June 29, 2015
Just how gossipy is Caunes? It depends to whom you talk, but in general I would say "very". This has a connection to the petty crime that happens, which plays out in a funny way.
I found out how gossipy in my particular case, some people are, on my way to the shops to do errands this morning. On my way, I ran into my elderly cycling partner coming back from the boulangerie and the butcher's on his bicycle. He greeted me in his usual cheerful way, and stopped his bicycle to chat. Within seconds, I learned that the cashier at the butchers had told him that she took care of Beau while I took communion at Mass yesterday evening.
This was true: I have taken to hiking to church, sitting outside with Beau so as not to disturb either my next door neighbors or parishioners at Mass. When I need to take communion, I either tie Beau to a nearby tree, or someone offers to hold him for me in the meantime.
Yesterday, the cashier at the butcher's --a woman my age who does not attend Mass, but drives her mother there and back each Sunday-- offered to take Beau. I like her, but she is not someone who can keep anything secret. "She and her mother are the biggest gossips in the village", a friend (who shall be nameless, as everyone but one in this post will be), cautioned me. "If there is anything personal you don't want spread around town, she's not the person to tell."
On the other hand, it is essential to be able to obtain information from trusted friends in order to be aware of who in the village might be a potential source of problems. And since it is now widely known that there is a drug market not far from my door, to know who might be affiliated, is to know whom not to share my opinions with, so as to avoid being "tagged" with a grudge by part of the gang.
And grudges abound in Caunes, as in any small community. I now understand why Agatha Christie found such inspiration in the small English village: people living close together become very aware of each other: their habits, their comings and goings and their personal lives.
For instance, I now know that one of my friends is detested by a young man affiliated with the drug trade, a grudge which began because she obtained an order that the road where he normally parks be closed off. The closure came on account of a wall in danger of collapse which is shared by my friend and an English couple. Arriving in his car a few days ago, concluding my friend had denied him his usual parking space by the wall, the young man hurled obscenities at my friend in front of the head of the village police, who was setting up the barricade. My friend in turn warned him that he was on notice that she would lodge a formal complaint if he verbally abused her in the future, and the policeman was her witness.
I know, too, that the red car always parked in front of the drug dealer's house is actually owned by the boyfriend of the young woman who cleaned for me last year, a young man who made bookshelves for me then. I know that the car is uninsured and that the police have warned the owner that if it is involved in an accident there will be hell to pay. (The cars are bought cheap on the black market.) I know too, that my former cleaning woman's car is, also, uninsured.
I felt violated by having my tires deflated, but I now know that last Saturday night, this young woman had her car broken into and the gas line damaged by an attempt to siphon off the contents of the tank. More, the intoxicated or drugged young man I met early yesterday morning and referred to in yesterday's blog, is believed by the police to be the person who vandalized the car.
And I know that my neighbor down the street had his car damaged a few weeks ago by someone trying to siphon gas; that an Englishwoman had the same thing happen last week; and that a man who raises burros and horses in Caunes' countryside was broken into: there is an angry sign posted on the farm gate, warning anyone thinking they would try to break in again that they will be met with the full force of his fury.
One of my friends heard someone trying to break into her restaurant last week: she stuck her head out the window of her garden and realized two young women and a young man had climbed on top of a garbage bin and were trying to enter the house through an open window. My friend had sang froid: she shouted out the window "I see you and I just took a photo of you, which I am taking to the police in the morning!"
The malefactors answered back, "Oh, it's nothing, don't be afraid!" and ran away. My friend recognized one of the girls as someone who had dropped off a resume, hoping for a waitressing job for the summer.
This morning when I spoke about all these events with the one person I will name in the post, Gilles Adiveze, the head of the municipal police; he told me that I was wise to put my car in my garage, despite the challenge of parking it. He also said I should never open my front door automatically because someone rang the bell. He advised me that I should either get a chain for the front door, or, when someone knocks, go up to the second floor and look out the window.
"It's disconcerting when they see someone, and if they meant any harm, they'll scram when they see you. And you have a dog, which is reassuring."
A male friend was more philosophic. "I never locked my door when I went out until recently. And I still leave my wares out for anyone to buy on the honor system. Some people think that's crazy, 'How can you do that?'.
"But if you start to be taken over by a paranoia then the bastards win. The bastards will win in the end, anyway, but they don't have to win because you gave into fear."
Monday, June 29, 2015
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Facing Facts
Sunday, June 28, 2015
I have a garage, one big enough for my compact car to fit inside. I have refrained from using it because the garage is entered from the back of the house on a strip of land given as an easement by elderly neighbors just down the hill. Parking in the garage involves reversing in the very small space between the doors of the garage, backing into the garage ever so gently.
The terrace is immediately above the exterior of the garage. Last year I put up clothes lines in the space under the terrace. It seemed the practical thing to do: since the weather is dry and hot here in the summers: clothes dry in the midday sun in an hour or two.
I wlll have to figure out a way to string clothesline and take it down whenever I have to park the car from here on in. Another incident this morning persuaded me that it was best not to create an opportunity for further vandalism of my car.
This morning Beau and I joined Pipasa and Bija, two Japanese women friends, for a jaunt to the brocante/vide grenier on the outskirts of Carcassonne. We agreed to meet at 7:45 a.m. so as to have our choice of the pickings. Pipasa and Bija got in the car first, to give me time to give Beau a quick walk.
While I was walking Beau in the vicinity, a young man of about twenty, dressed in a pink Lacoste shirt and summer jeans, approached the car. Seeing that Bija and Pipasa were not French, he tried to speak to them in English. I approached, and asked the young man what he wanted.
He was obviously either drugged or intoxicated. He jumped a bit, in the way drug addicts and hard core alcoholics always do when someone steps back from further contact, as I did.
"You don't have to fear anything from me", he whined.
"Can I help you?" I said in French.
"I need five liters of gas", he continued, then mumbled something unintelligible.
"I'm sorry", I said in French and walked away. He stalked off towards the village talking to himself.
Last night I could hear lots of noise coming from the direction of the open air bar, La Cantine du Cure. Their license allows them to stay open until 2:00 a.m., and after yesterday's incident, I was more sensitive than usual to sounds. I spent a pretty miserable night thinking about whether I was doing anything to invite reprisals from anyone in the village, then decided that since I have a garage, I'm going to use it.
I parked the car in the garage late this morning, after Bija, Pipasa, Beau and I returned from the brocante. I asked Pipasa what she thought of the incident.
"It's nasty", she offered. "This never used to happen."
Pipasa helped me park today, and I'll just keep practicing this difficult parking maneuver. Knowing I won't let myself be victimized by drunken, drugged, or just malicious teenagers will make all the effort worth it.
--And I'm lucky to have a garage. An Englishwoman with a red license plate like mine had her car vandalized in the parking lot of the Place d'Europe last week, ostensibly as part of an effort to siphon out gas. She has to park outside, her house in the village having no space for a garage.
I have a garage, one big enough for my compact car to fit inside. I have refrained from using it because the garage is entered from the back of the house on a strip of land given as an easement by elderly neighbors just down the hill. Parking in the garage involves reversing in the very small space between the doors of the garage, backing into the garage ever so gently.
The terrace is immediately above the exterior of the garage. Last year I put up clothes lines in the space under the terrace. It seemed the practical thing to do: since the weather is dry and hot here in the summers: clothes dry in the midday sun in an hour or two.
I wlll have to figure out a way to string clothesline and take it down whenever I have to park the car from here on in. Another incident this morning persuaded me that it was best not to create an opportunity for further vandalism of my car.
This morning Beau and I joined Pipasa and Bija, two Japanese women friends, for a jaunt to the brocante/vide grenier on the outskirts of Carcassonne. We agreed to meet at 7:45 a.m. so as to have our choice of the pickings. Pipasa and Bija got in the car first, to give me time to give Beau a quick walk.
While I was walking Beau in the vicinity, a young man of about twenty, dressed in a pink Lacoste shirt and summer jeans, approached the car. Seeing that Bija and Pipasa were not French, he tried to speak to them in English. I approached, and asked the young man what he wanted.
He was obviously either drugged or intoxicated. He jumped a bit, in the way drug addicts and hard core alcoholics always do when someone steps back from further contact, as I did.
"You don't have to fear anything from me", he whined.
"Can I help you?" I said in French.
"I need five liters of gas", he continued, then mumbled something unintelligible.
"I'm sorry", I said in French and walked away. He stalked off towards the village talking to himself.
Last night I could hear lots of noise coming from the direction of the open air bar, La Cantine du Cure. Their license allows them to stay open until 2:00 a.m., and after yesterday's incident, I was more sensitive than usual to sounds. I spent a pretty miserable night thinking about whether I was doing anything to invite reprisals from anyone in the village, then decided that since I have a garage, I'm going to use it.
I parked the car in the garage late this morning, after Bija, Pipasa, Beau and I returned from the brocante. I asked Pipasa what she thought of the incident.
