The Aude, III

I am a big whiny baby. Many of the roads in the Aude, the ones that go to the most spectacular sites such as ruined fortresses on mountaintops, are very twisty. Twisty and steep. Twisty, steep, and extremely narrow. Twisty, steep, extremely narrow, and just not worth it. One bit of road in particular, which hadn't looked so bad on the map, put me in a flop sweat, and I was ramming my foot down on the pretend brake on the passenger's side the entire time. And moaning a little, since I'm a big fat baby.

 

That road was on the way to Nébias, population 228. We had a map for a short hike with a labyrinth of stones, and we made our way up the path, which first wound through someone's farm. Heather was blooming, and the path was covered in chamomile and marigolds.

I was having sciatica again so the others went ahead while I perched on a mossy rock and read. Every so often some children would tear through the little glade I was in, and shout, "Bonjour Madame!" which pleased me immensely. From the reports, the labyrinth was wonderful, hard to navigate in a good way, and apparently exhausting.

With gigantic black clouds barrelling toward us, we scampered back to Nébias to look for a café and some coffee and chocolat. The owner was Vietnamese, a former electrical engineer, his wife Indian, and they raised their children in both France and China. And my feeling, listening to his story, is that we were kindred spirits -- we feel at home when we are strangers somewhere.

That's Rennes-Le-Chateau in the photo below  (at the top of a very twisty narrow road). Crazy monks. The Aude is dotted with chateaux, many of them ruins or built on top of what the Cathars had built before being stomped to smithereens.

We even got to stay in one, the Chateau des Ducs de Joyeuse, a 16th century chateau without a particularly bloody history. The transformation to hotel did not diminish its medievalness at all, and it was set just beside the river Aude which was jewel green and rushing from spring rains.

I want to come back to the Aude for about a month someday, with camping equipment and inflatable kayaks. And blinders and short-acting tranquilizers.

The Aude, II

Given my family's struggles with mercury poisoning, I wasn't going to miss the Musée de la Chapellerie (Hat Industry Museum) in Esperaza. We watched a video explaining all the steps of hatmaking, we saw the actual machines involved in the complicated process of turning wool into felt into hats, but there was no mention of mad hatters. 

From the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Research Program:

"The felt hat industry has been traced to the mid-17th century in France, and it was probably introduced to England sometime around 1830. A story passed down in the hat industry gave this account of how mercury came to be used in the process: In Turkey, camel hair was used for felt material, and it was discovered that the felting process was speeded up if the fibers were moistened with camel urine. It is said that in France workmen used their own urine, but one particular workman seemed consistently to produce a superior felt. This person was being treated with a mercury compound for syphilis, and an association was made between mercury treatment of the fibers and an improved felt.

 

Eventually the use of solutions of mercuric nitrate was widespread in the felt industry, and mercury poisoning became endemic."

Using mercury in hatmaking was banned in the United States in 1941. Of course, a failure to generalize to other routes of mercury ingestion, along with the decline of the felt hat industry, has meant that there aren't any mad hatters anymore, just autistic children and a lot of people who need drugs for mood problems, hormone problems, and immune problems.

 

That night we had so-so pizza in Limoux, but I had my favorite wine so far: blanquette de Limoux, a bubbly white. 

It was cold, and tourist season had not yet begun, so Julian and Nellie had the square all to themselves for a postprandial dance. Nellie was not wearing her new hat, which was not felt, and so presumably absent of mercury and urine, either camel or French.

The Aude, I

After school last Friday we hopped in the car and drove south, on our way to the département of the Aude, country of the Cathars. That night we stayed in our first chambre d'hôte, and it really did seem like being a guest of a French friend. Almost. The house was grand in a cozy kind of way, the propriètaire was gracious and forgiving (there was an incident with a broken plastic wheelbarrow that I'll sweep under the rug here), the dining room lovely. Just the four of us with many candles, fresh lilacs, and old silver. To start we had a salad of chopped lettuce, grapefruit, and salmon that I'll have to recreate. Then chicken with a creamy sauce and mushrooms -- and how does the skin stay so crispy? -- along with cauliflower in cream sauce, zucchini, roasted potatoes, tart tatin. 

