THE plaintiff seeking damages at the bar here in Dinan’s Palais de Justice had clearly had the fright of his life and even trembled as he told the court what had happened.

Yes, he said, he could still see the headlights in the night when he closed his eyes. ‘I was driving along the expressway when the accused appeared out of nowhere and smashed right into me – just about head-on.’

He’d been hit by a drunk driver who was going against the flow on a dual carriageway, the sort of ‘accident’ that accounts for one crash in 100 here and one fatal one in 20 on the motorways. For 40 to 50 people a year, very often the innocents whose only and unwitting mistake was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s next stop the morgue.

A gendarme explained that the offenders were sometimes on mind-altering medication or even attempting suicide. Then there were the drunk or drugged, and the elderly or just plain irresponsible, not to mention, especially in Brittany, GB or GBJ drivers forgetting at least momentarily that they aren’t back home on the M3 or Victoria Avenue.

One 84-year-old drove 18 kilometres on the wrong side down near Nantes. ‘I was very frightened for my own safety,’ he admitted to the judge. ‘But I knew I wasn’t a danger to others on such a wide road because I was only driving very slowly and, anyway, I pulled over and parked when my car developed a mechanical problem.’

The gendarme coughed politely and reminded the court that the Monsieur was forgetting that what he’d thought was the hard shoulder was in fact the fast lane. Another driver – middle-aged, sober and, well, lucid – who’d missed his exit, just U-turned and drove back to it.

The motorway network in Brittany is unusually dense and there are slip roads every four kilometres on average, compared to only 30 or 40 kilometres nationally, which clearly multiplies the risks. And it can get very busy too because, unlike the rest of the country, it’s all free with no péages or toll booths anywhere.

Local lore generally attributes this government indulgence to the much loved Duchesse Anne de Bretagne, who has as many cafés and bars, restaurants and hotels named after her here as there are Red Dragons in Wales or Royal Oaks in Merry Olde England.

Yes, most people hereabouts will tell you proudly that way back in 1491, good old Annie made it a condition of her marriage to Charles VIII and the associated unification of Brittany and France that the Paristocracy would never impose any toll roads in the region. Which may be a nice story and certainly a good one to tell the grockles but frankly, just between me and you, mon vi’, it’s all cobblers, I’m afraid.

As ever, alas, the truth is more prosaic and it should in fact be Chapeau! – hat’s off! – to General de Gaulle, bless his khaki socks. He was the one who decided in 1958 that something had to be done to promote economic growth in a region that was and remains essentially rural, a peninsula stuck way out into the Atlantic and far from the main industrial and trade routes that sweep up and down continental Europe.

Which, funnily enough, may explain why 200,000 Parisians flee the madding capital for the provinces every year, particularly young families. Most of them head south to the sun but an awful lot go west to Brittany which enjoys a nationwide reputation for peace and quiet and ‘authenticité’, whatever that means. The perfect place to bring your kids up in, anyway.

Yet many of them soon come to regret it. When she got invited to her umpteenth ‘petit café’ and equally little natter with all the other mums outside the primary school at 8.30 one morning, Marie-Paule finally realised that she should never have let her husband talk them into leaving the banks of the Seine to come and settle near the Rance in Rennes.

Not that the town and the Rennais aren’t nice and friendly, on the contrary, and she readily admits that life in Paris was exhausting: the perpetual panic to find someone to look after the kids, four people crow-barred into a tiny but pricey two-bedroom flat, the incessant daily grind they call ‘metro-boulot-dodo’ – tube-work-sleep.

But in Rennes everything is so heart-achingly slow that she sometimes feels as if she’s slipping in and out of some sort of waking coma. When she goes to pick up the kids, she’s amazed to see only mums there. In Paris, it’s all grannies, nannies and assorted other childminders because everyone else is at work.

And she misses going out when she wants, where she wants, the permanent buzz of big city life, and dislikes the way people in the boondocks are constantly watching and worrying what others are doing and thinking, unlike Paris, where no one could care less what anybody else is up to.

Mind you, Voltaire would have disagreed with her. He thought Paris was a chaos, a throng where everybody hunts for pleasure and hardly anybody ever finds it, and Balzac went even further, dismissing the Ville Lumière or City of Light as a disease, sometimes several diseases.

Be that as it may, Marie-P’s clearly suffering from boredom on a scale that’s difficult to imagine unless, of course, you’ve ever been caught in St Lawrence on a wet Sunday afternoon in winter, or had to sit through an entire Johnny Halliday CD, come to that.

And it does make you wonder which is worse: a provincial life that’s so uneventful you’re easily pleased or one in the capital that’s so full of stimuli you’re easily bored.
Mme Masstairmann and I lived in Paris for three or four years, and loved it and left it. But our Parisian friends were horrified. You won’t last five minutes out there in the sticks before the sheer monotony has you collapsing to the ground hyperventilating, they prophesied.

But that was 25 years ago now and we wouldn’t ever go back. Well, not to live anyway, and not unless it was to spend a few half-term days like last week with our daughter, Fleur, who’s now a student at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques.

And fair’s fair, it was great to wander round the bustling theatres, cinemas and restaurants in the Quartier Latin on a Saturday night once again, boring old Fleuro to tears with tales about the way Mme Masstairmann and I used to smooch around there when we were, er, young lovers.

These days, Saturday nights tend to be a scotch and a good book, looking forward to Sunday morning when we go for a jog along the Rance towpath, then stroll up into the old quarter to get a baguette and the paper. Le Journal du Dimanche, it’s called. Yup, The Sunday Newspaper. I wonder how long it took its creators to come up with such an exciting title. Not that it gets any better inside, either, but that’s all there is. Mind you, when you’re having a little read and a quiet aperitif in the soft autumn sunshine at some pavement café in the tree-lined Place St Sauveur, it doesn’t really seem to matter all that much, eh.
Kenavo!