She reclines in a white crocheted slip on a gently tilting couch before a body of still water. Her long, slim, supple-looking limbs lay loosely, her honey-tanned skin glows, and her expression is alert but calm. All is suggestive of a battery of recent treatments, including, quite possibly, given a slightly enigmatic look in her eyes, a thorough colonic irrigation. We live in a spa world, of which the creature lolling on the cover of Bazaar magazine's Spa Guide 2007 represents some kind of princess.
It seems a luxury holiday is no longer complete without a spa component. Yet I wanted to seek out a different kind of spa: a practical spa, a down-to-earth spa, the kind of place spas were before they became temples to narcissism. Surprisingly, I found two in the country you might least expect, given the power there of the cult of beauty: France. Specifically, the ancient Savoie thermal resorts of Brides-les-Bains and Aix-les-Bains.
It is a shame, as they say, that doctors do not prescribe money, but in France they do at least prescribe spas. The French state will, astonishingly, reimburse its citizens for three weeks of therapeutic spa treatment annually. Different maladies are treated at different spas around the country, according to the specific qualities of their thermal waters. Go to the doctor with the evident symptoms of obesity, for example, and you may leave with a prescription for a course of treatment with the diuretic liquid that gushes from the ground at Brides-les-Bains.
Nonetheless spa treatments are losing favour with French doctors as they switch to the more common western approach of ladling out pills. The spa centres have fought back with the concept of bien-être. These general “wellbeing” programmes retain a no-nonsense, clinical quality to scourge the pampering treatments on the rise in the rest of the spa world.
It was no surprise, given its speciality, that the brochures for the Brides-les-Bains spa were heavy with beaming, Rubenesque French women, nor that they emphasised the efficacy of the waters in treating that questionable affliction, cellulite. Dimpled thighs are not among my problems, but I had acquired a belt of post-Christmas fat and, in any case, I was happy to sign up for my own battery of treatments in the hope of some non-specific benefits.
Modelage sous affusion - a “remodelling massage” with anti-cellulite, circulatory and relaxing properties - was the first item on the prescription-like document handed to me on checking into the spa. After pulling the privacy curtain behind her, my white-uniformed masseuse directed me to lie face down on a concave slab of marble covered with drainage holes. Suspended above me was a branching horizontal pole from which tepid thermal water began to dribble and was moved over various parts of my body as the masseuse rubbed me down with oil: touch and the warm subterranean fluid are meant to have a powerful combinatory action.
My next therapy, the bain hydromassant, was another weapon in the anti-obesity armoury. The bath in question - a great, cream bowl shot through with jet-holes and with a beeping console at its prow - hovered in appearance between the plaything of a rich pervert and something your grandmother might use. My last treatment for the day was more familiar: a soft Swedish massage, with an unexpected but entirely appropriate slant in the form of a blind masseuse.
Brides-les-Bains is not all about maladies and self-improvement. Not only can you ski in the surrounding terrain of the Trois Vallées – the largest skiable area in the world – and sink afterwards into the thermal waters, there is also the question of nourishment. Both Brides and Aix-les-Bains have introduced something called a “diète légère”, a light diet, to accompany a spa stay. I tasted it, and I will say no more about it. The proper way to enjoy these spas is with Savoyard cuisine, which, despite the mountains, is not haute. It consists largely of cheese – fat wheels of raclette and reblochon, for example – transformed into various delicious fondues, along with the odd bit of charcuterie. You wash it down with the easy local wines and then have it pummelled out of you later, at the spa.
There is something about being sprayed with a firehose by a well-groomed Frenchwoman in uniform that gets the mind racing. As I received my last treatment, the douche au jet (essentially what they used to do to Chilean leftists but supposedly good for you), it occurred to me that the spa world was undergoing a new belle époque. Brides-les-Bains was one stop for itinerant aristocrats in the 19th century, but to experience the relics of that period in all their drained glory you really have to go to Aix-les-Bains.
This Savoie town, now with a population of 25,000, floats on water. It encrusts the coast of Lac du Bourget, France’s largest freshwater lake, and its sulphurous thermal waters have drawn crowds, on and off, for hundreds of years. The English leisure class flocked here in their thousands in the 19th century to “take the waters”, which then meant literally swallowing it. Palatial art nouveau hotels sprang up to cater for this rich and feckless foreign clientele.
But the aquatic rich moved on after the second world war, to bathe and gamble in Cannes and Monte Carlo, and in their place came the elderly French, who, courtesy of the state, descended upon Aix-les-Bains seeking treatment for their rheumatism and arthritis, conditions for which the town’s malodorous waters are particularly suited. Now France prefers to drug its aged, Aix is seeking to exploit its liquid asset anew in the nebulous form of bien-être.
My spa advisers in the town were particularly keen for me to try “le spa-jet”: a pod within which you are mechanically sprayed from every direction to the accompaniment of an inbuilt son-et-lumière show. It is perhaps an acquired pleasure, and one that the woman who was simultaneously massaging my face - who had a hacking cough and neglected to secure a part of the machinery that crashed within an inch of my nose - did not help me acquire.
Aix is modestly famous for another machine, the patented Berthollaix: a kind of cauldron into which you stick any ailing body parts to be pleasantly steamed. But it is the magnificent new government spa building that should cause the most pride. It is the most modern in France and is worth seeing as a wonder of the welfare state alone. Vast, open and light-filled, it strikes just the right note of austere healthiness.
It has a big pool of thermal water for you to gambol in and, upstairs, there’s a complex for treatments such as a thermo-vegetal-mineral mud application and the “Aix special”. Mick the masseur gave me the latter, a vigorous manipulation under a downpour of the local balm, followed by another going-over with a firehose. Beefy, with a shaven head and dressed in a tight-fitting white cap and full-length smock, Mick looked like, in a way, what he was: a meatworker.
I have barely probed in this account into the efficacy of the thermal treatments, apart from the hazy relaxation they engender. But I left the spas having found, to my surprise, that my ribbon of festive fat had melted away, leaving a pleasing tautness. I had done nothing so obvious as exercise on my petit tour but had been endlessly stroked, sprayed, kneaded and inundated, and – pinch me – I think it worked.
Way to go
Brides-les-bains.com has full details of spa and ski-and-spa packages.
Brides-les-Bains is accessible from Geneva, Lyon/St-Exupéry and Grenoble airports. BA, EasyJet, Ryanair, Bmi and Flybe among the carriers. If taking the Eurostar, transfer in Paris to the TGV to Môtiers. There are shuttle buses to the town from St-Exupéry, Grenoble and Môtiers. For the road routes see brides-les-bains.com.
The village has accommodation from two to four stars. The two-star Athena hotel (see website for directions; +33 4 79 55 31 01; info@hotel-athena-brides.com) has doubles from €43 (£29). The three-star Grand Hôtel des Thermes (Parc Thermal; +33 4 79 55 38 38; info@gdhotel-brides.com) has doubles from €115 (£78).
Aix-les-Bains.com has more details on the thermal resorts in the town. For more details (in French) on the modern state spa, Chevalley, see thermaix.com. The spa-jet treatment is available at the Villa Marlioz (Avenue de Marlioz, +33 4 79 61 79 61).
Aix-les-Bains is accessible from Chambery/Aix-les-Bains, Annecy, Geneva and Lyon St-Exupéry airports. For details of shuttle buses, see above.
The town has a wide range of accommodation from one to four stars. The three-star Hôtel Le Manoir (37 rue Georges 1er; +33 4 79 61 44 00; hotel-le-manoir@wanadoo.fr) has rooms from €86 (£58).