"It's nasty", she offered. "This never used to happen."
Pipasa helped me park today, and I'll just keep practicing this difficult parking maneuver. Knowing I won't let myself be victimized by drunken, drugged, or just malicious teenagers will make all the effort worth it.
--And I'm lucky to have a garage. An Englishwoman with a red license plate like mine had her car vandalized in the parking lot of the Place d'Europe last week, ostensibly as part of an effort to siphon out gas. She has to park outside, her house in the village having no space for a garage.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Change of Plans
June 27, 2015
There is a summer truffle festival going on as I write, about an hour away in Roullens en Malepere, a village southwest of Carcassonne. The Languedoc has long been famous for its truffles and the opportunity to visit a village devoted to them, to learn about them, to see the dogs used in the search for these earthy bits, was irresistible. Unfortunately, it was not to be.
I woke early, got myself and Beau ready, making my way to the car by 9:15 a.m. The car was parked alongside the wall by the marble statue of a giant ear a hundred feet from my house, a legal parking space. I got Beau in the car, put his seat belt on, then mine, and pulled away.
As I pulled away, I felt the car move with difficulty. I moved on up the hill that intersects with the main road, Avenue du Minervois. The car continued to move with difficulty. I parked it a few yards down the top of Avenue du Minervois and realized why. Both of the tires that, in the parking space, had been closest to the wall, that is, those aligned with the front passenger seat, were flat --punctured or deflated. The passenger side of the car had also been scratched and slightly dented.
As I was taking all this in, Raymonde, a woman who works at the Mairie, crossed the street to see what I was looking at. "This was done intentionally", she said. "There's a lot of hooliganism now" she added.
And my car is a perfect target, as its red license plate indicates it is a rented car. When I picked up the car at Blagnac airport in Toulouse, the young man there advised me not to leave the vehicle registration document in the car. "Without that, they can't sell it very easily", he explained at the time. I took his advice and kept the document at home, except when I was using the car, when I carried it on my person.
I called the roadside assistance number for my car, a Citroen. The tow truck would be by in forty-five minutes to an hour. In the meantime, I went to the Mairie.
When I walked in, I was greeted by the Mayor, a young man in his mid-forties. He already knew about the vandalism because Raymonde told him when she walked in. I asked whether I could have a statement from the relevant authority for purposes of establishing a record of the incident for insurance purposes. He produced one within minutes, stamped with the Mairie seal and signed by him. "Have a good weekend --despite this", he told me with a wistful smile as he handed me the document in an official envelope.
What will happen is that I will be without a car until my car is repaired in the middle of the week. The leasing company will either have the car returned to me here, or will hire a taxi to take me to the garage where the repairs to the car will be done. Insurance will cover everything but to that end, the leasing agent for Citroen will require a copy of the statement from the Mairie, attached to an e-mail, sent by me as soon as possible. I don't have a scanner, so I walked down to La Marbrerie give my friends my news and to ask them, as a favor to me, to transmit the Mairie document and my cover letter.
When I got there, I got a clearer picture of what might have happened from Christine, who runs La Marbrerie day to day:
"Last night, I heard a car alarm go off at 2:00 a.m. And nearby,our chef --Luc-- heard some people outside near his door. He heard them fiddle with a car for a long time. So for sure, somebody went looking for a car to steal a car last night. Whoever damaged your car intended to steal it. Perhaps they were able to get inside, but when they looked for the certificat d'immatriculation and could not find it, they realized the car would be hard to sell. So they decided to take revenge by puncturing your tires and damaging the chassis, especially as it's a rented car.
"At least it's not personal. I thought at first that you might have parked in a parking space some creep thinks if his personal parking space. You would never have seen the end of that," Christine ended.
So Caunes, like everywhere else, has its petty crime. There is a small traffic in marijuana, active in the late evening, in front of a house a thousand feet from my door. Around 9:30 p.m. each night, one or two cars stop and wait quietly. One young man alone is believed to be behind the trade --a neighbor. I mentioned the fact to Gilles Adiveze, head of the municipal police, a few days ago. He told me everyone was aware of the traffic, that he dutifully sends in reports of it to the Gendarmerie (which is the ultimate authority in such matters). However, the amounts sold are small enough that even if the seller were arrested and found guilty no prison time would be ordered. So the trade goes on.
I see the dealer frequently, and always wish him "Good day", and him me. I wonder whether he might not have an idea of who did what to my tires, but I'm not going to ask him.
And as it turns out, my tires were not punctured, just the air let out of them. If I can get a taxi to Trebes, I can have the car back in my possession late this afternoon.
That will be something to be grateful for.
*****
Amazingly, the taxi arrives quickly, and takes me just as quickly to Trebes, half-way to Roullens-Malpere and the truffle festival. I arrive at 4:30 p.m., see the truffle-sniffing dogs, buy a truffle 3" across for 7 Euros, as well as a cheese --a tomme from the Pyrenees--and consider myself lucky. The day has been eventful, and far from a waste.
There is a summer truffle festival going on as I write, about an hour away in Roullens en Malepere, a village southwest of Carcassonne. The Languedoc has long been famous for its truffles and the opportunity to visit a village devoted to them, to learn about them, to see the dogs used in the search for these earthy bits, was irresistible. Unfortunately, it was not to be.
I woke early, got myself and Beau ready, making my way to the car by 9:15 a.m. The car was parked alongside the wall by the marble statue of a giant ear a hundred feet from my house, a legal parking space. I got Beau in the car, put his seat belt on, then mine, and pulled away.
As I pulled away, I felt the car move with difficulty. I moved on up the hill that intersects with the main road, Avenue du Minervois. The car continued to move with difficulty. I parked it a few yards down the top of Avenue du Minervois and realized why. Both of the tires that, in the parking space, had been closest to the wall, that is, those aligned with the front passenger seat, were flat --punctured or deflated. The passenger side of the car had also been scratched and slightly dented.
As I was taking all this in, Raymonde, a woman who works at the Mairie, crossed the street to see what I was looking at. "This was done intentionally", she said. "There's a lot of hooliganism now" she added.
And my car is a perfect target, as its red license plate indicates it is a rented car. When I picked up the car at Blagnac airport in Toulouse, the young man there advised me not to leave the vehicle registration document in the car. "Without that, they can't sell it very easily", he explained at the time. I took his advice and kept the document at home, except when I was using the car, when I carried it on my person.
I called the roadside assistance number for my car, a Citroen. The tow truck would be by in forty-five minutes to an hour. In the meantime, I went to the Mairie.
When I walked in, I was greeted by the Mayor, a young man in his mid-forties. He already knew about the vandalism because Raymonde told him when she walked in. I asked whether I could have a statement from the relevant authority for purposes of establishing a record of the incident for insurance purposes. He produced one within minutes, stamped with the Mairie seal and signed by him. "Have a good weekend --despite this", he told me with a wistful smile as he handed me the document in an official envelope.
What will happen is that I will be without a car until my car is repaired in the middle of the week. The leasing company will either have the car returned to me here, or will hire a taxi to take me to the garage where the repairs to the car will be done. Insurance will cover everything but to that end, the leasing agent for Citroen will require a copy of the statement from the Mairie, attached to an e-mail, sent by me as soon as possible. I don't have a scanner, so I walked down to La Marbrerie give my friends my news and to ask them, as a favor to me, to transmit the Mairie document and my cover letter.
When I got there, I got a clearer picture of what might have happened from Christine, who runs La Marbrerie day to day:
"Last night, I heard a car alarm go off at 2:00 a.m. And nearby,our chef --Luc-- heard some people outside near his door. He heard them fiddle with a car for a long time. So for sure, somebody went looking for a car to steal a car last night. Whoever damaged your car intended to steal it. Perhaps they were able to get inside, but when they looked for the certificat d'immatriculation and could not find it, they realized the car would be hard to sell. So they decided to take revenge by puncturing your tires and damaging the chassis, especially as it's a rented car.
"At least it's not personal. I thought at first that you might have parked in a parking space some creep thinks if his personal parking space. You would never have seen the end of that," Christine ended.
So Caunes, like everywhere else, has its petty crime. There is a small traffic in marijuana, active in the late evening, in front of a house a thousand feet from my door. Around 9:30 p.m. each night, one or two cars stop and wait quietly. One young man alone is believed to be behind the trade --a neighbor. I mentioned the fact to Gilles Adiveze, head of the municipal police, a few days ago. He told me everyone was aware of the traffic, that he dutifully sends in reports of it to the Gendarmerie (which is the ultimate authority in such matters). However, the amounts sold are small enough that even if the seller were arrested and found guilty no prison time would be ordered. So the trade goes on.
I see the dealer frequently, and always wish him "Good day", and him me. I wonder whether he might not have an idea of who did what to my tires, but I'm not going to ask him.
And as it turns out, my tires were not punctured, just the air let out of them. If I can get a taxi to Trebes, I can have the car back in my possession late this afternoon.
