Napoleon, the first modern dictator, a creature born of the French Revolution, cuts like an Alexander through the Gordian knot of French history. Along with the Revolution's abolition of English weights in favor of the metric system, Napoleon imperiously reorganized France by creating departments, which he then numbered alphabetically, cutting across historical provinces and territories. So ancient Perigord and Quercy became, at a stroke, the Dordogne - named for the major river - unromantic but brutally pragmatic, like the little general himself.
Numbed by in-flight pseudo-sleep, I started our trip by leaving one of our guidebooks in the seat pocket of the KLM Skyhopper that flew us down from Amsterdam to Toulouse, gateway to southwestern France. After hitting the ATM (in the e-world, there is no longer any need for traveler's checks or currency exchange, just stick your plastic in a machine) I waited to collect our luggage while Nancy secured our rental car, a silver Citroen Saxo hatchback.
Seems like every European vacation begins with us driving a rental car in addled circles around a foreign ring road in the gray rain. After some fatigue-worsened misadventures and frustrations, found our hotel and climbed into bed for our 1 1/2 hour body-clock-reset nap (Resetting Your Body Clock). Rising, showering, drove into Toulouse, a big pleasant sensible city that is the headquarters of Airbus Industrie, France's pride and joy. Parking in an expensive pay-and-display, toured the Musee Saint Raymond with a well-presented interesting usual collection of Roman antiquities recovered from the rubble under Toulouse's cathedral of St. Sernin. (Scratch the pavement in a French city and hit the ruins of a Roman town, usually better laid out.)
Bought a phone card (available in tobacco or newspaper stores), and to pep up our energy, had a coffee on Toulouse's Place du Capitole as the late-afternoon sunlight washed city hall's yellow sandstone into gold hues.
At dinner (maigret de canard; along with foie gras in every configuration, virtually the Perigordian national dishes), we were kitty-corner from a New Jersey couple who had a daughter living on Franklin Street in Cambridge. Like so many American couples we meet when traveling to Europe in October-November, they were between their fifties and seventies, married (for the second time, Nancy later speculated), grown kids off on their own (almost invariably, one lives near us), successful, fairly cultured, often traveling via Michelin (Guidebooks for France), and usually interested in us. Perhaps they see in us themselves twenty years before, as we see in them flickering possible futures for ourselves.
Our bedroom at home is a skylit third floor so day tiptoes in with a waking light massage, but on vacation Nancy draws all the curtains to dream like an opium eater. I, by contrast, have the day's itinerary planned out (Managing Your Itinerary) and am impatient to get rolling. By 10:00 am I had badgered Nancy downstairs for the hotel's breakfast and we were out, relocating to our in-town hotel.
In my original planning, I had miscalculated the dates - lost a day in the transatlantic - and thus had made a whole slew of reservations for one day too late ... a fact I discovered an hour before we were to leave for the airport. Thinking furiously, I had concluded we would just see Toulouse at the trip beginning rather than its end and frantically phoned to secure a one-night stand.
After checking in to our original target (which proved ironically not to be as pleasant as our hastily-arranged ring road motel), headed over to the Cathedral St. Sernin, a big gray space named after St. Saturnin. (To evolve Latin in French, just pronounce them as if you were drunk and had to slur everything down to no more than three syllables.) Martyred for not sacrificing a bull to a local pagan god, he was tied feet-first to its legs and dragged down stone steps until his skull cracked, an experience venerated in numerous monastic cloister capitals throughout the region.
Perhaps Nancy and I have become too-casual European travelers: aside from our lost guidebook, we both forgot film and Nancy had left her lipstick on the bedroom bureau, so we occupied ourselves picking up these items (an argument for starting one's trip in a large city, where you can find everything quickly), deliberately not calculating prices. As it turned out, with the euro's weakness the franc was at record lows (FF 7.50 per $1), so everything proved cheap.
The Musee Augustin, a former convent, has a lifespan typical of ecclesiastical structures: deconsecrated in 1791, returned to the city by Napoleon, used as a factory, then a tobacco curing shed, rescued just before collapse and now restored. It had good lapidary (sculpture fragments). The Musee Georges Labit, on the other hand, was a converted Moorish house endowed by its owner, an Asian enthusiast who had died in 1905 at 34 of tuberculosis or equivalent dissolute disease, leaving his home mulched to the wainscoting with Asiatica. Now thoroughly 'restored' (gutted) it was sparely furnished, well lit, and intriguing. The few visitors were outnumbered by the security guards who all clustered like chattering pigeons around the entrance, ignoring the visitors.
Les Jacobins is the former abbey church of the original Dominican followers of St. James Major (called St. Jacques in French, hence Jacobins, The Way of Saint James), unusual in that its apseless nave was bisected by a line of thin columns, giving the church a light and luminous feel.
Stopped for late-afternoon tea in an Asian fast food cafeteria where young Vietnamese speaking liquid French offered Chinese or Japanese to Cameroon blacks with African-accented French who paid Amex and seated themselves next to tacky plaster jug-bearing Venuses.
Over the years, Nancy and I have come to view fine evening dining as among a country's legitimate vacation attractions, especially in France (which requires ascetic discipline at breakfast and lunch: Mastering the Art of Surviving French Cooking). In France there is a standard of culinary excellence: Michelin stars (pneumatic six-pointed balloons that Nancy and I nicknamed splotches). Three splotches go to only the world's best restaurants (about 35 in all France), and a restaurant's rise to or fall from three stars is national news. Even though Nancy and I are still tightwads on hotels, we now seek out better cooking, especially in Perigord and Quercy where the stars are thick on the ground.
Walked a mile and a half to dinner. Arriving at 8:15 pm, we were among the first, though as the evening wore on all the tables filled - always reserve dinner in a destination restaurant, because You Never Know. Had very good feuillété and magret de canard, as well as bits of cheese and an exquisite chocolate hot mousse pastry cake.
In France credit cards are done at-table with a rent-a-car-style hand-held portable reader that chitters up your bill while you watch. Our Amex-swiping waiter was delighted to discover we were Americans. He described for us his recent long holiday in the States, where he had driven from coast to coast (through Okla-oma). He loved it and was eager to go back. Talking to real Yanks made the memories that much more vivid for him, and we were pleased to listen.
After in-room cereal-fruit breakfast and coffee, loaded Saxo (whose weak engine led us to christen him Saxo le Faible) and headed north, into the real France of narrow highways bordered with lines of plane trees, bark mottled in cloud-cover gray - toward the cathedral town of Albi (www.mairie-albi.fr) noteworthy for its fortress cathedral, the tangible memory of the brutal suppression of Catharism known as the Albigensian Crusade.
After a hundred years of brutality in pursuit of orthodoxy, the Catholic Church was in no mood to brook any further dissension, so starting in 1265, the Church built in Albi the remarkable fortified cathedral of Ste. Cecille. Built of brick, it rises on Albi's western promontory adjacent to the equally fortified Episcopal Palace, commanding a view over the Tarn. Its sheer vertical bricked faces are pierced intermittently with windows that are little more than arrow slits. If a cathedral can be said to have belligerent attitude, Albi's does - and it has so stood for seven hundred years of gray rainy skies.
Culturally, politically, and linguistically, the Dordogne particularly and the Languedoc generally have been isolated from the French mainstream - Langue d'Oc means tongue of the oak tree, from the immense impenetrable forests that covered the area in Charlemagne's time. Far from Paris, close to a big Spanish country to the south, rural, the Dordogne is a melange of Texas, the Tennessee hillbilly country, and Vermont.
After having had picnic lunch in the gray mists adjacent to a Tarn bridge looking back at the cathedral, we crossed back to the former bishop's palace and fortress, now converted into the Musee Toulouse-Lautrec, after Albi's most famous son.
Collecting Saxo from the pay-and-display, headed north to Cordes-sur-ciel (Cordes under the sky), a mountaintop town whose settlement and fortification began in 1222. Though Cathar, Cordes was starved into submission and so escaped destruction. Like Perouges in Alsace or San Gimignano in Tuscany, Cordes was a retreat and market guarded by zigzagging cobblestoned streets through arched stone gates leading to a yellow sandstone town square boasting a well and a covered market where apocryphal legend has it three Inquisitors were executed.
To Cahors, checked in to our two-box hotel, admired the lovely small-balcony view over the broad, slow-flowing Lot (rhymes with goat). Showered, changed, and walked a mile into town for our Michelin splotch dinner: exquisite fishy mousse, a 'fig' of prosciutto and foie gras (the two cleverly rolled into the shape of a fig, complete with stem) and lovely duck.
Had a bottle of Saint Roch, a cabernet/ syrah based Cahors wine. When it ran empty (we had yet to discipline ourselves to a bottle a night), ordered a further two glasses. Flutter, flutter, two oversize red-wine goblets immediately arrived ... and sat empty. Nancy stopped eating, figuring this would summon forth the absent wine. But though the host saw our distress, the sommelier, the only person who under French dining protocol is allowed to bring the magic liquid ( The Hierarchy of French Dining Service), was occupying himself at another table, regaling a bored couple with an extended erudite exposition of the wine they were awaiting permission to drink despite the woman's unmistakable facial expression: Get out of here. Finally the host, beside himself with agitation, caught the sommelier's eye. The two disappeared into the kitchen briefly - we imagined polysyllabic Gallic imprecations and broken crockery - before the sommelier reappeared bearing the wine as if having transformed it from water personally, and poured. In ladylike fashion, the Boss lifted her fork.
