On our first full day in France, we ventured down the River Tarn at the suggestion of our B&B hosts to explore the hilltop bastide villages that the region is known for.
Click on each gallery image for more information.
Only in France would you see Coke cans designed by Jean-Paul Gaulthier. Black lace roses and fish-net stockings for sophisticated, putain-style, evening drinking; le sportif, Chanel-style, for afternoons on the tennis court or at the beach.
All social eventualities covered.
Although we’re off in the woods by ourselves, we can see our nearest neighbours’ residence through the trees. It is situated at the very end of the laneway, requiring them to pass the house to and fro en route to work, groceries, lunch, dinner, etc. In fact, I believe their farm buildings mark the location of the original Montplaisir that (apparently) shows up in records 1000 years ago. Back then, the farm was probably fortified.
We were graced by a visit by neighbours a few days ago. I don’t know if they are from the farm, as our conversation didn’t get that far. Two ladies came up to the edge of the terrace, staying just outside the string of (non-charged) electric fencing that keeps the free-range livestock off the terrace and away from the potted plants: one had grey–white hair, the other, dark. They stood there being extremely polite and French for several minutes at least before I noticed them through the kitchen window and went out to introduce myself.
We’d hardly begun our conversation when their companion—a guy—came charging up the hill from the wood, swinging his limbs, shouting, making a fuss. I have no idea what his problem was: perhaps he doesn’t like all these foreigners in the area; perhaps he’s part of the group of farm folk who string electric fences across the hiking trails/ancient rights of way that link village to village on our hill; perhaps he didn’t like not being the centre of attention; perhaps he perceived me as being a threat to his women.
Whatever. He was clearly in testosterone mode, braying away at the top if his voice, flapping and posturing.
I thought for a moment that he was going push right through the fence.
But Gaston—our hero—came to the rescue.
Emerging from the house onto the terrace, he said in his manly way:
“Hey! That’s quite enough of that. You be quiet. Eat some grass. Enjoy the view. And let the rest of us have some peace.”
And that was that. The Guy shut up, backed down, turned away. The ladies just continued looking at all of us as if astonished at the lack of manners just displayed.
These “neigh”bours are the local free-range donkeys.
And it just goes to show that, no matter where you go, no matter how far you travel to get there, no matter how remote and isolated a refuge you seek out, there are jack-asses everywhere.
We lizard-wrangled this evening.
When Gaston opened the bedroom window, a beautiful little green lizard sprang onto the sill and dropped onto the floor from where it had worked its way between the screen and the window casement.
A great deal of banging, dragging of furniture over the floor, and swearing alerted me.
“Anything the matter?”
Bang, grunt.
“Hey! Is something wrong?”
“I’m trying to catch a lizard.”
Quick little critters. Four hands, four feet, two heads were required to corner it. I thought I had trapped it behind the dresser with a box, but got only the tail.
“Quick! Grab it.”
By the time Gaston shifted the dresser, the valiant reptile had dropped its tail and fled into the corner.
We eventually cornered it between Gaston’s feet and my hands.
Meanwhile, its tail continued twitching and writhing, sans owner, in the box for a good five minutes.
“Cool, eh?”
“Gross. Poor little guy!”
On the evening before we left our rental near Mirepoix, as Gaston and I had supper on the terrace in front of the cottage, I watched the clouds drift from west to east across the southern horizon, picking up the blues and violets from the forest-shrouded hills. We hadn’t seen the Pyrenees since the evening we arrived: first the tramontane-driven rain socked in the valleys, and once that passed and the sun shone, humidity veiled the mountains. Occasionally you could make out dim outlines.
We got nice ganders at the midi-Pyrénées the morning we were in Tarascon-sur-Ariège. We were visiting the Grotte de Niaux, the only cave in France with Magdelena-era cave paintings (12,000 to 14,000 years) that the public is still permitted to see in the original. There are about 10 caves with artifacts or traces in the Tarascon area. The entrance to the Grotte de Niaux is at ~1000 feet above the valley, with views to the west. Sheer white limestone cliffs studded with conifers and hardwoods. And the air there: crisp and clear at mid-morning.
The cave paintings included some impressive, expressive bison, but were not nearly the colourful works of art that images from Lascaux in the Dordogne have created expectations of. The guide mystified us more than enlightened us: she had a canned talk and any questions from the group that delved deeper and required that she explain her statements—well, forget it: you were just going to be even more confused. The bison were nice though. And that the guide had the waxen, transparently pallid appearance of one who rarely sees daylight also led to some entertaining but quiet speculation. We decided, given our disappointing experiences in getting more information from her on other questions about cave dwellers, that we wouldn’t bring the subject up.
Perhaps she had been coated with her own layer of limestone slip. Mineral-based physical sunblocks are the new thing, after all. And certainly the water here in le sud de France contains sufficient lime to scale anybody nicely after a few weeks. The water at St-Gély was the hardest we’ve encountered: I couldn’t even get a lather up with that. It was less hard at Mirepoix. In Nézignan-l’Evèque, soap lathered, but more sediment was left behind. Paris leaves its own special imprint after a couple of showers. I suppose if we lived in southern Alberta, we wouldn’t even notice, but – oh – for the dulcet washes of west coast water.
