I’ve always had a soft spot for Michelin guides. They are to the world of travel what the Oxford English Dictionary is to the English language: authoritative, stodgy and impeccable. Bonheur, for a certain class of European, is a late-model Citroen, a glove box full of Michelin maps and guides, and a week to drive around the vineyards of Provence. On my last trip to France, I decided to become that gentleman motorist, moseying from village to village as I filled my backseat with local specialties, guided only by Michelin’s star-studded triage of the French countryside.
France, cross-hatched as it is with narrow bands of asphalt, is ideally suited for automotive exploration, with each hillcrest promising a different slice of terroir, a new monk-brewed beer, a more pungent goat cheese or a fattier bowl of cassoulet. Blame it on Michelin, the family-run multinational tire company from Clermont-Ferrand: Through constant lobbying, they not only made sure there was a road for French drivers to hit, but also guaranteed there was something to get to when they did.
I started my Michelin adventure in Biarritz, a blue-rinse Disneyland of a resort town on the Atlantic coast, near the Spanish border. As soon as I hit town, I rushed to a newsstand, riffled a metal rack full of maps and picked out a French-language “Guide Vert to the Aquitaine,” the Atlantic coast area that includes Bordeaux, Bayonne, Biarritz and Pau.
In 1917, the patriotic Michelin brothers published the first of their “Guides to the Battlefields,” a rather optimistic editorial decision, given that the kaiser’s armies still occupied a good part of France. The series would eventually lead to more conventional guidebooks to the regions of France and foreign countries, becoming the familiar, long-spined green (vert) guides focusing on churches, castles and curiosities, with the first volume to Paris in 1946.
For most of the 20th Century, the Guide Vert was a sober affair, with fine-lined drawings of church facades enlivened only by the occasional engraving of a beret-sporting Michelin man saluting a flamingo with a baguette, or something equally whimsical.
“At the beginning of the 19th Century,” I translated as I walked down towards the beach, “Biarritz was a simple whaling port, where the people of Bayonne came on muleback to swim.” The mules got the heave-ho when the Emperor Napoleon III visited in 1854 and decided to build the Villa Eugenie for his wife. At the turn of the 20th Century, two casinos were built–I came upon one of them, a streamlined Art Deco affair attracting such Jazz Age celebrities as Stravinsky, Cocteau and the omnipresent Hemingway.
Arriving at the curving Grande Plage (beach), “a hotspot of Biarrote animation both day and night,” I futilely scanned the waves for surfers or, indeed, any sign of animation, but since it was overcast and windy, found only a few etiolated Poles chasing the occasional patch of sunlight. Finding myself peckish, I poked my head into Chocolats Henriet, “a reference when it comes to the subject of chocolate,” and bought a bag of rochers de Biarritz, a crunchy confection made of bitter chocolate, almonds and orange peel. Delicieux.
What I particularly liked about Michelin was the way they put “stars” (rosettes, actually–three is the max) not only next to fancy restaurants, swank hotels and picturesque towns, but also alongside specific features–rood screens, grottoes, ossuaries–of buildings and landscapes. Thus, I walked along a beachfront promenade called La Perspective in search of the view** of the “three last summits of the Basque coast: la Rhune, Trois Couronnes and Jaizkibel.” Soon, I started performing my own subjective sorting of the day’s highlights. It was beyond my control. Subliminal stars started appearing next to my first espresso** of the day, the copy of the International Herald Tribune* someone had left on a table and a men’s room*** in the market.
Michelin’s originality lay not in its stars, nor in its lapidary style, but in the fact that it was aimed at an entirely new breed of traveler: the auto tourist. The 35,000-volume press run of the first edition of the Guide Michelin (which lists hotels and restaurants) may have been wildly optimistic–especially considering there were only 2,897 automobiles in the whole of France in 1900–but it was also a prescient publishing move. Competing guides such as Baedeker’s and Murray’s had been tailored to travelers going by train. The very existence of the Michelin guides increased the popularity of touring by car, which permitted motorists to discover, for example, the exceptional Grand-Marnier crepes at Mere Brazier’s bistro in the Col de Luere, which in turn led to calls for better roads out of Lyons.
At the Biarritz airport, I rented a chipper little Citroen Saxo–green, to match my guidebook, and rolling, I was satisfied to note, on Michelin radials. Ten minutes later, I was making a panicky entrance onto Autoroute 63, zooming north towards Bordeaux at 140 kilometers an hour (a bit under 90 mph) whenI really wanted to be heading east towards Pau, at something like 50 kilometers an hour.