That will be something to be grateful for.
*****
Amazingly, the taxi arrives quickly, and takes me just as quickly to Trebes, half-way to Roullens-Malpere and the truffle festival. I arrive at 4:30 p.m., see the truffle-sniffing dogs, buy a truffle 3" across for 7 Euros, as well as a cheese --a tomme from the Pyrenees--and consider myself lucky. The day has been eventful, and far from a waste.
Friday, June 26, 2015
Carnage in Isere and Tunis
June 26, 2015
It is hard to convey the sense of dismay French around the hexagon are feeling in the light of the news that the manager of a French gas company located in l'Ile d'Abeau was decapitated this morning. This is the first time that kind of brutality has occurred on French soil, which has not lacked for deaths due to radical Islam.
The suspect was en employee of the gas company into whose tanks he drove his car, precipitating an explosion. The chronology of the attack and the murder have not yet been established, although reporters have already visited the modest apartment complex where he, his wife and his three children lived.
The children are polite and well-behaved. The wife seems to have no idea of her husband's possible association with murderous Islam. The neighbors say the family was quiet; co-workers say the suspect was very much to himself, but polite. He had been on the radar screen of the French intelligence services, but fell off after 2008.
Meanwhile, at least thirty-seven foreign tourists (how many French as yet unknown), have been killed while lying in their beach chairs in a resort in Sousse, Tunisia. The country, which depends on tourism for its livelihood, has seen tourism fall off by 65% since attacks in March. The latest attack will be the "coup de grace" for the Tunisian economy and a boon to that of the Portuguese.
"The Portuguese are Judaeo-Christian, the Maghrebins are not", said an elderly friend who spent much of his career in Tunisia. "On New Year's Eve in Tunis, everyone went to the theatre. The plays were French --boulevard comedies by Sacha Guitry and Feydeau. The audience was 85% Tunisian, but they laughed in the same places we did. The Tunisians were always the nicest of the North African people, the Libyans the worst", my friend went on to say.
One of their daughters continues to live in Tunis, where she was brought up. Do her parents worry? They do.
People in their eighties remember living in North Africa pleasantly, remember most of the interactions with North Africans fondly. They now find themselves faced with a new order which leaves them profoundly ill at ease.
And those French that had the experience of living in North Africa and the Middle East are far more well-disposed to the peoples of North Africa, the Middle and Near East than the average Frenchman. And even the most hidebound Front National voter knows more about the people of North Africa and the Near and Middle East than most Americans. Most of these countries were, after all, French colonies, places where French felt at home. A recent article in Le Figaro reported on an archive of French newspapers and magazines in Alexandria, Egypt, a collection of papers that is a window into a vanished world in a cosmopolitan city.
The French remember a civilized world in which they held all the cards, for sure, but where someone who integrated into the French way of doing things could succeed. President Senghor of Senegal was one example: he is venerated alongside Voltaire and others in Le Pantheon in Paris, a signal honor. Sidney Toledano, the head of Christian Dior corporation, is of Moroccan Jewish extraction. Alongside them one can find many natives of North Africa who have distinguished themselves in France.
And those French who came from pieds noirs families --from French families who settled in North Africa-- are legion. Although most would think him quintessentially French, Albert Camus had a Spanish mother, a French father and was born in Algeria. Yves Saint Laurent was born and raised in Oran, Algeria. Enrico Macias, the singer, is from a Jewish family from Morocco, as is Gad Elmaleh (the partner of Princess Charlotte of Monaco). Kad Meerad, the popular actor, is French Algerian.
One estimate gives the number of Muslims in France at 7.5%. The number of Jews, in contrast, is 3.3%. What I notice, living here a good part of the year, is that the French are quite open-minded about new settlers, provided they accept French ways. The Portuguese are the most notable example of this, having started to come to France as low-wage workers in the 1950s. However, France continues to provide asylum to a variety of immigrant groups, including most recently, Malians and Libyans fleeing civil war in their countries. The government has set up shelters for these asylum-seekers in out-of-the-way places in the the country, where local concerns about unemployment and the French economy make resistance to government decrees is difficult. Notwithstanding, these townspeople have accepted their new neighbors, businesses appreciate the new customers, while volunteers teach them French.
In a word, the French see themselves as open to immigrants, and willing to help. Which makes today's attacks in Isere and Tunis a test of France's willingness to go on as before, in a spirit of openness.
It is hard to convey the sense of dismay French around the hexagon are feeling in the light of the news that the manager of a French gas company located in l'Ile d'Abeau was decapitated this morning. This is the first time that kind of brutality has occurred on French soil, which has not lacked for deaths due to radical Islam.
The suspect was en employee of the gas company into whose tanks he drove his car, precipitating an explosion. The chronology of the attack and the murder have not yet been established, although reporters have already visited the modest apartment complex where he, his wife and his three children lived.
The children are polite and well-behaved. The wife seems to have no idea of her husband's possible association with murderous Islam. The neighbors say the family was quiet; co-workers say the suspect was very much to himself, but polite. He had been on the radar screen of the French intelligence services, but fell off after 2008.
Meanwhile, at least thirty-seven foreign tourists (how many French as yet unknown), have been killed while lying in their beach chairs in a resort in Sousse, Tunisia. The country, which depends on tourism for its livelihood, has seen tourism fall off by 65% since attacks in March. The latest attack will be the "coup de grace" for the Tunisian economy and a boon to that of the Portuguese.
"The Portuguese are Judaeo-Christian, the Maghrebins are not", said an elderly friend who spent much of his career in Tunisia. "On New Year's Eve in Tunis, everyone went to the theatre. The plays were French --boulevard comedies by Sacha Guitry and Feydeau. The audience was 85% Tunisian, but they laughed in the same places we did. The Tunisians were always the nicest of the North African people, the Libyans the worst", my friend went on to say.
One of their daughters continues to live in Tunis, where she was brought up. Do her parents worry? They do.
People in their eighties remember living in North Africa pleasantly, remember most of the interactions with North Africans fondly. They now find themselves faced with a new order which leaves them profoundly ill at ease.
And those French that had the experience of living in North Africa and the Middle East are far more well-disposed to the peoples of North Africa, the Middle and Near East than the average Frenchman. And even the most hidebound Front National voter knows more about the people of North Africa and the Near and Middle East than most Americans. Most of these countries were, after all, French colonies, places where French felt at home. A recent article in Le Figaro reported on an archive of French newspapers and magazines in Alexandria, Egypt, a collection of papers that is a window into a vanished world in a cosmopolitan city.
The French remember a civilized world in which they held all the cards, for sure, but where someone who integrated into the French way of doing things could succeed. President Senghor of Senegal was one example: he is venerated alongside Voltaire and others in Le Pantheon in Paris, a signal honor. Sidney Toledano, the head of Christian Dior corporation, is of Moroccan Jewish extraction. Alongside them one can find many natives of North Africa who have distinguished themselves in France.
And those French who came from pieds noirs families --from French families who settled in North Africa-- are legion. Although most would think him quintessentially French, Albert Camus had a Spanish mother, a French father and was born in Algeria. Yves Saint Laurent was born and raised in Oran, Algeria. Enrico Macias, the singer, is from a Jewish family from Morocco, as is Gad Elmaleh (the partner of Princess Charlotte of Monaco). Kad Meerad, the popular actor, is French Algerian.
One estimate gives the number of Muslims in France at 7.5%. The number of Jews, in contrast, is 3.3%. What I notice, living here a good part of the year, is that the French are quite open-minded about new settlers, provided they accept French ways. The Portuguese are the most notable example of this, having started to come to France as low-wage workers in the 1950s. However, France continues to provide asylum to a variety of immigrant groups, including most recently, Malians and Libyans fleeing civil war in their countries. The government has set up shelters for these asylum-seekers in out-of-the-way places in the the country, where local concerns about unemployment and the French economy make resistance to government decrees is difficult. Notwithstanding, these townspeople have accepted their new neighbors, businesses appreciate the new customers, while volunteers teach them French.
In a word, the French see themselves as open to immigrants, and willing to help. Which makes today's attacks in Isere and Tunis a test of France's willingness to go on as before, in a spirit of openness.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Goat Cheese On Everything
June 22, 2015
France in 2015 remains a country of small farmers, cherished by their compatriots for bringing to French tables food that is largely made according to traditional, trusted methods. Not surprisingly as a result, any effort to industrialize the raising of animals for human consumption is met with a blistering hue and cry and determined opposition.
The French are well-aware that the methods their devoted farmers use are inefficient and costly. However, the possibility that cheaper, but inferior food may flood the market, driving out the small producers, remains a real fear in the minds of the French. That this is a national concern is demonstrated by a recent news program which featured a long segment on what went into developing "bio" chickens, comparing non-bio chickens to those bio chickens made for a supermarket, to those carried by a local butcher.
