Oh knickers!

Photo La Redoute

Oooh là là…French lingerie has always seemed a bit naughty, hasn’t it? Even in the most staid mail order catalogues, the underwear pages look like stills from Emmanuelle. French women spend an average of £69 a year on lingerie, mostly on underwear – just behind the British, who spend £74, mostly on nighties. There is surely an interesting socio-psychological explanation for this if anyone cares to find it…

The women of Gaul went topless and it was only when they were conquered by Caesar that they had to cover up with a bandeau, which was a sort of Roman boob tube. Later, in the twelfth century, women wore a basquine – a stiff linen corset that immobilised everything – and in the fourteenth century, they wore an extra-large belt that pushed the breasts up. However, this was banned in some regions – an edict of Strasbourg declared that no woman should wear any form of breast support at all. I’m jolly glad I wasn’t around then.

Picture Herodote

During the reign of Charles VII, corsets were tight. The king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel, started a trend in court circles of wearing a dress that exposed one breast, which must have been chilly – but practical, I suppose, if you were a nursing mother.

In the 1550s, women were encased in whalebone and steel rod corsets. Although these sound like torture devices used by the Spanish Inquisition, they were actually torture devices imposed by Catherine de Médicis, who banned ‘thick waists’ at court. They required a lot of time and effort to fasten and could reduce the waist to less than ten inches – permanently.

The seventeenth century saw Cardinal Mazarin issue another two edicts against the immodesty of women’s dress and in 1677, Abbé Jacques Boileau published a book called The excesses of the naked bosom which was a violent attack on burgeoning cleavages. Popular at this time was the gourgandine – a laced bodice that revealed and accentuated the breasts and was intended to be worn indoors. The word came to mean a ‘brazen hussy’ which gives some idea of its effect on men.

The eighteenth century was the era of libertines – Dangerous Liaisons was written at this time and the infamous Marquis de Sade was born in 1740. With the loosening of morals came the loosening of corsets and women’s clothing became increasingly provocative.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, declared that corsets were no more than ‘body presses’ and joined the anti-corset protests initiated by the medical profession, which was worried about its effects on women’s health. Rousseau’s famous maxim might well have been ‘Woman is born free and everywhere she is in corsets’ – but given that he was a bit of a Jacques-the-lad, his motives for getting women out of corsets are, frankly, suspect.

Corsets were banned during the French Revolution, in the interests of liberté, no doubt, but came back into fashion in the early 1800s, when they were designed in such a way as to separate the breasts as far apart as possible.

In 1859, a Parisian newspaper reported the death of a young socialite whose tiny waist had been the talk of the town. She died two days after a ball and when the autopsy was carried out, it was discovered that her liver had been pierced by three of her ribs…the corset had killed her. It was around this period that knickers were invented – before then, women had worn nothing underneath. With the new craze for crinolines, something had to be done to protect their modesty as sitting down or bending over in a crinoline left nothing to the imagination. The new knickers were long and crotchless, frilly and beribboned and called indispensables in French.

In 1889, a French corset maker, Herminie Cadolle, invented a garment she called le Bien-être or ‘Wellbeing’. This was basically a corset split in two: the innovation being the fact that the breasts were supported from the shoulder by straps rather than squeezed up from below. This top half became known as a soutien-gorge, or ‘throat support’ which is the French word for bra today. No-one is quite sure why we use the word brassière in English: centuries ago, it was the French word for shield and today it means a child’s vest.

In the early part of the twentieth century, when cycling became popular, corsets had to become more supple to allow freedom of movement. During the First World War, women were needed in the fields and factories and the upper classes, thus deprived of their maids, had to swap their corsets (which had to be laced from the back) for girdles. And that was the end of that…

Or was it? In 1946, a French couturier designed the guêpière (from the French word for wasp) or basque. This is indeed a corset but women wore it for frivolous rather than practical reasons. The origins of the suspenders attached to them are uncertain but contrary to popular belief, Gustave Eiffel did not invent them, although I bet he wished he had.

