Duck Season by David McAninch

Author:David McAninch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

CONDOM, A BOURG OF 7,000 souls, is an unlovely place at first glance, long on auto body shops and cheap eateries and short on cozy medieval charm. Its limited offerings to the leisure traveler include a somewhat high-end restaurant (which accounts for one of the Gers’s three Michelin stars), the vestiges of an old bishopric, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Dumas’s musketeers touching sword tips, and a mid-size cathedral, which has the not-inconsiderable distinction of serving as the venue for the most, and to my knowledge the only, glamorous social event of the year in the Gers: an annual black-tie gala called—yes—the Dîner des Mousquetaires. (It bears mentioning that this gala is thrown by a Gascon fraternal organization whose capitaine is the Duc Aymeri de Montesquiou; readers may recognize the last name as that of D’Artagnan’s mother, whom the duke has claimed, not without controversy, as an ancestor. I had occasion to meet this dignitary at one of the galas; he was very tan and wore a blue sash affixed to his tuxedo with a pin in the shape of a musketeer’s sword.)

If people outside of Gascony know the humble sous-préfecture of Condom at all, it’s probably because they’ve seen Le Bonheur est Dans le Pré, a hit movie from the ’90s about a middle-aged Parisian who leaves his wife for a beautiful goose farmer from the town. (The erstwhile soccer star Eric Cantona played the girl’s brother, his native Marseille accent passing for a Gascon one.)

Wander around Condom for a few hours, though, with no particular destination in mind, and a curious kind of beauty reveals itself. It’s not the beauty of very old things restored to grandeur, like that of France’s celebrated churches and châteaux. It is the beauty of moderately old things unaltered from how they’ve always been.

After arriving in Condom in the middle of the afternoon and checking into a cheap hotel, I explored the streets for a while, filled with a pleasant wistfulness. Here was the very kind of faded provincial bourg I used to stumble on in rural France back in the day. Here was the grubby bar with its foosball table and brown-tobacco smells, the rusty security gate being noisily cranked down for the night, the narrow commercial streets with their slightly gone-to-seed ’70s vibe and plastic shingle signs advertising mundane services and amenities: COIFFURE MESSIEURS, PHILDAR LAINES ET TEXTILES, CHAMBRES TOUT CONFORT.

I strolled by the locks of the canal at the edge of town, past an abattoir and a lumberyard, then circled back to the center and ascended the Rue Gambetta. Down a side street, in the window of the local chamber of commerce, someone had installed a display of black-and-white photos of a Dîner des Mousquetaires gala from the 1960s: men with shellacked hair and skinny ties squeezed in at banquet tables crowded with bottles and ashtrays. The last names of certain of the grands hommes in attendance had been written in grease pencil next to their likenesses—“Lapeyre,” “Abeillé,” “Serres,” “Gerbaud,” and, near the image of a young, be-sashed man, “de Montesquiou.

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