The arbiter of the quality of poulet bio au grands surfaces, poulet bio au boucher and poulets non-bio was, appropriately, a well-known chef. The verdict: "bio" supermarket chickens were far better than "non-bio", but the "bio" chickens from small producers were even better. Why? Because the small farmer gave his chickens a combination of grains he prepared himself for their feed. There is a definite rapport qualite-prix --a connection between quality and price.
Yesterday, an opportunity to visit some of the farms of the neighboring region, the Val de Dagne, presented itself, so I and a neighbor went trawling the offerings. With our dogs, we visited three farms and one vintner. The first farm bred goats for cheese, offering ten varieties: goat cheeses marinated in olive oil and herbs, goat cheeses encrusted with red pepper or black pepper and others of varying sizes and moistness.
Female goats are friendly little creatures, not so billy goats, the kings of the herd. Watching one of them mount a female and seeing the many young goats around, I reflected on the prodigious result of his rather clumsy approach The more the merrier in farmland, though.
The farm offered lunch, grilled goat meat, or merguez, Moroccan-style sausages made with goat, instead of the traditional beef or lamb. My friend and I opted for the merguez, which was uncooked. We were pointed to the two grills on site and realized we had to cook the sausage ourselves. I managed to neither under, nor overcook the meat, which we ate with a salad dressed with --of course, goat cheese.
Our next stop was a vintners in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Notwithstanding that the vintner was not one of the major producers the wine was superb, particularly the red they called Delicatesse: round, tannic and complex, I bought a half case, a price readers would only wish was available where they are reading this.
We next visited a large farm on a hill even more remote than our previous stops. This farm was devoted to sheep farming. Over 400 sheep slept (standing up, of course) as we made our approach. At 6:00 p.m. that evening they would be led up to their summer pastures by their shepherds, a caravan called a transhumance in France.
We were not able to visit every farm open that day, but finished our tour in another small village where syrups made of medicinal herbs, honey and products made of lavender were made. A demonstration of how the essence of lavender was distilled was in progress when we arrived; among the crowd, two Augustinian monks from the nearby abbey of Largesse watched, dressed in their ivory linen robes. I bought a tapenade spread of wild garlic, olives and olive oil. (Wild garlic is individually culled and tastes milder than that grown commercially.)
The farmer's life in France is relentless, but people who work as farmers or shepherds love the freedom of being their own boss, whatever the difficulties. While many prefer to work at a desk, for those who either inherit a farm or those who leave the city to run a farm (known as neo-ruraliens), the opportunity to be close to nature and to live far from the madding crowd makes it all worth it.
It can be difficult for young farmers to find wives, though. Such that there is actually a website and a television program which function as dating sites for farmers too busy to pick up girls at bars. A farmer's wife has to have no interest in a trendy lifestyle or vacations, because she'll have neither. She and her husband may, however, have the regard of their neighbors and the gratitude of their compatriots for perpetuating, for so long as it remains possible, the production on a small scale, of delicious foods envied the world-over.
France in 2015 remains a country of small farmers, cherished by their compatriots for bringing to French tables food that is largely made according to traditional, trusted methods. Not surprisingly as a result, any effort to industrialize the raising of animals for human consumption is met with a blistering hue and cry and determined opposition.
The French are well-aware that the methods their devoted farmers use are inefficient and costly. However, the possibility that cheaper, but inferior food may flood the market, driving out the small producers, remains a real fear in the minds of the French. That this is a national concern is demonstrated by a recent news program which featured a long segment on what went into developing "bio" chickens, comparing non-bio chickens to those bio chickens made for a supermarket, to those carried by a local butcher.
The arbiter of the quality of poulet bio au grands surfaces, poulet bio au boucher and poulets non-bio was, appropriately, a well-known chef. The verdict: "bio" supermarket chickens were far better than "non-bio", but the "bio" chickens from small producers were even better. Why? Because the small farmer gave his chickens a combination of grains he prepared himself for their feed. There is a definite rapport qualite-prix --a connection between quality and price.
Yesterday, an opportunity to visit some of the farms of the neighboring region, the Val de Dagne, presented itself, so I and a neighbor went trawling the offerings. With our dogs, we visited three farms and one vintner. The first farm bred goats for cheese, offering ten varieties: goat cheeses marinated in olive oil and herbs, goat cheeses encrusted with red pepper or black pepper and others of varying sizes and moistness.
Female goats are friendly little creatures, not so billy goats, the kings of the herd. Watching one of them mount a female and seeing the many young goats around, I reflected on the prodigious result of his rather clumsy approach The more the merrier in farmland, though.
The farm offered lunch, grilled goat meat, or merguez, Moroccan-style sausages made with goat, instead of the traditional beef or lamb. My friend and I opted for the merguez, which was uncooked. We were pointed to the two grills on site and realized we had to cook the sausage ourselves. I managed to neither under, nor overcook the meat, which we ate with a salad dressed with --of course, goat cheese.
Our next stop was a vintners in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Notwithstanding that the vintner was not one of the major producers the wine was superb, particularly the red they called Delicatesse: round, tannic and complex, I bought a half case, a price readers would only wish was available where they are reading this.
We next visited a large farm on a hill even more remote than our previous stops. This farm was devoted to sheep farming. Over 400 sheep slept (standing up, of course) as we made our approach. At 6:00 p.m. that evening they would be led up to their summer pastures by their shepherds, a caravan called a transhumance in France.
We were not able to visit every farm open that day, but finished our tour in another small village where syrups made of medicinal herbs, honey and products made of lavender were made. A demonstration of how the essence of lavender was distilled was in progress when we arrived; among the crowd, two Augustinian monks from the nearby abbey of Largesse watched, dressed in their ivory linen robes. I bought a tapenade spread of wild garlic, olives and olive oil. (Wild garlic is individually culled and tastes milder than that grown commercially.)
The farmer's life in France is relentless, but people who work as farmers or shepherds love the freedom of being their own boss, whatever the difficulties. While many prefer to work at a desk, for those who either inherit a farm or those who leave the city to run a farm (known as neo-ruraliens), the opportunity to be close to nature and to live far from the madding crowd makes it all worth it.
It can be difficult for young farmers to find wives, though. Such that there is actually a website and a television program which function as dating sites for farmers too busy to pick up girls at bars. A farmer's wife has to have no interest in a trendy lifestyle or vacations, because she'll have neither. She and her husband may, however, have the regard of their neighbors and the gratitude of their compatriots for perpetuating, for so long as it remains possible, the production on a small scale, of delicious foods envied the world-over.
Friday, June 19, 2015
The Battle of Waterloo --LIVE!
June 20, 2015
The Battle of Waterloo is going on as I write this (for tomorrow's post).
Tonight, BFMTV, the French 24-hour news station, is carrying live the first part of the battle, the French attack.
The actual battle was fought two days earlier one hundred years ago, on June 18 2015. However, the organizers of this spectacle held anniversary celebrations on Wednesday, as the public began to arrive and the re-enactors prepared to go through their drills. Fifty thousand people were involved in putting on this spectacle (which will last four days) together. Five thousand men, dressed in costumes designed as exact replicas of those the combatants wore, form the armies. There are horses and flags, rifles, cannons, smoke and funny hats. French newspapers and magazines have been full of stories about the re-enactment, which will not be repeated until 2025. Tickets have sold well, at 15.75 Euros each.
Needless to say, you have to be obsessed with Napoleon to spend what it costs of participate, let alone participate as a combatant. And what of the man who is Napoleon for the length of the four days? That would be Frank Samson, who will be retiring as Napoleon (a distinction he has held for six years) after this tour. At 47 years of age, Samson is the same age the Emperor of the French was when he was definitively defeated by the armies of the Grand Alliance.
His wife Delphine is his Josephine. Their two sons are participating, too: one is a page, the other a customs official. (The family that re-enacts together, stays together.) French television carried a clip of Frank and Delphine visiting a master costumer putting the finishing touches on their outfits. "People are bigger now", the costumer tells the reporter, "an average man was much smaller than the average man today." Which means more silks and ribbons to sew, happy news for a master costumer, when a historically accurate, complete costume can cost over $25,000.
It is now 10:00 p.m., and the battle is still raging on the plain of Waterloo. The sun has set, but darkness will not descend for another half hour. Re-enactors are feigning battle wounds, complete with evacuation on litters and treatment of injuries as would have been done at the time. Within limits of course: no gangrenous legs will be sawed off.
The re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo is the largest re-enactment in Europe. And a passionate interest in the event whose consequences changed the face of Europe is not limited to the French. There are 1400 Brittaniques, and as many Canadians and Australians participating alongside the French, Belgians and other nationalities. The "bravest of the brave", as Napoleon called him, Marechal Ney, is incarnated by Franky Simon, a Brussels bookseller.
And what of Frank Samson, why has he devoted so much of his life to pretending to be Napoleon, mastering the general's smallest gestures, moues and attitudes? It takes his mind off his work, he says.
