LONDON -- When I came out of the house this morning, Jean-Baptiste was standing in the road gazing into the field opposite with a worried expression. He had lost two cows, he said. And he was obviously right, because there were only five cows in the field.
Jean-Baptiste is what polite people no longer call a peasant. He lives in a big farmhouse in the Basque-speaking part of France, he is 70 years old and he has only seven cows. (His wife calls them his "pets.") But they live well, and all their children and grandchildren still live within reach of them, mostly in very beautiful places.
This is "la France profonde" -- deepest France -- and 50 years ago it was desperately poor. Now it allows families like Jean-Baptiste's a modest contentment, and in return they keep France looking like the dream of rural bliss that the urban multitudes expect. And how does he achieve all this with a couple of stony hillside pastures, seven cows, and some chickens? The Common Agricultural Policy, of course.