My Cycling Season (And This Blog) End; A Practical Solution

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

     The winds are blowing hard today, the last day of my cycling season with the Caunes-Minervois club. All my friends are there: Jacques, the incoming president, a former policeman; Jean, the retiring treasurer and a former gendarme; Patrice, a former miner and the club secretary; Jeannot, an expert in HCL --"yes", salt-- the oldest member, still going strong at 81 after treatment for bladder cancer four years ago; Claude, a retired employee of the mairie here; George, a retired harvester of grapes, here and in Spain; Jamie, the club Scotsman, an oil expert.  I have invited everyone over for un pot --a glass of wine-- after our ride, my last this year.  Everyone is keen on coming, those who didn't hear the invitation made last Saturday at the annual club dinner were phoned.  "It's not the sort of thing anyone would keep a secret --a chance to have a glass of something after the ride", Jamie jokes.
   
      We ride 30 kilometers into the Mas Cabardès commune, which includes the medieval Château de Lastours and an affiliated fort, both high in the mountains.  The hamlet below is lovely, a footbridge over a stream connecting one end with the other, the stream's banks still thick with flowers and foliage --the vines have turned gold in the autumn sun, but it's still green everywhere.  The temperatures, too, are mild and made for cycling.  Only the stiff winds --the gusts throw our bicycles around a bit and test our control of them-- bespeak the beginning of the end of the cycle of warm weather.  Still, the weather is marvelous by the standards of New York, which is chilly now.

     I am in good form today and able not only to keep up, but at times, outpace the pack.  Attaque! shouts Patrice when I lurch forward past him.  I overhear Claude observe to Patrice, "Elle set costaud--" ("She's sturdy--") and I'm glad that in my last outing I'm making my best showing all season.

     The pot I have planned for after the ride's end, three hours later, is actually a sort of second lunch: I put out two bottles of award winning local reds, a platter of fresh charcuterie and saucisson from Icher, the local butcher: everything from blood sausage to head cheese to country paté and ham; along with a strawberry mousse refrigerator cake from the village boulangerie.  Everyone digs in, talking and joking animatedly.

     "How much do you understand, when everyone talks at once?" Jamie asks me.  We agree we miss about a quarter of what is said in the flurry of talk.

      Not that we're excluded from the conversation because we can't follow the rapid flow of words: at one point, George tries out his Spanish on me --he has a great accent and just the right intonation to sound like an average Spaniard.  Which leads several people to remark that the Spanish speak more loudly than the French, so much so that they can be heard several feet away. --A remark with which I agree, by the way.  The French place a value on speaking softly and on restraint in expression, neither of which interests the Spanish.

       The French also place a value on following the rules, even if only their idea of the rules. Spaniards, on the other hand, abandon all pretense of doing so, and just say they'll do what they want to do, to hell with the rules.  Hence the distinctiveness of each people.

      At some point all the wine has been drunk and the merits of each commented on; two thirds of the platter is gone and the cake entirely consumed.  At which point everyone picks up the dishes and brings them into the kitchen.

      "If my wife saw me doing this, she would be shocked" Claude says, sotto voce.  Everyone behaves like a gentleman and before they leave, I kiss each one and wish them Bonne Année --a good New Year.  They have been a kind of second family to me here, welcoming me and looking after me.  I would not have chosen to settle here had it not been for their hospitality to me last year.  One year later, I still feel grateful for their friendship, and good humor.

                                                                           ***

       At one point, I thought I wanted to put have a new bath put in on the top floor of the house while I was away.  It seemed a very practical idea: I could return to a house better outfitted for visitors, and I would not have to have workmen in the house when I was there.  I was wiling to pay what was required to accomplish the project and had a plumber give me his estimate for the work.  I had someone in mind for the job of general contractor, Lars, who has done such good work for me fixing my shutters.

     Lars works on large projects and has put in bathrooms --he put in a full bath in a house that belongs to an ex-pat couple who live on Avenue du Minervois.  I've seen the bathroom, and it's just what I would like to see on my top floor.  I've also seen the bathroom Lars put in in his own house on Avenue Montgaillard, another good piece of work.

     So Lars can do the job.  The thing is, he doesn't want to.  He's too busy now, but even later on in the year, he's not sure he wants the job, which isn't what he really wants to do.  He wants to do more creative work --decorative painting.

     Which is too bad, because I trust Lars, which is important.  Too many other workmen I've spoken to here are vague about prices and when they will complete jobs.  It seems that in the Midi work gets done very, very slowly:

     --The re-gilding of the altarpiece of Notre Dame du Cros by gilders in Provence took two years (and the crown of the altarpiece remained ungilded, notwithstanding);

     --My friend Roseline Amen has 45-year old exterior shutters she would like to have replaced: she has been waiting two years for new shutters.

