But where the hell is the Béarn?
Deep France: A Writer's Year in the Béarn
Author: Celia Brayfield
I didn't know where the Béarn was.
I didn't even know who Celia Brayfield was, although the cover of the book stated that she's a best-selling writer.
I bought it over some misunderstanding. I was looking for a book that would help me to understand more about Calais. I thought Calais was in Gascony (I previously misread an information in another book), and because Deep France seemed able to teach me many things about Gascony, I bought it. So much for my French geography.
The Béarn proved to be far, far away from Calais. I opened up a map of France and found it to be a dot down in Southern France, near Spain, in the Pyrenees, in the French Basque countries. A rural gem hidden in deep France. You may not have heard about the Béarn, but you must have heard about some Béarnais - The Three Musketeers and Cyrano de Bergerac. Yes, they are real historical figures eternalized by the writings of their later-generation Béarnais fellows.
Brayfield, a writer of several books and a single mother, decided to live a year in France, to get away from London which got too much for her. (In one part of the book, she wrote about the fear felt by her daughter's friend, who's living in Central London, when she wanted to go out one night about 10pm to buy milk and found a male on male gang rape happening in her own front steps.)
Béarn is a part of French which is not quite the stereotyped French that most people had in their minds. The Béarnais are basically different from the typical 'Parisian' French that people know or imagine. The Béarnais came from a different stock - The Basques are closer to the Welsh than to the rest of the Europeans. They have a different language, different customs, and different traditional cookings.
So Brayfield chronicled - well, wrote down - her experiences in the beautiful Béarn month by month. Some are personal matters of living as an ex-pat, some are stories of the places she visited. And since she's very fond of cooking, she also included several Béarnais recipes at the tail of every chapter.
Too bad that she suffered an incident that left her wheelchaired and then crutched for the last several months of her stay in the Béarn. If she hadn't had that incident, I'm sure that we can know more things about the Béarn from her book since she was planning to visit some more places before she went back to England.
Deep France is not a very bright book, but it contains many interesting titbits about the region (What do the people of the region think about the National Front, since the Béarnais themselves are not quite French? What do a Béarnais quarter of an hour mean to them? How to bargain and shop in Béarnais flea markets? etc.). And the book destroyed several stereotypes of Frenchmen that we the non-French often imagine and believe. You might also want to read the book if you're interested in France but has no access to books in French.
Author: Celia Brayfield
I didn't know where the Béarn was.
I didn't even know who Celia Brayfield was, although the cover of the book stated that she's a best-selling writer.
I bought it over some misunderstanding. I was looking for a book that would help me to understand more about Calais. I thought Calais was in Gascony (I previously misread an information in another book), and because Deep France seemed able to teach me many things about Gascony, I bought it. So much for my French geography.
The Béarn proved to be far, far away from Calais. I opened up a map of France and found it to be a dot down in Southern France, near Spain, in the Pyrenees, in the French Basque countries. A rural gem hidden in deep France. You may not have heard about the Béarn, but you must have heard about some Béarnais - The Three Musketeers and Cyrano de Bergerac. Yes, they are real historical figures eternalized by the writings of their later-generation Béarnais fellows.
Brayfield, a writer of several books and a single mother, decided to live a year in France, to get away from London which got too much for her. (In one part of the book, she wrote about the fear felt by her daughter's friend, who's living in Central London, when she wanted to go out one night about 10pm to buy milk and found a male on male gang rape happening in her own front steps.)
Béarn is a part of French which is not quite the stereotyped French that most people had in their minds. The Béarnais are basically different from the typical 'Parisian' French that people know or imagine. The Béarnais came from a different stock - The Basques are closer to the Welsh than to the rest of the Europeans. They have a different language, different customs, and different traditional cookings.
So Brayfield chronicled - well, wrote down - her experiences in the beautiful Béarn month by month. Some are personal matters of living as an ex-pat, some are stories of the places she visited. And since she's very fond of cooking, she also included several Béarnais recipes at the tail of every chapter.
Too bad that she suffered an incident that left her wheelchaired and then crutched for the last several months of her stay in the Béarn. If she hadn't had that incident, I'm sure that we can know more things about the Béarn from her book since she was planning to visit some more places before she went back to England.
Deep France is not a very bright book, but it contains many interesting titbits about the region (What do the people of the region think about the National Front, since the Béarnais themselves are not quite French? What do a Béarnais quarter of an hour mean to them? How to bargain and shop in Béarnais flea markets? etc.). And the book destroyed several stereotypes of Frenchmen that we the non-French often imagine and believe. You might also want to read the book if you're interested in France but has no access to books in French.