Waterway to go...

France has a rich network of canals. If you wanted to – and if you had the time - you could travel from north to south and from east to west without ever setting foot on dry land. There are quicker ways to do it, of course, but why rush?

Canals have been around for thousands of years and France has a great tradition in hydraulic engineering that reaches back to the twelfth century. They were built initially for irrigation and then as a means of linking towns to rivers but it wasn’t until the sixteenth century that the French began to build longer canals – a feat made possible by the invention of locks. In 1526, a man with the unfortunate name of Adam de Craponne, was born into a noble family in Salon-de-Provence. A hydraulic engineer, he developed several canal networks in the region but his most famous canal, the Canal de Craponne, provided water for Salon and irrigation for the Crau, an arid rocky plateau nearby. At sixty-two kilometres, it was the first grand canal. Monsieur de Craponne not only invested his entire fortune in the project, he also had to borrow money from his friend, a certain Nostradamus - who evidently foresaw a great future for canals. Unfortunately, he was unable to foresee Adam de Craponne’s fate: he died a ruined man, poisoned - so the story goes –by rivals.

Probably the best known canal in France is the Canal du Midi which was built to link the Atlantic Coast to the Mediterranean. The idea had existed for over a thousand years - the Roman emperors Nero and Augustus considered it as did Charlemagne, Francois I, Charles IX and Henri IV. Several attempts were made at building a canal but they all failed.

The reasons for building one were simple: the sea route around the coast of Spain was not only long (3000 kilometres) – it was also dangerous because of pirates. Moreover, the Straits of Gibraltar were controlled by the powerful Spanish Kingdom who lined its coffers at every passage. This would be a way to weaken Spain’s economy.

In the seventeenth century, in the reign of Louis XIV, one man made the building of this canal his life’s work. His name was Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax collector from Béziers. Within twenty years he had become very rich (no questions asked) and launched himself into the project with dedication and almost foolhardy enthusiasm. In 1666, the King issued an edict for the construction of the canal and work was begun the following year.

The canal was built to link the Garonne river at Toulouse (which flows into the Atlantic at Bordeaux) and the Etang de Thau, one of a string of lagoons along the Languedoc coast. It was a great challenge that had defeated many an engineer before him, not least because of the features of the landscape. But Riquet was undeterred. When he came to a hill, instead of going around it, he built the world’s first canal tunnel – le tunnel de Malpas; when the ground sloped, he built a lock and when a river had to be crossed he built an aqueduct. Today, there are three hundred and twenty-eight such constructions – some of which are over three hundred years old.
Twelve thousand people worked for him. He paid them above the going rate and – unheard of at the time – he paid them on their days off (which included rainy days) and when they were ill. They were even provided with subsidised housing. Needless to say, this didn’t make Riquet terribly popular with other, less generous employers…

Poor Riquet died exhausted and bankrupt in 1680, just a few months before the canal was completed. His son carried on the work and in 1681, it was inaugurated by the King. Known as the Canal Royal de Languedoc up until the French Revolution, it was renamed the Canal du Midi by paranoid revolutionaries.

From the very beginning, the canal was used to transport people and mail as well as merchandise. The Barque de la Poste (Postal Barge) took four days to travel the 240 kilometres from Toulouse to Agde and stopped regularly along the way to allow its passengers to eat (the stops were called dinées) and to sleep (couchées). At every stopping place there was a chapel, an inn and stables for the horses that pulled the barges. Horses were used for traction until the 1930s, when motorised barges replaced them.

Between 1830 and 1856, another canal was built linking the Canal du Midi to Bordeaux because the river Garonne flowed too slowly to be economical. Ironically, the Bordeaux-Sète railway line was finished at around the same time and marked the beginning of the decline of fluvial transport.

photo www.canal-du-midi.org

Today, the canals are known collectively as Le Canal des Deux Mers: - Canal of the Two Seas – which covers a total distance of over four hundred kilometres. In 1996, it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. Together with the other 6300 kilometres of waterways in France, it accommodates thousands of tourists messing about in boats every year while cyclists and walkers travel the old towpaths beneath the shade of the plane trees. It is a wonderful way to experience the variety of France and a perfect opportunity to just relax - and go with the flow…

French bloomers

There are two flower festivals in France during the month of February: la fête de la violette in Toulouse and la fête du Mimosa in the south of France. It’s nice to have something to brighten up the dull wintry days between Christmas and the first signs of spring.

