André Verchuren – “Les Fiancés d’Auvergne" (1960)

J’ai quitté mon cher pays et j’ai laissé mon cœur

Dans mon Auvergne jolie 

Parmi les bois, les champs, les vallées, et les fleurs

Let’s say you’re riding your bike on a hot Sunday afternoon in the good ol’ U. S. of A, and you need a cold drink.  What do you do?

You simply stop at any gas station, or convenience store, or grocery store, or drug store, or liquor store and grab yourself an ice-cold water, iced tea, sports drink, lemonade, orange juice, V-8, Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Mountain Dew, ginger ale or whatever.  Nothing could be simpler.

That’s not the case in France.  If you’re riding your bike in France on a hot Sunday afternoon and you need a cold drink, you’re S.O.L. 

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Last month, I was in Chantilly, France – an exurb of Paris that is home to a big-ass horse racing track and the largest racehorse-training community in France – on a very hot Sunday afternoon.

The rooms in the resort hotel where I was staying with a group of my fellow Americans didn’t have drawers or shelves or any place to put your socks, but it did have a number of bicycles that guests could rent.  

A Chantilly bike trail 

I picked out the biggest mountain bike available – it was a couple of sizes too small for my statuesque frame – and headed off through the countryside.

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Within moments, I rode past what I thought were boxes for picked fruit:

I quickly realized they were beehives.  Merde!

I wasn’t about to run that gauntlet a second time, so I pretty much had to go in the opposite direction – headed for I knew not where.

The Chantilly Polo Club logo

Pretty soon I was smack-dab in the middle of the Chantilly Polo Club, which was hosting something called the “Prestige Cup Endurance” – a one-day, 120-kilometer equestrian endurance race that attracted 100 competitors from fifteen different countries.

Prestige Cup competitors

After getting my fill of looking at horses, I rode on to the nearby village of Vineuil-Saint-Firmin, passing the magnificent Château de Chantilly en route.  I had worked up quite a thirst by then, so I was glad when I spied a small grocery store.

One wall of the store was devoted to refrigerated coolers full of meats, cheeses and other dairy products, produce, and fresh pasta.  The store also had a whole aisle of shelves full of still and sparkling bottled water, juices, soft drinks and beer.  

The Château de Chantilly

Apparently it had never dawned on the store owner to make room in his coolers for some of those drinks so people like me could buy something other than a room-temperature beverage.

I remounted my bike and continued into Chantilly.  Surely I would have no trouble finding a place to buy a cold drink in the middle of the day in such a good-sized town.

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By chance, I happened to ride down the street where the French government’s local tourist office was located.  Unfortunately, the young woman on duty spoke only French.  

I don’t know about you, but I find it a bit odd that someone who works at a government tourist office in a country that draws a lot of visitors from the United States, the UK, and other English-speaking countries doesn’t speak at least a little English.

It turned out that there was a small supermarket only a few doors down from the tourist office.  But it closed at noon on Sundays.

I rode a few blocks further and saw another small supermarket.  Sadly, it had also closed at noon.  (In the United States, stores used to be closed on Sundays so everyone could go to church.  Closing at noon on Sunday obviously doesn’t accommodate churchgoers, but it does accommodate Frenchmen who want to watch soccer on TV while lying around the house – or those who prefer to watch soccer while getting hammered at a local bar.)

Eventually I found a gas station that had a small selection of cold drinks, and grabbed a bottle of water only moments before dying of thirst.  

Then I did what I should have done in the first place.  I found a bar, leaned my bike up against the wall, and went inside for a beer:

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That night the group of American tourists I was traveling with dined at Le Goutillon, a simple bistro that offered classic French fare.

What it didn’t offer was an air-conditioned dining room, or menus in English.  

The French-only menu wasn’t an issue for me, because one of the things I learned on this trip was to order rognons de veau – veal kidneys – every chance I got.  (I ordered veal kidneys for dinner three times on my trip, and was glad I did.)

Rognons de veau

(NOTE: Don’t be confused if you see rognons blancs on a French menu.  Rognons blancs are testicles, not kidneys.)

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about renting a bike at a hair salon in Bruges, Belgium, and riding along the Damme Canal to the village of the same name.

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André Verchuren was known in France as “the king of the accordion.”

He began playing the piano à bretelles – the “piano with straps” – when he was a four-year-old.

When he was 16, he won the accordion world championship – shocking the judges and the audience by playing while standing up, which was just not done in that era.

Verchuren joined the French resistance movement in World War II.  He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and spent a year at Dachau, an infamous concentration camp.  

Following the war, Verchuren became a hugely popular – and very busy – performer.  “I travelled seven million kilometres by car, one million kilometres by plane, and sold over 50 million records. But most importantly, I made 17 million couples get up and dance,” he once told a newspaper.

Verchuren was over 90 when he finally retired.  A year later, he died of a heart attack in Chantilly –  almost five years to the day before I took the bike ride described above.

Click here to listen to “Les Fiancés d’Auvergne,” which was Verchuren’s signature song.  

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: