Hotel Bellevue

(ãhepzz 2000)

 

It was getting late and we had been driving all day, making our way back up from Marseille to Holland. We always spend the night in one of those cheap motels which have emerged in France since a few years. The kids love it: the creditcard code to get in, the automatic showers that clean themselves, the absence of any personnel, which gives you the feeling you’re in a deserted space station. Alas, all these were booked full in the area because of some sporting event. As dusk fell and it started to rain things began to look rather grim. In low voices Martin and I discussed the possibility of driving on through the night. We could stop for dinner and be home around 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning…

We decided to leave the highway and check out the Route Nationale for a restaurant on the way. Most of these were closed. Rural France turns in early. And most of them looked like they had given up on clientele ten years ago. Everyone is on the toll highway.

A road sign! Le Bellevue Bar-Hotel-Restaurant. Do you have lodging for four? Of course. How much? 200 francs (35$). Can we still get a meal? Sure.

A family business, we assumed. An elderly couple and their son Gilles, a man in his late thirties with thinning hair and a bad limp. And a large dog wearing a scarf and an ill-fitting sort of harness that closed on his back. He barked and snarled despite being told repeatedly to back off. He’s quite harmless, they assured us.

Upstairs we put our overnight bags in a room where the couple was busy putting sheets on the beds. The old stairs creaked, the furniture was crummy and the whole place looked like the hotels from my childhood. I excitedly explained to my children that this was real France, France as it was forty years ago - take a good look, kids, this is disappearing fast. Hygiene and other regulations will kill these places. Permits will not be reissued before everything has been thoroughly ‘renovated’.

Drinks at the bar went on for ages. They never appeared on the bill, I realized much later. The elderly couple took their leave - so they were not the owners after all. Around a quarter to ten I carefully informed if we could sit down now at the dinner table that had been set in a corner. Gilles came out of the cellar beneath the bar carrying a dust-covered bottle of red wine. Château de l’Ours, a bordeaux from the côte de Blaye, he proudly announced. De l’ours? A bear? My mind’s eye immediately saw the mythical Bête du Gévaudan: a beast said to have shorter legs on one side, so it could only walk up the ‘côte’, and then roll down loudly howling after reaching the top, only to start its ascension again eternally. But the mystery was solved after taking a better look at the label: it said des Tours, but some letters had faded with time.

The meal was fine, most of the children’s chicken terrine in aspic disappeared into the dog who from then on became our best friend. He was only six months old, Gilles said, but he has already earned his life’s keep. Is he such a good watchdog then? No, this dog hunts truffels. I was delighted. Usually, pigs are trained for this purpose, but I had heard some dogs could be taught. The secret is to never let him taste one, Gilles explained. Once he’s had one, he will eat them himself instead of just marking the spot. I wonder if that goes for Hector, the Dope-Sniffing-Hound. This dog also can sing, Gilles added. He fetched his mouth organ and played. The dog yodeled along. Gilles fetched all sorts of wind instruments and the dog performed.

The children went off to bed. Gilles brought out a bottle of excellent local Champagne and we questioned him about all these instruments. Because I could play these, I was in a special prestige unit in the army, he told. And showed us his album, in which he is wearing the weirdest costume-uniform, a mix from all the french colonies: Algeria, Indochina, Madagascar, Guyana etc… They would travel all over the world and parade. But later he was sent to Bosnia - no prestige fooling around this time. The apero’s, the chateau de l’ours and the bubbly were starting to get to him, so he told how his wife had left him recently, taking their three kids with her. Now he was alone in this godforsaken place on the RN67 outside Chaumont-sur-Marne. His leg was bad, his parents were old, the hotel was run down and his wife had stripped him. And in so far we could judge, he was not the type who could cope with city life. Crippled inside - and outside.

The next morning we ate breakfast while enjoying the view on the Marne valley. When we checked out, it appeared his creditcard machine would channel the money to his ex-wife’s bank account. If he guided us to a cash dispenser we were willing to make the detour. But it was out of order. What to do? We followed him to his sister’s restaurant in another town. I used my card there. But he didn’t get the money. He still owed her.