For a nation rightly proud of its cooking, France is curiously unsympathetic to the other end of the digestive pipeline. Below the public toilette (where you can sit) they also sustain the W. C. (two ceramic footprints straddling a hole in the floor). And their hotel room design treats the toilet as an afterthought. Our bathroom was long and narrow, the toilet facing perpendicular so that my midnight-seated knees banged the wall. For a folding yardstick like me this represents - shall we delicately say - an obstacle to a satisfactory experience.
Rain pelted through the ground fog at breakfast. Outside the breakfast room's picture windows, geese honked aggressively, pushing their beaks through open windows to be fed by bemused retired Italian couples.
Cahors spans the Lot at the Pont Valentre, a remarkable medieval military bridge, complete with crenellated towers (stone parapet archer notches) and machicolations (overhanging catwalks with large floor holes for dropping boiling oil on attackers) begun in 1308. According to an old (and common) legend, the bridge's architect in a moment of weakness offered the Devil his immortal soul when the bridge was finished, then tricked him out of his prize by leaving a stone unplaced. Pont Valentre's topmost corner block sports a sculpted devil trying to wrestle it into position.
Cahors is the hometown of the notorious Jean de Cahors, Pope John XXII (1249-1334, Pope from 1316) in the time of the Great Schism and competing Rome and Avignon popes. He was so reviled that it was 650 years before another pope took the name John XXIII. Cahors' one-star cathedral, St. Etienne, has an 1135 ornamental north doorway that originally served as the west entrance with a tympanum last judgment.
Rain coming down, we were eager to be off to the caves of Pech Merle, but Nancy wanted to see the cloister, so we followed the church walls (like many in this area, over the years it had been built into the town walls and adjacent secular buildings). We came upon a modest door, whose handle Nancy tried (there are few doorknobs untwisted anywhere along our touring route). A tiny eighty-year-old nun in mufti eagerly invited us in, thrust pamphlets into our hands, and promised us the cloister after we read about the Way of St. James and saw the lovely photographs her students had taken.
After an absorbing half-hour giving her exhibit due respect (and learning about the Way), our hostess nun led us up a set of stairs to open the cloister. Some years back the cloister had become a convenient sheltered place for the youth of Cahors to do drug deals, "and you would not believe what it had become." A Flamboyant Gothic square much defaced during the Wars of Religion, it was now dark with soot, but to her it was a link to a fondly remembered past. The memories of travel come from the moments you do not plan, the unexpected gifts of learning and experience.
Back in Saxo, we drove furiously along the Lot through gray gloom, climbed the limestone hillsides (here Saxo gained his epithet). Three minutes before lunch-time closing, we spun to a halt in a shower of gravel in the parking lot of Pech Merle.
Geologically, Perigord and Quercy are a large limestone hump cut east-east by a series of rivers - from south heading north, they are the Tarn, Garonne, Lot, Dordogne, Correze, Vezere, and Isle - that all flow into one another and eventually into the Garonne's grand estuary at Bordeaux and into the Bay of Biscay. The soft limestone substructure means the rivers, whose flow rises and falls with winter snows and spring runoff, can cut spectacular loops of vertical cliff faces. Atop these are sprinkled picture-postcard towns and fortified chateaux. Underneath them are caves, some of the most extensive in Europe and - more important - the havens of Prehistoric Ice Age humanity, and thus repository of some of the oldest art in the world.
Hurriedly bought tickets and were led to a gift shop built into the hillside, where we followed cement steps down to a heavy iron door that our host swung open for us, handed us two plastic-sheathed guides in English, then closed it behind us.
Pech Merle (www.quercy.net/pechmerle has map and good photos) has vast caverns with wide aisles and narrow passages, and big and varied stalactites and stalagmites. Striking drapery arises where a small crack in an overhanging wall yields a slow stream that gradually builds up a narrow undulating fan of rock with different colored striations. Lit from behind, it resembles a gigantic strip of bacon.
Water, if allowed time, is irresistible. A round rock had been caught in a whirlpool and eroded, a grain at a time over millennia, into a spinning top in its own conical catchbasin, the two co-evolved. (A heavy rain twenty years ago had penetrated the cave and the top had been filmed, spinning in place, whirling silently in space.)
Caves notwithstanding, Pech Merle is made spectacular by its cave drawings: charcoal and ochre sketches of horses, bisons, and many huge woolly mammoths, all drawn with remarkable artistic sense and economy of line. Subtle, gentle, knowing drawings, they speak across time and for a moment, one admires them just as drawing. Then the realization hits: these are the oldest human art in the world, 20,000 years old.
Eight hundred generations - more years, mind you, generations - separate us from these painters. Eight hundred fathers-to-sons. All of recorded human history, all the emperors and civilizations and inventions, constitutes only one-fourth of the time gap. Yet when we look at their creations, we see that, filthy and toothless and mute though they were, they had much in common with us. And I could have reached through the chicken wire grating and touched their work, my hand where their hands had been.
Except one cryptic stick figure at Lascaux, the drawings never show humans. Their art is all about the hunt - bison, horses, mammoths, aurochs (oversize pre-cattle), deer (cerf in French) reindeer (renne), ibex. The surviving caves are sanctuaries far beneath the earth, reachable only by crawling great distances (they brought torches) for hours bringing with them light and water and their tools. In some places they erected scaffolding so as to draw on ceilings or high walls. These galleries were destination halls, deeply hidden and adorned with drawings. Blessing the hunt, or manhood initiation? These images must have been very important, if not pantheistic at least venerative.
Years later, the caves were sealed when their entrances were blocked (usually from a collapse). They slumbered for 20,000 years until recently rediscovered - Pech Merle was found in 1922, Lascaux in 1944. For all we know, there are more such caves, hidden under Perigord and Quercy, waiting for the next howling dog to fall in.
The Pech Merle museum, which we visited after our cave tour, had a fascinating collection of smaller artifacts as well as great displays of climatic change over the last 50,000 years.
Picnicked in St. Cirq Lapopie, a fortified town perched atop a bend in the Cele. Under gray skies, we climbed up through picturesque streets to the ruined castle and village church and down to the river itself with a mill and hand-operated locks for boating tourists.
Drove on twisty roads through the town of Labastide Murat (Michelin gave it an undeserved star), where we stopped for coffee/ tea and cards, toward our B&B farmhouse in the tiny town of Themines. The address - La Buissonniere, Le bout du Lieu - sounds like a description, not driving directions, but sure enough, a tiny side-road arrow directing us to Le bout du Lieu. La Buisonniere, marked by a blue sign with hand-painted white letters, was an ivy-covered farmhouse surrounded but by other neat cottages and broad wheat-yellow fields.
Lured by a charming description in independent travel newspaper, we had booked three nights there with the hostess, Mme. Elizabeth Coleman (nee La Perouse, a descendent of Albi's second-most-famous son, the navigator and explorer)." She had moved to New York shortly after World War II, serving as a translator for NATO, then many years later returned home to France with her (English) husband, who had died only a year ago.
B&B's have charms and quirks. Madame was delightful, if talkative, spoke excellent English, and was glad of the company. The B&B was a converted farmhouse with rough stone walls and a guest room/ bathroom with a separate entrance. The guest-room wing connected to the bathroom via an uneven cork floor (with a mirror at one end, a real shock when you are navigating with the lights off), and you had to identify your receptacle to make sure it was the sink or toilet, not the washer/ dryer.
Dinner at the Michelin-recommended restaurant 10 kilometers away, pleasant enough except for the accumulation of cigarette smoke. One does not smoke when one eats, but the entire table lights up between courses. In apparent concession to non-smokers, they exhale blow plumes toward the ceiling, but even so, after 2 1/2 hours, the gray haze intrudes and the airborne nicotine can spawn a headache. Later Madame told us we should make a point of telling restaurateurs that we preferred a non-smoking room, if only to send a message. Toward the end of the trip, we reserved at a two-splotch place, asking if they had a non-smoking section. In charming exasperated French, the hostess told us she would try, "mais les français sont incorrigible!"
Madame's husband had died the preceding December, and she had opened the farmhouse as a B&B at the encouragement of her friends, who wanted her to have human social contact. It was a good idea. Though needing pointers in B&B mechanics (the guest bathroom sink and cabinet were cluttered with personal items, leaving little space), she relished the role of hostess. When, on the basis of an envelope addressed to her and a historic-Albi postcard showing the admiral himself, I asked if she were related, she all but blushed with pleasure.
Madame was all for persuading young girls not to have sex - "I tell them, sex is a wonderful and beautiful thing for when you are older." And how should the girls resist boys' importuning? "The boys should go to brothels to get their exercise and learn about sex and save young girls from ruining their lives." A window, Nancy and I decided later, into a vanishing French provincial cosmopolitan morality that accepted a double standard as so immutable it should be accommodated.
