France

In October, a panel of 21 experts from across the world gathered for the first of what promised to be a series of reports assessing readiness for pandemics. ‘Infectious diseases know no borders,’ warned the Global Health Security Index. ‘So all countries must prioritise and exercise the capabilities required to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health emergencies.’ Every country was called to be transparent about its capabilities ‘to assure neighbours it can stop an outbreak from becoming an international catastrophe’. Two countries were held up as the best examples: Britain and the United States. If a league table were drawn up of countries that most failed to contain Covid deaths, the US and the UK would be pretty near the top.

Chatting on the café terrace with my new friends Didier and Emile made me aware that certain political ideas, which before the Covid-19 pandemic I had comfortably assumed belonged on the wilder shores of political discourse, are now mainstream among the under thirties. I felt a little envy, perhaps, for Didier’s undoubting conviction that questions of equality, gender, race and white supremacy were the ultimate verities for humankind. But a single word often betrays a great design, and his supplementary advocation of voluntary euthanasia for the chronically sick and elderly indicated all too clearly in which direction his ideal post-Covid society would be headed.

I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to normal, thank goodness,’ I ventured to the chap sitting alone at the next table. He was staring at the centimetre of lager remaining in the bottom of his glass. The cheapness of his clothes and the loneliness enveloping him like a caul was contradicted by his youthful glamour. ‘Normal?’ he said. ‘Normal doesn’t work. You can shove your old man’s normal up your backside.’ My sociable, celebrant spirit recoiled from the aggression. ‘I only meant that it was good to see the bars and shops open again,’ I said lamely.

I walked to the salon in fiery sunshine. Gorgeous, zaftig Elody was wearing a short satin dressing gown of silver and gold. She was alone. ‘Ça va?’ she said, helping me into the gown. ‘Black dog,’ I said. ‘What is black dog?’ she said. ‘Cafard,’ I said. ‘A black ox trod on my foot.’ I sat in the chair, removed my glasses and stared in the mirror. The straps of my black face mask made my ears stick out. And strewth, the hair. ‘Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren,’ I said. Elody speaks no English and my French is rudimentary. ‘What?’ she said. I had a stab at translating the limerick into French. She stared at me via the mirror with rapt, sceptical attention.

The most visible local landmark is a solitary two-headed Jurassic mountain called Le Bessillon, six miles long and 800 metres tall at the highest peak. These are unimpressive vital statistics for a mountain perhaps, but the Bessillon exerts a tremendous, almost uncanny presence on us all. The foreign correspondent and his wife have bought an 800-tree olive farm on a nearby hillside. From their outside dining table this great primeval slab and its forested sides can be seen in profile, like a finely drawn illustration in a Victorian encyclopedia. Between the dining table and the mountain is nothing but oak forest and pylons, and beyond it more oak forest until a distant village on a plateau. (The elegance of French electricity pylons and barbed wire makes me laugh.

France is divided into a red zone and a green zone. We’re green. Green for go. From this morning we no longer need a signed and dated permit to leave the house; we can socialise with up to ten other people at a time; and we can travel up to 60 miles in any direction. In theory we could fill a minibus and go on a beano down to the coast tomorrow. And in spite of the government ordering bars and restaurants to remain closed, the village beer bar unexpectedly opened for business last Saturday, and the lights were on in the poshest village restaurant where people inside could be seen tucking in. Perhaps, in truth, the delicate decision about when to open the bars and restaurants has been quietly devolved to the local mayors’ offices.

From my hospital bed in Hyères I could look out of the window and see the old town and Edith Wharton’s old house, the Castel Sainte-Claire, away on the hillside. Christophe, a male nurse, came in to welcome me and take my temperature, pulse and blood pressure. He was masked and gloved against possible infection from the old Covid Dix-Neuf and he spoke English. As he slipped on the finger thermometer and inflatable sleeve, he reminisced about his rugby-playing days. Thirty-five years ago, he said, he had competed against an English team who played rugby with a violence that was incredible.

Statistics is the continuation of politics by other means, to misquote Clausewitz. One hundred and fifty years after the crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, historians still clash aggressively about the death toll. Was it as high as 40,000 or as low as 10,000? It matters because the Paris Commune is a shibboleth, a great left-wing site of memory and martyrdom, made famous by Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France. He presented the Paris Commune as the first great experiment in communist government. Its crushing by the army of the conservative Adolphe Thiers is depicted in left-wing folk memory as the ‘reactionary, repressive forces of capitalism’ ending an idyllic experiment in socialism.

Covid statistics are like complex machinery; if you don’t read the instructions you won’t operate them properly. Which is why the claim by some media outlets that the UK now has the second highest number of Covid deaths in Europe, should be handled with caution. It is true that on Wednesday the official UK Covid-19 death toll increased by 4,419 to 26,097 after the government included deaths outside hospitals for the first time. The figures were revised respectively by Public Health England since the first UK death in March. According to the Guardian, ‘The change comes after weeks of criticism of the way that the UK had been reporting its coronavirus death toll, which made effective comparisons with other European countries impossible.

Once a week we break French emergency law and have a friend round for drinks on the terrace. The terrace overlooks the village rooftops as if it were a box at the theatre. Two weeks ago we were pleasantly lit up, when, at one minute to eight, the villagers below came out on to their terraces or stood at their windows and front doors to make a noise in support of the ‘essential’ workers: nurses, doctors, carers, postmen, shopkeepers, council workers, and so on. Some banged saucepans together or beat them with wooden spoons. Some blew horns of one kind or another, including what sounded to me like one of those long prayer horns blown by Tibetan monks from monastery rooftops.

In France the rule for going for a walk stipulates an hour in duration or a kilometre in distance. We are fortunate here in having a 40-minute circular walk that starts at the front door, most of it on a footpath, though beginning with a steep climb that makes me pant like a greyhound after a course. Then the path levels and runs pleasantly through olive groves and vineyards. One is never out of sight of houses and at three points along the route house dogs — in order: a pair of Weimaraners, a Jack Russell and a pedigree sheepdog — enjoy intimidating passers-by by throwing themselves in a frenzy of barking at the wire boundary fences containing them. Otherwise the route is bucolic and quiet enough to quieten the mind and exhaust the frail old mongrel.