>The real problem with French lingerie is that is it expensive. I have three teenage girls and getting them to wear sensible pants is impossible – so I need to make sure I have enough money aside for thongs and tangas and lacy push-ups. I like to call it my G-string budget…

Eau Zone

Can you imagine drinking pure spring water straight from the tap? Well, that’s what we do here in Grenoble – we also shower in it, brush our teeth with it and do the washing up in it. The water comes from a spring - la source de Rochefort – which bubbles up between the Mount Rochefort and the river Drac, south of the town and is filtered naturally through a hundred metres or so of alluvial deposits. The reservoir lies in a protected zone of nearly 3000 hectares – a beautiful nature reserve where house construction, industry and the use of pesticides is forbidden but walking through forest glades and observing the flora and fauna is actively encouraged. And while Grenoble water is untreated, the rest of France is having to drink something reminiscent of their local swimming pool on a crowded Saturday afternoon because the Ministry of Health has intentionally over-chlorinated the water supply in case terrorists contaminate it with botulism. The sensible people of Grenoble were not having any of this nonsense and refused the treatment – besides, any terrorist wanting to contaminate this water supply would have to be pretty good at orienteering and cross country running…

Grenoble Daily Photo

The French are the world’s second biggest consumers of bottled water (the Italians are the first). The average person gets through 124 litres a year, which is about a bottle and a half a week. We British manage just 14 litres a year – and most of that is probably drunk in one go on the same morning-after-the-New-Year’s-Eve-party. Mineral water – eau minérale – offers health-giving properties that are recognised by law. This means that strict rules are enforced at the site of the spring, as the quality has to be consistent. The water must come from a single source - of which there are 1,200 in France – and temperature, mineral content, taste and visual appearance are monitored closely to ensure they do not vary. Although I am usually suspicious of what I would term fanciful cures, I admit that I have gulped down several litres of a well-known mineral water in my time, which is supposed to help you slim by acting as a diuretic. I know full well this is nonsense. What it really means is that you go to the loo five times an hour and pay for the privilege – you could get the same results with a gallon of tea and a couple of fig rolls. Nevertheless, it is high in calcium so it is good for your bones. Other mineral waters make different claims. Vichy water is good for your complexion (you have to drink it, not wash in it), Hépar water is good for your nerves and fizzy water like Salvetat is good for the digestion. A well-known manufacturer of slimming products has even brought out a ‘zero calorie’ water…and yes, I thought it was a joke too but I’ve seen people buy it...

I’ve always believed water to be a pretty boring element but in fact it’s good for all sorts of things. Spa towns (named after the Belgian town of Spa) have been around since Roman times and have fallen in and out of popularity ever since. You no longer have to be a wealthy aristocrat to take the waters – the doctor can prescribe a three-week cure and the Sécurité Sociale will reimburse you. In Uriage-les-Bains, a thermal resort a few miles into the mountains around Grenoble, you can treat your eczema, sinusitis or rheumatism just by taking a bath. It is something to do with sulphur and arsenic, says the brochure reassuringly. You can also drink the water, have it injected or get pulverised with it – an experience similar to being set on by riot police with water cannons. My rheumatic mother-in-law has been on a cure twice and each time she has come back exhausted and aching all over but adamant that it has done her the world of good.

She's probably right. But I still think the best use for water is to make a Nice Cup of Tea which, as we all know, cures everything. So I'll just go and pop the kettle on...

Mountains

When I moved to Grenoble from Aix-en-Provence, I thought I would never get used to the mountains. Grenoble is surrounded by three mountain ranges: the Chartreuse, the Belledonne and the Vercors so there was – as the writer, Stendhal once put it – a mountain at the end of every street. I did not find them beautiful, I found them oppressive - aggressive even. I missed the airy blue spaces of Provence.