Southwest to Figeac, a very nice medieval town noteworthy as the birthplace of two famous Frenchmen, Charles Boyer and Champollion. Boyer, born in 1899, was for many years the best-paid actor in the world. On August 26, 1978, two days before his 80th birthday, he killed himself (seconal overdose) in Culver City, California, two days after the death of his wife of 44 years. We saw a window advertising his biography for sale.
More significant is Jean-François de Champollion. Though the British captured and preserve it, it was a Frenchman who decrypted the Rosetta Stone. During Napoleon's quixotic 1799 invasion of Egypt, his troops had uncovered the stone, but after Nelson destroyed Napoleon's navy at the Battle of the Nile, the future emperor abandoned his troops and sneaked home (arriving, with the luck of the audacious, just as the French public was crying out for a strongman to seize the government in a coup d'etat). The British then prudently removed the Stone to the British Museum, where it remains today.
A linguistic polymath, Champollion had a command of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, haldean and Syrian by the age of 14. Working from drawings (the Napoleonic Wars were raging furiously) and building on the work of an Englishman who had made the first discovery (the phonetic construction of Cleopatra's name), Champollion after a few years made the breakthrough discovery that the same symbol could stand either for a sound or a whole word idea. Today his decipherment of hieroglyphics is honored in Figeac by an enormous (23 x 36 foot) replica of the Rosetta Stone laid in the courtyard of the Place des Ecritures (Inscription Square) across from the Musee Champollion.
Stopped briefly at the hilltop town of Capdenac le Haut with its town-square monument to France's dead so typical of small French towns. One son of this small town died in the Algerian war of independence (1959-62). World War II claimed six. And in World War I, 37 sons of Capdenac were killed. Almost any French parish church tells the same story - the utter devastation of a whole generation slaughtered in tactically idiotic battles by generals raised on glory and dueling sabers who thought that machine guns would be impressed by l'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace.
Conques, on the Polish route, is famous for its Abbey de Sainte Foy (Holy Faith), a 13-year-old girl martyred in nearby Agen in 303. Her relics were kept in Agen until the ninth century, when a devoted monk from Conques wormed his way over a decade into the post of custodian, whereupon he promptly stole the relics and brought them back to Conques. The Conqueois say the saint then doubled her rate of miracle production. Sainte Foy's twelfth century tympanum, in fine yellow sandstone, has fine Brueghel-esque round-faced peasant worshipful kings. Though stylized and severe to us, these sculptures were carved for an illiterate population, all of whom lacked eyeglasses or close-up photographs. Expressions and gestures are large. Often the figures were painted in garish colors. Amidst all this grim pedagogy, humanity's humor peeps out - around the archivolt, the sculptors had carved small Kilroy-was-here faces and hands with Disney-Quasimodo features and expressions, peeping through the folds as if the stone were merely a flimsy yellow curtain.
In the two remaining sides of the cloister, youths from the local vocational school dressed as monks (with pierced eyebrows and tattoos) were doing careful ecclesiastical engravings and etchings to the boombox strains of "'Til the midnight hour."
Ate our standard picnic lunch - baguette with ham, mustard, tomato, and carrot sticks - under the town hall awning among municipal notices establishing hunting days, days you could finish off an already wounded animal, and the rare hunting-free days.
Along the Lot through Decazeville to the abandoned medieval town of Peyrusse le Roc set along and above the Auderne River. During the Middle Ages, it prospered from nearby silver mines, but competition from the newly-discovered Americas drove it out of business. Today a ruined castle outcropping, an ivy-overgrown parish church, a belfry, and a few scattered granite buildings lead down to the fast-flowing Auderne. Crossing a stone bridge, we hiked up the stream for an hour or so, a pleasant green forest walk.
Returned to Themines just in time to shower for our home-cooked dinner. The newsletter had suggested Madame was a fine cook, so we had prevailed gently on her to host us (at the extremely reasonable price of 100 F a person). She wheeled out pureed pumpkin soup, magret de canard with courgettes, a Boston-lettuce green salad (our first on the trip; Nancy was delighted), a thick complex Bordeaux, and tarte tatin. She also provided a witty dinner guest, Christian, an Americanophile friend of hers from a nearby town. He was in his early sixties, had gone to college in Connecticut, had had three wives - one ex-wife lived in Winchester, Massachusetts - and had lived in Jordan and hung around with the ex-pat European crowd ("American diplomats there referred to Tony Blair as Clinton's poodle"). A splendid time was had by all, and at eleven pm we rolled down the short corridor back to our room - easiest drive of the trip.
A pilgrimage site for 800 years, Rocamadour became famous in 1166, during the height in the growth of the Way of St. Jacques, when every way-station needed an abbey church and its own set of relics. A hermit's corpse was found buried on the bare ground site where a chapel was being erected. After due prayer, the locals concluded it was the publican Zaccheus, husband of St. Veronica (she of veil), who with his wife fled and were guided by an angel to Limousin.
Michelin gives Rocamadour three stars for its magnificent setting. In the rain and fog - ground-hugging cloud cover - it rated at best one star. Climbed the 223 steps to the Chapel of Notre Dame de Rocamadour, its soot-blackened ceiling hung with ship-model ex votos. The chapel also hosts a thirteenth century Black Madonna carved in walnut that was once covered in silver plating (now long since vandalized and melted down), the bare slim limbs and planar face echoing with both postmodern and primitive overtones.
Climbed up past a Stations of the Cross to a Calvary behind a trio of late-middle-aged grumbling Australians whose complaints were so funny they lifted Nancy's and my spirits. In the lower town, consoled ourselves with a sit-down lunch of tasty smoked-duck salads.
The chateau of Castelnau-Bretenoux was a disappointing jumble of buildings from the eleventh century, thirteenth century, seventeenth century and eighteenth century, enthusiastically restored by a celebrated nineteenth century opera tenor, Monlierat, who bequeathed it to the state. Our guide had a soft curly hobbit beard, small round eyeglasses, and a hobbit's smug closed-lip smile. He spoke in well-timed liquid French accompanied by gestures so precisely calibrated with his pacing one might have supposed him to be a Tolkien-droid. When he called for questions at the end, we asked, "When will it stop raining?" which broke up the nearby American couple (from Seattle, on a cycling tour, taking a break from splashy pedaling).
Almost all French restaurants close one day a week (the fermeture hebdomadaire or seventh-day closing), often Monday. Madame had recommended the Relais des Gourmandes in Gramat but in its locked doorway was pasted a faxed copy of a printed sign announced closing for a "national manifestation demanding equality fiscal for restaurants." Apparently fast-food joints whose business is mostly takeout are exempted from the 17.5% VAT paid by high-end dining establishments. Still, individual small-business entrepreneurs expressing their displeasure by going on strike against their customers, as if they were peasants, the government was the seigneur, and the diners were somehow a blind aristocracy? Only in France.
Walked around Gramat but after checking a series of closed places, went reluctantly to our fallback, the Hotel le Centre. Though it was only 8:50 (when diners are normally coming in), we were greeted with a hostess who, upon inquiry, said only, "Terminé. Desolé." Yes, darling, you certainly looked desolated, desolé to you and the horse you rode in on. Settled for the Lion d'Or, a three-box hotel-restaurant, the only place serving. Returned home at 10:30 and came in quietly via our own entrance so as not to disturb Madame, and Nancy whispered, "I had forgotten the appeal of being able to come and go anonymously."
A local host can make helpful calls: though our Michelin green reported that the Tours de Merle were closed, Madame's phone call elicited that two tour groups were coming that day and we could come so long as we arrived when either was there.
Thanking Madame and bidding her goodbye, loaded up Saxo and drove north to the small fortified town of Martel with a fine eighteenth century town square and covered market and a remarkable 13-sixteenth century Gothic fortified church: huge buttresses converted into defensive towers, machicolations protecting the flat east end, and a bell-tower built into a keep during the Hundred Years' War.
Driving along the Lot on our way to Gluges (a picturesque small town nestled beneath a cliff), spied a corn maze in an apple orchard between the highway and the Lot. Corn mazes are great fun for kids of all ages. Over the last five years, they have become something of a mini-worldwide phenomenon, with more than a dozen in the United States (www.mazemaker.com), Europe, and elsewhere. This one (www.labyrinthus.com) had closed for the season but not been harvested yet, and we toyed with sneaking in to run it. In an English-speaking country I would have charmed our way past the apple pickers but that was asking too much of my French.
After a brief visit to Carennac (rain finally stopping), into Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, a nice twelfth century abbey church with a Romanesque east end and a defaced Last-Judgment tympanum (as is common in France, holy figures were not defaced but ecclesiastical ones were). Picnic - by now we had our stomach clocks set to 2:00 pm as normal lunch time - on a bench adjacent to the Dordogne near the Chappelle des Penitents. Economically, the town is struggling, with many houses and gîtes for sale. (A gîte is a French vacation home that we might call a summer cottage.) Judging from what we saw of real estate ads, one could buy a gîte, rent it through the summer for enough to pay the annual debt service and taxes, and have the use of it in spring and fall (the best time, climate crisp and no hordes). Though the French eventually won the Hundred Years' War, the English are retaking Perigord gîte by gîte.