And what does Frank Samson do when he's not incarnating Napoleon?
--He's a attorney specializing in traffic regulations.
The Battle of Waterloo is going on as I write this (for tomorrow's post).
Tonight, BFMTV, the French 24-hour news station, is carrying live the first part of the battle, the French attack.
The actual battle was fought two days earlier one hundred years ago, on June 18 2015. However, the organizers of this spectacle held anniversary celebrations on Wednesday, as the public began to arrive and the re-enactors prepared to go through their drills. Fifty thousand people were involved in putting on this spectacle (which will last four days) together. Five thousand men, dressed in costumes designed as exact replicas of those the combatants wore, form the armies. There are horses and flags, rifles, cannons, smoke and funny hats. French newspapers and magazines have been full of stories about the re-enactment, which will not be repeated until 2025. Tickets have sold well, at 15.75 Euros each.
Needless to say, you have to be obsessed with Napoleon to spend what it costs of participate, let alone participate as a combatant. And what of the man who is Napoleon for the length of the four days? That would be Frank Samson, who will be retiring as Napoleon (a distinction he has held for six years) after this tour. At 47 years of age, Samson is the same age the Emperor of the French was when he was definitively defeated by the armies of the Grand Alliance.
His wife Delphine is his Josephine. Their two sons are participating, too: one is a page, the other a customs official. (The family that re-enacts together, stays together.) French television carried a clip of Frank and Delphine visiting a master costumer putting the finishing touches on their outfits. "People are bigger now", the costumer tells the reporter, "an average man was much smaller than the average man today." Which means more silks and ribbons to sew, happy news for a master costumer, when a historically accurate, complete costume can cost over $25,000.
It is now 10:00 p.m., and the battle is still raging on the plain of Waterloo. The sun has set, but darkness will not descend for another half hour. Re-enactors are feigning battle wounds, complete with evacuation on litters and treatment of injuries as would have been done at the time. Within limits of course: no gangrenous legs will be sawed off.
The re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo is the largest re-enactment in Europe. And a passionate interest in the event whose consequences changed the face of Europe is not limited to the French. There are 1400 Brittaniques, and as many Canadians and Australians participating alongside the French, Belgians and other nationalities. The "bravest of the brave", as Napoleon called him, Marechal Ney, is incarnated by Franky Simon, a Brussels bookseller.
And what of Frank Samson, why has he devoted so much of his life to pretending to be Napoleon, mastering the general's smallest gestures, moues and attitudes? It takes his mind off his work, he says.
And what does Frank Samson do when he's not incarnating Napoleon?
--He's a attorney specializing in traffic regulations.
Faits Divers
June 19, 2015
Caunes-Minervois is, like everywhere humans hide, as full of troubles as the next place, albeit writ small. Here, they often involve cultural differences ,which is unsurprising in a village of 1700 with sixteen different nationalities living side-by-side. Then again, sometimes they do not have as much to do with national customs as simple human thoughtlessness.
Last night, at 2:00 a.m., I was awakened by the sound of blasting hip-hop. There had been a wedding at 5 o'clock in the village, of a Canadian couple I'd met earlier in the week, a relatively large gathering. In total, the bridal party numbered about sixty, with many of them friends of the bride and groom's parents flying in from Calgary, Canada.
The wedding was held in Caunes because the bride's parents have a house here. I happened to walk by the Mairie just at five o'clock yesterday, just after the wedding had been celebrated. The bridal couple and many of the guests were outside the Hotel d'Alibert, where the ceremony had been held. The d'Alibert is a Renaissance chateau opposite the Mairie, and a beautiful place for an exchange of vows. I passed just as champagne was uncorked: there was much clinking of glasses, kisses and hugs. After the brief reception, the wedding party proceeded to the cave of the abbey for dinner and dancing.
The bride was tall, blonde, young and beautiful. The groom was tall, dark and handsome. They had rented a tiny house for the week, a house with a "For Sale" sign on it, and flyers pasted around the town advertising the fact. Curious exactly where the house stood, and whether it could be worth the 100,000 Euros asked by the owner, I found it in a tiny alleyway where I had never ventured. The bridegroom was just returning from buying bread and kindly let me in. The place was tiny, if beautifully renovated. As a gesture of thanks, I invited them for tea, an invitation they understandably never took me up on.
As you have already guessed, it was the bridal party that generated the noise that woke me up at 2:00 a.m. I might have been back in New York City. In the morning I decided to speak with Gilles Adiveze, head of the municipal police about it. I got to his office in the Mairie at about 10:45 a.m.
"Oh, you're not the first to come speak to me about the noise last night. Ten people have been by here before you this morning. The wedding party caused the noise. They were completely drunk by 2:00 a.m. and turned up the volume. They carried on (as you probably know) until 4:00 a.m. We went to see the bride and groom this morning and explained that what happened was completely inappropriate."
I asked whether maybe, in the future, the person in charge of abbey rentals could explain to anyone using the abbey's cave that they can't pump up the volume the way last night's group did.
Monsieur Adizeve was quick to reply:
"Oh, you know, after this, we realized we had no provision about noise in the rental contract. We have already added a paragraph to the contract concerning noise, so this is not going to happen again."
Caunes' Benedictine abbey was a ruin not too long ago. In fact, the Mairie used to rent out the rooms inside as apartments, very cheaply. The restoration changed the monument's profile and created a potential source of revenue for the village. Additionally, the Mairie has determined that reinforcement of the exterior stone of the facade is necessary, so scaffolding on the outside of the building has been erected. Workmen are plastering over the stone work, much to the annoyance of those who see the stone as integral to the charm of the building. One of the local historians in particular, is enraged, suggesting the latest restoration is part of a back-door deal with contractors to which the public was not party.
The French are a suspicious lot. They take offense at the entrepreneurial efforts of the English-speaking business owners, but also their own. And they can be deeply cynical.
Coming across the owner of the chateau where yesterday's marriage was solemnized, we chatted. The couple married under French law, although they are going to live in Canada, which is interesting, I said. In response, he asked me rhetorically, "Did I know when most French marriages began to fall apart?"
I did not.
"The first year. Getting married in France won't save yesterday's married, even if they are Canadian and going to live in Canada!"
Caunes-Minervois is, like everywhere humans hide, as full of troubles as the next place, albeit writ small. Here, they often involve cultural differences ,which is unsurprising in a village of 1700 with sixteen different nationalities living side-by-side. Then again, sometimes they do not have as much to do with national customs as simple human thoughtlessness.
Last night, at 2:00 a.m., I was awakened by the sound of blasting hip-hop. There had been a wedding at 5 o'clock in the village, of a Canadian couple I'd met earlier in the week, a relatively large gathering. In total, the bridal party numbered about sixty, with many of them friends of the bride and groom's parents flying in from Calgary, Canada.
The wedding was held in Caunes because the bride's parents have a house here. I happened to walk by the Mairie just at five o'clock yesterday, just after the wedding had been celebrated. The bridal couple and many of the guests were outside the Hotel d'Alibert, where the ceremony had been held. The d'Alibert is a Renaissance chateau opposite the Mairie, and a beautiful place for an exchange of vows. I passed just as champagne was uncorked: there was much clinking of glasses, kisses and hugs. After the brief reception, the wedding party proceeded to the cave of the abbey for dinner and dancing.
The bride was tall, blonde, young and beautiful. The groom was tall, dark and handsome. They had rented a tiny house for the week, a house with a "For Sale" sign on it, and flyers pasted around the town advertising the fact. Curious exactly where the house stood, and whether it could be worth the 100,000 Euros asked by the owner, I found it in a tiny alleyway where I had never ventured. The bridegroom was just returning from buying bread and kindly let me in. The place was tiny, if beautifully renovated. As a gesture of thanks, I invited them for tea, an invitation they understandably never took me up on.
As you have already guessed, it was the bridal party that generated the noise that woke me up at 2:00 a.m. I might have been back in New York City. In the morning I decided to speak with Gilles Adiveze, head of the municipal police about it. I got to his office in the Mairie at about 10:45 a.m.
"Oh, you're not the first to come speak to me about the noise last night. Ten people have been by here before you this morning. The wedding party caused the noise. They were completely drunk by 2:00 a.m. and turned up the volume. They carried on (as you probably know) until 4:00 a.m. We went to see the bride and groom this morning and explained that what happened was completely inappropriate."
I asked whether maybe, in the future, the person in charge of abbey rentals could explain to anyone using the abbey's cave that they can't pump up the volume the way last night's group did.
Monsieur Adizeve was quick to reply:
"Oh, you know, after this, we realized we had no provision about noise in the rental contract. We have already added a paragraph to the contract concerning noise, so this is not going to happen again."
