I'll Drink to That by Rudolph Chelminski Read Free Book Online

tell that it had come from the water tower.”
    Improvisation was the urgent watchword of that bizarre 1960 season. Another veteran of that maddeningly pluvious year, eighty-five-year-old Claude Beroujon, told of the deconsecrated chapel near Jullié that stood in as a warehouse, filled to the roof with barrels of Beaujolais. “We put wine everywhere we could,” he said. “It was only the growers’ talent for vinification that saved a terrible year and made it acceptable.” Unspoken: the vintage was not too watery, after all, by the time it was bottled. In the Beaujolais, the thought of a whole year’s wine being tainted with water was (and is) scandalous and abhorrent. Water is certainly acceptable for cattle and for cleaning floors and watering flower beds, but as a drink for human beings it is viewed with deep suspicion.
    Even with an equal devotion to the sanctity and comfort of their wine, it is doubtful that anyone could recreate Marguerite Chabert’s stroke of genius today. That sort of thing isn’t done anymore. With the ever-growing authority of the European Union’s bureaucrats in Brussels, a stringent set of health and sanitary rules is slowly squeezing the folklore out of the Beaujolais, France and, indeed, Europe in general. Whole milk and unpasteurized cheeses are in mortal danger from statutory creep, as are a host of kitchen and winemaking practices that used to give a special character to the French table. (French cooking schools no longer teach the old way of making of the veal, chicken and fish stocks— fonds de veau, fonds de volaille, fumets de poisson —the fundamental building blocks of the great classic sauces that were until recent times the central glory of la cuisine française. Young graduates now often arrive in professional kitchens with can openers in their pockets, for serving up the ready-made pastes and powdered stocks, guaranteed sanitary, developed by the giants of the food industry.) Prodded by the nannies of the European Commission in Brussels, while binding themselves progressively tighter with the intricate web of domestic social legislation defining their welfare state, France is fast becoming a serious nation—serious, glum and humorless.
    This is a pity, because the country that gave the world Rabelais, Molière, Jacques Tati, the Surrealists and the troubadour Georges Brassens has a wonderful native penchant for nonconformity, dissidence and humor, one that the political-intellectual establishment has been attempting for years to bury under a tsunami of analytical hot air, statistics and bafflingly complex legislation that hardly anyone understands much less bothers to obey. In these economically trying times, the Beaujolais is one of France’s last bastions of the ancient, honorable spirit of dissident laughter. Gabriel Chevallier knew all about that.
    Chevallier (1895-1969) was a journalist and author from Lyon who knew and loved the Beaujolais for its wine and its people, and habitually spent his vacations in the picturesque hillside village of Vaux-en-Beaujolais. Taking his inspiration from the traditional French antagonisms between right and left, church and state, bourgeoisie and workers, loyalists and revolutionaries—and, yes, male and female—he composed his novel Clochemerle in 1934 as a kind of extended ode to the Beaujolais. The book was an instant and hugely profitable best seller, translated into twenty-seven languages, and it remains in publication to this day. In France, it is one of the great fictional revealers, those fun house mirrors before which populations can stop for a moment, contemplate their reflections and either grin or grimace at what they see. Say “Clochemerle” to any French man or women, and you will immediately be greeted with an ironic smile of recognition for the national characteristics, good and bad, that are revealed through the singular behavior of the citizens of the imaginary little Beaujolais village that Chevallier