On vacation, everything takes longer than you think and you never know when you will get lost following squiggly French roads. Power-walked along the scenic cobblestone barge quay of Argentat, then drove briskly to the Tours de Merle (www.toursdemerle.com). Though late, we were waved in and had the place to ourselves (except for the sheep and their dip), the promised tour bus proving to be 45 minutes late. Comparative advantages of Germanic sensibilities in a land with Latinate clock management.
At the juncture of Auvergne and Limousin, Merle was fortified from the twelfth century to fifteenth century. The invention of reliable artillery had spelled its doom, and the Wars of Religion had finished it, when it was bombed into oblivion.
The seven towers at Merle have all been gutted; their granite square columns are overgrown with ivy and moss. Wrapped in fog, they would have been ethereal; in bright sunlight they would have been dazzling. Even with the color-muting gray skies, they were impressive and a good scramble.
Adjacent to the entrance was a 'living medieval village': a small cluster of thatched roof houses with dirt floors, wooden sties, chickens and pigs rutting in the mud. Even peering in for only a few moments, we both realized how unspeakably vile was ordinary life in the Middle Ages (the only remotely authentic depiction I can remember is in, of all things, Terry Gilliam's dreadful movie Jabberwocky).
Sunlight serendipitously appeared - mirabile dictu - when we arrived in Collonges la Rouge, a tiny village with its unbelievably lurid brick red sandstone - church, sixteenth century corbelled houses, hotel de ville - in effect a free outdoor museum.
Returning to Saxo, we set off down the road and just as Nancy was shifting into fifth gear, I realized I had left my reading glasses on his roof. (At age 47, I have now passed the bifocal divide.) Nancy pulled into a dirt parking lot and as she swung around, we heard a clank-chink. Somehow my glasses had stayed atop Saxo for several hundred yards of serious acceleration. As I write this, they perch atop my lengthening nose. What human organs continue to grow throughout your life? Nose, ears, and feet. Princess Di went from a bob to a ski slope. That huge noses, ears, and facial air denote evil and cruelty are testament to our subconscious gerontophobia at work.
Into Brive la Gaillarde, our evening destination mainly for convenience, and navigated Nancy to our Hotel Ibis, where Nancy luxuriated in a good shower.
We had reserved dinner at Bistro Chez Francis - I reserve everywhere, usually the day before, because You Never Know. By 8:30 the bistro, very small and furnished with old Cinzano posters, Jean Cocteau ink drawings, and a little blackface jockey lawn ornament - something you no longer see in America - was hopping and they were turning people away. Nancy had the 85F ($12, love that low euro) menu and we treated to a lovely Bruno Clair Marsannay.
Kitty-corner from us, a couple from Philadelphia overheard talking English, leaned over, and asked me, "Can I guess what you do for a living? College professor?" He was a consulting psychiatrist, now mostly retired, and he and his wife had long vacations twice a year (good idea, that). France was their favorite destination; this was their 19th trip. Like us, they believed in thoroughly covering only a small geography and taking their time.
Taking advantage of our first sunny day, north along the Vezere to the Site de la Roche, for a ramble (more than a walk, less than a true hike), boulders gowned green with moss and ivy. Lazily to Uzerche: an old town square, a thirteenth century church with a modest dusty eleventh century crypt and a very curious twelfth century belfry. Sat in the small park adjacent to the town hall and ate our baguette and cheese, overlooking a river bend, bright in the late autumn sunlight. Through pine and maple forests to the windswept cold rounded hillock of Suc au May for what Michelin over-rated as a three-star view, and into Treignac, small town with a long pleasant scramble through woods - guided by a wildly friendly Doberman who knew the route - to a rocky stream for fetch-the-stick.
Dusk falling, into St. Leonard de Noblat for its two-box hotel with splotch cooking. A turn-of-the-(last)-century grande-dame of a type now seen mostly in romance movies, the hotel was comprised of several adjacent townhouses: interior corridors went up, over, and around, among flowered velvet wallpaper and past heavy oak side tables with gilded discolored mirrors. Our small top-floor room's bathroom and toilet were separate alcoves that had once been at corridor-end before a door had made them en suite. Fine dinner with good correct French family service - father the chef, mother the hostess, junior and his best friend as tuxedoed waiters and busboys.
From three flights up, our hotel window overlooked a narrow street into old St. Leonard de Noblat and I dressed to the kootchy-coos of three grandmothers tapping on the window of a Renault station wagon in whose child-protected front seat was securely strapped a baby girl swaddled in a pink snowsuit.
St. Leonard's twelfth century church suffers from the physical Hulkomania of an abbey church with a swelled head. A simple Latin-cross nave was exploded when its plain transeptal altar was replaced by a fifteenth century chancel and ambulatory. Now the enormous choir head totters on a thin nave body.
The abbey church of Solignac a few miles out of town retained its twelfth century integrity - a plain open space of yellow stone that would glow in sunlight. Like Fontevreaux in Normandy (where Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Richard Coeur de Lion are buried), it was simple Romanesque cruciform, more meaningful to modern eyes because more harmonious and unornamented.
Detoured to Montbrun, a well-preserved fourteenth century chateau now a private home, closed to the public but photogenic outside including a crescent moat lake with a crumbling donjon being slowly torn apart by ivy vines, thence to the fortress chateau of Châlus, where we toured the 13-seventeenth century chateau buildings that now house a fascinating small museum to Richard the Lion Heart, and climbed the free-standing tower keep to see where, with a single lucky arrow shot, history took a huge random turn.
Afternoon stretching the tree shadows, we headed to Jumilhac (Zhoo-mee-yack), a large chateau surprisingly unmentioned in Michelin2. Its flyer stated that even off-season tours were available by phone appointment. So, while Nancy sat in the town square watching an elderly sextet rattle without success Jumilhac's arched oak doors, I braved the nearby pay phone. Can we have a tour? I asked in French. Bien sur. In five minutes? No, give me twenty minutes. So we sat on the fountain playing cards until the door creaked open.
Our young guide wore lavender corduroy pants, purple sneakers with white laces, and two sweaters, one over the other. Her dark-blonde hair was extravagantly hennaed, her ears multiply pierced, but she was earnest and shy, smiling and blushing when we asked questions. "Would you prefer the tour in English?" she asked in musical Midlands tones when she heard our flat American French. "I haven't spoken English for several days. I quite like to." She had the strangest Franglais accent - "I was born in Norf-hampton, but came to France at age four" - and mispronounced or mistranslated words. She was a self-taught guide, self-taught translator (she was translating her house guide into English house and struggling with words like "minegolds" and "heer-ess" (heiress)), caretaker, and probably ward. Later we speculated on her family history - parents dead unexpectedly, French cousin taking her in, life in a chateau, the stuff of Dickens updated.
The castle itself was fascinating: a thirteenth century main house, enclosed in the sixteenth century (when given to Jean de Jumilhac by Henri IV after the Wars of Religion as a loyalty reward). Residential wings were added in the seventeenth century when Louis XIII and Richelieu made it finally safe to do so. Now Jumilhac's private owners were industriously restoring, clearing out fallen plaster and lath, refinishing or replacing broken marble stairs - the pre-restoration places show how much 'reconstruction' (gutting) is involved. The rear gardens were being returned to a classical French parterre with climbing roses, low boxwood hedges, and a central fountain, plus a hedge maze which our guide let me run. The main dining room had Jacobean wood paneling with large hunting murals painted into the panels between the windows; it had been used as the setting for a historical vampire movie, Pacte des Loups.
The postcards our guide diffidently offered for sale were bundled in a huge stack secured by a crumbling rubber band. I bought one to send back to Recap and also tipped her because she was so engaging, at which she blushed again.
Dusk falling, we navigated through Montignac, along the Vezere, and to our night's hotel, a forest country hotel-motel in Tamnies, a tiny village that we approached from the less frequented direction that required rubbernecking at every intersection. Were greeted by an enormously energetic grandfatherly proprietor with white hair, the country Frenchman's outdoor uniform - gray sweater over wool shirt and under tweed jacket - an impenetrable accent and tommy-gun speech. He whisked us to our room - a suite, really - that cost only $35 a night (with all the flies you could swat; they left windows open to air the room). Worn out from the long day, dined on their prix fixe, $17 apiece for three courses, and a smooth full Sancerre.
Montignac, the nearest village to Lascaux, has adopted poison-pill defensive measures against the summer bus herds but eventually we cracked the maze of one-way streets, traffic-calming barriers, and morning market bustle to arrive at Lascaux II, probably the most famous cave art in the world.
On September 12, 1940 - shortly after France had fallen to the Nazis, but still in unoccupied Vichy - two schoolboys were following their dog that had fallen down a hole. Exploring, they found themselves in a large, linear underground gallery whose walls and ceilings were decorated with magnificent polychrome drawings in charcoal and ochre of bulls, aurochs, bison, horses, deer and reindeer. Their teacher summoned local expert Abbé Breuil, who dubbed the site 'the Sistine Chapel of Perigord'. (Magnified black and white photo of the boys standing at the entrance, dark-eyed delinquents with cloth caps, open black vests, blousy white shirts with sleeves rolled up, looking warily up at the camera. Round-eyed curé in black front-button gown, square clerical beret, and glasses.)