I remember eating Parma Violets when I was a child and calling them ‘perfume sweets’ because I thought that’s what they were made from. In a way, I suppose, they are. Perhaps Toulouse, called la ville rose because of the colour of the buildings, should have been named la ville violette after the flower that is its emblem. Certainly, the Parma violet is omnipresent in this town. As you stroll beside the Canal du Midi, a heady scent drifts along the towpath from La maison de la Violette - a fragrant barge that has been turned into a shrine to this purple flower with its heart-shaped petals. Once inside you are offered a crystallised violet (only one, I’m afraid) and are free to look around and learn about the history and the uses of this flower.

In ancient Greece, the violet was considered a symbol of fertility and love and it was used in love potions. As it was also used as a cure for a headache, the recipient had no excuse not to succumb. Violets were used extensively in the middle-ages both in cookery and in medicine: apothecaries made cough syrup from them and they were used to add colour and flavour to food.

During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, they were still used in cookery but it was also fashionable in court to douse oneself liberally with violet-scented powder to mask bodily odour - although violet-scented soap may have been a better idea…

Violets were Napoleon’s favourite flowers. Josephine wore them on her wedding day and Napoleon sent her a posy of violets on every anniversary. After her death, he picked violets growing on her tomb and wore them in a locket around his neck. In exile on the Isle of Elba, he promised his followers he would return in the spring… with the violets. This earned him the nickname of Caporal Violette and the flower became his emblem, worn by his followers in his honour. Suddenly violets were everywhere: on pots, on clothes and on postcards. The postcards looked innocent enough but they were cleverly drawn and on closer inspection, revealed the outline of Napoleon’s portrait cunningly camouflaged. When he returned from exile, women offered him bouquets in the street and violets were strewn beneath his feet. Up until 1874, the French government tried to ban – with little success - any reproduction of a violet because it was the symbol of the Bonapartists

In the language of flowers, the violet is symbolic of faithfulness in love. It is associated with Valentine's Day too, since legend tells us that violets grew outside the window of the jail where Saint Valentine was imprisoned. And in a profound philosophical statement, this delicate, sweet flower also represents death...

Mimosa, on the other hand, represents sensitivity and feminine energy – whatever that is (I certainly haven’t got any…). This sunshine-laden tree is a member of the acacia family and was brought to the Mediterranean from Australia in the early nineteenth century. Rich Europeans planted it in the gardens of their villas on the French Riviera and enjoyed the masses of golden flowers that bloomed in the late winter months. Mimosa is prized for its delicate fragrance and is a component of several well-know perfumes as well as being used to scent soap and other products of the perfume industry.

Mimosa growers are called mimosistes and between January and March, they export more than eight million bouquets of their flowers all over the world. The fête du Mimosa takes place mid-February in the small town of Mandelieu-la-Napoule where the streets are vibrant with music and gaily-coloured floats. La mimosette – a cream-filled brioche decorated with mimosa and made from a secret recipe - is baked especially for the occasion and you can also buy mimosa syrup, sweets and even jelly.

photo mandelieu

In aromatherapy, mimosa is taken to relieve anxiety and depression and to liberate oneself from “oppressive memories”. It apparently provokes feelings of joy and lightness of spirit and the truly whimsical can use it to induce prophetic dreams.

On a less picturesque note, mimosa extract is used to treat a variety of ailments including swollen ankles and sensitive skin. The bark is used to make an astringent gargle and to treat colic and… chronic diarrhoea.

I expect that is where the feelings of joy and lightness come in…

Crumbs!

In French the word for friend is copain, which comes from the Latin cum pane (with bread) and is the person with whom you share your bread. One could be forgiven for thinking that the French invented bread but it was probably the Egyptians: however, while few people have heard of eesh baladi, nearly everyone knows what a French stick is.