     So I have arrived at practical solution to the lack of a toilet on the top floor of the house, adjoining the lovely bedroom overlooking the hills:

      I bought a toilet for the homebound.

      The pharmacist in Caunes sold it to me.  It has been manufactured like a chair in "Danish modern" style and has deep pink cushions.

      I had originally thought of buying a chamber pot --I used one as a little girl-- but a chair is much easier to use.  The "chamber pot" slips out from the chair and being steel, can be easily cleaned.

      The cost of my planned renovation would be thirty thousand dollars.  The toilet cost me--
      Eighty-eight euros --about one hundred twelve dollars.

     To the Caunois there's nothing at all strange about the solution I chose to the problem of having no bathroom on the third floor.  Chamber pots were commonly used in homes in Caunes until not too long ago, and some people still use them:

      "My mother-in-law still uses one" Christine, the owner of La Marbrerie, tells me.  "That's her solution to not having a bathroom  on the floor where her bedroom is."

     I leave Caunes Thursday morning a very happy home owner.

                                                                     

   

     

   

I Got Her Wrong: Toulouse

Friday, October 17, 2014

     If French cities are women --as the feminine gender of the word --la ville-- would suggest, Lyon is an ageless beauty who keeps up the tradition of elegant silks, Carcassonne a mussed old lady who hasn't changed her make-up in fifty years; and Toulouse --Toulouse is a modern woman who updates her look each season and who knows what's going on in the world, the French equivalent of the female New York Times reader.

     Montpellier is a university town, so it would be a woman focused less on style than making a statement of one sort or another.  While all these concentrations have their merits, Toulouse projects ambition as no other city in the south --perhaps no other city in France-- does.  Airbus, the Franco-German aeronautic consortium, has its headquarters in Toulouse.  As a result, the big accounting firms, Ernst & Young and KPMG, have offices there, along with many other players in the big business of making commercial jets.  The style of the 19th century buildings is not much different from that of Montpellier --both have lovely ironwork balconies-- but Toulouse's are taller and made of red brick, rather than white building materials, as in Montpellier.

     The main shopping streets in the city center are pedestrianized, broad avenues with every high-end European brand represented.  The Garonne flows through the city, dividing the neighborhoods of Saint Etienne in the center from more casual Saint Cyprien on the other side.  It was in Saint Cyprien that I went for a lunch that could have come from an alternative restaurant in San Francisco: everything I ate at Les Temps des Vendanges was market-fresh, from the arugula salad with pomegranate seeds, tuna, and figs flavored with coriander and tarragon; to the hake with sweet potato purée and a mirepoix of carrots and onions chopped tiny; to the three cheeses --sheep, goat and cow's milk; to the just-sweet-enough creamy rice pudding I had for dessert.  The price for the four courses, VAT and tip included: about $50.

     After lunch, I went on to one of the major museums in Toulouse, the Musée des Augustins, an enormous former monastery of red brick. Its forty foot ceilings allow even very large paintings to be lined up on top of each other, a 19th century way of hanging works on canvas.  The garden in the central courtyard is planted with flowers and herbs that were part of the medieval cloister garden: it too, is very large.  The ground floor also includes three huge rooms of wonderful medieval sculpture.  Seeing the giant statues of the saints I was reminded of the omnipresence of the symbols of medieval Christianity: as so many people could not read, images conveyed the message the Church wanted to communicate.  I find the wood and stone carvings so lifelike and dynamic in their monumentality --and unthreatening, unlike Tilman Riemenschneider's unseeing holy men.  The French style has delicacy without their austerity.

     I save the retrospective of Orientalist painter Benjamin Constant for my day's end, and go on to the Fondation Bamberg, housed in another very large red brick building of medieval style.  I have never heard of the Fondation Bamberg, and once in its galleries, wonder why I hadn't: it contains a spectacular collection of Old Masters as well as early twentieth century New Masters.  I have to list some of the painters by name: Works by Lucas Cranach, the younger Breughel, Van der Weyden, de Hooch, Tintoretto, Veronese, Guercino, Clouet, Canaletto, Guardi, Longhi,  Pisarro, Fantin-Latour, Gauguin, Derain, Matisse, Vlaminck, Signac, Dufy, Sickert, Bonnard, Vuillard, Utrillo, Boudin, Sisley, Caillebotte, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec --and others.

     Georges Bamberg was from a German family from Cologne, but born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1915.  He began collecting at seventeen, and when he decided to open his collection to the public winnowed it to make it more coherent; notwithstanding, the collection is massive.  The paintings are displayed on walls decorated with green flocked wallpaper, with antique chairs and period lighting placed in the rooms to give the feeling of being inside a domestic interior.  The overall effect is staggering.  It is as if someone picked the paintings up the way we shop for the week at a supermarket: buying one of everything we think we'll need.  The abrupt division of the collection into two such distinct halves, Old Masters and early twentieth century art, marks it as a personal collection, not a museum --but what a collection!