However, it looked as if I was going to be here for a while so I decided to make an effort to know the mountains better. I began at the Musée Dauphinois, housed in a former convent perched on the slopes of the Mont Rachais that overlooks the town. Here they have a whole floor dedicated to an exhibition called Les Gens de L’Alpe – The people of the Alps – who, from about three thousand years ago until the beginning of the twentieth century, chose to live at altitudes of between four thousand and six and a half thousand feet. They must have had a good reason to choose this way of life because it was a gruelling one and, cut off from the valley, they had to be self-sufficient. Life was not possible without animals and it was thanks to the goats, sheep, cows and mules that they were able to feed and clothe themselves, keep warm and move from place to place in search of fresh pasture. Animals also gave them the necessary goods for bartering: wool, cheese, meat and skins. The museum has a collection of tools and everyday objects used by these people and you can peer into life-size reconstructions of their living spaces, including a school room.


Society evolved, communications improved and les gens de l’Alpe moved down to the valley. However, the mountains were still a part of their lives. In the same museum, on the floor above, is an exhibition dedicated to the history of skiing. Cave paintings suggest that skis have been around for a long time. Originally, they were used for travelling and hunting and skiing only became a sport at the beginning of the eighteenth century. With the invention of ski lifts in the 1930s, Alpine skiing became popular and today, people come here from all over Europe to ski.


I don’t ski because I find it too uncomfortable, too expensive and too frightening. Climbing seems a little dangerous and paragliding downright foolhardy. But I do love walking in the mountains when the snow has melted, the Alpine meadows are turning green again and flowers are pushing up their heads between the rocks. France has 110,000 miles of hiking trails among which are the Grande Randonnées (GR) which are long distance trails. Part of the GR5 crosses the Alps from Lake Geneva to Nice and takes about four weeks to walk, if you are reasonably fit. French hiking trails are well-marked with coloured blazes painted on trees and rocks to guide you and I have only ever been lost once – and that was because I was following my husband.


In order to preserve the many species of mountain flowers, it is forbidden to pick them and if you are caught with an illicit posy you will be heavily fined. Certain flowers may be picked in moderation – for example, génépi, a flower used to make a delicious digestif – but you are only allowed to pick forty sprigs. As many people make their own génépi liqueur, I’m sure most of them pick flowers by the bagful but I have never heard of anyone being caught.


Mountain air and water, of course, are renowned for their restorative properties. “Taking the waters” became popular with the upper classes at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in France, and mountain spa towns like Uriage and Allevard had elegant hotels and guesthouses built as well as a casino for their wealthy and rheumatic patrons.

Mountains offer not only pleasure and good health but also protection. The Vercors range is a natural fortress of sheer cliffs looming above deep gorges - I once drove through there in a thunderstorm on tortuous, narrow passes and had nightmares for several nights afterwards. During the German Occupation of France in World War II, the hostile, rugged Vercors was a refuge for those who wanted to escape the political and racial discriminations of the Vichy government. When the Germans moved south, the French Resistance movement set up a dozen camps in the Vercors’ forests and by July 1944, there were four thousand civilians and military men camped there. The inhabitants provided food and clothing for them while the Allies dropped weapons and medicine by parachute. In defiance of the Occupation, the résistants raised the French flag and in the name of liberty they proclaimed the Republic of Vercors, This provoked the Germans into launching a ferocious attack by road, on foot and from the air. The fighting lasted for a week: six hundred résistants were killed as well as more than two hundred local people.


Today, I am beginning to see the beauty and the majesty in these mountains. They have become comforting and familiar and I love to see them change with the seasons, from warm, bare rock against a blue sky to snowy peaks sparkling in the winter sun. And, as the French writer Boris Vian once said – what’s the point of moving mountains when you can simply walk over them?

A bicyclette

Grenoble is an oxymoron of a city. It is the capital of the French Alps and surrounded by mountains – yet it is as flat as a crêpe Suzette. In fact, it is the flattest town in France. This makes getting around less strenuous than in other cities and if you are not brave or foolish enough to take your car, there are plenty of other ways to travel.

