Le Sud De France 5.0: Swallow The Toad

Nicolas de Chamfort‘s Dictum reads, “(one) must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

I agree and my preference is for the small European toads—the greenish ones with little warts--and I find that one is usually sufficient to get me through the day. It’s one of the reasons I fit into France so well.

A recent survey showed that the French are the most pessimistic people in Europe. That in part accounts for the high price and the regular shortages of toads here in the South.

It was particularly a bad toad day last week (mid-January) for the French who awoke to see a photo of their President, Nicholas Sarkozy, on a calendar published to raise funds for the blind--who luckily can’t see the photos or the calendar. There amidst photos of celebrities like Gérard Depardieu, was a shot of Sarko. He is in profile and wearing dark “blind” person’s glasses and holding a white cane. The irony of a “blind” president was only made worse by the presence of the Carla, Mme S, who is seen standing in front of him and staring at the camera. Her expression is saying nothing less than, “Help I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!”

Montpellier is the center of the Languedoc region and like most big cities a hub of toad use by the population. A few weeks ago the papers were all abuzz about an announcement by the French rocker Johnny Hallyday. He had been ill and was now all better and had picked Montpellier for his triumphant return to performing. It was big news across France because he’s their biggest rock star ever, sort of like Bruce Springsteen and Elvis rolled into one. 

What you never heard of Johnny? He was part of the French Invasion that paralleled the British Invasion in the 1960s. The reason that you and the rest of the civilized world hasn’t heard of him is that to Americans and Brits he’s like Frankie Avalon with a mustache or Sonny Bono without Cher. Or to put it another way, a one toad pony.

Serge Gainsbourg on the other hand was a real French rock star whose songs have much in common with Bob Dylan. . His songs spoke of hypocrisy and pain. He knew about both having survived the Holocaust and an affair with Bridgette Bardot. Serge was a three toad a day man and it even that couldn’t keep him alive. 

Speaking of toad abuse, I upped my dosage the other week after passing a police “roadblock”. Roadblock is a loose term as the cops were simply standing by the side of the road blocking nothing. They just stood there hands behind their backs, appearing annoyed, like school marms waiting for kids to get back from recess. They were evidently looking for something specific—there’s a lot of drug traffic in the south--but what I really noticed were their uniforms. These Gendarmes are part of the French army and are dressed in what someone in Paris considers Haute Couture. Yet is that any excuse for dressing officers of the law in puffy blue jackets, black boots and matching black tights. Standing at the roundabout they exuded not nonchalance but “Mon dieu, what am I doing here freezing my ass off in these silly tights?” 

It gave me a week of nightmares about being chased by little blue triangles with thin black legs. 

One of my heroes is the French writer Gustave Flaubert. He hated France and he hated the middle class French the most, “There are gestures, sounds of people’s voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo…the bourgeois…is for me something unfathomable.”

That’s the voice of a man who knew his toads. Luckily, he died in the 19^th century and didn’t live to see Auchan and Castorama. These are the suppliers of middle class life in France. Castorama is a hardware store that is a lot larger than an American Home Depot and just a little smaller than Rhode Island. It contains everything you need to build a village from scratch. Auchan is a supermarket in the way Superman is a regular guy. You can literally get everything you need there to feed the village and decorate all the houses you’ve built.  

Large box stores, like the elephant and whale, like to live in herds. About 12 miles from us several dozen box stores have settled in a "zone industrielle" near Beziers. Last Saturday, we went on safari to hunt through the January sales for things for the house.

As we left home I popped a toad and stuck a spare one in my pocket just in case. A light rain was falling as we drove down the N9, our windshield wipers flapping and dark clouds massing above us. Three miles from the zone we began to see traffic, two miles from Auchan the traffic was crawling. I began to wonder if this was really such a good idea after all. 

Arriving at Auchan we joined a caravan line of cars circling through the parking garage. It was a bit like a game of musical chairs. Whenever a car left a space, three or four cars would descend upon it at top speed. The winner was not the one who got to the space first but the one who effective blocked the other cars from it. 

It is a game of “chicken” played out in slow motion in a crowded parking lot. While waiting my turn in this gladiatorial arena I watched an ancient, tiny Renault “Twingo” slide between two large Citroens SUVs and a half dozen children and mothers to get into a space. I was stunned by the driver’s daring and his disregard for bystanders. It could have been a very ugly scene except that when the Twingo door opened a cane popped out of the driver’s door followed by a shrunken old guy wearing the very same dark glasses as Sarkozy wore in the calendar for the blind photo. 

I pulled the spare toad out of my pocket, tore off its head and swallowed it in a single bite.

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