     My last gallery visit of the day is back to the Musée des Augustins to see the Benjamin Constant retrospective.  This is not the Benjamin Constant who loved Madame de Recamier, but Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant, who lived from 1845-1902, and was one of France's most successful late 19th century academic painters.  He made his name painting Orientalist scenes of sultans, pashas, emirs, eunuchs and janissaries, women in harems.  When the vogue for them passed he became a celebrated painter of portraits, including a full-sized one of Queen Victoria, and another of Pope Leo XIII.  He was financially successful and well-regarded in academic circles, his gifts as a colorist melding perfectly with his handling of the exotic subject matter.  The colors jump out at you; the images, while clichés of imperialism, are luscious.  Perhaps that is why Constant was denied the Gold Medal of the pre-eminent organization of French painters, the Salon --of which he was an official, for many years.  He finally won it for a somber portrait of his handsome eldest son, Andre, dressed like a gentleman.

     I had put off visiting Toulouse all summer, as I had been put off Toulouse by my experience trying to get to Blagnac Airport during my first weeks in Caunes.  I had to pick up visitors there and being new behind the wheel, made a hash of both trips.  La Ville Rose, as Toulouse is known, held no interest for me.  Today, having time on my hands, and more confidence behind the wheel, I made the trip, which took ninety minutes.  I am so glad I did.
  

A Literary Groupie In Montpellier

Wednesday, October 15, 2014
10:00 p.m.

     I have just returned from a round trip to Montpellier, two hours away.  I made the drive early this afternoon to see Emmanuel Carrère, author of La Royaume, a well-received tome divided into two very different parts.   The first is about Carrère's life as a fervent Catholic thirty years ago and his eventual loss of faith.  The second part is a history of the early Christian church, focusing particularly on Paul and his acolyte, Luke, author of one of the Gospels.

     Carré, who is fifty-six, has the face and physique of a lightweight boxer who has seen better days.  His eyes are rather close-set, and his face has deep furrows around sunken cheeks.  His large paunch --which contrasts with his slender build-- suggests a man for whom physical exercise is not high on the list of priorities.  His mother is a historian and a member of the Academie Française; his father was an insurance broker.  Carrère was born to, and continues to enjoy, privilege: one reason why, at the end of La Royaume, he says "I will never be admitted to the Kingdom.".  In person, he is very soft spoken and thoughtful, as I found when I met him at Librarie Sauramps, the marvelous --and enormous-- bookstore off the central square in Montpellier, place de la Comedie.

     The book uses all sorts of anachronisms --likening some historical figures to  Ché Guevara and Vladmir Putin, for instance-- to render its subjects compelling, a technique which serves what Carrère admits is a pedagogic purpose.   Despite having long ago lost the desire to participate in Christian religious services, Carrère still has an enduring fascination with Christianity, which he describes at one point in Le Royaume as a kind of science fiction.  He also retains a great respect for many practicing Christians he has known personally, including his godmother, who died fifteen years ago.  He mentions that whenever he saw her, a fervent Catholic and a composer of sacred music, her first question was always, "How is your soul?"

     Not always very well, when he was young, is the answer.  Using religious practice as a way of organizing a troubled psychic life, Carrère became rigidly observant.  No one event led him to lose his faith, but perhaps greater emotional maturity --and the ending of an unhappy early marriage-- left him feeling less dependent on the rituals of the Mass to prop up his psychic state.  Those things and five bouts of psychoanalysis.

     Even as a secular fifty-something, Carrère is scrupulously conscientious intellectually -but never boring.  For instance, in the second part of the book he admits to a fondness for pornographic films.

     He does not, however, make the observation in passing, detachedly.  He describes, instead, coming upon a pornographic snippet --of a young woman masturbating-- on the Internet.  He tells us that, upon seeing it, he was enchanted --and absolutely convinced that the young woman was not a professional.  Which leads him to observe that certain devotional works of Marian art are caricatures of Mary; and a few --like Caravaggio's, for which his mistress modeled-- teem with life.  So, continues Carrère's argument, in pornography, just as in sacred art, the same questions of authenticity arise.

     The passage is dropped into the book like a depth charge.

      Which is why I want to ask him about it.  I get my chance at the "Meeting With" held after the book signing --it's why I drove two hours to Montpellier, and will have to drive two hours back.  "Yes!"  --Just as I was the very first person to have my copy of "La Royaume" signed, I am the first person picked to ask a question, which I have written down.