By bicycle, for example. Now, I don’t ride my bicycle here because – well, for a start the tyres need blowing up and I’ve lost the bicycle pump but also I don’t want to die just yet. In Grenoble, you pedal at your peril. There are several miles of clearly-marked cycle paths winding their way through town ( they even have their own traffic lights ) with the unfortunate tendency to come to an abrupt halt just when you need them most: at the edge of a river or motorway bridge or at the beginning of a dual carriageway. Here you are forced to launch yourself into wild traffic that’s enough to make anybody’s wheel buckle. Moreover, most people don’t realise these lanes are for cyclists. Motorists think they are serendipitous parking spaces, joggers think they are running tracks, teenagers on mopeds think they are for doing wheelies on and as for dogs…well, let’s say they give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘wheels in motion’…

Nobody is quite sure who invented the bicycle. The French claim it was a certain Count Sivrac whose célérifère - a sort of glorified hobby-horse without steering, pedals or brakes – appeared in Paris in 1791. The Germans and the Scots are also strong contenders for the honour but it was two French coachbuilders, Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest, who improved on the basic model and popularised it, in 1861. Just over forty years later, the Tour de France was created and became the most prestigious cycle race in the world.

photo by Eric

Of course, there is always the Solex to make things easier. This is a motorised bicycle invented in 1940 and – along with strings of garlic, stripy tee-shirts and la baguette – it became a symbol of France. It was made here until 1988, when a Hungarian firm took over production. Now, the Solex is made in China. I rode one once, a long time ago, and it was rather fun. You pedalled frantically until the motor fired and then off you tootled, holding on to your beret and bracing yourself for the potholes (it had no suspension). When it rained, the Solex – which relied on friction on its front wheel to activate the motor– would not start and you could end up red-faced and pedalling like a maniac for several kilometres before you called it a day and rang for a taxi.

Today, a new electric Solex has come on to the market. Very green, I'm sure - but not really quite as fun, n'est-ce pas?

Poisson d'avril

It’s April Fool’s Day tomorrow and here it’s called Poisson d’avril, or April Fish. On this day, if you’re not careful, you’re likely to find paper fish taped to your back by mischievous children - which does indeed make you look rather silly. The origin of this custom is a little vague. One explanation is that this time of year coincides with the sign of the zodiac, Pisces, and another dates back to 1564 when Charles IX changed the calendar so that New Year’s Day fell on the first of January rather than on the first of April, as it had until then. People got terribly confused and some forgot and went around wishing Happy New Year to everyone in April, which they found enormously funny. The original “April Fish” joke is said to have involved sending some poor fool – who still thought it was January and not April, despite the warm weather, gambolling lambs and apple blossom - to market, to buy freshwater fish when it was out of season. I suppose he got wise to it eventually.

I was never terribly successful with April Fool's Day jokes. When I was a child, I once filled the sugar basin with salt and my normally mild-mannered father was very upset because he was in a hurry to get to work and was looking forward to his cup of morning tea. Another time, my mother made him "coffee" from gravy-browning - and if my memory is right, he didn't even notice. When my own children were small, I regularly woke them up on the first of April with "Quick! There's an elephant on the balcony!" or some such witticism. Strangely enough, they never ever believed me.

Making scents

When I was a little girl, my friend and I would collect fallen rose petals from the garden (or, if I’m honest, rip my mum’s roses to shreds) to make “scent”. We would steep the petals overnight in water and the next day, we would fish them out again and proudly dab the result behind our ears. It always, always looked and smelt like viscous dishwater but to us it was our very own Chanel N°5.




My tastes are a little more sophisticated now and there’s nothing I like better than going to the perfume counter at the Galeries Lafayette and dousing myself from the testers. French perfume has always had a whiff of wicked frivolity about it and here in France, nine out of ten women wear it as do one out of two men – and even babies have their own eau de toilette. It wasn’t always so. Before Julius Caesar arrived, the Gauls were a pretty malodorous bunch but the Romans soon had them smelling of roses. And with Christianity came incense and scented candles in the churches although later, Christianity would be responsible for a decline in the use of perfume and cosmetics.

