From France to France

A TGV journey south, one name at a time

At 13.37 on a Sunday afternoon, we left Strasbourg for Lyon.I was in coach 15, on the left-hand side, travelling backwards. This mattered more than it probably should have. I like looking out of train windows, and travelling backwards gives the curious sensation that the country is being taken away from you rather than delivered.

Most of the other passengers were not looking out at all.Some were asleep. Some had laptops open. Others had headphones on and had effectively built small private rooms around themselves. The TGV was carrying several hundred people through eastern France, but quite a few of them appeared to have decided not to participate in the journey.

I did.

Strasbourg disappeared. Then Alsace began to loosen its grip.At first the changes were small. The houses looked different. Roofs altered. Villages seemed less tightly arranged.

Somewhere south of Mulhouse, it occurred to me that we were leaving that very particular world of Alsace and entering what I thought of, rather imprecisely, as France proper.That is, of course, nonsense.Alsace is France.But it didn’t feel nonsensical from the window.

Countries become much simpler when viewed from a map. On a map, Strasbourg and Lyon are two dots joined by a line. What the map doesn’t show is how many different versions of France lie between them.

A territory, not a département.

Belfort came next. Even its administrative name makes you stop: Territoire de Belfort. Not simply another département but a territory, a small linguistic survivor from the complicated business of borders, wars and national identities.The city looked appealing from the train. The station was more functional than Strasbourg, and beyond it the railway world changed decisively. We were entering TGV country.The line straightened. Cuttings appeared. Tunnels swallowed us. Stations became pieces of infrastructure placed in the landscape rather than grand entrances to cities.

At Belfort-Montbéliard TGV, glass, concrete and steel sat almost anonymously among fields and woodland. Then we accelerated away again.

For all the romance attached to the TGV, much of its physical world is not romantic at all. It is intensely engineered. The railway does not follow the country so much as negotiate with it.

At more than 300 kilometres an hour, that negotiation happens quickly.

Yet curiously, the experience inside the train did not feel hurried.

That became one of the surprises of the afternoon.The TGV is one of France’s great symbols of speed and modernity, yet nobody seemed particularly interested in making the passenger feel rushed. Stops were generous. People boarded with luggage. Others wandered slowly down platforms. Doors remained open for what felt like a civilised amount of time.France had built a train capable of enormous speed without concluding that every second of human life therefore needed to become frantic.

I rather liked that.

Besançon

Then came Besançon.I have driven past it several times and always thought the same thing.I should stop there.Perhaps it is the name.Besançon sounds beautiful before you know anything about it. Some place names have this quality. They arrive already carrying atmosphere.

The TGV station, unfortunately, does not.From my seat, Besançon Franche-Comté TGV consisted mainly of immaculate tracks, a modest shelter, planted embankments and woodland. The historic city itself was somewhere else.

A regional train waited a few platforms away with Bourgogne-Franche-Comté written along its side.There was something almost funny about that.The words were administrative and efficient. Behind them stood Burgundy, Franche-Comté, dukes, Habsburgs, wars, fortified cities, ancient loyalties and several centuries of Europeans disagreeing quite vigorously about who belonged where.

Government can fit an enormous amount of history onto the side of a regional train.

We rolled on.The population thinned. Woods appeared. There were meadows and small lakes that made me think, for no particularly good reason, that I would quite like to spend an afternoon fishing there.

White cattle appeared in the fields.

Charolais.

Another France had arrived.

The colour of the country

The houses changed again.They were flatter now. Brown and ochre rendering dominated. The colours of buildings seemed to merge with the colours of the dry late-summer landscape.It had been an extraordinarily hot summer.

On 6 September, some leaves were already changing colour and the grape harvest had begun unusually early.The landscape looked as though somebody had moved the calendar forward.

Later, the maize would turn almost exactly the same colour as the houses: straw, tobacco, faded brown. Fields and villages seemed to have been painted from the same palette.

You notice these things from a train.Or rather, you notice them if you are looking.

Dijon

Dijon arrived with mustard attached to its name.That seems terribly unfair to a beautiful city, although extremely successful from the point of view of mustard.I had been there once before. I had a coffee and moved on.

This time I arrived through the railway sidings.The station was, well, a station.Dijon may offer dukes, medieval streets, churches, glazed roofs, wine and centuries of Burgundian history, but the railway welcomes you with platforms, concrete and practical signage.

Some of the most beautiful names in France arrive through very ordinary stations.Then, between the wires and railway buildings, there was suddenly a glimpse of the cathedral.A few seconds of old Dijon rising behind modern railway machinery.Then it was gone.

The train remained at Dijon for what felt like quite a while. This, too, turned out to have a reason. When we left, I discovered I was now sitting on the left-hand side facing forward.The train had reversed.I had not expected that.Apparently even progress occasionally changes ends.What a railway shows you.

Leaving Dijon, the train gave us the parts of the city that visitors don’t normally photograph.

