Exbrayat Blog

Tybo and Saint-É

Antoine and I returned late last night from Saint-Étienne, where the Exbrayat centenary celebrations went very well indeed. Unfortunately, we did not have reliable internet access there, hence the lack of blogging.

We will be updating the blog a lot in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I will whet your appetite by saying that we may have arrived in Saint-Étienne desperately seeking Tyborowski, but we left having found him. The director who made so many of Exbrayat's films stood still long enough for me to snap his photograph on Friday, and was most intrigued to learn of this blog and all of the things one can find online. As he was as dissatisfied as we were to find that his photograph was not one of them, I'm sharing it with you here.

In Saint-Étienne

It is very warm and sunny until about 8.30PM. The night is very mild, no chill. As always, the food is great and plentiful. We have free wifi at the hotel. It’s a shame we’re only here this time until Sunday.

It’s my first time in Saint-Étienne, the town where Antoine’s grandfather was born and died, and which he called “one of the ugliest towns in the world“. I don’t know what it looked like while he was alive, but right now much of the main roads have been completely dug up; you have to walk over planks and around mounds of rubble to get down the street. And yet, it’s not unpleasant. It’s actually quite nice. It baffled me before, but now I can sort of see why Exbrayat made Saint-Étienne his main residence, after living mostly in Switzerland for seven or eight years, before he died.

A history lesson

My grandfather's house in Planfoy was a treasure trove for a kid who loved books, history and good food. I remember one year, it must have been 1977, when my grandmother was away for a few days at Upaix, and it rained a lot (this was before global warming was invented, we still thought the Coming Ice Age would end civilisation). Also in those days the only Greens in France were "les Verts", the champion football team of St-Étienne.

Exbrayat's centenary is this week

Things here are quite hectic as Antoine and I prepare to travel to France in a few days, where we will take part in the Exbrayat centenary celebrations for several days. Amongst other things, we are ensuring that our audiovisual equipment is running properly so that we can blog and podcast from France. These technical things are always great fun - I just hope we don't forget to bring our electrical adapters with us.

Getting wifi access whilst we are there seems too good to be true, but France does seem to be quite ahead of the UK in these terms, so we shall see. All of this makes me wonder what someone like Exbrayat would make of this low cost, easy way to reach many more readers than his hundreds of books ever could. Goodness, he would have loved food and wine blogs - so much so that they may have distracted him to the point where he never would have been as prolific in writing his books, films, and plays...

Exbrayat's blogging peers

Samuel Pepys and Chaucer are both bloggers, now. Who next, Shakespeare?

Chaucer link via Alex Bellinger

Re-writing history

On the one hand my grandfather would not have spent much time contemplating what was written about him on Wikipedia, but on the other hand he would have found it quite amusing to edit such a website.

Today, I decided to look up April 24 and see if there was an event that he would have noted. I was appalled to spot an incorrect reference to Operation Demon as occurring in April 1940, when the British forces began evacuating Greece. At the time, the Italians were not yet at war, in fact the Germans had not even begun their assault on the Western Front. So I corrected it and decided to finally correct the Wikipedia entry on Charles Exbrayat.

The strangest error that seems to have spread across the web is that Charles Exbrayat was born in St Etienne but passed away in the nearby village of Planfoy. The Internet Movie DataBase even has the locations switched round. Really weird is that the regional nature reserve website has the same error. The error has spread to other countries. The truth is that he was indeed born in the mountain-encircled industrial town of St Etienne (I can remember passing coal slag heaps and the ManuFrance factory). He also lived in Planfoy during the 1960s until about 1984, when he moved to Switzerland. He returned to St Etienne shortly before his death in March 1989. He is buried at Planfoy, in the mountains that he loved.

Why the place of birth should be recorded incorrectly I have no idea. I can only assume that the location of the funeral got confused in a press report with the location of his decease.

Exbrayat's cabbage

Exbrayat's favourite cuisine was Chinese, and he loved to experiment. This recipe of his looks like it derives from Chinese stuffed cabbage. (We use Savoy cabbage, because it softens better.)

Exbrayat's Cabbage (serves 2-3)

Small Savoy cabbage
500g or 1lb or minced beef
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
A garlic clove or two
1 small shallot
1/2 white onion
A glass of red wine (we have used a Côtes du Rhône but any Beaujolais region would be good)
A couple of splashes of dark soy sauce
A little olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Exbrayat's culinary passions

You may have noticed a collection of links to food blogs on the sidebar of the Exbrayat blog. That's because my grandfather was so obsessed with cooking, food, and wine. Indeed, in his mini-autobiography, he says:

And now the score: the half-century passed, of all that I have brought to fruition, of what am I most proud? Of my Prix du Roman d’Aventures no doubt, but also of having been elected President of the international federation of the gastronomic and oenocological press. My hobby? Cooking. The place where I feel most at ease? My cellar. Distinguishing marks: after over thirty years dedicated to literature, I received the Order of the Mérite Agricole.

Coming soon to this blog: Exbrayat's recipes. For now, you'll have to salivate in anticipation.

Exbrayat and the English

There is a new photo, of Exbrayat in London, in the photo album. As the caption to it reads, he was not a major fan of England, despite basing so many of his stories here. In fact, my mother and I have been transcribing a radio interview he once gave, wherein he discusses how he had just spent some time in England and found it so awful, and that it is impossible that anyone could be happy living here - and this after his daughter (my mother) had just married an Englishman!

We'll publish the transcript of the interview soon.

The mystery of Exbrayat Square

I am quite looking forward to getting my first glimpse of Exbrayat Square in Saint-Étienne during the centenary celebrations on the 5th of May. Claire, Exbrayat's daughter, tonight showed me a newspaper clipping of an article written by journalist Alain Cigolotti (who she says always wrote very complimentary things about her father). In it, Cigolotti explains the mystery of the sign for the square, which had - at that writing - been stolen three times. There is no date on the article, but it is not recent, as Exbrayat's wife's handwritten notes are all over it (she died years ago). So who knows how many times since then the sign has been stolen? We will ask when we are in Saint-Étienne next month.

We would love to scan that newspaper clipping, by the way, but those scribblings by Claire's mother make it impossible: She had her own suspicions about who was responsible, to which her (quite hilarious) notes pertain. As we would like to avoid any libel lawsuits, this particular item will remain firmly locked in the family archives.