Caunes' Benedictine abbey was a ruin not too long ago. In fact, the Mairie used to rent out the rooms inside as apartments, very cheaply. The restoration changed the monument's profile and created a potential source of revenue for the village. Additionally, the Mairie has determined that reinforcement of the exterior stone of the facade is necessary, so scaffolding on the outside of the building has been erected. Workmen are plastering over the stone work, much to the annoyance of those who see the stone as integral to the charm of the building. One of the local historians in particular, is enraged, suggesting the latest restoration is part of a back-door deal with contractors to which the public was not party.
The French are a suspicious lot. They take offense at the entrepreneurial efforts of the English-speaking business owners, but also their own. And they can be deeply cynical.
Coming across the owner of the chateau where yesterday's marriage was solemnized, we chatted. The couple married under French law, although they are going to live in Canada, which is interesting, I said. In response, he asked me rhetorically, "Did I know when most French marriages began to fall apart?"
I did not.
"The first year. Getting married in France won't save yesterday's married, even if they are Canadian and going to live in Canada!"
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Withholding At The Source; "La Loi Macron";The Nutella Smear
June 18, 2015
The French have an intimate relationship with their tax authorities, one which is about to change. Historically, the French have paid their income taxes the year after the income is paid. Each taxpaying French citizen is charged with filling out a form each year, one most French do themselves. On the form the taxpayer declares his income for the previous year and the tax due.
What this means is that the French have the use of more of their pre-tax dollars for longer than Americans, who are governed by a regime called "withholding at the source". The mechanics of withholding at the source mean that the employee, upon hire, declares himself and the number of his dependents for purposes of having the employer calculate how much tax will be withheld from the employee's salary and paid to the government with each paycheck. When the taxpayer fills out his tax return for the previous year, the amount withheld is a credit towards any tax due, if not the basis for a refund in the case of overpayment.
Witholding at the source is common in many countries, but France has been slow to adopt it. The proposal is part of La Loi Macron, a package of about 100 reforms to make France more competitive in international markets. Macron is Emmanuel Macron, the 37-year old former Rothschild banker who is the Socialist government's Finance Minister. Despite the controversy over the reforms, Macron enjoys popular support, has not been demonized in the press, and Manuel Valls, the popular Prime Minister, has his back.
Notwithstanding, the French are nervously asking questions about how withholding at the source would work in practice:
"When the law goes into effect do I have to tell my employer about my family life?"
"If the law goes into effect in 2016, does that mean 2017 will be a tax-free year, as in 2016 tax payers will both pay 2015 and 2016 taxes?"
Withholding at the source pre-empts taxpayers' best efforts to play cat-and-mouse with tax authorities by putting tax moneys into tax authorities' hands immediately and placing the onus on the taxpayer to claw back any claimed excess withholding.
So when Francois Hollande, seeking to minimize impact of the change, justified it as normal in most parts of the developed world, he was eliding the psychological sea-change the new regime will bring about. The French "Fisc", as it is known, is very well-established and knows its business, but it has not had the cooperation of employers, who will now be brought into the tax collection system. That is bound to make waves.
La Loi Macron contains a variety of other proposals, which have stirred up controversy, including:
-Introducing more competition in legal services for jobs such as bailiffs and court clerks;
-Opening up inter-city bus routes to allow them to compete with trains;
-Setting rules for the sale of state assets, which might lead to the sale of airports in Nice and Lyon;
-Regulating how long taxis can wait for customers outside buildings and airports;
-Removing the requirement that farmers employ architects when making minor changes to their land;
And, most controversially,
-Extending the number of Sundays stores could be open from 5 to 12. But only after internal agreement to do so, and with approval of the "Workers' Council".
La Loi Macron is not a wholesale reform, which would never pass in France. Even though the changes it seeks are incremental, in the course of moving the reforms forward, the government has twice had recourse to a section of the French constitution, Section 49-3, which allows the Prime Minister to declare the law adopted, thereby bypassing the Assemblee Nationale and sending the legislation directly to the French Senate for a vote.
That maneuver can be overturned by a vote of "no confidence" (motion de censure), which requires the vote of a majority of the deputes and implies the collapse of the government. That motion has been made by opponents of La Loi Macron, those being the most leftist of the deputes in the Assemblee Nationale, but they are unlikely to prevail.
Notwithstanding the significance of the reforms being brought into being by the new law, France is adapting slowly to global realities. The Labor Code (Code de Travail) is as impenetrable as the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, and remains a bulwark of labor, and a guarantee of employment for those lucky enough to have a permanent job --a Contrat de Duree Illimite, or "C.D.I.", as it is known.
No reform of the Code de Travail is expected anytime soon.
***
France's unemployment rate tipped the 10% mark a few weeks ago, a fact of which everyone is aware. Notwithstanding, Segolene Royal, the Ecology Minister (and former partner of President Francois Hollande), made news by criticizing a product beloved of French children, and made in France, "Nutella".
The Nutella "smear", if you will, was set off by offhand remarks Royal made on television a few days ago. She said Nutella is unhealthy because it is made with palm oil, and that its production is harmful to the environment. While these are both probably true, 13% of all products on French supermarket shelves are made with palm oil. For decades, Nutella has been s a treat for French children, spread on a freshly-made crepe, made at home or sold alongside ice cream in sweet shops.
Segolene Royal is the "Energizer Bunny" of French politics. Throughout her career she has been an indefatigable self-promoter. Upon giving birth to one of her children with Francois Hollande, she invited cameras into the hospital room immediately after the birth; and, as chief executive of the Poitou-Charentes region, she spent much of her time unsucessfully promoting the development of an electric car to be made there. Royal was the presidential candidate in 2007, elbowing out Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to the horror of the more conservative members of her own party, whom she called "dinosaurs". Now that Valerie Trierweiler (the woman Hollande left Royal for) is out of the picture, Royal has come to function more and more as Hollande's unofficial "First Lady", along with holding her ministerial brief.
"Hollande and Royal are the Hillary and Bill Clinton of French politics", a French friend told me. "After all is said and done, now they will stick together to the very end."
The Nutella "smear" caused some French workers at the factory in France where the product is made to tell news cameras "France's unemployment rate isn't high enough, she thinks we ought to close another factory, right?" In Italy, the wife of the Prime Minister Matteo Renzi took her daughter to a sweet shop to have --what else?-- a crepe with Nutella.
Update: I stand corrected about Segolene Royal's "First Lady" status. Julie Gayet, the actress to whose Paris apartment President Holland was caught speeding on his motorcycle last year, was at his side for a commemoration of a World War II anniversary today. This is Gayet's first official public appearance as President Hollande's partner.
The French have an intimate relationship with their tax authorities, one which is about to change. Historically, the French have paid their income taxes the year after the income is paid. Each taxpaying French citizen is charged with filling out a form each year, one most French do themselves. On the form the taxpayer declares his income for the previous year and the tax due.
What this means is that the French have the use of more of their pre-tax dollars for longer than Americans, who are governed by a regime called "withholding at the source". The mechanics of withholding at the source mean that the employee, upon hire, declares himself and the number of his dependents for purposes of having the employer calculate how much tax will be withheld from the employee's salary and paid to the government with each paycheck. When the taxpayer fills out his tax return for the previous year, the amount withheld is a credit towards any tax due, if not the basis for a refund in the case of overpayment.
Witholding at the source is common in many countries, but France has been slow to adopt it. The proposal is part of La Loi Macron, a package of about 100 reforms to make France more competitive in international markets. Macron is Emmanuel Macron, the 37-year old former Rothschild banker who is the Socialist government's Finance Minister. Despite the controversy over the reforms, Macron enjoys popular support, has not been demonized in the press, and Manuel Valls, the popular Prime Minister, has his back.
Notwithstanding, the French are nervously asking questions about how withholding at the source would work in practice:
"When the law goes into effect do I have to tell my employer about my family life?"
"If the law goes into effect in 2016, does that mean 2017 will be a tax-free year, as in 2016 tax payers will both pay 2015 and 2016 taxes?"
Withholding at the source pre-empts taxpayers' best efforts to play cat-and-mouse with tax authorities by putting tax moneys into tax authorities' hands immediately and placing the onus on the taxpayer to claw back any claimed excess withholding.
So when Francois Hollande, seeking to minimize impact of the change, justified it as normal in most parts of the developed world, he was eliding the psychological sea-change the new regime will bring about. The French "Fisc", as it is known, is very well-established and knows its business, but it has not had the cooperation of employers, who will now be brought into the tax collection system. That is bound to make waves.
La Loi Macron contains a variety of other proposals, which have stirred up controversy, including:
-Introducing more competition in legal services for jobs such as bailiffs and court clerks;
-Opening up inter-city bus routes to allow them to compete with trains;
-Setting rules for the sale of state assets, which might lead to the sale of airports in Nice and Lyon;
-Regulating how long taxis can wait for customers outside buildings and airports;
-Removing the requirement that farmers employ architects when making minor changes to their land;
And, most controversially,
-Extending the number of Sundays stores could be open from 5 to 12. But only after internal agreement to do so, and with approval of the "Workers' Council".
