The Best Loved Villages in France

You can ask Marc Meneau—the prizewinning chef of L’Espérance, a superb hotel and restaurant where singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg spent the last years of his life (without ever crossing the threshold of the basilica)—anything you wish about Vézelay. His enthusiasm warms the heart. No one knows this place better than he does. “The five-hundred-year-old roots and soil of my village have taught me how to cook in a way that resembles me: it’s a local cuisine, inspired by Vézelay. My father’s saddlery, and my mother’s café and grocery store, dictated a style of cooking that’s like me. It’s one that makes the eyes shine with pleasure, a combination of local influences, of my travels around the world, and of the development of tastes. Between 1970 and today, extensive building works converted the grocery store into an inn, and then into a ‘Relais & Châteaux’ hotel-restaurant where the kitchen gives us hope,” explains the chef of L’Espérance. Keen to offer all-natural produce, he has his own vineyard and organic kitchen garden. Is he Vézelay’s “mascot,” as some claim? He doesn’t seem to object to the suggestion.

Every wall, every street in Vézelay drips with history—some of it significant, some of it less so. It was here in 1146 that St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade in the presence of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine; and it was here in 1190 that Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart met before joining the Third. At a bend in a lane one comes across the Porte Neuve abutting a twelfth-century wall. This “new” gate is famous for its appearance in the Resistance comedy La Grande Vadrouille (Don’t Look Now . . . We’re Being Shot At!), in which actors André Bourvil and Louis de Funès speed through it on their bicycles. Indeed, the majority of the night scenes, such as the one in which the two stars hide from the Germans, were filmed here.

At Le Pontot, the café at the foot of the basilica where the villagers usually meet up, Marc Meneau pops in for a drink. “Those who come to Vézelay looking for Jesus should realize that he’s in this house,” he booms, giving the proprietor’s hand a goodly shake. “Hi there, Jesus, I’ve come to have a look at your pretty house. Jesus dwells in this seventeenth-century house and he also lets out rooms. Who’d have thought it? You can even sleep with the angels!” Everyone nods, laughing. But if there is one place Marc Meneau adores, venerates even, more than any other, it is the basilica’s gardens. Standing squarely in front of the vast horizon, he exclaims: “It’s really beautiful. I’d so love to be a painter; green, blue, yellow—the colors!”

The Best Loved Villages of France by Stéphane Bern. Excerpt reprinted by arrangement with Flammarion. 256 pages, hardcover list price $34.95