In the twelfth century, the Crusaders brought back exotic scents from the East and from Spain, pots of fragrances used in the making of gloves. At this time, Grasse, in the south of France, was already known for its tanneries and the first French perfumers were known as the maîtres gantiers or Master Glovers. They were the only people authorized to sell perfume for gloves. By the end of the seventeenth century, they had become known as Master Perfumers and Grasse had become the largest production centre of the raw materials for perfumery: roses, jasmine and citrus trees that thrived in the Mediterranean climate.

The Renaissance was an era of frivolity and excess. Charles VIII and François I both had personal Master Perfumers and although François’s son, Henri II, did not share this passion his mistress, the beautiful Diane de Poitiers, did and she attributed her youthful appearance to a secret, fragrant beauty water. However, it was during the reign of Henri III that the nation’s love for perfume became an obsession bordering on madness. Henri was very effeminate and surrounded himself with like-minded courtiers who wore outlandish frilly clothes, make-up and jewellery and drenched themselves – and the dogs and parrots they brought to court – with heavy perfume.

By the time Louis XIV came to the throne, the air was more breathable. Louis did not dislike perfume but he preferred it to be discreet. Natural scents became popular and it was during his reign that eau de Cologne was created…by an Italian barber living in Germany. He mixed grape spirits, oil of neroli, bergamot, lavender and rosemary to “capture the essence of an Italian spring morning after the rain”. It was not only used as a fragrance - it was diluted in bath water, mixed with wine, used as a mouthwash, an enema and even injected directly into the body. The original cologne is now known as 4711, after the number of the house where it was being produced in the nineteenth century.

According to legend, when the French royal family tried to escape during the Revolution disguised as commoners, they were betrayed by Marie-Antoinette's distinctive perfume which revealed her true identity. Those brave Revolutionaries may have despised luxury and privilege but their love of perfume was not diminished and they eased their guilty consciences by creating perfumes such as parfum à la nation and parfum à la guillotine - a heady scent to be sure. Not surprisingly, they did not really catch on.

The Emperor Napoleon was a man obsessed with personal hygiene and it is said that he ruined many a uniform because he insisted on dousing them in his favourite eau de Cologne to get rid of the manly smell of his sweaty soldiers. While in exile, he was horrified to find he had run out of cologne. He could not do without his daily rub-down so he ordered his servant to rustle up something from the local flora. A French company claims to sell this authentic Napoleon eau de Cologne today…and according to their web site, they also sell the intriguing “Swimming-pool water fragrance”. Eau de swimming pool? On closer inspection it turns out to be a product that scents your pool water and not something to make you smell like the local baths on a Saturday afternoon. Phew.

Grasse is still the perfume capital of France today although the industry now relies more on chemicals than flowers and there are many products other than soap and perfume that require a scent. There are still a few fields of flowers but much of the raw material is imported and processed in the factories located in the countryside surrounding the town. Every factory employs one or two perfumers – or “noses” as they are known. They work at a perfume organ – a mini-laboratory that does indeed look a bit like an organ - surrounded by the raw materials which they mix and smell until they are satisfied, which can take months or even years.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to be offered a huge bottle of my favourite perfume for my birthday tomorrow but I suppose I’ll have to settle for a dog-eared card and an I O U as usual. Anyway, I could always nip round to the Galeries Lafayette for a really special occasion…

Bounty hunters: it takes Allsorts...

I don’t often buy the local newspaper but I think I’ll buy it more often from now on after reading the following story:


A few days ago, there was an armed robbery in the region. Two men were caught stealing sweets from… Lidl. When confronted by a member of staff, one of them whipped out a huge knife and threatened her before running out of the shop with his accomplice to a waiting getaway car: a Mercedes SUV with a Swiss number plate.

Now, I couldn’t have made that up, could I?

To be fair, it turned out the car was stolen too…

UPDATE: And in a strange parallel-universe incident, a conman robbed an Antwerp bank armed only with chocolates...