La Loi Macron is not a wholesale reform, which would never pass in France. Even though the changes it seeks are incremental, in the course of moving the reforms forward, the government has twice had recourse to a section of the French constitution, Section 49-3, which allows the Prime Minister to declare the law adopted, thereby bypassing the Assemblee Nationale and sending the legislation directly to the French Senate for a vote.
That maneuver can be overturned by a vote of "no confidence" (motion de censure), which requires the vote of a majority of the deputes and implies the collapse of the government. That motion has been made by opponents of La Loi Macron, those being the most leftist of the deputes in the Assemblee Nationale, but they are unlikely to prevail.
Notwithstanding the significance of the reforms being brought into being by the new law, France is adapting slowly to global realities. The Labor Code (Code de Travail) is as impenetrable as the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, and remains a bulwark of labor, and a guarantee of employment for those lucky enough to have a permanent job --a Contrat de Duree Illimite, or "C.D.I.", as it is known.
No reform of the Code de Travail is expected anytime soon.
***
France's unemployment rate tipped the 10% mark a few weeks ago, a fact of which everyone is aware. Notwithstanding, Segolene Royal, the Ecology Minister (and former partner of President Francois Hollande), made news by criticizing a product beloved of French children, and made in France, "Nutella".
The Nutella "smear", if you will, was set off by offhand remarks Royal made on television a few days ago. She said Nutella is unhealthy because it is made with palm oil, and that its production is harmful to the environment. While these are both probably true, 13% of all products on French supermarket shelves are made with palm oil. For decades, Nutella has been s a treat for French children, spread on a freshly-made crepe, made at home or sold alongside ice cream in sweet shops.
Segolene Royal is the "Energizer Bunny" of French politics. Throughout her career she has been an indefatigable self-promoter. Upon giving birth to one of her children with Francois Hollande, she invited cameras into the hospital room immediately after the birth; and, as chief executive of the Poitou-Charentes region, she spent much of her time unsucessfully promoting the development of an electric car to be made there. Royal was the presidential candidate in 2007, elbowing out Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to the horror of the more conservative members of her own party, whom she called "dinosaurs". Now that Valerie Trierweiler (the woman Hollande left Royal for) is out of the picture, Royal has come to function more and more as Hollande's unofficial "First Lady", along with holding her ministerial brief.
"Hollande and Royal are the Hillary and Bill Clinton of French politics", a French friend told me. "After all is said and done, now they will stick together to the very end."
The Nutella "smear" caused some French workers at the factory in France where the product is made to tell news cameras "France's unemployment rate isn't high enough, she thinks we ought to close another factory, right?" In Italy, the wife of the Prime Minister Matteo Renzi took her daughter to a sweet shop to have --what else?-- a crepe with Nutella.
Update: I stand corrected about Segolene Royal's "First Lady" status. Julie Gayet, the actress to whose Paris apartment President Holland was caught speeding on his motorcycle last year, was at his side for a commemoration of a World War II anniversary today. This is Gayet's first official public appearance as President Hollande's partner.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
French Vintners Confront Climate Change
June 17, 2015
Monday the Vinexpo trade show in Bordeaux began, amidst awareness that the French wine industry must innovate in the face of global warming. The French wine industry (which employs half a million people), has been aware of the threat posed to its delicate crop by the effects of greenhouse gases for some time. Since the decade beginning in 2000 the changes have been apparent in the Bordeaux region: fewer frosts, perhaps a little less rain, no unusual thaws, but the phenomenon is there. When the wind blows, it might be stronger, the showers more violent. The weather is less stable. Nothing very troublesome from day to day, but all that obliges us to reflect", explained Michel Rolland, a consultant oenologist to tens of wineries around the world, quoted in Le Figaro.
The situation might, nevertheless, be worse than it first seems. Temperatures in the Bordeaux area the last 30 years are the hottest in 1400 years, the article in last Sunday's paper reports. The climactic conditions of Bordeaux 30 years ago are now found 100 kilometers to the north of the Bordelais and at altitudes 200 meters higher. MeteoFrance anticipates an important increase in the risks of drought on France's Atlantic coast. So the future has to be planned for.
Today, wine grapes mature sooner, during hotter weeks. That changes the grape, making it more sweet and producing wines higher in alcohol content. Whereas in years past, winegrowers sought to harvest sooner rather than later, they now find themselves trying to find ways to brake the growth cycle. For instance, the grape clusters are trained as high as possible, as the higher they are the less affected by the heat of the sun they will be. Growers are also increasing the number of plantings that give shade to the grapes. Researchers are also experimenting with clones of various varietals.
However, there are complications associated with this at the level of the most exquisite of the French wines, those produced under the appellations d'origine controlees ("A.O.C."). Bordeaux, Alsace, Burgundy and Champagne, all the great wine growing regions, are all governed by rules of production for their finest wines, specifications which penalize growers who use wines other than those part of the traditional composition of the wines. Wines varying from the classic combinations cannot be sold under the A.O.C. rubric and become mere table wine, a much cheaper product.
Thus, until the regulations are modified to encourage the experimentation needed to adapt the A.O.C. wines to climate change, the grands appellations will be slow to adapt, notwithstanding the threat to the future livelihood. Nothing will replace experimentation on the vines on a large scale. There's nothing worse than working in a rush. It would be better to erect the scaffolding of a long-term plan now than to wait for 2025, only to say "Shucks! Growing merlot is no longer possible in Bordeaux, what do we do now? commented Michel Rolland.
Of course, the characteristic taste of a particular wine may change, even as it becomes capable of surviving the change in temperatures in the region of its production. Once the French have anticipated the problem, there's no cause for complaint, says Rolland with typical frankness.
(All quotes are from the article Le vignoble francais s'adapts au rechauffement climatique, published in Le Figaro of Sunday, June 14, 2015.)
Incidentally, caveat emptor: the new term for what used to be called vin du table is vin de France.
Monday the Vinexpo trade show in Bordeaux began, amidst awareness that the French wine industry must innovate in the face of global warming. The French wine industry (which employs half a million people), has been aware of the threat posed to its delicate crop by the effects of greenhouse gases for some time. Since the decade beginning in 2000 the changes have been apparent in the Bordeaux region: fewer frosts, perhaps a little less rain, no unusual thaws, but the phenomenon is there. When the wind blows, it might be stronger, the showers more violent. The weather is less stable. Nothing very troublesome from day to day, but all that obliges us to reflect", explained Michel Rolland, a consultant oenologist to tens of wineries around the world, quoted in Le Figaro.
The situation might, nevertheless, be worse than it first seems. Temperatures in the Bordeaux area the last 30 years are the hottest in 1400 years, the article in last Sunday's paper reports. The climactic conditions of Bordeaux 30 years ago are now found 100 kilometers to the north of the Bordelais and at altitudes 200 meters higher. MeteoFrance anticipates an important increase in the risks of drought on France's Atlantic coast. So the future has to be planned for.
Today, wine grapes mature sooner, during hotter weeks. That changes the grape, making it more sweet and producing wines higher in alcohol content. Whereas in years past, winegrowers sought to harvest sooner rather than later, they now find themselves trying to find ways to brake the growth cycle. For instance, the grape clusters are trained as high as possible, as the higher they are the less affected by the heat of the sun they will be. Growers are also increasing the number of plantings that give shade to the grapes. Researchers are also experimenting with clones of various varietals.
However, there are complications associated with this at the level of the most exquisite of the French wines, those produced under the appellations d'origine controlees ("A.O.C."). Bordeaux, Alsace, Burgundy and Champagne, all the great wine growing regions, are all governed by rules of production for their finest wines, specifications which penalize growers who use wines other than those part of the traditional composition of the wines. Wines varying from the classic combinations cannot be sold under the A.O.C. rubric and become mere table wine, a much cheaper product.
Thus, until the regulations are modified to encourage the experimentation needed to adapt the A.O.C. wines to climate change, the grands appellations will be slow to adapt, notwithstanding the threat to the future livelihood. Nothing will replace experimentation on the vines on a large scale. There's nothing worse than working in a rush. It would be better to erect the scaffolding of a long-term plan now than to wait for 2025, only to say "Shucks! Growing merlot is no longer possible in Bordeaux, what do we do now? commented Michel Rolland.
Of course, the characteristic taste of a particular wine may change, even as it becomes capable of surviving the change in temperatures in the region of its production. Once the French have anticipated the problem, there's no cause for complaint, says Rolland with typical frankness.
(All quotes are from the article Le vignoble francais s'adapts au rechauffement climatique, published in Le Figaro of Sunday, June 14, 2015.)
Incidentally, caveat emptor: the new term for what used to be called vin du table is vin de France.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Dog Bite
June 16, 2015
One of the things that has to be accepted by anyone above a certain age living on their own is the possibility that death will come calling and only you will be there to let him in.