Two things about highway driving in France: the food is really good, and there are plenty of places to pull over and picnic with playgrounds, places that are beautifully maintained where you can feed ducks or look at roses or read a book in peace. You don't have the feeling that if you take your eyes off your child for one second, they will be stuffed into someone's trunk. Highway traveling is, well, civilized.

It's hard to say whether it was simply the cold wind, the sciatica, and Julian's abominable mood, but Carcassonne was something of a disappointment. It's mostly rebuilt, and while it doesn't look Disneyesque or anything like that, still, you don't have the feeling while wandering around that you have dropped back 800 years and that a knight on horseback may come galloping around the next corner. It's very impressive to see from the highway, a walled city on a hill, but when you're actually in it, you can't forget that it's a recreation. I did have an excellent lunch of moules frites though, with a bottle of cider. 

Carcassonne is another addition to the list of places to go back to, in better moods and when the children are older. I was dying to go to the Museum of the Inquisition but had to keep Nellie from knowing such a thing even existed. I explained a bit of the history of the Cathars in the most antiseptic way, since she gets very upset at the idea of violence -- Simon de Montfort was...a mean man. Chris and I muttered about the similarities to our current President, crusader and chief inquisitionist. Another mean man. It turns out that the way to get that back-in-the-Middle-Ages feeling is simply to contemplate Bush, Abu-Ghraib, and the Patriot Act. Same behavior, different costumes.

Feu! Feu! Petassou!

We had a do-over of rained-out Carnaval a few days ago, moments after a hailstorm. First the children paraded around the village, picking up parents and stragglers as they went, confetti flying everywhere.

We had been wondering what a petassou was for many weeks -- it had been mentioned in notes home from school several times but wasn't in our dictionary. And had we been forced to guess, I don't think "octopus dressed in old clothes and stuffed with hay" would have made the top ten.

Each class sang a song or two, and then began making as much racket as possible, shaking plastic soda bottle with shredded ends and other homemade noisemakers, and yelling "Feu! Feu! Petassou!"   (Burn! Burn! Petassou!) The ritual is that the petassou takes on all the bad deeds of the entire year, goes through a trial, and is burned so that the village and its people are purified for the coming year. The costumes and masks allowed everyone, of every class, to participate, so that the lowliest worker could party with the aristocrat.

Have I mentioned I love it here?

 

Often I see the children reach a point of collapse -- sudden weeping and wailing over something they are certain they will never ever master, like riding a bicycle or jumping rope-- and right after the collapse, whatever they were collapsing over is accomplished. I have been grumbling about the state of my French, and feeling rather hopeless about it. It's not that I couldn't read French, or understand when someone was speaking clearly and relatively slowly to me. It's French among French people, fast and furious and slangy, that I was unable to navigate. But Saturday, at the market in Bergerac, I was walking behind an elegant old man, who suddenly shook his cane at another man passing by, and said, "You walk right by without saying a word, what a savage you are!" with a giant grin for the friend he was harassing. And I laughed out loud because I understood all of what he said. Then I noticed I was catching little bits here and there of conversations around me, and it was like a veil had lifted, or at least become more transparent, that had been separating me from everyone.

On the way home, I listened to a radio show in which commentators discussed Hannah Arendt, Nazism, and what is lost when a film about the Nazis is done in English rather than German. And I understood most of that too. The next program started with a tape of a speech, and I recognized De Gaulle's voice, and understood what he was saying. 

So after my wailing and complaining reached its peak, a breakthrough. And that, along with the fact that the average radio show talks about Hannah Arendt, is enough to make me want to stay in France and not go back. Well, those things and crème caramel.

I was so overflowing with confidence that going to lunch yesterday at a friend's did not worry me. And it's true that I had no trouble understanding anyone's French, on a variety of topics. But my speaking was...bad. My ears have started working better, but not my mouth.