     The event is held in the auditorium of Montpellier's Mediatheque, and there is also a simultaneous transmission outside the auditorium, as the hall fills completely.  I am nervous, but I have my script.  I read out in French:

     Perhaps because I am not capable of expressing my intimate desires so publicly, I was struck by the pornographic episode in "La Royaume".

     At first reading, I thought it was your way of saying "I'm a sinner."

     However, I heard you speak at another event and say that it was only a way of making the point that in the profane sphere, as well as the sacred, the same questions of authenticity arise.

     My question remains, though. You have lost your faith, but have you abandoned the idea of--

     THE PEACH!

     The minute the words are out of my mouth, one half of the audience, cries out

     "LE PECHÉ!"

     That half is the censorious half of any group of people in France, without which the group would not be French.  I have committed a malapropism, ending my question using the word for  --a peach-- a feminine noun --instead of le peché, the masculine noun and the word for "sin".

     The other half of the audience laughs.  (I can only imagine that the audience outside the auditorium, mostly young -much younger than the senior citizens in the auditorium-- must have found my gaffe hilarious.)

     Emmanuel Carré, however, just takes my question.  He kindly elides the gaffe on which the audience focused:

     I agree with your analysis of my purpose in inserting the story in the book.  As to "sin", however, I wanted to stay away from that idea, which is so unproductively loaded with guilt.  I do, however, recognize --and I know the emotion well-- the existence of feelings of culpability.  I don't, however, think there is anything wrong with watching pornography on the Internet.

     I am exhilarated at having articulated my question cogently, if not in perfect French.  I drive through the night in a state of exaltation, Radio Classique keeping me company, the cool air pushing me forward towards Caunes, where I arrive about 9:45 p.m.

     The village is absolutely quiet.  The contrast between the fervent intellectual life of Montpellier and the sleepy rural village could not seem greater.

   

And The Days Dwindle Down To A Precious Few

October 13, 2014

     Nicole Leveling, my new cleaner, arrived just before 9:00 a.m., minutes after Beau and I returned from our regular morning walk through Caunes.  I think she is a keeper, which is a relief.  She will help me organize my closets in addition to cleaning, so that all the linens along with my clothes are easily accessible.  I have bought additional storage units at the local shopping center and begun reorganizing in advance of her return Thursday, so I am feeling ahead of the game.

     A chance encounter with a water meter reader from Carcassonne Agglo means that I have dealt with one of the more problematic tasks associated with my departure --reading the water and electric meters. I saw the man in his truck coming slowly down my street and stopped him, asking whether he had anything to do with meter reading.  If it were New York City, he would not have given me the time of day --instead the man stopped his car in front of the house, came inside and searched for the meter, which I had not been able to find.  (It was located underneath the kitchen sink, not the likeliest place.)  He gave me the address where to send the reading before I left, although he thought I ought to check with the mairie to make sure I had the zip code right.  I happened to be on my way there on precisely that errand, when I stopped him.

     Imagine my joy when Madame Davila, the mairie secretary not only found the address I needed, but gave me a printed form I could easily fill out and mail to the address given to satisfy the meter reading requirement.  I know how to read the compteur for the electricity and I already have a bill Electricité de France reading, so I can send it to the address on the bill and be done with that, too.

     I repacked my bags and left behind much I thought I'd bring back to New York.  After checking with DHL, it became obvious that even if I could get the courier service to pick up the two suitcases I filled (largely with French language books), I would have to fill out several customs declarations and print them out before.  After shipping a twenty foot container to Caunes, I never want to see a French customs form again: the books will have to wait to be read next year.

     Beau visits Dr. Mougin next Monday and will be vaccinated against rabies again, so that he can return with me using his Pet Passport and I mine, without my having to ever see the U.S. Department of Agriculture office at Kennedy Airport again.  He still does not like being left alone and it doesn't take much to get him barking if he is alone --the hammering from the next-door-neighbors' home repair project, for instance-- but he is much better.

     The house is secure, although I still find unsettling the news of the recent robberies.  I had a long talk about them --and the car burnings last week-- with Roseline Amen, a retired emergency room nurse I have gotten to know through my participation in the church fair at Notre Dame du Cros.

     I do not worry about my personal safety, she told me.  I leave my shutters open --I don't want to lock myself in, although some people think I should.  

     Vis-a-vis the latest incidents, the village has changed.  It used to be just wine-growers,  --and abstemious ones, by the way.  My family were typical, the value all held was the value of work.  Today, as a psychologist explained to me, the most important thing is leisure.  People work without thinking they will stay at any one job.  In the village there are now families --one in particular-- where no one works.  Whenever something happens, they are the usual suspects.

     It turns out that that family is the family that lives on the rue de Notre Dame, not far from me.

