The fictional world of St Denis
St Denis is a fictional town that is located on the banks of the river Vezere, somewhere in the quadrilateral formed by the city of Perigueux, the capital of the Departement of theDordogne, and the large towns of Sarlat and Bergerac and Belves. The Dordogne is one of the largest departments in France, and the Commune of St Denis is one of the largest in the Dordogne. But it contains only 3,000 people, just over half of whom live in the town of St Denis itself.
To create Bruno’s St Denis, the author borrowed elements from Sarlat and Bergerac, but mainly from smaller towns like St Cyprien and Belves, Les Eyzies and Siorac, Eymet and Sainte Alvere, Tremolat and Le Bugue and Le Buisson. The Mairie the war memorial come from one town and the Gendarmerie and the Hotel de la Gare from another, the tennis club and the man square come from a third and the College and the bi-weekly markets from yet a fourth and so on. Any investigating visitor who thinks the real model of St Denis has been located is mistaken. The Bruno novels are works of fiction and St Denis is an invention.
Some of the features of St Denis — its cafes and its war memorial, its markets and theMaison de la Presse, and bakeries and the Mairie, the school and the retirement home — are characteristic of small towns across France.
The river that runs through St Denis is the Vezere, on one of those long, lazy loops it takes before joining the Dordogne. The valley of the Vezere is hailed in all the tourist brochures as ‘the cradle of mankind’ because the evidence of the caves is clear that humans began living in this valley some 40,000 years ago and have continued to do so ever since.
No other place on earth can make such a claim, and in few other places is history quite so close and palpable and intimate. It is in the buildings and castles and churches, but also in the presence of those caves in the cliffs, dark holes like eyes from the deepest past still gazing at their descendants today. In some of those prehistoric caves where people painted animals thousands of years ago, guns and secret wireless sets were hidden by the Resistance in the 1940s, during World War Two.
And now like so many other small towns, there is a sullen resistance under way against ‘Europe,’ or at least against the bureaucratic expression of Europe that comes in the form of food inspectors in the markets and regulations about what farmers may and may not grow. It is not so much the idea of Europe that people dislike, but its probing and busy-body nature, and the way Europe has come to stand for the modern way of doing things, for globalization and the disappearance of the small shopkeeper and the need for mothers to go out to work and the replacement of the traditional midday meal with the fast food available at MacDo or the sandwiches on the shelves of the supermarkets.
Along with the rest of France, the Dordogne voted No in the 2005 referendum on the draft new European constitution. Not that it mattered; the political elites of Europe simply re-packaged the bulk of the constitution’s provisions into the new Treaty of Lisbon, which was then ratified by parliaments rather than by popular vote. The one country that held a referendum on the Treaty, Ireland, voted No.
To create Bruno’s St Denis, the author borrowed elements from Sarlat and Bergerac, but mainly from smaller towns like St Cyprien and Belves, Les Eyzies and Siorac, Eymet and Sainte Alvere, Tremolat and Le Bugue and Le Buisson. The Mairie the war memorial come from one town and the Gendarmerie and the Hotel de la Gare from another, the tennis club and the man square come from a third and the College and the bi-weekly markets from yet a fourth and so on. Any investigating visitor who thinks the real model of St Denis has been located is mistaken. The Bruno novels are works of fiction and St Denis is an invention.
Some of the features of St Denis — its cafes and its war memorial, its markets and theMaison de la Presse, and bakeries and the Mairie, the school and the retirement home — are characteristic of small towns across France.
The river that runs through St Denis is the Vezere, on one of those long, lazy loops it takes before joining the Dordogne. The valley of the Vezere is hailed in all the tourist brochures as ‘the cradle of mankind’ because the evidence of the caves is clear that humans began living in this valley some 40,000 years ago and have continued to do so ever since.
No other place on earth can make such a claim, and in few other places is history quite so close and palpable and intimate. It is in the buildings and castles and churches, but also in the presence of those caves in the cliffs, dark holes like eyes from the deepest past still gazing at their descendants today. In some of those prehistoric caves where people painted animals thousands of years ago, guns and secret wireless sets were hidden by the Resistance in the 1940s, during World War Two.
And now like so many other small towns, there is a sullen resistance under way against ‘Europe,’ or at least against the bureaucratic expression of Europe that comes in the form of food inspectors in the markets and regulations about what farmers may and may not grow. It is not so much the idea of Europe that people dislike, but its probing and busy-body nature, and the way Europe has come to stand for the modern way of doing things, for globalization and the disappearance of the small shopkeeper and the need for mothers to go out to work and the replacement of the traditional midday meal with the fast food available at MacDo or the sandwiches on the shelves of the supermarkets.
Along with the rest of France, the Dordogne voted No in the 2005 referendum on the draft new European constitution. Not that it mattered; the political elites of Europe simply re-packaged the bulk of the constitution’s provisions into the new Treaty of Lisbon, which was then ratified by parliaments rather than by popular vote. The one country that held a referendum on the Treaty, Ireland, voted No.