Along with strings of onions and smelly cigarettes, the baguette - that thin loaf of crusty bread that makes a sandwich as long as your arm - is an enduring, albeit hackneyed, symbol of France. The elongated form of the baguette was created in the early twentieth century and was invented for townspeople who lived near to a bakery and could buy their bread fresh, twice a day. The bread was made to be eaten on the same day as purchase and this is still the case. I have tried wrapping leftover baguette in a tea towel; I have put it in a plastic bag overnight; I have popped dry bread in the microwave, I've sprinkled it with water and baked it in a hot oven - but the result is always the same: day-old French bread tastes like carpet slippers.

Bread has been the staple diet of the French for centuries, even if they are now eating a mere five ounces a day as opposed to the two pounds they were eating in 1900. The Ancient Gauls ate their food off a thick slice of bread called a tranchoir and when told to "finish your plate", that's exactly what they did. This custom lasted well into the fourteenth century, although the wealthier classes would give the sauce-sodden tranchoir to the poor to finish off. The quality of bread eaten was an indicator of wealth and the whiter and finer the flour, the more expensive the bread. At this time, the humble peasant had to make do with coarse, black rye bread that he made himself - but not before he'd paid tax to his overlord to grind his flour in the communal mill and more tax to be allowed to use the communal oven. As if that wasn't humiliating enough, he often had to add straw or even clay to the grain when times were hard, producing a loaf that, I suspect, closely resembled the 100% natural high-fibre rustic bread you can buy for a small fortune in any organic bakery today.

The rising price of bread was one of the reasons for the French Revolution. The harvest in 1788 had been extremely poor and the population was starving. At the beginning of 1789, riots broke out throughout the country, and not for the first time. People were demanding work and bread and it was then that Marie-Antoinette - who was a little half-baked herself – was supposed to have suggested that if there was no bread, they could eat cake instead (actually, she didn’t say that, but I wanted to get that joke in about her being half-baked…) Later, in 1791, the Constituent Assembly fixed the price of bread and decreed that bakers could only bake one sort of loaf, the "Equality Loaf", made from three parts wheat flour to one part rye.

In the 19th century, the mechanical kneading machine was invented and bakers no longer had to knead their dough by hand - or with their feet, which had been the case for some types of bread. Consumers were hostile to the idea but professional bakers welcomed the chance to lighten their workload. Further changes followed, including the replacement of brewer's yeast with baker's yeast and the use of steam ovens over wood-fired ones until finally, in the 1950s, bread was being made in what is known as industrial bakeries, thus becoming plentiful and cheap. In the face of this competition, 6,786 traditional bakeries were forced to close down between 1968 and 1975. Today, shops known as "baking terminals" sell bread that they have bought frozen and partially baked and which they have finished cooking in their own ovens, to con you into thinking it is homemade. American and British-type sliced bread has also become popular - I have even seen it sold without crusts: pale and limp and wrapped in cellophane. It’s enough to put you off your croque monsieur…

Thankfully, there are many for whom bread is still the staff of life and 36,000 traditional boulangeries continue to flourish in France (that's one for every 1,500 inhabitants). Each region produces its speciality in a myriad of shapes and sizes, some flavoured with walnuts, raisins, bacon, olives, basil or garlic and others with names that read like poetry: fougasses, flûtes and fibassiers, polka, choine and gâche. The feast day of the patron saint of bread, Saint Honoré, is celebrated on the 16th May and events that include processions, free breakfasts and bread tasting are held throughout the country. And once a year, the Grand Prix of the Parisian Baguette (yes, really), is organised by the City of Paris, the victor walking away with a prize of 4000 euros (almost £27,000) and the honour of providing the President with his daily bread for a year. Now, that's what I'd call a real breadwinner…

*My camera has given up the ghost and I have had to find pictures on the Internet. I do not know who took them so please - if these are your photos - let me know and I will post your details (or remove them, whatever you prefer!).*

Noël, Noël...

