French Letter: With Molière in Pézenas

Late November in Brittany is not, generally speaking, the best time of the year. When it’s not raining, it’s about to rain, and as all remaining pastel shades drain from the landscape, the predominant colour is grey. 

For this reason, among others, my wife and I like to take at least a couple of winter breaks. Paris is a favourite destination, as it is at all times of the year, but on this occasion, we thought we’d go south, to the Languedoc.

The town of Pézenas is best known for the fact that Molière was a resident in the 1650s (keeping clear of the King, with whom he had fallen out) and wrote several of his plays there, including Le Docteur Amoureux. 

I think I’m right in saying that Doctor in Love, the 1960s rom-com starring Leslie Phillips, with James Robertson Justice as Sir Lancelot Spratt, was not a remake of the French farce. But I could be wrong. Perhaps it was a homage. 

As a schoolboy in Belfast in the 1960s, I had acted in several Molière productions, playing the part of Covielle, a buffoon, in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and Dr Purgon, the quack physician, in Le Malade Imaginaire. 

I didn’t find Molière’s comedies very funny at the time and still don’t. Then again, I’ve never found much to laugh about in the so-called comedies of Shakespeare, so what do I know? 

But the bewigged seventeenth-century dramatist was not my only reason for heading south. More to the point, I had recently responded to a tweet from a journalist friend I hadn’t seen for years who, it turned out, now lives with his wife in a magnificent townhouse in a village just up the road from Pézenas. 

To put the tin lid on it, another pal, recently discharged from hospital in Cannes after being fitted out with a new knee and hip, was feeling a little sorry for himself and jumped (metaphorically speaking) at the idea of five days in the Languedoc.

Thus it was that my wife and I found ourselves, after an overnight stay in the rather splendid town of Agen, driving south, via Toulouse and Carcassonne, towards Pézenas. 

What we hadn’t reckoned on was the fact that Brittany is not the only part of France to experience the onset of winter. The rain started to fall just as we passed the turnoff for Narbonne, and by the time we crossed into the department of Herault it was coming down like stair-rods. 

The sky turned black, illuminated only by violent flashes of lightning. In less than a minute, the surface of the road was ankle-deep in water. I turned the wipers up to eleven and leaned forward, squinting into the darkness. 

Many of our fellow road users followed our example and slowed down, some even switching on their hazard lights. Others, though – boy-racers to a fault – swept past at an unremitting 130 kph. How they weren’t all killed is beyond me – but then I’m not French. 

Two hours later, we made it to Pézenas, waterlogged and nostalgic for home, only to discover that the town has more cars than people and that there was not a single parking space to be found. I do not exaggerate. 

Our friend from Cannes had the same experience. Up and down we went, round and round. All the illegal spots had been taken. There was literally nowhere to leave our exhausted Renault. Not only that, but the space in front of our hotel (Le Grand Hotel Molière – what else?) was entirely blocked by cars and vans so that we couldn’t even get out for a moment to unload our bags.

Twenty minutes later, huddled together in the rain, without an umbrella, in the Parking Payant Voltaire, the best part of a kilometre from our hotel, we were forced to confront another of France’s recurring urban nightmares, the horadateur, a pay and display machine understood only by the evil genius who designed it and whose primary purpose is to enrage users to the point where they howl in frustration and lose the will to live. 

When we finally cracked it and the ticket vomited forth, we were soaked to the skin. But that wasn’t the end of it. Our contract stated that while we could park overnight in this distant outpost of Pézenas, we had to return by nine the next morning or face a fine of 33 euros. As my father would have put it, at least Dick Turpin wore a mask. 

At the Hotel Molière, through whose doors we eventually squished, dragging our bags behind us, the girl on the reception desk was sympathetic to our distress. A superior room awaited us, she said, and the bar would open at six. Up we went in the creaking lift, desperate to dry off and lie down. We unlocked the door. 

The room was dark, with only one small window that look straight across to a blank wall. Worse than that – much worse – we could hear the rain beating on the flat roof of what was plainly an annexe and the gurgling sound of the guttering. 

What was the problem? The receptionist wanted to know. Did we not find the room calm and … tranquil? No, we said, we did not. Fortunately, she replied, there was one other room available, for the same price, that was brightly lit and overlooked the square. We’ll take it, we said. 

And so began our first night in Pézenas. The road beneath our window resembled a painting by Pissarro of the Boulevard Montmartre in the rain, except that instead of an elegant parade of horse-drawn carriages there was bumper-to-bumper traffic, made up, I supposed, of cars that, like the Flying Dutchman, were unable to find harbour and were destined to remain in motion for all time. 

Next week, I will tell you what happened next. Oh, the times we have …