     They are very correct, though.  If you meet them on the street, they will always greet you politely.  However, I did hear one of them --he now lives across the street from me-- call his girlfriend a "dirty whore".  If you meet him on the street, however, he will greet you as anyone else in the village would.  Do they do a little "dealing"? --they probably do, to make ends meet, as even with the subsidies they receive, they need a bit more to live as they do.  

     Then, too, perhaps some of them burglarize houses in the village.  There's a couple --two women-- who live down the street.  They left the village after spending the summer here and a few weeks later, their car disappeared.  The neighbors who keep an eye on their house saw it was missing.  Now this part of the village is not one that anyone not intimately familiar with the village would know --only someone from the village, someone who knew that the two women had closed up the house could have successfully stolen their car.

     It also turns out that the name of the family, Saoudi-- is the same as that of my very first cleaner, the tiny young woman who spent four hours doing nothing when she was here.  In Rosline's opinion, she is not necessarily one of the relatives of the family of Fagins, though:

     I would not be in the least worried, Marta, either about your personal safety, or the house, if you've fortified it as you have.  The problems in the village are more than crimes, they are symptoms of a social pathology that is, unfortunately, now common in France.  In my brother's village a vigneron filled his barrels with grapes only to find that local teenagers had defiled them with refuse.  If there is even one fragment of glass inside, he's lost the value of the entire barrel.  

     I talked with the head of the local gendarmerie group this afternoon about the car burnings and the open consumption of marijuana.  This is his perspective:

     Today, in France, 60 to 80 percent of teenagers consume cannabis regularly.  Many start using it as early as twelve --I know of one case where a promising student ruined his chances of a better life, by becoming dependent on cannabis.  I know there is open consumption in front of the bank branch, but the problem for the gendarmerie is that if we approach, the users throw away the goods.  Also, under French law, use is not a crime, it is a violation of the health code.  The sanction is to be sent to a health service to address the dependency.  

     I asked about the torching of the cars last week:

     The investigation is, unfortunately, continuing.  The suspects are teenagers from Rieux, all with a dossier as long as my arm.  However, as they are minors, even if they are brought before the judge, he will just tell them not to do it again.  The burning of the car is an attempt to destroy the fingerprints that would inculpate the joyriders: "CSI" --the American TV program has taught them that.  If arrested the suspects face two charges --stealing the car and burning it-- not minor offenses.  However, proving the suspects are the perpetrators and as minors, bringing them to account --that's not easily done.

     Rosline Amen has the last word, which concerns a story I heard last year about an American woman beaten within an inch of her life by an intruder, a workman she had engaged:

     That was a "settling of scores".  Something happened between them during his work for her --she had one understanding, he had another-- it can happen.  What he did was personally directed towards her.  I understand that she returned to the United States to have the necessary surgery.  

     Whereas in the case of the burning of the car in the Place d'Europe, that was mere vandalism.  I happened to run into the elderly woman who owns the car incinerated.  She is terribly upset --she thinks it was done against her personally.  I tried to convince her that it wasn't, but she's unable to see it that way.

     It would be a cliché --but an apt one-- to say that as beautiful as Caunes is, it's not paradise, that it has problems just like anywhere else.  As Patrice Cartier said to me a few days ago, in response to my curiosity about these incidents,

     You've lived here long enough now to know what the life of the village is and not be surprised.

     Which, in its way, is a great compliment.

          

   

   

Unsettled; A Drive to Lyon and Grignan

October 12, 2014

     My departure date, October 23, approaches and it is time to put all in order.  Lars was here Monday to make needed repairs to all the shutters and to install latches on the shutters, a precaution intended to prevent a burglary.  And there are burglaries --it is a fact of life in any area where there are second homes.

     More unsettling than burglaries, however, are two incidents involving cars which took place earlier this week.  Two cars, one belonging to an elderly woman who kept it in the parking lot between rue des Écoles and Avenue du Minervois known as Place d'Europe, were incinerated.  The theory making the rounds about that, is that visitors from Rieux, the nearby village, came to Caunes to drink and, having no way of getting home, started the car, but could not get all the way there.  Abandoning the car, they gratuitously set it on fire.

     The story, to use an apt metaphor, spread like wildfire.  At the grocery store opposite the mairie, Marlène, the owner, gave her version of the story.

     The police know who did it, because someone saw them.  It's an outrage, but these things happen now.

     When bad things happen in Caunes, there are three persons likely responsible: firstly, "people from Rieux"; secondly, a family that lives on the village outskirts.  Both are perceived as Maghrebin, that is, Arabs from North Africa, natural scapegoats. Thirdly suspect is a transient family, headed by an alcoholic mother and father.

      How can the police know who did it?  They tell people they "know", but how do they "know", since the car was not set on fire in the Place d'Europe, but outside of Caunes?