Christmas customs were brought here by the Romans and the first celebration of the day was in 496 when King Clovis was baptised in Rheims along with his entire army of three thousand warriors, presumably in an Olympic-sized font. Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas day in the year 800 and on the same day in 1066 that other Frenchman, William the Conqueror, was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

The first Christmas tree appeared in 1837: it was brought over by a German princess on her marriage to the Duke of Orleans (Germans obviously considered a tree to be a suitable romantic gift because Prince Albert brought one over too, when he married Queen Victoria). Father Christmas evolved from Saint Nicolas, a thinner and more discerning person who distributed presents on the 6th December, accompanied by the Père Fouettard – a rather politically incorrect Father 'Spanker' who punished naughty children by whipping them. Saint Nicolas's day is still celebrated in the north- east of France and so children there get twice as many presents in December as everybody else, which seems a tad unfair.

You can buy Christmas crackers and stockings here now, even though traditionally, French children put their shoes beneath the tree on Christmas Eve. Mind you, as my own children pointed out, that’s only fun if you have big feet. They prefer Christmas stockings because they can tie them to the bedposts and stretch them big enough for Father Christmas to stick a stereo in there and maybe a laptop while he’s at it. The idea for Christmas crackers, on the other hand, came from the French bon bon – a sweet wrapped in tissue paper. Tom Smith, a 19th century London baker, brought these back from Paris, added mottos and gifts and eventually got rid of the sweet altogether to add the ‘snap’. Crackers are still a novelty in France, though – the French get their ‘snap’ from papillottes: foiled-wrapped chocolates which also contain a silly joke but no gift (unless you count the chocolate).

Leaving aside the premature fake-snow-and-holly-wreath window displays, the real run-up to the festivities begins – at least for those who live in Provence, as I used to - on the 4th of December, which is St. Barbara’s day. You plant grains of wheat in a saucer (rather like planting cress), and watch it grow tall and strong by Christmas. We still do this in our house even though my wheat nearly always dies, which apparently means I will not be prosperous during the coming year. Curiously enough, this has so far proved to be true.

The French have not entirely forgotten that Christmas is a religious festival and the focal point is not the tree or the fairy lights or even the bowl of mixed nuts. It is the crèche - the Nativity crib. In Provence, the figurines are clay representations of the Holy Family and also of villagers and local craftsmen. These are called santons - little saints - and the people who make them are santonniers. One santonnier I heard about has made a santon of every single person in his village and at Christmas, each villager brings his clay 'double' to the church and places it in the crèche. The crèche is often the first thing people want you to see when you visit their home although I’ve noticed that no one is ever impressed by my own cotton wool and papier mâché representation. Too conceptual, perhaps.

Children are kept busy here on Christmas Eve, either with cartoons on the television or attendance at Midnight Mass. Père Noël comes by at midnight and the presents are opened then. Rather than falling exhausted into bed, clutching their new Barbies/Playstations, with bits of Sellotape stuck to their pyjamas, the children then have to eat a gargantuan meal with friends and family, called le Réveillon. There is usually a turkey, stuffed with sausage meat and chestnuts, quite often oysters, foie gras, smoked salmon, plenty of champagne and a bûche de Noël -Yule log - for pudding. In Provence, they also serve les treize desserts - symbolic sweetmeats representing the twelve apostles and Christ, which include dried figs, nougat and calissons, a confectionary made from almonds and preserved melon. If you manage to get through that lot, you are allowed to go to bed, unless you are a guest in someone’s home, in which case it would be polite to offer to help with the washing up.

Chez nous, however, Christmas is resolutely English. When they were younger, my children would go to bed early on Christmas Eve after a few carols, mince pies and mild threats involving boughs of holly. They would wake up five minutes after I’d gone to bed and open their presents very noisily and would not want their Christmas dinner because they’d have eaten all the chocolate tree decorations. This year, the only difference will be that they’ll probably go to bed early on Christmas morning.

Joyeux Noël everybody!