Before the 1940 dog, the cave had been sealed for about 10,000 years, preserved by an entrance-sealing mud slide and protected above by a layer of argyle stone that prevented humidity from entering, forming stalactites, and so defacing the art. In 1948 Lascaux was opened to the public. With them, in came air. Despite preservation efforts (weak lighting, air conditioning, airlock), the steady flow of carbon dioxide damaged the paintings with a green effect (algae) and a white effect (bleaching from white calcite precipitate). In 1963 the cave was closed. With the original environment restored, the green effect has reversed and the white held in check. Today only specialists can enter Lascaux - five people a day for only 25 minutes apiece.
To build Lascaux II ( www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux), National Geographic first took a precise photographic survey, from which a shell was built exactly matching the cave's inner surface. Then a single artist, Monique Peytral, replicated the paintings using the same methods and materials as the cave artists. It took her six years. In 1973 a perfect replica was opened on the forest hillside adjacent to the original. Even it is limited to 2,000 visitors a day.
The results are worth it. Had you not known you were in a replica, you could not possibly divine it. Visitors are led in through an airlock, as if entering a preserved original Lascaux. They wait in a black anteroom illuminated with transparent blowups of the main paintings.
Our tour was conducted in French, but our guide's diction, elocution, reverence and drama made it all comprehensible, which led me to musing about speech comprehension.
The Great Hall of the Bulls is breathtaking: about a hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, with a ceiling ten feet overhead covered with overlapping giant silhouettes, line drawings, and shaded profiles of leaping aurochs (misnamed bulls) as if we are amid a thundering herd. The animals seem alive, thoroughly natural, their heads and legs (deliberately small as if to emphasize the body musculature) rendered with remarkable color sensitivity and shading. Entering, we stopped dead and stared.
Summer tourists must shuffle through in elbows-clenched groups of fifty who have ten minutes in the Great Hall. In late fall, our morning's first tour was only ten people and no children so when we fell silent, so did the room. Our guide enjoyed himself too. We lingered a luxurious forty minutes. At one moment he turned out the recessed lights, plunging us into pitch dark. Whispers as we sifted our weights, using feel-radar to locate one another. Then he flicked his cigarette lighter, passing it up and close, and bison heads and reindeer bodies gamboled and danced behind the orange flame.
As an awestruck ten-year-old boy I had read about the cave paintings, seeing the leaping bulls, thinking of Lascaux as a place magical, not of my world, ever beyond my reach. Stepping back into the gray French autumn, a forest of familiar yellow and brown maple leaves, the memory returned with an unbidden rush and with a shiver I realized that seeing Lascaux had been on my short life list. See Rome and die. Australia had been a conscious life goal. Lascaux was an unconscious one. Neither had disappointed. Six years after our first trip, a year ago we had gone back to Australia to see some new places and some places anew. Perhaps on our nineteenth trip to France we will come back to Lascaux.
The charm of Sarlat le Caneda, a medieval hill town just a few miles south of Lascaux, lies in its photogenic preservation of its thirteenth century and fourteenth century architectural past. Early in his reign, Napoleon untangled its Gordian knot of medieval streets by slashing what is now known as the Rue de la Republique straight through Sarlat from north to south, one half of which preserves its yellow stone maze of twisty small streets and sixteenth century gabled half-timbered houses. Wandered in the hazy sunshine, picnicked in a nearby park, passing up the dozens of menus touristique or foie gras on offer, and headed west to Les Eyzies de Tayac, another semi-troglodytic medieval village crouched under the limestone cliffs where the Vezere is joined by the much smaller Beune.
Humans have lived in the leeward shelter of Les Eyzies' limestone cliff face for over 25,000 years, first huddling, then building houses and a thirteenth century castle into the rock. Today the castle houses the National Museum of Prehistory's four rooms that display a treasure trove: 20,000-year-old man-made objects including a famous, tiny, enigmatic bone Venus head with corn-row braided hair. Just farther along the cliffside is Abri Pataud (abri means overhang, and farmer Pataud owned the land before it became an archeological find). The day we were there Abri Pataud was closed except for groups, but as at Tours de Merle, the friendly curator told us in French that another group was expected shortly; would we wait? Remembering our Cahors cloister, we hauled out the cards. Twenty-five minutes later a gaggle of high schoolers arrived, so we had not only a look at the tell but also an informative and animated forty-five minute explanation of modern archeology.
Abri Pataud's thirty vertical feet of strata divide into at least nine clearly distinct levels of human habitation laid like lasagna over tumbled boulders cracked off by the cold slow bellows of melting and freezing. The kids were bored - when the guide released them, there was a flash fire of cigarette lighters - and incurious; none of them had been to Lascaux or Pech Merle.
While showering and changing for our treat dinner, caught the pilot of a Franco-American linguistic television quiz show: Who Wants to be a Francophone?
Restaurant Centenaire has been a gustatory destination for thirty years, so we expected flawless service (The Hierarchy of French Dining Service) and dazzling food. The food did not disappoint: an amuse bouche - tuna timbale garnished with fresh tomato - then five courses: crab cake with dark sauce; risotto with truffles; St. Jacques scallops with pepper and apple cider sauce; duck sauvage; cheese; and finally a chocolate disk with vanilla ice cream. Not in the same league as our best meal ever (Altnaharrie Inn, Ullapool, Scotland, don't ask the price) but memorable.
With fruit and cereal, a pot of rich strong French morning coffee makes a fine in-room breakfast. We had been covering sights faster than expected, so (Managing Your Itinerary) I had figured out how, without disturbing downstream reservations, we could interpolate a three-day northbound excursion. We had 300 kilometers in front of us this day and I wanted us on the road early.
On every European vacation, Nancy and I try to see all our of host country's state or provincial license plates - it entertains on the drives and keeps you alert. In any trip's first few days, they are easy to harvest, but as the trip lengthens, the targets become fewer and much harder to spot. The day before we had made a big haul, bagging six of the remaining unseen twelve (out of an original 94+2), so we had only 4 to go (08 55 58 88), plus two - 2A and 2B from Corsica - that we were reserving rights to call not mandatory but extra credit.
The tiny town of St. Amand de Coly had a remarkable fourteenth century fortified church. It was early morning, the sun was shining on fields of frosted cornstalk stubble, and we parked under the plane trees amid the fallen leaves next to an elementary school filled with kids playing frenetically. Originally an Augustinian abbey, St. Amand was ravaged in the Hundred Years' War - by 1430 it had only two monks left - when it reinvented itself into a fortress: the apse built up with an encased battlement walk, the west facade extended upward into a fortified archer's tower with machicolations, crenellations, and arrow slits instead of windows. They worked: in 1575, a small garrison of Huguenots were able to hold out for six days against 20,000 Perigordian soldiers with massed artillery.
Blasted our way up the Autoroute toward Bourges. Most of France's Autoroutes are toll roads (péage) and the francs mount up fast, but this long stretch was free. Filled Saxo and picnicked, among Dutchies and Parisians heading home, at a nicely appointed roadside rest complete with concrete picnic tables and clean toilettes. On the way saw 3 more plates (55 58 88) leaving just 08, 2A, and 2B.
Honoring their Roman and medieval origins, modern cities like Bourges (www.ville-bourges.fr) are now protected by a sophisticated double defensive perimeter: an impenetrable ring road (periphérique) system and ramparts of zones industrials and council housing - big rectangular blocks of graffitoed stucco high-rise flats. Cars plus old stucco equals soot and grime. Fought our way through the smoky maze to the parking lot of our oasis Hotel Ibis (In Praise of Ibis). Like all its brethren, it was clean, well laid out, and friendly - and this one was particularly well located in town. The bed was big enough, the bathroom new and watertight. Why is inefficiency charming? Why is economy presumed to be soulless?
Bourges is built on a round-topped hill surrounded by two marshy rivers, the Voiselle and Auron. In 52 BC the Celtic chief Vercingétorix, fighting a defensive war against the advancing legions of Julius Caesar, had left it standing because the local citizens of Avaricum (as it was then known) assured him it could not be taken by siege. Wrong. Upon taking the town, Julius Caesar massacred all 40,000 inhabitants, then looted and burned what was left. When two centuries later the town was rebuilt under Roman rule, it was fortified with a high thick wall that was gradually incorporated into the foundations of many prominent public buildings, thus its perimeter can still be clearly traced in the oval circuit of streets.
Dinner at a small Italian pizzeria, O Sole Mio. Must have been a good choice. Within a half hour the place was wall-to-wall people, including a German-speaking couple who, exclaiming at the size of our duck salads, drew us into conversation.
Thomas and Mia Wittman were Austrians from Linz on a slow-paced autowander through rural France. He was early fifties, cross-cropped blond hair going gray, gap in his front teeth, and the angular inverted trapezoidal gold-rimmed glasses of the Teuton intellectual. A journalist with Austrian television, he spoke terrific colloquial English with a broad vocabulary (he had read the Starr report straight off the Internet). She was in her mid-thirties, short black hair, lovely slender hands, a municipal court judge who often heard housing-eviction cases. Both were delighted that we knew anything about Austrian politics, so we talked about the foibles of each other's politicians. Thomas tended to dominate the conversation, both by personality and better English, so after a while Nancy and I took to shushing him so Mia could get words in edgewise, which to his credit he took with very good grace.