     Patrice Cartier, a local writer, shared his point of view on the incident, a careful point of view decidedly in the minority.

     Drugs are not unknown in Caunes, as in the rest of the world.  Twice I have walked Beau along Avenue du Minervois in the evening and, passing alongside the bank, seen a couple of teenagers perched on the nearby ledge, a distinct perfume of marijuana traveling in their wake.

     Possession of marijuana is illegal in France, so I was surprised to see it being used openly, especially opposite Le Café de la Grande Fontaine, the one place in the village that is open non-stop, seven days a week, from morning to night.

     Yes, it's illegal, but in the small villages no one says a thing.  The Gendarmerie have other things to do than to bother themselves with bored teenagers smoking "kif", says Christine Bourges, who runs La Marbrerie.

     The "broken window" theory has evidently not penetrated the local consciousness, nor that of the gendarmerie.

      The transient family is not Maghregin and includes the fourteen year old girl, pretty and blonde, I saw the second time I scented marijuana in the air.

      Christine tells me, "C'est une famille qui se dégrade, tout le monde le sais."  ("It's a family in décline, everyone knows it."

      In the course of our conversation, Patrice too, refers to this family, and in the same way.

      But what to do?  The family is behind in their rent and is going to be evicted.  The children may be taken from their parents and placed in foster care.  Christine hires such children --she just took on a young man who cleans, helps in the kitchen and with anything else that needs doing.  His father is absent, his mother unable to raise him, so, at sixteen, he is on his own.

     Hopefully, he'll stick with the work --it's the only way out for him.  I know, because it was the only way out for me.  I've had several such hires and often they don't work out, but I want to do it because it was because of people who helped me that I found my way out of my hole.

                                                                          ***

     I made the last of my long-distance trips on Tuesday: four and a half hours to Lyon, in the Isère département, one way.  I set myself the test as the drive to Nice Thursday, October 23 will be just as long, and I did not want to never have done a drive of similar length before.  Beau stayed with Madame Froment, so I was also able to make the trip without worrying about how Beau would handle it.

     Lyon is known as one of the best places to eat in France.  Paul Bocuse made his reputation there, and still runs several restaurants in the city.  I made reservations at two restaurants, one of them being Sud, his bistro off Place Belcour, Lyon's gigantic central square; the other on rue du Palais Grillet --
 Palégrié.  I found both on the French website Le Fooding, where savvy French go to find restaurants around the country.  Both were delicious, although Palégrié's prix fixe menu: soup of mushrooms puréed with a confit of egg yolk and dried beef strips perched on the bowl's edge; sautéed skate; and, for dessert, a local cheese called faisselle was the more memorable.

     My airbnb in Villeurbaine, just over the Lyon city limits, was with a medical student, Clotilde Maury, with whom I was entirely in simpatico.  In fact, I was entirely simpatico with Lyon, a cosmopolitan city with much to recommend it.  Great museums, the historic association with silk weaving, a fine theatre, the Theatre des Celestins, and a diverse population.

     It was in Villeurbaine that I saw the first Hasidic Jew I saw outside of Paris.  And the many populations that inhabit the Lyon area seem somehow less marginalized than in the Midi --which is curious, because the Midi is where the people of France's former colonies predominate, each in their ghetto.

     And the Lyonnais are beautifully dressed, whatever their age.  I felt my city roots seeing men in well-tailored suits and ties and enjoyed the pleasure it gave me.  At last, somewhere in France where care is taken with dress!

     I had intended to try a third restaurant the day of my departure, but spotting a roadside marker for the village of Grignan, home to the château where the famous letter writer, Madame de Sevigné, visited her daughter and son-in-law, I decided to go there instead.  Grignan is in the Provence region, in the Drôme département about two hours away and halfway home for me.  In the summer, the place is the setting for numerous festivals held at the château that attract the well-heeled and cultured.  The Drôme is the home of million Euro villas, so its manicured aspect is the product of careful landscaping.  The château is set on a high hill overlooking all of the valley and in the distance Mont Ventoux is visible.

     What is amazing to me about the Château de Grignan, in addition to its spectacular placement in the landscape, is that it is almost all a reconstruction.  Almost entirely destroyed during the French Revolution, it was purchased by a famous dandy, Boni de Castellane, at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Needing money, he sold all the interiors before ultimately selling the châeau to a very wealthy widow, Marie Fontaine.  Marie Fontaine devoted the remaining years of her life --and fortune-- to reconstoring the château to its Renaissance apogée.  The exquisite and magnificent ivory façade is all the product of restoration.  The interiors are all of Madame Fontaine's choosing and do not, in general, reflect the period during the late 17th century when Madame de Sevigné was in residence.  In fact, the guided tour concentrates on giving a brief history of each piece, rather than on Madame de Sevigné, by far a more interesting subject.

