Los Gatos Weekly-Times

L'Escargot moved at a snail's pace

By Carl Heintze

Well, we're just back from barging through Burgundy. Or, as one of our fellow travelers put it, eating our way through France at a snail's pace.

The latter refers to our boat, the good ship L'Escargot, formerly a barge used to haul cargo, but converted into a vessel holding 24 passengers and a crew of six. L'Escargot got its name because it does travel about the speed of a snail, taking about a week to sail 40 miles through the lovely spring countryside of Burgundy, the home of Burgundy wine and Dijon mustard. The voyage is a minute look at the more than 200 miles of canals in Burgundy and an even smaller part of the vast network of such waterways that meander through the French countryside.

Once they were the arteries of commerce, but today they're mostly plied by tourists or vacationers who enjoy the leisurely pace of vessels that chug at a true snail's pace along the shallow waterway.

We could walk faster from lock to lock on the canal than the L'Escargot could motor. Or we could ride bicycles from one lock to the next, never at a racing speed, just ambling along looking at things. That, of course, was one of the trip's charms. We were never in a hurry.

The other was the cuisine. It is in the process of making me a devoted Francophile. The meals were endlessly delicious and endlessly varied and, as the French have proved, presented at each meal as things of beauty.

Cooking, of course, counts in making the French the world's greatest cooks, but so does freshness and presentation. Each dish on the barge was like an Impressionist painting. You hated to put your fork, spoon or knife into it. But, inevitably we did, only to find the taste was as good as the looks.

For instance, our first supper was terrine de legumes, filet de racasse, sauce duglairet and île flottante. I didn't know what all that meant either until it arrived on the table and then I discovered it was a vegetable aspic, a main meat dish appropriately sauced, with fresh vegetables and floating island for dessert. Along with this came two of a parade of white and red wines, never the same, and always excellent, and endless varieties of cheeses--the French make more than 300 different kinds--and that doesn't even include breakfast and lunch.

We ate and we ate. In between we sat on L'Escargot's forward deck and watched the scenery drift by--fields of rape seed, the stuff from which canola oil is made--torrents of yellow next to the green of wheat and barley, stone villages, lock cottages, each with its little garden and lock keeper, dog and television antennae, and forests just leafing out.

When we tied up, usually at a village on the canal, we bused off to see the Cote d'Or, the slope of gold, which looks somewhat like Napa Valley but which is even more famous, a south-facing slope of low mountains on which grow the grapes which have made Burgundy wines famous. Like Beaune, first cru, and Bourgogne chardonnay.

As with Napa's Highway 12, there is a wine road that meanders through the vineyards and we took it. We also had part of a day in Dijon, a modest, pleasant city which gains its fame from mustard, even though most Dijon mustard is no longer made there.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Now and then we met the French for whom I have increasing respect. I've come, as I said, to admire their cooking, but I've also begun to understand a little of their character. The French are among the most insular of Europeans--there is nothing so unchanging, for instance, as a French village--and at the same time, they are the most cosmopolitan.

There are all the things you have read about and some you've seen in pictures: Shakespeare and Company, for instance, where Hemingway went; the Eiffel Tower, of course; Pigalle, where GIs cruised during World War II; the bookstalls along the Seine; Notre Dame, the place we all know, better in some ways than perhaps New York.

Paris is much more than this, of course, and these days it is a very large city, very much choked with traffic in all directions, with its own problems of immigration; but it is still, without doubt, Paris.

In it and in the French countryside, the French tend to pretend that the tourists aren't there. It's not that they wish you'd go away or that they are unkind or impolite, it's just that they are French, proud of it and of their language, like them sometimes difficult, but also melodic.

The French like it that way. Unlike some other Europeans, the French don't emigrate much. They're happy where they are.

At the same time they're willing to let you appreciate what they consider to be their earthly paradise, to them the cradle of all that's good in European civilization, the place where the European Community began.

And the place without parallel when it comes to food. I can accept almost all of this, except snails. Nor apparently can most of those who travel on L'Escargot. The chef tried serving them as a delicacy on the farewell night of the cruise, but 70 percent of the passengers returned them to the kitchen untouched.

There are, it seems, limits even to Francophilia.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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