre for a while.

As I will be hot on the grail-trail in Paris, I search Montreuil’s churches, including the one Coryat visited, in search of a bloodline, or a painting to misinterpret. I even try making an anagram of Montreuil-sur Mer. I quit on Coca-Cola two and: “Um, Les Mort Rien". There was this mysterious symbol though.



And this:


In the courtyard of the Hotel de France there’s a lively outdoor painting of Laurence Sterne looking every inch the late-starter success story. I’ll write more about Sterne later, but it is worth remembering that his classic, Tristram Shandy, was an immediate best-seller in France, some time before the English got it. Here, on his – as it were – promotional tour, he picked up a Press Officer.

“Nor was it till I got to Montreuil, upon the landlord's asking me if I wanted not a servant, that it occurred to me, that that was the very thing.

A servant! That I do most sadly, quoth I.--Because, Monsieur, said the landlord, there is a clever young fellow, who would be very proud of the honour to serve an Englishman.- But why an English one, more than any other?--They are so generous, said the landlord.- I'll be shot if this is not a livre out of my pocket.”

It’s easy here, compact, circular, carefully nurtured, customer-friendly (very friendly); cyber café-less. A tourist town though, with its West Indies bar and quotes from Hemingway, but restrained; not theme-park. The visitors are older, largely, driving through.

The bronzed quartet from Ramsgate recognize a fellow Brit with a smile – what is it that gives us away, even without the England shirt on? The four often travel in Northern France, they enjoy the food and drink. “It’s more civilized than Kent, you can stay out to eat and drink without the fights.”

How is Abbeville [the next stop] I ask.
Katie says: “It’s beautiful. We go there often, but you could try Berck as well.”
Katie’s partner has a great-great grandfather who died at the Somme.
“It was sentimental really, to start,” she says.
We return to roots, and then we just return.

“I’m on a route, I have to follow,” I say.
Her partner finally speaks: no hostage to familial emotion.
“Then it’s straight down the N1. Easy”

Everyone’s a car driver now. Or a biker.

Mystery Two: a love story via Wodehouse

But who is Valentin?

I’m in Montreuil-sur-mer looking for the hotel with the courtyard painting of Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth century English writer – one of the Godfathers of the modern novel. He came here in 1765.

I ask the guide at the Citadel: “ah, yes, and your Mr. Forster?”
Well, if E.M Forster stayed in Dover with Auden, and the Hill of Devi in India, he could manage Montreuil, I am sure.
“Mais oui.”
I am given a guide to L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière, it is down the road and around the corner. And so it is: gated up, a museum now only in July and August.
Ok. No Laurence Sterne painting today.
Around the corner some more and there is the courtyard to the Hotel de France: Sterne, the picture, the flowers…and in the dark faded grandeur of its woody reception there is no information whatsoever about my man.

…but what about L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière, and E.M. Forster?

I read the guide brochure to L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière that I am given at the Citadel. What follows is a kind of Eddie Izzard translation, and a tale worthy of Laurence Sterne: in 1910 after a day of golf at La Boulie, Le Baron Eugène Fould-Springer heard an Englishman, Frank Wooster, talking about une ravissante maison in Montreuil…in 1914 they met again and the Baron asked if he’d bought it. “Hélas non,” said Frank.

Whist convalescing from “Phlebité” in 1917 the Baron said to his wife: “It’s a shame you never met the Montreuil-boy.” Because meeting Frank Wooster changed one’s outlook on life, it seemed.

Wooster contracted typhus at Gallipoli, was rushed home on the orders of George V, and then was taken prisoner at the battle of L’Yser. In 1922 he moved to Paris, and was friends with all the Fould-Springers and le Vicompte Joseph de La Goublaye de Nantois.

In 1928 everyone went to Montreuil and bought the house, L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière. It’s not Forster, but Wooster, ah-ha. Then next year the Baron died, in Shanghai. The hotel wasn’t big enough for children and so Wooster built another house, the Chateau de Montreuil. Then he married Marie-Cecile de Springer [who I assume is the Baron’s widow, though where the “de” came from, I am not sure] in Paris, but they came home that night, to their “dreamhouse.”

They went to Canada for the Second World War. Frank died in London in 1953.

If P.G. Wodehouse had co-written written this with E.M Forster the characters would have probably told each to bally well connect. But “Fould-Springer’s End” doesn’t sound right, though “Wooster Springs To”, might just.

Instead the true lives of the Woosters and the Fould-Springers remain the second mystery of my footsteps.

Escape From Clooney

I used to want to write a film titled, Escape From Sting: the Whole World is My Prison. Sting was everywhere a few years ago. Everywhere. But mostly in elevators. Now I’ve found the sequel: Escape from Clooney.

Ulysses in Search of an Apple

This is a walking trip; much more than I realized. I am in the footsteps of Thomas Coryat, and oh, my, were his big. I think he was on horseback more than he lets on. But for me, with a duty to write every day, I need time sitting down as well.

So I am surprised to find I walk so far in the towns as well as from town to town; not just to see sights and talk to people, but to find some kind of internet access. To date this is hard: the language that is most difficult for me to speak I find is not French, but Windows.

How do people use Windows? It is built to confuse. And in French it becomes a Babel of methods to lose work. Where is the USB memory stick? Why can’t I read that Word file. Why is this all so slow? And most of all: where has it all gone? Where is the Wi-fi?

I fantasize about wi-fi for my own beloved Apple Powerbook; walk all of Boulogne in search of it. Get close in the bar of an Ibis hotel; but not close enough. I am Ulysses in search of a cyber-café with Apple computers. Or a café with wi-fi. Everyone is helpful, but rueful. In a computer games store a young couple laugh: they have the answer. “McDo” they say. “Mcdo has everything.”

Perhaps McDonalds has not quite “everything.”





From a bookshop in Montreuil: the Tour de France and Windows - made for each other