     There is a lovely restaurant and inn, Le Clair du Plume, which is "the" place in Grignan, it seems.  There is a rather unfriendly village café, Le Sevigné, and lots of tiny boutiques selling clothes and pottery, two used bookstores and several art galleries.  One of the galleries, adjoining one of the bookstores, is run by a painter who began her career in fashion in Paris.  She let me into her fellow-shopowner's bookstore, where I picked up a set of the entire correspondence of Madame de Sevigné in three volumes, along with book of papers delivered at a symposium devoted to the 300th anniversary of the death of Madame de Sevigné in 1794.

     One of the papers deals with badinage, the playful back-and-forth between two people with a perfect understanding of each other.  Madame de Sevigné lived in Paris and was forced to see her daughter move away to Grignan, to live with her husband, who was six years younger than Madame de Sevigné and fourteen years older than her daughter.  He was a widower twice, so this was the third marriage for him, and he was anxious to produce a male heir.  Which he did, although the son died in his twenties, the estate passing to a daughter instead.  It was Madame de Sevigné's daughter who first published the first collection of her mother's letters to her, not long after Madame's death.

     Madame de Sevigné is considered by many writers --not all of them French-- to be a genius in her self-expression.  Virginia Woolf considered the Letters a great companion, as did Marcel Proust, and many authors in the centuries preceding.  She lived during the reign of Louis XIV and was part of his court, knowing everyone, their merits and their trajectories at court.  So reading her is not only an example of superb French, but a window into the world of the court of the Sun King.  Between the Letters of Madame de Sevigné and the Memoirs of the acerbic Duc de Saint-Simon, the splendors of the age unfold.  I was lucky to get a chance to experience Grignan and its château in the off-season, although I was happy to return to the much less sophisticated Minervois at day's end.
   

    

   

French workmen

October 6, 2014

     Autumn winds have made themselves known today in Caunes: there is no denying it: or the fact that  Wednesday, October 24 will be my last day for the year at 10, porte de Narbonne.

     I thought I had arranged matters so there would be no rush to complete tasks.  That is true, for the most part, but there are a few items I was unaware of that need to be resolved before I depart:

     1. the electric and water meters need to be read during the month my contract assigns a meter reader to me, November, when I will be gone;

     2. the shutters in the house need to be leveled, so that they are flush with the exterior walls when they close, a precaution against robbery, as well as away of extending their life.  The front door, whose wood has swelled, making it an athletic event to open and close, needs to have its supports readjusted.

     3. SFR, another phone, internet and television service, has to replace Orange, which is more expensive.

     4. The old Butagaz butane canister that supplies gas for the stove top needs to sealed off and the new one -with a new feeding tube-- installed.

     5. The house needs to be cleaned from top to bottom, linens placed in giant garbage bags with lavender sachets inside to keep away bugs and the damp.

     As to #1, I have been told that it is possible to paste a piece of paper behind a shutter where a meter reader will find it and take the figure I write down from the meters the day I leave.

     As to #2, Lars Leveling, a Frenchman of Dutch origin has been here today to readjust the shutters, drilling into place crossbars that right them.

     As to #3 and #4, Lars will try to help me when he comes back Friday to complete the work on the shutters.

     As to #5, Nicole, Lars' German fiancée will come by next Monday and on October 24.

     Nicole and Lars met in Australia and decided to move to Caunes together.  They have two young children and will be married next May.  Lars is much in demand because his work is excellent and his price reasonable.  He is thirty-seven, strapping and full of energy.  He charges the cost of materials plus 15 Euros per hour, which includes paying him for a half-hour lunch and the time it takes him to put his tools back in his truck.  He works steadily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and he is punctual.

     I thought that when we agreed on the jobs to be done before I left it might be the beginning of --as Claude Rains said to Humphrey Bogart in the last scene in Casablanca-- "a beautiful relationship".  I had visions of myself going away, staying in touch with Lars via e-mail to approve plans and wire funds, returning to find that the top floor of the house was fully renovated with a new bedroom, full bath and even a sauna.  Lars put in a similar set-up in the house of a couple who live on Caunes' main street some years ago, so I know he has the ability to, at least, supervise the laying down of a concrete floor and tile on top, if not plumbing.

     But he's not interested: he's full up until next summer and he thinks a cement company could do the job more easily.  He could lay the tile, but that will not be done until after the tile is laid on top of the concrete --something else he would rather not do, because I've steel beams holding up the roof foundation.  He'd be happy to do the walls, to consult on the bathroom fixtures and install them.  Pressing him for names that could do the other tasks, he just told me there were many, although those who do very good work were hard to find.

     "I have a good reputation in the village, and I want to keep it, I want my clients to be happy."

     --Even if that means turning down jobs, it seems.

