The rain doesn't so much lash at the window as slump resignedly against it before sliding hopelessly to the ground. Alongside the track I see an unbroken sequence of muddy fields, flooded copses, flooded fields, muddy copses. It's February, I'm in Burgundy, and the train is going at a snail's pace. Across from me, a slender, grey-haired, taut-looking Frenchman's hacking coughs provide continuous percussion.
This is, of course, the first day of my week of holiday in France. I'd been happy to rely on a clockwork eight-minute connection in Zurich, but for all my connections in France I'd left plenty of time. Except one: this regional train from Dijon to Nevers, which has to arrive on time in order for me to make a six-minute connection. It would have been faster and safer to go all the way from Zurich to Paris, and then out to Vierzon from there, but when booking I'd wanted to do something more adventurous. I'd challenged the spider's-web governing logic of French railways, where all routes lead to the Île-de-France, and for my temerity I have been punished. Outside the village of Cheilly-les-Maranges my train ground to a halt, and eventually, after what seemed like a eternity, with no communication from the train staff, it began to crawl along again. But this time so slowly that it feels like there's a man with a red flag walking in front of it.
Thus far off the beaten track, perhaps I've wandered into a pocket dimension of kismet and strange coincidences. An hour ago, this train passed through the town of Beaune. Just yesterday, following a tip from my father, I'd picked up a book by Karl-Markus Gauss called Im Wald der Metropole ("In the forest of metropolises"), and discovered that the first section of the first chapter took place in Beaune. When I saw that I'd be passing through the town, I'd decided to read the chapter. I was still reading it when the train came to a stop, and kept reading it while waiting for the train to pull itself up by its bootstraps. Occasionally I try to check my connections online, but it is futile: this part of France no more has the internet than it has a functioning rail system.
Gauss's chapter takes us from the grimace of a man he encountered in Beaune, to the grimace of a bust by the eighteenth-century sculptor Messerschmidt that now resides in Schloss Belvedere in Vienna (which, coincidentally, I also visited for the first time last month), to another bust by the same sculptor of a prince whose advisor was the African-born Angelo Soliman, to Soliman's daughter's husband's second wife's son Ernst Feuchtersleben, a pioneer of matters psychosomatic, and finally to a bar in Vienna where Messerschmidt had lived. A fine chain of digressions.
There was something Kafkaesque about experiencing this meandering narrative while going nowhere, though. I should have sensed it as soon as I'd got off the train in Dijon, where there is a fine landscaped garden complete with natural history museum right next to the station. The platforms, though, are labelled A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, 3, and 37, and my train via Beaune departed from the latter. It's three minutes' walk from the station building, and guests are advised to follow the blue line painted on the ground through this modern-day not-quite-labyrinth. In a station where platforms have letters, the best adventures start at platform 37.
My train eventually picked up speed again, and after stopping at Montchanin it seemed to have gained a new lease of life, albeit with a forty-minute delay. At this point I'd more or less given up hope of making it to my destination on the same night, since I was on track to miss not only my fecklessly optimistic six-minute connection but also the backup train too. But, wonder of wonders, the latter was also slightly delayed, and so I was able to leap across the platform at Nevers. The next and final train – an elegant intercity from Vierzon – was even later, pulling in to its last stop with over an hour's delay. It was after midnight, and by this point the afternoon's rain had regressed through the stages of grief from depression to anger: now it flung itself assertively in my face as I sprinted the last few metres to the Grand Hotel Terminus. After thirty uncertain seconds at the intercom, I was let inside.
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