Despite their cigarette smoke - he went through two packs, she through a half-pack - our 3 1/2 hour conversation was so entertaining we scarcely minded. Walked home through the quiet cobblestoned night, shaking smoke out of our hair.
Took our time over the lovely buffet breakfast, enjoying the thick coffee and avoiding the pain au chocolat in favor of fruit. To minimize packing, we do laundry once, midway through our trips. Today was it. Drove off to the laundromat identified by a helpful Ibis desk clerk and scouted the day before. Left Nancy with a thick stack of coins and her Boston Globe magazine crossword puzzles, and went walking into the bright cold cloudless sunshine, up to the cathedral.
For tourists European cathedrals are architectural fossils and collections of historical art; for the Catholic locals, they are places of worship and social centers. Sunday morning high mass was just starting, so I sat in back, enjoying the hymns. When the sermon began, I slipped out to walk the city.
Spotted a license plate with an L prefix. Lisbon? I thought in passing, then glanced at the attractive woman sitting in the passenger seat. Mia Wittman, studying a map, Thomas beside her. To give myself time, walked a hundred feet down the street, then shrugged. Which would I more regret, turning or not turning?
They were delighted to see me and we immediately swapped email addresses. These days Thomas peppers me for American perspectives on our politics.
Back to the laundromat, Nancy urgently needed more coins - slow dryers - so I headed out foraging. Two corners away, found a wine shop that seemed closed though its front door was open. Five guys in sweatshirts and weekend beards were sipping wine around wooden cases and molded plastic chairs. When I asked for change, a very friendly big guy with small teeth amid a saturnine hairy face and a green sweatshirt cheerfully rose, a grizzly from his picnic basket, and clanged the cash register. Where was I from? America. Ah. Leaning forward, he demanded, "Gaure?" While I was sorting this out, he added, "ou Bouche?" Neither one nor the other, I said in French, who do you prefer? Gore. Bush let too many people in Texas be executed. But the two of them are much the same, I replied. He nodded emphatically. Chirac and Jospin (the French president and prime minister), he said with expressive arm waves, are photocopies of each other.
Laundry done, Nancy and I journeyed back to Cathedral St. Etienne to see its magnificent stained glass windows set in the five chapels lining the ambulatory around its semicircular east end.
We spent a mesmerized hour before those windows and could have spent longer. Those windows were fashioned eight hundred years ago. They had survived depredation and wars - during the Second World War, the windows had been boxed and stored in the crypt as a precaution against bombs - and still they spoke as brilliantly as when new. Tapestries fade, frescoes crumble, sandstone weeps. Glass that does not break speaks in full voice.
Bourges cathedral was built on sloping ground; its east end punched through the Gallo-roman walls. Thus its crypt is unusual in that it is above ground, light pouring in among its yellow stones. Among the typical lapidary fragments - partial columns and practice capitals - were some medieval joke sculptures: a man so smart he had to support his head with both hands, a man grimacing because he must for eternity stare at the round buttocks of another peasant mooning him.
For lunch, returned to O Sole Mio from a mixture of affectionate memory and desire for salad. It was late, the place was empty, and the staff greeted us like old friends, deriving much amusement from our card-playing. Conversation revealed that our game, Klabberjasz3, has a French variant. As I was counting the score, a Gen-X bleached-blonde waitress behind the counter exclaimed in unmistakable Yank, "I just heard American!" She proved to be from Miami, and when we asked how she got here, she replied proudly, "I married him," pointing to a hairy French chef at least as old as I. How did you meet? I gasped out, to cover my astonishment. "He was on vacation in Miami." They had been here a year and a half, her French was very good (at least to my dull ears), and her English already had French-accented overtones.
Contented from our salad-and-wine lunch, we were well disposed for a leisurely group tour of the Palais Jacques Coeur, built by a self-made man who rose from humble origins to being probably the richest commoner in France.
Every now and then history produces an entrepreneur so full of energy and creativity that he overcomes all. Jacques Coeur was one such, a fifteenth century Howard Hughes. Born ~1395 the son of a furrier, he made a colossal fortune through trade and business innovation. In each of France's major cities, he created the forerunner of catalog stores - display shops where the nobility could see samples and then commission clothing, silver, or ceramics. Their deposits financed Coeur's merchant fleets. He had vision, financial guts, and the flair of hubris - his motto was "A vaillans coeur, rien n'est impossible." To a valiant heart (coeur, his name), nothing is impossible. With deft market timing of the shifting tides of the Hundred Years' War, he bought low and sold high: guns, land, art, and money, always arbitraging upwards, eventually becoming the wealthiest man in Europe.
So spectacularly successful was Coeur that Charles VII made him Master of the Mint, and although the post was rife with bribe opportunities, none were ever proved. If anything, the flow was reversed - in 1449 he lent his king 300,000 gold ecus (without interest) to finance the liberation of Normandy. But his success sowed its own vulnerability: his local neighbors and debtors conspired in 1451 to frame him for poisoning the king's mistress, Agnes Sorel. His holding were immediately confiscated and he was saved from execution by Papal intervention, escaped from Beaucaire Prison (his locks lubricated by money, one suspects), fled to Rome and was given command of a fleet of ships for the ninth crusade. Dying on crusade at Chios in 1456, on his deathbed he 'confessed' to his crimes to shield his wife's inheritance from creditors.
Jacques Coeur's innovation and ego are on display in his palace. Commissioned in 1443 when Coeur was at his height, it is both richly ornate (but neither bawdy nor tasteless, unlike some palaces such as Francois I's pornographic murals) and practical, with all modern conveniences including a steam room set cleverly into a stairway to be warmed by heat rising from the main kitchen fireplace. Coeur's motif - a scallop overlaid with a heart, jacques coeur, get it? - is omnipresent, carved into lintels or printed on wall frescoes.
Dinner at Abbaye St.-Ambroix, a splotch restaurant in a converted seventeenth century monastery, lovely modern decor embedded in old marble Corinthian pilaster, the food delivered via orthodox formal French service. Halfway through the meal, Nancy found herself becoming ill, which seemed to stretch out the waits we had to endure, gazing longingly at our wine bottle on the sideboard, being ignored by all wait staff except the intermittently attentive sommelier.
Nancy was still feeling poorly that morning, so I alone mounted the 396 steps (counted on the way up, asked when I got down, was pleased to have my count confirmed - no recounts here!) to the cathedral's bell tower. At the summit - blue-gray oil-smoke haze softening a turbulent scrabble of brick-orange roofs - met a squat red-haired Australian who asked me to take his picture. He had been to America only once - New Orleans of all places - on a stopover from Melbourne to London, where he was teaching in East Anglia. He liked Americans much more than the English, whom he found reserved to the point of frigidity. "After twelve months, I'll close the door on my flat, say goodbye to two people, and go home."
Collected Saxo and saw 2A in the Ibis parking lot. After visiting the modest but intriguing Musee du Berry (domestic arts and crafts, a polished wooden table with hemispherical holes in its surface to hold walnuts for cracking), headed south on the Autoroute, I driving while Nancy conserved energy and slept.
Noirlac's magnificent twelfth century abbey, restored during the last forty years, sits in a sylvan park. The weather was flawless, clear blue skies and low forties, and we picnicked at the convenient parking-lot tables. Like the other great surviving abbeys we have seen - Silvacane and Senanque (Rhone valley), Fountains and Riveaux (Yorkshire), Jedburgh (Scotland), and even Solignac earlier in this trip - Noirlac was peaceful, contemplative, serene, elegant; a fine stop.
Forged south to Crozant, a ruined fortress (like the Tours de Merle) at the joining of the Creuse and Sedelle rivers. A misshapen finger of land with fine granite piles and good scrambles even if not in the same league as Tours de Merle.
Powered down the A20 into trucks and dusk, an 08 license (leaving only 2B) the only relief from ticking kilometers, and into the agglomeration surrounding Limoges, thus breaking one of my navigating rules: Never come into a strange city after dark. After a curse-fueled transit (not my finest moment of this trip) of Limoges' sprawling dirty confusing one-star 170,000-people pit, found our spot by brute force.
Had dinner that evening in the hotel dining room, the Land of Lost Businessmen on the Road: well lit tables set for one, men reading the soccer news and chomping through their Menu Formule Rapide, muzak repeating on an eight-minute loop (until Nancy asked for something, anything else). Our food was plain but serviceable - I compensated with a nice bottle of Mercurey. Nancy had a genuine lettuce salad. Some nights are just about resting from the highway and getting a good sleep.
Thankfully leaving Limoges behind, down the A20 to Chalusset, a modest pile of ivy-covered ruins, now being restored - some hantier franchissement interdit - but we went everywhere anyhow. A great walk and picturesque hike, with an iron balcony view into the castle's ruined three-story guts: foggy with low morning mist, moody and ethereal, much better than Crozant. Stopped in the little town of Souillac to see its Romanesque church doorway pillar relief of the prophet Isaiah, then along a pleasing stretch of the Dordogne to Carlux for its view and Carsac-aillac, a tiny yellow sandstone church with glowing interior and a spare modern Stations of the Cross. On the benches before it we ate our usual picnic sandwiches and watched construction workers repairing loose lauze tiles on the adjacent vicarage's stone roof.