     Yet I have to admire Lars' perspicacity: in a small area like Caunes and the surrounding villages, opinions about workmen's quality of work are the coin of the realm, freely exchanged and of different value.  Many men work in the building trades, the competition is intense and the make-up of work teams is fluid, with carpenters, plumbers, plasterers and electricians jumping from one to another.  There are no residential general contractors: people who are aware of all aspects of a job and coordinate the sequence that has to be followed to execute a renovation project in line with the client's wishes, work in the commercial sector.  On the residential side, there are plumbers who manage plumbers, painters who manage painters, electricians who manage electricians, but no one with the expertise --and the inclination to manage all aspects of a job.  I think Lars has the ability to do so, but he doesn't wish to. Working as he does, independently for the most part, usually the last workman to come on to a job, he doesn't butt heads with workmen from other trades. --That also helps his reputation with clients, who engage him for small jobs and large before and after a large project is completed --more or less to a client's satisfaction.

     I should also be grateful to Lars for not leading me on.  Anyone who ever read Peter Mayle's A Year In Provence remembers the impenetrability of the masons, their unreliability and the particular frustration Mayle felt over having a circular stone table set up in the garden.  Lars has given me reason to think about whether I really need to put a second full bath in this house, given the undoubted aggravation that juggling several workmen --each with a different way of working-- would cause.

     I can live without the extra bathroom for the foreseeable future, I have learned.

Beating The Bureaucracy - A French Sport

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

     As the days left me in France become fewer and fewer, I concentrate on tying up loose ends before I  close the house and wend my way to Paris October 28.  The taxes, the phone, internet and television subscription; the insurance on the house, the portable phone contract: the goal is to leave all in place so that next year I don't spend half the summer battling the different French bureaucracies.

     Take the phone company I signed up with, Orange: because I was staying in France more than 3 months, I was not eligible for the contract for a residence secondaire.  I pay 57, 80 Euros a month for the three services, too much to stay a subscriber through the year.   But if I cancel, in addition to the 50 Euro cancellation fee, I lose the phone number I have now and I have to start the process of signing up all over again.  This year I lost six weeks trying to get the phone set up and battled with Orange over whether I should have been charged for technicians' visits.  Ultimately, I had to spend 176,80 Euros to call in an electrician to jump start my services.

     Thankfully, some competition between the different phone, internet and television companies exists. Another company, SFR, will allow me to keep my present phone number; better, their price for the same services is almost 20 Euros cheaper.  I have just enough time to cancel my Orange contract, send back their equipment and install that SFR sends me.  I will still pay 50 Euros for canceling the service, but as a long-term proposition, SFR pays, allowing me to keep the house "plugged in" year round at a reasonable cost --and hopefully, saving me hours of aggravation in the years to come.  I learned about the cheaper service from a French woman who is a master of the bureaucracy.

      Vis-a-vis the error in identifying me as a taxpayer at the Trésor Publique, the notaire replied to my e-mail and sent me a copy of the document establishing me as the owner via e-mail.  The error was the Trésor Publique's.  I will visit tomorrow to try to straighten out the error, so the bill for the taxe d'habitation gets to me next month.   Ça sera compliqué, the woman at the Trésor Publique  told me when I highlighted the error and asked that it be rectified.  The bureaucracy will resist.

       Next year, with all my regular expenses mensualisès-- paid automatically-- I should be able to return to the house in Caunes without dreading the bureaucracy.  The chimney sweep has to clean the flue --a yearly requirement.  And next year the roof's timbers have to be sprayed to attack any xyllophage colonies: like termites. these insects eat wood.  The men who perform these works are independent contractors, so there's no bureaucracy involved.

       The life I've led here has been a French life, albeit with fewer constraints.  I have used the health services and found them to be at a high level.  As a private individual going to a private clinic the service was excellent, although I understand that public clinics are at a comparable level, if the bureaucracy greater.

     There are those who know their way around the bureaucracies and get the most of them.  It pays to educate yourself about them if you are receiving health care under the Secu, the French health system: if you know how to work the system the benefits are much broader than those most Americans receive, jaw-droppingly so.

     I give you the example of a Danish woman who lives in Carcassonne and is covered under the Secu: In her eighties and suffering from cogestive heart failure, she and her husband are determined to take their usual holiday in Biarritz this year, notwithstanding.

     The woman, whom I'll call Gräne, needs oxygen to live.  As carrying an oxygen tank with them on their trip is impractical, Gräne called the Secu and explained her situation.  The Secu will deliver an oxygen tank large enough to tide Gräne through her holiday to her hotel in Biarritz.  The cost of the tank, its delivery and pick-up at the holiday's end?  All covered by the Secu.  

     Gräne is a master of the bureaucracy.