Wined up

In an attempt to civilise the uncouth barbarians of Ancient Gaul, the Romans brought with them the art of wine making. The Gauls had been growing vines and making crude wine for thousands of years before the Roman occupation but it was the Romans who showed them how to do it properly. The first wine using Roman methods was produced here in the Dauphiné, by the Allobroges tribe and soon other Celtic tribes were planting their own vineyards all over the country.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, France had become a Christian country. Wine was in great demand because it was a potent symbol in the Church and so it was the clergy who oversaw the planting of vineyards around the major cities. Later, the monks took over and became skilful wine growers, establishing most of the great vineyards we know today.

By the fifteenth century, vines were cultivated everywhere in France. The middle-classes vied with the aristocracy in producing the finest vineyards which they planted outside the city walls. Wine was still a drink for the elite and it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that it became available to ordinary people. It was healthier than water which was usually germ ridden and the average man would drink a litre a day. No wonder they had a Revolution…


In 1875, the vines became infested with an insect called phylloxera and the crops were destroyed. Wine growers had to start again from scratch by grafting the ancient French vines on to American ones. Over a million hectares of vineyards disappeared from Brittany, Normandy and Picardy but wine production actually increased – so much so that the government had to bring in measures to stop wine growers planting inferior vines and producing cheap plonk and encourage them to produce better quality wines. The reputation of French wine persists today…and to be honest, even the plonk is good.

But let’s not give the French all the credit. If it weren’t for us, they’d have no wine bottles or corks – or even corkscrews. Wine used to be kept in casks – invented by the Ancient Gauls – but they were not airtight, so conservation was difficult. With the invention of coke ovens in seventeenth century England came a new method of making bottles from thick, reinforced glass. These travelled well and moreover, a cork stopper could be banged into the neck with a mallet without breaking it. Wine could now age gracefully without turning to vinegar (from vin and aigre, meaning ‘sour wine’).


Poster by Favre&Assoc

Getting the wine out of these new bottles proved difficult however. More often than not, the glass neck had to be broken, which could put a bit of a damper on a romantic candlelit dinner for two. It was an Englishman who first patented the corkscrew in 1795 – the inventor took his inspiration from a tool called the bulletscrew or gun worm, a device that extracted stuck bullets from rifles. Not terribly romantic either but very efficient.

November is the month for Beaujolais Nouveau which is always released on the third Thursday of the month, regardless of when the harvest began. Drinking and celebrating the arrival of new wine is an old custom. In the middle ages, it was in the best interests of the vineyard owners to get their wine on the market first, as this would ensure them a good price. Also, wine did not keep well at that time, so the younger the wine the better. A great celebration was held on the 11th November in its honour, the fête de la Saint Martin - in fact, one of the politer synonyms for a hangover is ‘the Saint Martin blues’, although I have never heard anyone say it.



Beaujolais isn’t the only new wine – I have drunk a very nice new Côtes du Rhone – but the media hype ensures that Beaujolais is the best known and most popular. The grape it is made from – the gamay – is particularly suited to new wines as it is sweet and fruity. Most Beaujolais Nouveau is drunk by the New Year and you’re unlikely to find any in the shops after that. I have no idea what happens to all those unsold bottles – perhaps they really do end up as vinegar.

When drinking wine in France, the custom is to chink your glasses with your fellow drinkers and say “Tchin, tchin”. This onomatopoeic toast has its origins in the middle ages when it was common to poison one another’s food and drink. The idea was to knock your goblet against your neighbour’s goblet so that some of your wine splashed into his (tchin) – and he did the same to you (tchin) – that way you could both be sure no-one had slipped arsenic into the claret.

These days, however, fewer people are chinking their glasses. French wine consumption has dropped by half since the 1960s and people prefer to drink water with their meals rather than the traditional vin de table. This doesn’t concern me, of course, as I’m English so I have been waiting eagerly for the Beaujolais Nouveau to arrive on the 15th of November, a glass in each hand. Tchin tchin…

Grave circumstances

November is a bit of a morbid month here with three days, including Armistice Day, devoted to remembering the dead. The first, All Saints’ Day – or Toussaint - is a public holiday and, although it sounds nice and holy, it has its roots in pagan mythology. Like Hallowe’en, All Saints’ Day was created to supplant the Celtic celebration of samonios (samhain) which marked the end of summer. In the eighth century, Christian monks who had come as missionaries to Gaul found themselves witness to strange rituals and dark goings on at around the beginning of November. People would lay places at the table for deceased relatives and light candles and lanterns to guide the dead souls whom they believed mingled with the living during this time. These practices were so deeply anchored in the rural population that they endured in one form or another even after conversion to Christianity. In fact, in certain parts of France today, people still light lanterns for the dead and in Brittany, they pour milk on the tombs as an offering. I bet it curdles...

