Happiness is in Les Prés d'Eugénie

A few notes of music resonate and seem to bounce off the park's ancient trees. The bells of the Couvent des Herbes play the opening bars of Une petite musique de nuit. It's 1pm. It's time for a stroll in the park for some, tennis or the spa for others, sunbathing by the pool or lunch at La Ferme aux Grives or La Maison Rose, or even at L'Orangerie. Still others sit on a bench at the foot of the gigantic magnolias and listen to the birdsong... At Les Prés d'Eugénie, time seems suspended. Only to your will. And Monsieur's. " Monsieur " is how everyone refers to chef Michel Guérard. It's not " chef " (like everywhere else) or " Monsieur Michel " (like " Monsieur Paul " at Paul Bocuse). No, it's " Monsieur ", as in a couture house, like Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Cristóbal Balanciaga or Christian Dior..." One of the first recipe books I bought at a flea market was Christian Dior's annotated one," Michel Guérard rightly points out. " Monsieur ", a sign of both respect and admiration, is above all a sign that Michel Guérard is of the calibre of the greats, of the calibre of those who will leave their mark on the world.toffe of those who will undoubtedly leave an indelible mark - remember that he is one of the Gault&Millau academicians with 5 gold toques. " Monsieur " is not just a chef; together with Christine - whom he joined for love in this " Far West " fifty years ago - he has imagined a total work of art in the heart of a 15-hectare park.

A pastry chef by training, a chef by passion, Michel Guérard first made a name for himself - and gained recognition - with a table he created " without a penny", in Asnières-sur-Seine, in the mid-1960s. Spotted and supported by the best gastronomic critics, imagining - with the Troigros or Paul Bocuse - what Gault&Millau would call " nouvelle cuisine " in 1973, his establishment Le Pot au Feu attracted gangsters and thugs (Asnières was then the HQ for gangsters), workers and foremen (it was still in the heart of an industrial belt), big bosses and the Tout-Paris (who didn't mind the big thrills beyond the Périphérique) in a joyous gourmet maelstrom with just 26 seats. Alas, he was expropriated, the world moved on, and so did the red suburbs. Christine Barthélémy, daughter of the visionary founder of Chaînes Thermales du Soleil, is now at the helm of a new spa acquired by the group, in the heart of the Chalosse region. People had already come here to take the waters under Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV); the empress Joséphine de Beauharnais was a regular visitor, followed by Eugénie de Montijo, who went so far as to authorize the village to bear her name. Sometimes all it takes is one meeting, when it's the right one...

" There was nothing, so we had to invent or reinvent everything. "Clever and visionary, pragmatic and skilful, Michel Guérard is a bit of all these things. " I had to find a way to get the word out about us, to get people to come to us; the thermal baths weren't enough... I thought that imagining a healthy, slimming cuisine went well with thermalism. " With his light sauces and airy mayonnaises, he made his mark and put Eugénie-les-Bains on every gourmet's menu. The year was 1974, just 50 years ago. Christian Millau - who was, in his own words, " a few kilos overweight " - went there immediately. Naturally won over, the journalist devoted a long article to the Guérard couple's new adventure in the June 1974 issue (no. 62) of our magazine: " With his recipes and inventions, Michel Guérard is quite simply ridiculing for ever the appalling, dismaying, hopeless "diet cuisine". Michel Guérard, for his part, confides with mischief in his eyes: " As a child, I wanted to be a priest, then a doctor, then an actor: I do good..." He does good with both his dietetic and gourmet cuisine, but not only that.

Success is always the fruit of a complicated alchemy. There's " Monsieur 's" cuisine, of course, and Madame Guérard's taste for interior architecture, decoration and the art of gardening, their shared taste for china, antique shops and galleries. They restored, enhanced, built, enlarged, moved, bought and decorated... Together, they created a family home in several opuses: a main house (" La Grande Maison "), a convent, an inn, a spa farm... where imperial portraits, panoramas, daily pleasures, convertibles, chests of drawers and curiosities are cheerfully distributed. Resolutely pioneering, they added health to haute gastronomy, well-being to health care, chic to medical care (spa cures are prescribed by doctors and most of the time reimbursed). Adventurous, they invented, tested, tried again, questioned and asserted themselves. Visionaries, they laid the foundations for an institution which, according to Éléonore and Adeline, their daughters now at the helm of the group, " today embodies permanence and youthfulness "; and which, according to Hugo Souchet, head chef, " can live for at least another 50 years ". While they are already thinking "about the future of the house, particularly from an ecological point of view", he " continues to feed off the inventiveness of 'Monsieur'. "

An inventiveness that has always gone beyond the plate, but returns to it again and again. And to quote Auguste Escoffier in his Guide culinaire: " At a time when everything is changing and transforming, it would be absurd to pretend to fix the destiny of an art that is in so many ways a product of fashion, and as unstable as fashion. But what already existed in Carême's time, what still exists today, and what will exist as long as cuisine itself, is the substance of this cuisine; for if it simplifies outwardly, it does not lose its value, on the contrary. And as tastes become ever more refined, cuisine itself becomes ever more refined to satisfy them (...) it will even become more scientific and precise. "And we think, as Christian Millau did, at the time of departure: " Everything is so beautiful, so calm, everything breathes so much happiness, that from the first moment you wake up, punctuated by birdsong, you already feel like another man...".