Sunday lunch is an event in France. The children ran around outside while we chatted and I drank a delicious glass of wine from a box. Children are expected to participate in things like Sunday lunch, and they are expected to make their own fun -- no one is making the slightest effort to entertain them or to provide them with toys, movies, craft supplies, anything. So the children made up a game that involved hurling seed pod grenades and guarding ammo dumps that was apparently deeply fun, and when they came in to eat they were beaming and sweaty and red-cheeked.

The first course was a bright green pea soup. We mopped up the last bits with some bread and kept our plates for the salad, a layered heap of raw fennel, sliced orange, and olives, with a vinaigrette. Fabulous. We drank an organic wine from near Perpignan, not nearly as good as the red from the box. Next was cous-cous, with stewed pumpkin and parsnips, raisins and roasted sunflower seeds. And quince tart. We talked about Bush, and Monsanto, and how to keep from being depressed in the face of all they have done. We talked about plants. We talked about books.

I love it here.

Les Trottoirs de Villamblard

I love the French word for sidewalks. It makes me think of pigs trotting down the side of the road, doing errands and visiting like those old Uncle Wiggly stories. And even more than the word, I love the trottoirs here in the village. Imagine how much time they took to make! And doesn't it make you wish concrete had never been invented?


The other side of the street does not fare so well, but it makes me smile to myself every time I walk there because it is so utterly un-American. Maybe it's because my father is a lawyer, or maybe it's simply because I've lived in the US for most of my life -- but when I make my way down the west side of the street, I can't help imagining the towering piles of lawsuits brought for sprained ankles and the broken hips of little old ladies.

The little old ladies in Villamblard seem to negotiate the trottoirs without problems. They simply walk slowly and look where they're going. Last week I was trotting through the church parking lot, which in my defense is somewhat pebbly and not perfectly flat, and was turning around to look at the flowers blooming around the statue of the Madonna, when suddenly -- boom! -- I was on the ground. I brushed myself off and looked furtively around to see if any of the old ladies had seen me, but the streets were deserted and possibly my dignity is not in tatters. 

Halfhearted work has begun on the most dilapidated parts of the trottoir, so that in the future it will be at least solid if not flat. I'm making a vow that before we leave, I'm going to strike up a conversation with one of the little old ladies to see if I can find out how old those beautiful stone trottoirs are, where the stones came from, and whatever else she can tell me. And in our remaining three months I plan to walk slowly and look where I'm going.

Language Learning III

(Hard to photograph this, but see the colombage on the top half of the building? In Bergerac.)

One of the best moments in France so far was last week, when Nellie invited a French girl over to play, the bespectacled gangly Pauline, and the two of them were in her room playing with stuffed animals and Playmobil, chattering away in French. I was eavesdropping from my room, and honestly could not tell which voice was which. As far as learning the language goes, the seven year old has the rest of us beat by a mile.

Chris and I have been reading French books and French newspapers. We try, with varying success, to speak mostly French to each other and the children. But even after seven months, we are unable to follow a conversation in which French people are talking to each other, which is kind of depressing. 

A few days ago, Nellie and I snuggled in to watch Astérix Chez Les Bretons, in which our heroes go to England to help an English cousin. One of the best parts of the movie is that the English characters speak French with a hilarious English accent. I was chuckling away until Nellie asked me to translate what they were saying, and I saw that we had opposite problems -- she could understand the French fine, but the English-accented French threw her. For me, the opposite. 

I realized that all the reading has been improving my French quite a lot, and that the thing I am lacking is not grammar, or vocabulary, or even idioms -- it's rhythm and intonation. The English-accented French in Astérix is funny partly because the words are pronounced wrong, but also because the flow of the sentences is utterly non-French. And to my ear, the words become comprehensible because the English rhythm is familiar. 

So instead of spending this rainy morning reading more Harry Potter et La Coupe de Feu, I'm going to go watch TV instead, even though I resist it because it is so much more difficult. And Julian? He falls somewhere between Nellie and the tone-deaf adults. His accent is better than ours, his comprehension is much better, but we don't get to hear him speak much. I hope before we leave I'll have a chance to eavesdrop on him too.