In the ninth century, Louis the Pious instituted a feast day for all the saints with the aim of replacing the pagan feast of the dead with a joyous Christian celebration. As usual, the French didn’t take a blind bit of notice and carried on inviting their ancestors to dinner. To cater for this, the Roman Catholic church had to invent a ‘Feast of the Dead’ on the second of November but to this day, most French people choose to remember their ‘disappeared ones’ on the first – probably because it is a holiday.

The day begins for many with mass followed by a family lunch - to which only living relatives are invited - and in the afternoon, everyone goes to the cemetery to put flowers on relatives’ tombs and tidy them up a bit. The traditional flowers are chrysanthemums because – like everything else in the cemetery – they need very little looking after and do not mind the cold. It is the ultimate faux-pas, of course, to offer chrysanthemums to anyone on any other occasion, unless you are trying to drop some sort of grotesque hint.

Cemeteries in France are beautifully kept and many are listed as historical monuments. The idea of cutting through one en route to the shops or nipping in for a sneaky fag on your way home from school would be shocking and incomprehensible to the French. It is important to keep grave plots neat and tidy and woe betide the slatterns who let their epitaphs get dusty – they’ll get a stern dressing down from the town council and more than a few cold stares. Like prisons, cemeteries are surrounded by high walls, the gates are locked at night and there are strict rules to be obeyed: singing or playing music is prohibited except for liturgical chants and military music; you are not allowed to enter if you are drunk or under fourteen and unaccompanied; animals are forbidden except for guide dogs and you are not allowed to take photographs without permission. A quarter of an hour before closing time a siren sounds, loud enough to wake the…well, never mind…and a uniformed keeper walks round to check in case anyone was thinking of spending the night there.

In the village of Mens, 55 kilometres south of Grenoble, you can find private Protestant cemeteries. They were established during the Reformation when Protestants were forbidden by Catholics to bury their dead in 'true Christian' ground. There is also a cemetery divided in two by a low wall: on one side are the Catholic graves - neat and tidy and decorated with photographs and flowers and dinky little statues; on the other side are the Protestant graves - plain, austere and overrun with vegetation...

The most famous French cemetery is Père Lachaise in Paris, established by Napoleon in 1804. This is the place to be buried for any...er... body who is anybody. Chopin is buried here as is the painter Pissarro; Jim Morrison’s grave is regularly besieged by fans and it is traditional for admirers to kiss Oscar Wilde’s tombstone while wearing lipstick. Today there are more than 300,000 people here ‘eating dandelions by the root’ (French for ‘pushing up the daisies’), making Père Lachaise the biggest cemetery in the city of Paris.

Perhaps the most unusual burial place in Paris is les catacombes. These are a network of tunnels and rooms beneath the city in what was once the site of Roman quarries. In 1786, bones from the cemeteries in the centre of the city were moved here as they were presenting a health hazard. There are about 186 miles of tunnels beneath Paris and only a small section is open to the public but of course, that doesn’t stop the cataphiles – catacomb lovers or urban explorers, as they prefer to call themselves - from using the many secret entrances to gain access and hold wild parties amongst the artfully arranged skulls and bones of about six million people. Well…they’re not disturbing anyone, are they?