Actually, I didn’t want to be on the highway at all. I’d meant to spend the early afternoon checking out nearby Bayonne**, particularly the Gothic cloister* of the Sainte-Marie Cathedral and the Goya canvases in the Musee Bonnat**. But one threshing roundabout had led to another, an old Negresses Vertes*** song was playing on the radio, the sun was shining, and the exquisitely groomed French highway seemed to invite me to follow its gracile curves.
My goal for the afternoon was a place called Oloron-Sainte-Marie–11,067 inhabitants, altitude 224 meters–“a somewhat austere town,” the Guide Vert told me, “like those one often finds in the mountains, that seems to whisper its family secrets between the walls of tall houses coiffed with slate tiles.” It was known as a center for the production of Basque berets, a sugary confection called the “russe,” and the magnificent Romanesque portico** of its Sainte-Marie Church.
Leaving my car next to the local pelote court, I quickly determined that, first, the portico** of the Sainte-Marie church was completely veiled by polythened scaffolding; second, the beret factory, though housed in the charming brick-and-smokestack Maison Beighan off a fountain-filled civic park, was not only locked tight, but also showed no signs of ever having retailed its creations to passersby; and, finally, upon closer inspection, the only Michelin-recommended bistros in Oloron were actually at least 10 miles outside Oloron. To make matters worse, all the restaurants around the square were closed until dinner, and an all-pervasive odor of chocolate had me salivating like a hypoglycemic hound. When I asked a tiny woman in a cardigan where the bakery was, she paused and thought my question over.
“Ah, oui,” she finally said, creakily. “That is the Lindt factory up on the hill you smell. There is always an odor of chocolate around here.”
How very Willy Wonka of them. I decided to return to the church square, where, my guide promised me, the Maison Artigarrede would at the very least sell me a russe, “a house specialty for three generations, a cake prepared with almonds and praline cream whose recipe remains a family secret.” I was vaguely hoping some sparkling-eyed Juliette Binoche*** would lure me into the back of the confectionery, but all I got was the usual singsong of “Bonjour, monsieur”–cake in the box, coins slapped in change tray–and, “Au revoir, monsieur.”
I spent a week using the Michelin guide to plan my itinerary, facing gargantuan roundabouts and fighting French drivers from Pau to Albi, from Albi to Carcassonne. My last stop was a promising-sounding fishing town called Collioure**, where Matisse, Braque and Picasso had summered a long, long time ago.
Collioure’s tiny harbor featured three pebbly beaches, Catalan fishing boats painted in gay and glossy colors, and culminated in Notre-Dame-des-Anges, whose cylindrical stone clock tower and wave-lapped Mediterranean setting made it seem more lighthouse than church. Painters had set up their easels on the beachwalk, and galleries in the old Moure neighborhood sold neo-Impressionist canvases. Tourists of all nationalities walked around with multi-scooped ice cream cones, or queued for excursions to Spain in small sailing ships.
There was only one recommended restaurant in town, but I was sick of slavishly following Michelin, and then enduring a lonely meal next to les waters. Leaving the guide in my hotel room, I asked a pretty, hip-looking young woman in a sandwich shop where she went to eat when she had a night off. She gave me a rave review of a bar down the road.
“It doesn’t look like much, but the tapas are great.”
I sat at the bar, where the latest Manu Chao album blared and people smoked and laughed. The waiter wrote my orders on the bartop before me with a grease pencil and I was presented with a series of dishes–grilled octopus, garlic-dosed anchoiade***, spicy olives and deep-fried calamaries**–by a grinning chef with long white hair pulled back in a pony tail. A Michelin inspector would have turned tail the second he saw the cook’s dirty white T-shirt–but frankly, who wanted to hang out with Michelin inspectors? I took part in an argument about the difference between Romantic and Romanesque with a group at a nearby table, who talked me into trying Banyuls, a dessert wine that is a local specialty.
For an hour, at least, I felt like I’d trusted my instincts and broken out of my automotive cocoon, the signposted and symbol-studded world of Michelin, which has so diligently rated, measured and alphabetized every feature of the touristic world.
It is indeed a good thing to know how to use a guidebook. Better, though, to know when to put it down.
