My little town in Normandy

The town is called Bleray. I arrived there at eight o'clock on New Year's eve. I couldn't make it by the road. There was too much traffic. I had to leave my car at mid-course and take the train. It seemed that everybody was going to Normandy to celebrate. It's getting trendy to leave Paris on New Year's Eve, if you can afford a house in the country. Or if, like me, you have friends who have a house in the country.

Bleray is a typical french village. There is one small catholic church, located in a round place at the center of the town, in front of the local City Hall. There are maybe a hundred houses. It's nice. On the day I arrived, it smelled of cows and damped earth, since it has been raining for the past few days. Normandy is in the western part of France. It rains all the time, even inside the people who live there. They are among the heaviest drinkers I ever met, second only to the Russians - nobody can beat the Russians at drinking.

By the way, it must be said that the only good vodka is iced Zubrowka. The other brands don't deserve to be called vodka. At least, according to my uncle André, who was born in Paris from a russian family who had fled from Russia to France in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution. He is not really the liberal type. Rather conservative, you might say, having been wounded during the french algerian war (1954-1962) and forever bearing the mark of it on his face. But he sure knows a lot about vodka. He's a french conservative, meaning that he hates George W. Bush's guts as much as he hates the "bloody commies".

My friends had made their own Foie Gras, another trendy thing to do in France on New Year's eve. I don't know which recipe they used (and they wouldn't tell), but it was delicious. I buttered the last of it on a bit of "chapon" (capon), cooked "à la broche" (barbecued) in the chimney, an incredible taste. The "chapon" was served together with potatoes, also cooked in the chimney. You just have to cut each potatoe in two and to put a little bit of butter in the middle of it, then to wrap it in aluminium paper and to place it in the middle of the ember, when there are no flames anymore but it's still very hot. Don't peel the potatoes. It should take half an hour before it's done. We had full boxes of belgian chocolates, brought by a belgian friend, and champagne for dessert. A lot of fun. And then it was midnight. We all kissed each other, two times, on the cheeks. On this occasion, I have been offered a wonderful book, who made me think of you, Absalom ! Absalom ! by William Faulkner.

I read and read again these beautiful phrases : "His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names" or : "He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence."

These words should be carved on the front of each war monument, in France and in the United States.

See you soon ! Goodbye America !