Another unusual burial site lies beneath the deconsecrated church of Saint Laurent in Grenoble. More than 1,500 tombs have been uncovered that include fifth century mausoleums, seventh century sarcophagi and other tombs dating from the fourth century right through to the eighteenth. The church is now a museum, and you can walk around the crypt on gangways suspended above it and peer into the open stone coffins. Fortunately, they are empty now but I am nevertheless reminded of the words carved on one Frenchman’s headstone: Just leave me to sleep. That's why I'm here…

Mysterious

The nights are drawing in and it’s time to gather around the fire and tell spooky tales of ghosts and sprites and other fearsome apparitions. Did you know, for example, that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, France was overrun with werewolves? In the space of a hundred years, there were thirty thousand trials concerning loups-garous and many of these cases are well-documented. In 1573, in the village of Dole in the Jura region, a certain Gilles Garnier confessed to having murdered and eaten scores of young children and a few years later, a father and son admitted killing and eating several adolescents. In 1603, a thirteen-year old boy called Jean Grenier from Aquitaine was found crouching in the bushes chewing on what turned out to be human flesh. Another werewolf caught red-handed - or pawed in this case - was a creature called Jacques Rollet, who not only admitted to eating human beings but commented on the fact that lawyers had particularly thick skins. Well, we all knew that, didn’t we?

These wolf men all had something in common: they were excessively hairy, their nails were long, sharp and black, their teeth pointed and they scampered around on all fours – at least when there was a full moon. As recently as 1930, a werewolf was thought to prowl the streets of Paris and even today, desperate parents use the threat of a loup-garou under the bed to chasten naughty children.

As far as I know, there have been no cases of loups-garous in this region – although there are plenty of excessively hairy men. There is, however, a history of fairies. Near the thermal resort of Allevard are two caves said to be occupied by fairies and at the height of the resort’s popularity at the end of the nineteenth century, they were a major tourist attraction. However, unmarried women were not allowed to enter as legend had it that a young girl was warned by one of the malevolent fairies that if she did not marry her lover – who had gone to war – in exactly a year’s time to the day...he would die. On the allotted day, the lover preferred to go hunting rather than get hitched and met his death as predicted. The fairy got the blame, of course, rather than the disgruntled bride-to-be…

Closer to Grenoble, the village of Sassenage claims to have been home to the fairy Mélusine. Legend relates how a certain King Elinas met a beautiful young woman, Présine, while out hunting. She agreed to marry him on condition that he never see her give birth. He broke his promise, however, and his wife promptly disappeared with her three daughters. Years later, on learning of their father’s broken promise, the girls took their revenge and imprisoned him. Présine therefore punished her eldest daughter, Mélusine, condemning her to turn into a snake every Saturday and if she married, her husband must never see her as a snake otherwise she would disappear forever. One day, Mélusine met the handsome Raymondin in the forest and agreed to marry him as long as he didn’t try to see her on a Saturday. Strangely enough, he accepted – I suppose he thought she was the sort of woman who like a girls’ night out. Unfortunately, one Saturday, suddenly suspicious and mad with jealousy, Raymondin burst into the bathroom where poor Mélusine was trying to deal as best she could with her scaly skin problem - and discovered her secret. She fled to the caves in Sassenage and was never seen again. The small, spherical stones still found in the mountains around Sassenage were believed to be the fairy Mélusine’s petrified tears.

Other strange stones include those observed by two young girls in 1842 in the village of Clavaux. Stones started falling around them in slow motion so they ran to tell their parents who returned to the place with them. Suddenly, a sort of whirlwind began to suck the two children skywards and their parents had to grab hold of their feet to prevent them from disappearing into the stratosphere like helium balloons.

On a more ghostly note, this region has its White Lady too. On the outskirts of the village of Château-Bernard, some say a hitch-hiker can be seen thumbing a lift at night. All in white, she tends to dissolve like mist into the darkness as you approach her but thirty years ago, a man actually stopped and gave her a lift. Taking a fancy to her, he put his hand on her knee and then groped her breasts at which point he realised that she was – literally – frigid. She suddenly disappeared and feeling guilty, no doubt, the dirty old man stopped at the next police station to report what had happened and discovered that he’d just tried to make out with a ghost. I hope he had nightmares for the rest of his life.

There are countless other mysteries but to be honest, I’m still grappling with the everyday ones, never mind the supernatural. My house does seem to be haunted though…by three young girls who only appear at mealtimes and then mysteriously disappear…mmmm…