Domme is a hilltop bastide, overlooking wheatfields, founded by Philippe le Hardi (Philip the Bold) in 1283, impregnable until there was accurate long-range artillery. Fine walks and views. Like Gluges and les Eyzies, La Roque Gageac crouches along limestone cliffside. Here we paused for coffee and cards as the tourist traffic whizzed by, then climbed rickety metal yellow-painted ladders bolted into the cliff side to a troglodytic fortress. Privately maintained (and not mentioned in Michelin), it was a vertiginous aerie reminiscent of Mesa Verde with a great hazy river view. A hot-air balloon was floating along the riverway, and we entertained ourselves chasing him until he caught a cliff thermal and disappeared.
Our evening's hotel was a destination we had pre-booked from America (Managing Your Itinerary), the two-red-box/ splotch cooking Manoir de Bellerive (www.bellerivehotel.com/), a member of the Relais du Silence network (www.relais-du-silence.com or www.silencehotel.com). The lovely room - almost a suite - had a huge modern bathroom with a glorious tub and infinite hot water. At dinner, we saw only a solitary Frenchman with thinning hair reading a book (high-end businessman) and two older Americans (seventy no longer seems 'elderly', to aging Nancy and David, now we define that as 'older') having a cheerful married conversation, he dusty gravelly and didactic, she bubbly with fractured Mandarin English, evidently a Chinese émigré from long ago.
Over the years, marital conversation becomes shorter and more jargonized, especially so on vacation when you have experienced the same things and had all day to mention them to one another. So marital vacation dinner-table conversation observes the convention that if we keep our voices low, we can not only not intrude on other tables (Nancy's motive), we can also overhear their conversations just in case the free gossip can be entertaining. Dinner ambled along, we getting snatches of their conversation while the same 45-minute music loop repeated its electronically arranged versions of Sixties hits: Strangers in the Night, A Man and a Woman, and Windmills of Your Mind. "That's Lara's theme from Doctor Zhivago," said the adjacent husband, and Nancy leaned over and said, "The Thomas Crown Affair".
That opened the floodgates. Next thing I knew we were deep in conversation with them and scarcely a breath later we had swapped seats, man-to-man and woman-to-woman. Don Burnham was a retired psychiatrist. (What is it with France, do they all get discounts?) "What is your discipline?" he asked. (What is it about me? The alleged beard?) The friendly and accommodating waiter (who later peeled off our Bergerac's label that is now pasted on our wine cellar wall) handled, with nary a raised eyebrow, serving us at the proper tables, chosen desserts to the proper places and the petits fours to ... hesitating, he asked in French, What do I do? Give it to the ladies, I replied.
Next thing I knew, Ja Ju at our table and Don at his were telling Nancy and me about their house in Cussac, just down the road, and Nancy and I were making simultaneous spur-of-the-moment decisions to accept their offers to come tomorrow and have a drink....
The fog hung thick as pea soup - more than half our days had begun that way - but by 10:30 it was burning off as we came to yet another picturesque Dordogne riverbank cliffside town, Beynac-et-Cazennac. Climbed the twisty yellow sandstone cobbled streets toward the castle. Had to navigate a brief stretch of chantier interdit at the castle's foot, to protect us from falling fragments, but time stops at lunch so it was probably all right. At least, so I rationalized. Arriving in the castle, had great views over the Dordogne valley. A couple of miles farther along on the river's other bank, we ascended to Castelnaud with equally great vistas, restored and filled with armor and siege weaponry, including a working trabuchet (mechanical slingshot, a very nasty and effective weapon though slow to load).
The Dordogne was finally showing its beauty in the autumn sunlight. The abbey of Cadouin is known for its well-preserved cloister with sculpted pendants and capitals. For several hundred years Cadouin was also a pilgrimage church because it had a scrap of linen supposedly the Shroud of Turin. Alas for the pilgrims and the abbey, in the mid-1930's the shroud's border was recognized as an Arabic inscription naming several caliphs who lived circa AD 1100 ....
Last stop before dusk was the grotto of Rouffignac (www.grottederouffignac.fr). In Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, intrepid travelers walk into the underground world via an open volcano. Fantasy? Rouffignac is a low convex arch of black metamorphic rock, open to the sky, that descends in a long low-sloping passage that grows steadily darker to utter blackness. Today an electric train rattles you a kilometer into the earth, through caverns measureless to man.
Protected by a layer of almost impermeable Argyle stone, the cave is dry and as such free of stalactites and stalagmites. Fissures were bludgeoned into rooms by swirling cavitation, rows of quartz rubble tossed along the sides, smooth limestone walls rising inwardly to form naturally perfect surfaces for drawing and carving. Nearly a mile from sunlight is the Sistine Chapel: a flat limestone ceiling in what had been a two-foot crawl space, covered like a billboard with bison, hair horses, ibex goats, and herds of woolly mammoths - this was 13,000 BC, the late Magdalenian Period, middle of an Ice Age. To draw, the prehistoric artists used pebbles of manganese oxide, lying flat on their backs, unable to see their whole surface - the images are in some cases eight and ten feet long. Withal, they are marvelously graceful, almost avant-garde in their delicate, economical depiction of bunched shoulder muscles or a flexing haunch, a lovely reverence for the animals they drew.
Emerging as from Verne, collected Saxo and followed last night's napkin directions until we found the Burnhams' converted farmhouse in Le Maine, Cussac. "I'm so proud of you!" cried Ja Ju, arms outstretched as to recently freed captives, as we tottered apprehensively toward the front door. They led us inside, Don uncorked a Guigal Cote Rotie and a fantastic Roquefort, and they showed us around.
Framed of gray stone, the farmhouse's bones were three hundred years old but the interior was bright as a new penny. The entrance led to a living room with a magnificent stone fireplace. To the left, a polished wood staircase led via a right angle to a balcony overlooking the living room and to a study and a master bedroom and bath. Left on the ground floor was the kitchen with butcher-block table for both serving and eating - "I don't cook!" Ja Ju exclaimed delightedly - and on the other side a television / sitting room with a washer-dryer in an attached mud room beyond.
Don had spent several years compiling research for a book on complicated misogynist Swedish author/ playwright August Strindberg, who married three times, each one stormy and ending in divorce, and wrote endlessly about the war for dominance between men and women. Strindberg's men and women are bound together in a fierce mixture of desires murderous and erotic, sex and death inextricably caught up together. After many years, for instance, Strindberg had finally decided to marry and had counseled his young protégé also to get married. Halfway through his own honeymoon, Strindberg had written anxiously to advise the lad to break off the engagement as a tragic mistake.
Reluctantly bidding them goodbye, pressed on north in the dark toward Perigueux and our rocking-chair hotel. Had modest dinner at a tiny Cambodian restaurant run by Frenchmen; the lemon-grass chicken and strong sweet Chinese tea hit the spot.
Perigueux's Michelin entry illustrated the Dreaded History Omission. Because guidebooks cannot bring themselves to pan anywhere, they resort to condemnation by omission: the more history, the less there is to see now. So a full page of emperors, goths, dukes, sieges, revolutionaries, and artists that leads to a single paragraph describing a destination as "first and foremost a market town" can be translated as sooty traffic jam. Beware the one-star cathedral, my son, the lots to park, the dirt to wash. First cathedral, built 6C, demolished tenth century. Second cathedral, bigger than the first, consecrated 1047, burned to the ground 1120. But the third one, begun 1173, stayed up - until 1575 when it was flattened by the Huguenots. An eighteenth century "restoration was carried out with little regard for the original design", so that when the remaining buildings were demolished in 1852 to be rebuilt as practice for Montmartre, no one protested.
Fleeing beautiful downtown Perigueux, discovered that traffic had been brought to a standstill by cars stopped in mid-roundabout. Not abandoned, mind you - their owners were chatting easily with les flics. And Saxo's windshield sported a snappy lime-green day-glo flyer that read, in French:
The social treasury and the government, on the pretext of augmenting your health
benefits, has this summer taken unjust measures against private health care
professionals and private hospitals.... These blind, collective and unjust sanctions,
taken over the objections of your practitioners, would have strong economic consequences
on practices and their technological plateaus that would thus penalize you directly.
The honorariums you pay today to your health practitioners serve of course to pay us,
but also:
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Were the cops towing the traffic blockers, ticketing them, or taking license numbers? No, how Anglo-Saxon of you. They were helpfully directing consumers away from the town center. Half of our parking lot had been blocked off to provide reserved parking for the strikers. A disaffected group able not just to boycott vendors or withhold services but to prevent others from doing their own business. Only in France.
Picnicked at Bourdeilles, an interesting double chateau, one building a ruined thirteenth century fortress (multiply taken and reduced, multiply rebuilt), the other an adjacent sixteenth century Renaissance chateau. Brantome, a little farther on, had an abbey with dovecotes carved into rock buildings themselves framed in the limestone cliffside. Walking past the front-end loaders moving sheetrock into the hollowed-out cavernous troglodytic garage, came upon the enormous troglodytic relief Cave of the Last Judgment: a brooding, weathered frieze of blurred faces and grim skulls surrounding a large central figure. Sculpted in the fifteenth century, it would have been more at home in an Amazonian jungle, strangled by leafy vines with cockatoos screeching overhead.
