French kissing
Vows made, speeches finished, champagne quaffed and we’d done it. We were married. Our car swept us away from the Palace of Westminster, where we’d plighted our troth in the gilded splendour of St Mary Undercroft, and we sped across the river towards Waterloo International. A few hours later we were in Paris, at the Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli. This is one of the city’s finest and most luxurious hotels — not that we were in any fit state to appreciate its spectacular interiors. With thumping headaches and fuddled eyes we staggered from the lift towards our room. I pushed open the door and a blaze of polished marble and silver mirrors flared from within. There was a bottle of champagne waiting for us in a silver pail. We took a few celebratory sips before fatigue overwhelmed us and we fell asleep on about an acre of bed.
Next morning I awoke first. The bed was even larger than I remembered from the night before. In the dawn gloom I could barely make out my wife across the vast sea of linen. I cupped my hands and called her name. Far off, a mermaid shape stirred sleepily. I left her to it and padded quietly into the bathroom. Slipping into a cotton robe that made me feel rather like James Bond, I crossed to the centrepiece of the room, a deep porcelain tub upraised on four lion’s paws of polished steel. I turned the levers, the golden taps gushed and thundered and I sank into its hot, foaming depths.
I never made it to breakfast, not till the fol lowing day at least. It was worth the wait. The dining-room of the Meurice is an extraordinary synthesis of styles. The mosaic floor looks like something from a Roman villa; the mirrored walls modestly quote Versailles; at either end there’s a mighty buttressed fireplace piled high with fanciful carvings and delicately worked stone; look upwards and the four huge chandeliers soar into a painted sky teeming with dimpled cherubs. It’s a wonderful effect. The monumentality and splendour belong to the 19th century, when palaces were projections of political might, but the imperial idiom has been re-expressed here on a more human and more accommodating scale. Truly, breakfast in paradise.
Our next stop was the Ile-de-France. On the banks of the river Essonne, the Domaine de Belesbat is a beautiful golf-château with a red-brick moated tower that dates back to the 15th century. The charismatic manager, Christophe, gave us a run-down of the resort’s history. Once a love-nest where the King of Navarre stashed his spare mistresses, the estate was expanded in the 18th century and now includes a fine landscaped park. The deer-in-residence, Belle, is extremely tame, having been ‘educated by a local family’. She sometimes tries to join in the golf. Christophe is particularly keen to open ‘the door of hospitality’ to his guests who come from all over France to play the par-72 course, one of the country’s finest. There are no green fees for residents. My unsporty wife wasn’t tempted. ‘I’m not having anything to do with balls or holes,’ she huffed. Instead she took a dip in the pool followed by a light toasting in the ‘cabine de bronzage’. I strolled around the secluded woodlands and watched in admiration as expert golfers whacked their Maxfli Noodles up the fairway. No sign of Belle. Perhaps she was caddying.
At night we supped magnificently at the restaurant and had fun practising our terrible French with the head waiter. Most of the staff are pretty fluent in English. The moathouse is lit up after nightfall and we wandered out into the park, dawdling over the ornamental bridges and enjoying the twitterings of owls and frogs and other nocturnal rummagers. Belesbat is like living in the Middle Ages but with better sanitation. The Japanese owner has renovated the 100-odd rooms, raising them to the squeaky-clean standards you’d expect from a top Tokyo hotel. He is equally keen to nurture the château’s historical connections. Voltaire stayed here for a year in 1725 and mounted satirical burlesques in the grounds. In his honour, the hotel has established links with scholars all over Europe, in particular with the Voltaire Society in Oxford. For golfers who are keen on Enlightenment philosophy (if there are such people), this has to be the greatest hotel in the world.
And so to Provence, where we stayed at an exceptional four-star hotel within a working vineyard. The Château de Berne was a wreck 20 years ago when its present owner, Bill Muddyman, rolled up in his Landcruiser and bought it on the spot. He restored the main building and created a stone tower that now rises austerely over the surrounding cypresses like a mediaeval Italian monastery. He salvaged the vineyard, added the auberge and its restaurant, and brought in experts to renew the neglected strengths of the local wines.
The result is like a dream you hope you’ll never wake up from. The air-conditioned rooms are sumptuous, the food is immaculate. You can bask beside the pool all day puzzling your way through Le Figaro at the rate of one article per ten minutes, or let your eye drift towards the planted terraces where pale olives luxuriate in the sun. The staff weave about unobtrusively letting you get on with it. All of them profess a love of Bill Muddyman. ‘Ah, Beel,’ they sigh, ‘you have met eem? Beel is so greayytt.’ I was expecting a brisk entrepreneur in braces but Beel turned out to be a charming, shy and quietly imposing Londoner. He treated us to lunch on the shaded terrace and gave us a few key tips on making it in the Far East (‘Never blow your nose in Yokahama’) and then he was off, a little reluctantly, to mingle with the other guests.
We joined a tour of the ‘cave’ followed by a tasting supervised by Brigitte, a buxom blonde in a provocative black dress. The rosés are much better than those commonly available. We were offered the award-winning white cuvée speciale. A very complex wine, Brigitte told us. It was strong, rich and with a lovely golden hue. What flavours did we detect? ‘Butter, honey and sunflowers,’ offered the simpler souls among us. More advanced palettes sensed grapefruit, shaved coconuts, Belshazzar’s feast and The Magic Roundabout. I wasn’t sure. I got a very clear hint of wine but I didn’t think that would add much to the discussion, so I kept quiet.
We made off with a few bottles of Wild Pig, a sparkling rosé with enough kick in it to launch Thunderbird One. And with that we toasted our return to London. Honeymoon over. Paradise lost. If only we could do it all over again.
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