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.
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