No trip is complete without a vacation from your vacation. After the previous evening's disappointing hotel, we had booked into the three-red-box, splotch cooking Moulin de l'Abbaye, a fully restored ancient mill at brookside with a magnificent marble and chrome bathroom in whose enormous jacuzzi tub Nancy luxuriantly soaked after we had shared in-room tea and cards. Dinner later was marvelously tasty: oeuf parfait that would make a deviled egg blush with shame; pavé (flagstone) of foie gras and gesiers de canard (duck bits); small bit of fish with endive and Bergerac wine sauce; rouleaux de pintade (rolled pigeon) with courgettes tagliatelle; pear turnover with vanilla ice cream and pear/ cognac flavoring. Memorable.
Angouleme proved to be another fizzle: the allegedly complete ramparts were all but invisible under parking garages, freeway underpasses, and cement walls as if we were circumambulating Manhattan's FDR Drive. Out of town southwest looking for sit-down lunch, found three pizzerias all of which closed at 2:00 pm (and we knocked, of course, at 2:05 pm), eventually assembled picnic lunch from an Intermarche. Like Brantome, Aubeterre-sur-Dronne had a remarkable troglodytic church with a massive interior space moist from seeping springs and green with algae, grass and slime from the moisture.
Bergerac's compact old town tumbles down to the Dordogne's wide banks. Its old town is collapsing; more than half the historic buildings were leaning, crumbling, disintegrating. Perhaps historic designation makes them invulnerable to gutting and prohibitively expensive to rehab, the French equivalent of environmental contamination? If so, they are struldbrugs, at once immortal and decrepit, not blessed but cursed nevermore to be, always to remember.
Up to Bergerac, the Dordogne is navigable by seagoing barges, so for centuries it was an Atlantic upriver port. By 1910, the infernal combustion engine and its creatures the railroad and motor-lorry had put paid to the barge trade. Some bargemen sold their boats for scrap wood, others burned them in a Ghost Dance against technology. A handful hung on until the 1930's. Now the heritage is being kept alive, at great municipal cost, with restoration or building anew from the old plans. (Digital age reminder: the tangible decays but the information is all: blueprints as mechanical DNA.) The commonplace can slip out of mind in the wink of a generation's eye.
Continuing our vacation from our vacation, stayed in a Campanile motel (www.campanile.fr or www.envergure.fr; half a notch below Ibis and just as Yank-acceptable) east of town. Saw a culinary oasis vision just across the highway: the Buffalo Grill (www.buffalo-grill.fr), built like a Ho Jo with bright lights and a logo of bright red longhorns. When we entered, a Cambodian waitress in denim coveralls with a denim miniskirt, red bandanna, and red Keds wished us "Bonsoir, messieurs-dames." The place-mat menu had five flavors of steaks and three (good) local wines. The house music was the flat-toned Texas cadence of Willie Nelson singing On the road again, goin' places where I've never been ...
A sign east from Bergerac advertised burotic. Sex in the office? Filing cabinets with mental health problems?
Beaumont was a lively bastide whose square was filled with the weekly market, its church and houses of the glowing yellow sandstone bright in the clear chill air. On to Biron, a complicated mess under an acre (literally) of leaking roofs covering eight centuries' continuous evolution: fortress, chateau, keep, apartments, cistern, courtyards, all built by the various Barons of Contaut-Biron until finally they ran financially aground. "Two sculptures were sent to America at the beginning of the last century," the guidebook delicately put it, " to maintain the lifestyle of the Marquis de Biron."
Monpazier is the best-preserved bastide. Its village square and couverts are virtually unblemished, with four-inch firebreaks between the houses and cart-width passages running parallel between the main streets. Robust design endures because the fundamental needs of homo urbanis - familiarity yet privacy - are unchanged even after six hundred years. In the hamlet of Besse, a curious eleventh century carved church doorway bore unmistakable Celtic runes and filigree. On the way we had to pass an eight-wheeled armored Vehicule Ecole - someone learning to drive a tank gives new meaning to 'defensive driving'.
The ruined fortified chateau of Bonaguil was an enormous maze-like three-dimensional wreck that took an hour to explore: cavernous crypts (or cryptic caverns), a thick moat, a barbican, and a lozenge-shaped donjon keep that overlooked each of two defensive courtyards. Thoroughly built up in the early sixteenth century by nasty combative Berenguer de Roquefeuil, it so intimidated armies that it surviving untouched until the Revolution, when it was mutilated at leisure on general principles. An unidentified parking lot license plate had a bumper sticker labeled "Corsica Ferries 2000." Out of pity, Nancy offered to claim it as a 2B but I stayed strong.
Agen was a no-star town with the red-box Chateau des Jacobins, furnished as if by Proust's maiden aunt: our very large high-ceilinged room had white plaster molding on ceiling and each wall. Twenty minutes' half-blind darkness driving to Puymirol for dinner was rewarded by our arrival at the two-splotch Les Loges de l'Aubergarde. Though the building itself dated from the seventeenth century, its interior was modern - our salon (non-smoking, the small room) was scoured down to the stone, whitewashed, and dramatically pin lit. Pigeonnier and foie gras with lentils, cabillaud (casserole) and white beans, then a small pot au feu and a great local wine, Chateau Belmon from the Pays du Lot (not Pays d'Oc).
Lingering over our dwindling leisure, drove by easy stages toward Toulouse through stands of trees being grown for their long narrow lumber (omnipresent in low-lying riverbank areas inaccessible for farming) and tiny farm plots, mostly growing corn, photogenically patchwork but incredibly inefficient. Used-farm-equipment dealerships mutely testified to the grim reaper of economics overcoming EU subsidies and nostalgia for the old life.
The bastide of Lauzerte, surrounded by wheat and corn fields was earnestly trying for a Michelin-green star. In the town square, a wag sculptor had sculpture rolled up a corner of the cobblestone and laid blue-and-yellow ceramic tiles underneath, as if the stones were shag over linoleum.
Moissac, a gritty industrial town bisected by the Bordeaux railway, is famous only for its abbey ( vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/medart/image/France/Moissac/moismain.html) with its cloister and great tympanum. In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco transplanted the tympanum to his fictional abbey and described it in painstaking detail (first day, sext, pages 41-44) suffused with apocalyptic portent. It is a magnificent early Gothic (c. 1130) sculpture - at least, so I concluded from glimpses through the thicket of galvanized aluminum scaffolding. The cloisters behind - nearly leveled in the nineteenth century to make way for the Bordeaux-Sete railway, saved in an early act of historic preservation - were a gallery of studying capitals and pendants carved in sets of apostles, prophets, parables, and bishops.
Detoured to Montauban for the Musee Ingres, the last of the pre-Impressionists, Born in 1780, Ingres bridges the Romantics such as David (whose influence is apparent in his women's alabaster skins and round cheeks) to the Impressionists. Born before Delacroix, Ingres outlived him by a decade, dying in 1865 resentful of the younger man's success.
Our last drive, in darkness through gas stations, strip malls, and industrial buildings of the Toulouse outskirts, onto the ring road and our final Ibis: Blagnac Airport. After a fruitless search for a bistro, ate in Ibis's a-national dining room, the murmured conversations around us in half a dozen languages.
Arose at 4:20 am, checked out, bade goodbye to faithful feeble Saxo in the pre-dawn parking lot, and made our on-time flight to Amsterdam with an easy hour to spare.
Landed at Schiphol (Skip-hol) Airport with no baggage in tow and a 51/2-hour layover so despite my normal transit paranoia, we bought day-return tickets into town. Arriving at Centraal Station amid blowing rain that would later delay our outbound flight two hours, hopped a cab to the Rijksmuseum. Seeing stolid red-brick Flemish buildings, slick wet cobblestone streets, rusting Citroen 2CV's parked beside brown-water canals brought back youth-sugared memories of the six months (February to August, 1971) I had lived in Amsterdam, at the tender naïve age of seventeen, working in First National City Bank of New York, one of ten Americans in an office of three hundred Dutchmen, making 87¢ an hour and living penuriously in a 350-year-old hotel that cost me $4.25 a night.
A horse-face building of practical red rococo wings like the Smithsonian or the American Museum of Natural History, the Rijksmuseum (rikes-museum) houses some of the greatest works of perhaps art's greatest time - seventeenth century Holland - with the major Rembrandts and my personal favorites, the luminous Vermeers.
When we had squeezed out every possible second, ran through a sudden sheeting downpour to our bus. As we dripped in our seats and the bus came into Leidesplein, I saw the intersection where in April, 1971, hurrying to work one grim dark wet morning, I had caught the front wheel of my $8 one-gear bicycle in a tram track, tumbling over its handlebars and tearing a hole in one of the two pairs of pants I then owned.
Twenty-nine years ago: the same place but a distant time, a different world, my future self unimaginable, my past self recognizably the same.
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Dordogne, October 2000
v2. 23,100 words
1/29/01