Graffiti.Scaffolding.Apartment blocks.Back gardens.Service roads.Freight yards.Rows and rows of tank wagons.France can be very ugly in places.This shouldn’t really need saying, but somehow it does.

The France exported to the world consists of villages, markets, châteaux, vineyards and café terraces.

Actual France also contains ring roads, warehouses, railway wasteland, concrete, exhausted retail parks and walls that nobody has painted for a very long time.One does not cancel out the other.A beautiful country does not have to be beautiful everywhere.Perhaps railway journeys are particularly good at revealing this because railways run through the backs of places. They show you where the bins are kept.

Then, almost immediately, came the vineyards.The famous fieldsSouth of Dijon, the names become almost absurdly famous.

Gevrey-Chambertin. Nuits-Saint-Georges. Beaune.They are names many people encounter first on bottles, restaurant lists or behind glass in expensive shops.The vineyards themselves were surprisingly unassuming.Rows of vines.Dry soil.Tracks.Posts.Agricultural machinery.Nothing in the field itself announced that one patch of earth might produce something discussed with great seriousness in Tokyo, London or New York.

The vines were unassuming. The names were not.That seemed important.Again and again during the journey, the name contained more than the view.

Besançon had sounded poetic while its TGV station looked almost anonymous.Dijon carried mustard, dukes and Burgundy into a perfectly ordinary railway station.And now fields that looked rather modest were attached to names with international reputations.

Perhaps that is part of what travelling through a country actually means: discovering the distance between the name and the thing.

Beaune

Then we stopped at Beaune.Beaune immediately makes me think of the Hôtel-Dieu, the magnificent old hospital founded in the fifteenth century to care for people who could not afford care.It was a remarkably forward-looking idea: medicine, dignity, charity and financial sustainability brought together centuries before anybody invented a PowerPoint presentation to describe such things.The Hospices became famous. The wine became famous. The roof became famous.And from my seat at Beaune station I saw a rather ordinary platform, some railway signals, weeds and houses.What a contrast.But again, both were true.Beaune was the Hôtel-Dieu.And Beaune was also this platform.

The train clown

By now, the interior of the train had developed its own story.A man had positioned himself near the entrance to our coach. I couldn’t tell whether he was drunk, stoned, eccentric or simply enjoying himself tremendously.

He had appointed himself train clown. Eventually I noticed that he was holding two cans of beer.This answered some questions while raising others.

Meanwhile an SNCF employee came quietly through the carriage collecting rubbish from passengers.

Outside, Burgundy rolled past.Inside, the train clown held his beers.The whole thing became slightly surreal.

This enormous piece of sophisticated engineering was carrying us south through France while somebody collected crisp packets and another passenger appeared to be auditioning for a role nobody had advertised.Modernity is never as tidy as the brochure suggests.

Five o’clock

At five o’clock I went back to the bar.Earlier I had paid €2.80 for an espresso, which struck me as entirely reasonable for a captive audience travelling at high speed through Burgundy.The barista now appeared to have developed a pizza problem.He had too many.Five o’clock, in his opinion, was therefore an excellent time for me to have one.

This struck me as madness.There was only an hour until apéro.

Non merci.

There are limits.

The SaôneChalon-sur-Saône came and went.The name reminded me that we were now connected to Lyon not only by railway but by water. The Saône flows south from here and eventually meets the Rhône in Lyon.Before the railway, there was the river.Before the TGV compressed France into hours, people and goods followed water.It is easy to think of modern infrastructure as replacing what came before. More often it simply lays another network across the old one.River.Canal.Railway.High-speed railway.Different centuries solving the same problem: how do we get from here to there?Not doingBy late afternoon, everything had slowed.The train rolled gently through small towns. Old station buildings passed. Gardens. Hedges. Warehouses. Houses pressed close to the tracks.

It was hot.Earlier, in Dijon, it had been 31 degrees.I wondered what people were doing on a Sunday afternoon like this.Probably not very much.A long lunch. Shutters partly closed. Somebody reading. Somebody sitting in a garden. Someone waiting until the heat softened before going out again.Not doing.Just being.Very French.

And perhaps this was the strangest contrast of the journey.The TGV exists to conquer time. Outside the window, much of France seemed perfectly content simply to inhabit it.

At 16.39, after travelling for more than three hours and passing through what already felt like several different countries,

Lyon was still eighty minutes away.People underestimate how big France is.But perhaps they also underestimate how many Frances there are.Alsace had disappeared behind us. Belfort had reminded us of borders. Franche-Comté had given us forests and open country. Besançon had supplied a beautiful name and an anonymous station. Dijon had supplied mustard, cathedral towers and a change of direction. Burgundy had given us world-famous names attached to remarkably ordinary-looking vines. Beaune had offered six centuries of history and a rather modest platform.

And still France continued.

Eventually another town rolled past.I didn’t catch its name.

By then I was getting sleepy.For most of the journey I had tried to pay attention.

Perhaps it was finally time to do what everybody else had been doing since Strasbourg.

Close my eyes and let France pass.