(From October 2009)
I had visions of a scene of scarcely controlled panic; gendarmes racing into the Gare de Lyon, dressed in black, with bullet-proof face guards and helmets, barricading platform H (“’ashe”) with a phalanx of machine-gun–toting, shorn-haired, black-clad toughs legitimized solely by badges of state-approved authority and the smell of café espresse and camembert on their breath. La Sécurité (avec deux accents égouts) sending in a bomb team with dogs and defusers, and the entire station being placed under arrest. Everything brought to a standstill. Just like Paris under a transit strike. Or a health-care workers’ strike. Or a container-truckers’ strike. Or a taxi-drivers’ strike.
That, at least, might explain the utter dearth of taxis in all of Paris when we disembarked and most needed one.
But Gaston assures me that, no, the discerning French nose does not need a dog trained to explosives to recognize fine cheese, finer olives, and the other fine points and opportunities in life.
+++++++
Gaston, being a guy, is stoic and never cries—at least in any way that would be readily recognizable by a normal and normally sensitive human being or other mammal or even by an alien or reptile or microorganism.
But the result of our trip from Montpellier to Paris, even now, a full month after that fateful day, brings a suspicious mistiness to Gaston’s eyes and a tell-tale cherry-red runniness to his nose. And it’s not H1N1.
No.
Gaston likes his olives. Every Friday at home, charged with acquiring the week’s groceries as his contribution to household expenses, he returns from the local grocery store with a tubful of green-olives-stuffed-with-hot-pimentos or -whatever. ‘Whatever,” because I’m not especially into olives, so experience his weekly pickings only in how they take up valuable fridge space that could be used to house something far more essential—like humous or organic lettuces or home-made soup stock or ratatouille.
However, once or twice or thrice or more a day whilst it lasts, Gaston visits his fridge-stashed cache for an olive fix. He fills a specifically shaped bowl (not so large as to diminish their contents; not so small as to deprive him satisfaction of his craving) with the little green jewels and with pickled onions (another item of which I beg leave to have only a passing—a very passing by—olfactory experience), sits on the sofa and savours the flavours, smacking and snorting and chomping in his own private ritual of appreciation and appetite.
Thus, Gaston was very happy in France. Particularly so once we discovered the markets.
We would park our rental car in an unknown town listed as having a public “marché (accent égout) traditionnel” on the day in question and wander aimlessly until we spotted empty baskets moving ever further off ahead of us on the street on the arms of French madames and, eventually, full market baskets making their way towards us on the arms of other said French madames. In this way would we find our way to the town/village marketplace.
And, once in the environs of said marketplaces, Gaston’s finely tuned and highly sensitive olive detector would deploy, much in the way the Pentagon’s satellite dishes trackg terrorist cell-phone conversations, or a mule deer’s ears follow possible sounds-of-concern while it goes about its browsing-and-pooping business. Within moments, he would locate and plot the locations of the various and sometimes multitude local olive vendors…. And pass by, following in my wake, as I, a veritable French madame myself with my own woven-grass basket over my arm, beelined to the produce sellers and the cheese vendors and the sausage vendors, but looking archly out of the corner of his eye at the wares. (—Who am I kidding? That’s far too subtle for Gaston: he would rubber-neck and stare, imitating the aforementioned Pentagon satellite dishes and mule-deer ears—and drool!) We might pass by two or three times to compare prices of lettuce, of green beans, of fresh basil….
And then, bowing to the inevitable and the interests of maritable longevity, I would stop and turn to him: “How’s your supply?”
“I could do with a few more.”
And so it would begin, yet again, once again….
I ate more olives proffered by vendors in markets in France than cumulatively through the previous four decades: the latest year’s (meaning the year before’s, as the olive harvest occurs in November/December) own green olives preserved with fresh minced garlic—sure to ward off any popish, anti-paratge, anti-Cathar vampire; preserved with lemon—sure to preserve any vampire of any faith until… well, forever; preserved with hot pimento, sure to bring to mind every morning exactly where those pimentos originated after Christophe Colon’s discovery and explorations of the world’s ring of fire; preserved with sweet pimento, sure to… I’m not sure what; preserved with basil and bay; preserved with … whatever! And of course an entire selection of black olives, preserved in various and imaginative and surprisingly tasty ways…. Who knew?
We would stagger back to the car, the basket over my arm and a couple of plastic bags hanging from Gaston’s hands laden with vegetables, herbs, leafy greens, fresh bread, cheese, sausages and, to Gaston’s eager anticipation, at least four varieties of olives, and our stomachs laden with bits and pieces of almost all of the above.
Who needs lunch? Or supper, for that matter.
And, in the days following, we (read: I) would endure the familiar olive ritual, sometimes accompanied by the very fine local plonk fine du terroir or plonck finer de pays or plonck particularly vignoble (each and all for less than 5 euros per), sometimes by Belgian brew selected by Gaston at the local Carrefour or Super U, but always, always with a reverence not seen in Canada—ever.
He had a goodly supply remaining when we left the south for Paris. It was packed individually in a bag with a supply of brie, camembert and a couple of chèvres intended for lunch on the train and days of enjoyment thereafter.
And we did enjoy our lunch, leisurely, because what else were we going to do on the train? Other than watch the landscape unfold, 16th-century chateau upon chateau, 12th-century fortress upon fortress, field upon field, vineyard upon vineyard, wood upon wood, hilltop bastide upon hilltop bastide. Gaston especially reveled in his oleai europaeai and his stinky cheeses. When he had finally finished (“had finished,” as in the French—not “was finished,” meaning dead; “had full,” not “was full,” meaning preggies), he folded them back into the bag, which he then carefully and reverentially placed in the rack above our seats.
“That was a very enjoyable repast.”
Then: “Remind me not to forget these.”
The last time Gaston said, “Remind me not to forget…” to me when we were traveling was en route from Surabaya to Kuta in Indonesia. He had written notes in his journal (isn’t that quaint?) not particularly complimentary about some of the people and situations we had recently encountered and stuck it in the pocket in the seat ahead of him on the airplane, on which we were flying instead of taking the bus and ferry that sank with 600-some overloaded passengers aboard that same day.
And, frankly, I—and it is all about me, after all—don’t see why he doesn’t just learn to put things away where they belong right away, because he always, always forgets, and I have other things on my mind than to remind him to gather up his toys, journals, whatever (“whatever!”), and so we experience unnecessary pain/regret/apologies and a complete waste of emotion and energy. I have, finally after two decades years, come to accept that what Gaston does/says/thinks/doesn’t do/say/think is entirely his responsibility and nothing whatsoever (“whatsoever,” not “whatever!”) to do with me (even though everything else is, of course, all about me).
And so the train pulls into the Gare de Lyon—finally and after the scheduled, but still too long (if you regret leaving where you’re leaving and have difficulty sitting still for 1.5 hours, let along for), 3.5 hours—and we gather our suitcases and backpacks and our market basket full of preciously fragile (“L’argile, c’est fragile,”) Provencal pottery unlike any other you’ve ever seen anywhere—anywhere!,—and disembark among the hordes to take a taxi to our appointed (definitely not anointed) apartment, and find no taxis in service in all of Paris and so have to walk \six kilometres with wine bottle-stuffed luggage and basket of pottery through crowded, cobbled, disgustingly smelly, litter-scattered, people-clogged (did I mention crowded? Let me repeat: storefront-to-storefront-packed), sunny, gloriously warm, late-afternoon-Saturday streets (especially once we entered the Marais, the recently funkified fashion district where our apartment was located).
It wasn’t until the evening following, as I tried to prepare our evening meal in a ridiculously small kitchen with no counterspace whatsoever and refrigerator one-quarter the size of the average North American bar fridge, that the tragedy made itself unescapably, undeniably, and oh-so-heartbreakingly (to Gaston) known.
“This is going to take a while,” I said, pushing sweaty hair out of my eyes, trying to salvage a Spanish risotto burnt on the gas burner that operated at only very high or barely on, stirring the reduced tomato sauce on the one burner that did work, and trying not to shriek in frustration, rage and … whatever! “Why don’t you have some cheese and olives while I get this under control?”
“I can’t find them.”
“???”
“I think we left them on the train.”
“——. We?!”
“I could cry.”
“——”
“——”
“You left them on the train?!!”
“I’ve looked all over and through everything for them.”
“I did, too. Actually. I thought you might have them stashed somewhere”
“I wish. But I’m afraid the worst has come to pass: They were left behind. And I could just weep.”
And me, ever sympathetic in moment of crisis: “My god. An unidentifiable package on the TGV. After the Metro bombings and Spain and 9/11, they’d declare a national state of emergency…”
And so Gaston held forth, in the strong, masculine, stoic Way of the Guy, on his theory of the discerning nose of the SNCF-employed Frenchman, capable of sniffing out quality cheese and excellent olives whenever any of those presented themselves.
And, all the while, something suspiciously like a tear trembled and caught the light in the corner of his eye.
Disclaimer:
Events in this report may appear larger than they actually were in reality.
In France, bathtubs are standard facilities, but many older hotels are being retrofitted with showers to meet demands by North Americans who simply cannot do without their morning top–down slosh, which of course with hard water and dry climate (as anyone who has lived in S. Alberta knows) means dry, dry skin.
The retrofits into hotel rooms also mean that the facilities are bijoux. In the shower in the Paris hotel room we’d booked into during our Victoria–south France transit, you couldn’t bend or crouch down to pick up your shampoo bottle from the floor of the shower without having your head, knees or your butt untuck the shower curtain from the stall. You’d have to be some tai chi expert or Chinese acrobat and be able to lower your body along only vertical planes, or just be short, to avoid that. And then, of course, the curtain would stick to you, compounding the out-of-shower water experience.
Ah well, after 12 hours of airplaning, 1.5 hours of transiting from airport to city, and three hours walking aimlessly and dazedly while awaiting your hotel room to be made available, any shower feels great.