Last year in Caunes I had a migraine headache in the middle of the night so bad that I thought I would breathe my last, but for a neighbor who called a doctor. On my way back from Ojai, California to Palm Springs last February, a patch of synovial fluid behind my left knee was aggravated to the point of causing the entire calf to swell to twice its size, the result of six hours behind the wheel. A trip by ambulance to the emergency room led to a correct diagnosis, although for a while I thought perhaps I had a deep-vein thrombosis, or gangrene from a broken toenail.
Anxiety is always the best response to a perception that something is not quite right with the body, but that does not, of course, make the path to an accurate diagnosis and treatment any easier. In the close moments I've had over the past year, the thought has occurred to me that it would be highly undignified to die of any of the things I have imagined might be wrong with me. I'm really all for dying in my bed, preferably while sleeping, if it comes to that. But you don't always have a choice.
Yesterday I was bitten by a dog. The dog that bit me, Alba, is the eleven-year old bitch belonging to Roselyne Amen, a neighbor with whom I have become friendly working on the church bazaar. Roselyn is a retired nurse, and the woman who came to my aid last year. I was in the midst of a brief visit related to the church bazaar, when Alba struck.
Roselyne was showing me the embroideries she was preparing for sale. I was admiring them when Alba came over and parked herself alongside me. I bent down to pet her on her back and, --WHAM! --Alba sunk her front teeth into my thumb.
Believe me, if you've never had a dog bite from a family pet, you don't know what you're missing. What Alba did with her teeth wasn't an abrasion, and it wasn't a cut: it was a puncture, nice and round. Actually, four punctures, because two teeth penetrated my flesh first. Then, as I screamed and tried to withdraw my hand, Alba's grip loosened, but not her aim: she bit me again in another part of the thumb. Fortunately, I was able to yank my hand away before Alba could do more damage.
I was so surprised, I could only jump up and down to try to rid myself of the pain, all the while yelling, "Ow! Ow! Ow!"
Roselyne ran over immediately, found Betadyne and band-aids and dressed the wounds. "She's untouchable", Roselyn now told me. "I can't even brush her. I think she suffers from back pain, so she's especially sensitive where you touched her. I should have told you."
Should she ever have!
Of course, I asked whether Alba was vaccinated against rabies. "No", there's no rabies here, and it's expensive. So since there isn't any, I don't. Do you want me to call the vet?"
I did, and Roselyne duly phoned. The vet told her to come by in an hour, and I offered to pay half the vet bill. Alba is a house dog, a dirty one, for sure, as she can't be brushed or bathed, but she doesn't mix with other dogs or stir beyond Roselyne's house. Still, I wanted a vet notified in the worst case. So Roselyne took Alba to the vet, who gave her a form to fill out, and said he would check on Alba in fifteen days. Meanwhile, I went to my doctor in the village, Dr. Laetitia Salomon. Her secretary got me in to see her right away, and I was duly bandaged and told the same thing about rabies that Roselyne had told me.
I slept like a baby last night and was up early to greet Nicole, who helps me clean, and Fabien, the electrician installing my heating and air conditioning system. All went well while they were here. After they left I went in search of Roselyne and, finding her, paid her my share of the vet bill. I also saw Dr. Salomon, by chance: she was doing an errand in her car. She asked how I was, and I said "Fine".
I was relaxed, thinking the worst was behind me --until, while washing my hands when I got home, my bandage fell off, and I saw that my thumb had swollen to twice its size.
I know of two people who died of blood infections that went untreated immediately. So that's another one of my phobias, septicemia. I called Dr. Salomon's office, and was once more told to come down immediately. Dr. Salomon wrote me a prescription for amoxicillin, which I promptly obtained at the pharmacy down the street and swallowed with a glass of water. I was in such a rush to get to Dr. Salomon that I walked out in my house slippers and left Beau behind.
"That swelling, it's not on account of infection, it's just inflammation", said the pharmacist. "The swelling in the thumb ought to go down in 48 hours. You've nothing to fear, but you can take the amoxicillin as a prophylactic."
I was more than happy to do so. On your own, you can't be too careful. Fortunately, the medical help required is available in the village, and in the worst case, there are good private clinics in Carcassonne. That is not the case in many of the most remote villages in France. Every summer the news reports how dire the situation is each August when the few doctors that work in the hinterlands leave. It is now very difficult to find a substitute to care for patients in the villages in August, when virtually all of France is on vacation.
I am lucky that I did not decide to live in the Massif Central or one of France's other mountainous areas, where a ten minute walk to the doctor's would have been impossible. French medical care (as I hope my account has demonstrated) is among the best in the world, particularly when it comes to basic care. Unfortunately, because of the hardships associated with living in remote areas, medical school graduates don't want to work there. So this summer, the news will again report on the dangerousness of August for the inhabitants of mountain villages.
One of the things that has to be accepted by anyone above a certain age living on their own is the possibility that death will come calling and only you will be there to let him in.
Last year in Caunes I had a migraine headache in the middle of the night so bad that I thought I would breathe my last, but for a neighbor who called a doctor. On my way back from Ojai, California to Palm Springs last February, a patch of synovial fluid behind my left knee was aggravated to the point of causing the entire calf to swell to twice its size, the result of six hours behind the wheel. A trip by ambulance to the emergency room led to a correct diagnosis, although for a while I thought perhaps I had a deep-vein thrombosis, or gangrene from a broken toenail.
Anxiety is always the best response to a perception that something is not quite right with the body, but that does not, of course, make the path to an accurate diagnosis and treatment any easier. In the close moments I've had over the past year, the thought has occurred to me that it would be highly undignified to die of any of the things I have imagined might be wrong with me. I'm really all for dying in my bed, preferably while sleeping, if it comes to that. But you don't always have a choice.
Yesterday I was bitten by a dog. The dog that bit me, Alba, is the eleven-year old bitch belonging to Roselyne Amen, a neighbor with whom I have become friendly working on the church bazaar. Roselyn is a retired nurse, and the woman who came to my aid last year. I was in the midst of a brief visit related to the church bazaar, when Alba struck.
Roselyne was showing me the embroideries she was preparing for sale. I was admiring them when Alba came over and parked herself alongside me. I bent down to pet her on her back and, --WHAM! --Alba sunk her front teeth into my thumb.
Believe me, if you've never had a dog bite from a family pet, you don't know what you're missing. What Alba did with her teeth wasn't an abrasion, and it wasn't a cut: it was a puncture, nice and round. Actually, four punctures, because two teeth penetrated my flesh first. Then, as I screamed and tried to withdraw my hand, Alba's grip loosened, but not her aim: she bit me again in another part of the thumb. Fortunately, I was able to yank my hand away before Alba could do more damage.
I was so surprised, I could only jump up and down to try to rid myself of the pain, all the while yelling, "Ow! Ow! Ow!"
Roselyne ran over immediately, found Betadyne and band-aids and dressed the wounds. "She's untouchable", Roselyn now told me. "I can't even brush her. I think she suffers from back pain, so she's especially sensitive where you touched her. I should have told you."
Should she ever have!
Of course, I asked whether Alba was vaccinated against rabies. "No", there's no rabies here, and it's expensive. So since there isn't any, I don't. Do you want me to call the vet?"
I did, and Roselyne duly phoned. The vet told her to come by in an hour, and I offered to pay half the vet bill. Alba is a house dog, a dirty one, for sure, as she can't be brushed or bathed, but she doesn't mix with other dogs or stir beyond Roselyne's house. Still, I wanted a vet notified in the worst case. So Roselyne took Alba to the vet, who gave her a form to fill out, and said he would check on Alba in fifteen days. Meanwhile, I went to my doctor in the village, Dr. Laetitia Salomon. Her secretary got me in to see her right away, and I was duly bandaged and told the same thing about rabies that Roselyne had told me.
I slept like a baby last night and was up early to greet Nicole, who helps me clean, and Fabien, the electrician installing my heating and air conditioning system. All went well while they were here. After they left I went in search of Roselyne and, finding her, paid her my share of the vet bill. I also saw Dr. Salomon, by chance: she was doing an errand in her car. She asked how I was, and I said "Fine".
I was relaxed, thinking the worst was behind me --until, while washing my hands when I got home, my bandage fell off, and I saw that my thumb had swollen to twice its size.
I know of two people who died of blood infections that went untreated immediately. So that's another one of my phobias, septicemia. I called Dr. Salomon's office, and was once more told to come down immediately. Dr. Salomon wrote me a prescription for amoxicillin, which I promptly obtained at the pharmacy down the street and swallowed with a glass of water. I was in such a rush to get to Dr. Salomon that I walked out in my house slippers and left Beau behind.
"That swelling, it's not on account of infection, it's just inflammation", said the pharmacist. "The swelling in the thumb ought to go down in 48 hours. You've nothing to fear, but you can take the amoxicillin as a prophylactic."
I was more than happy to do so. On your own, you can't be too careful. Fortunately, the medical help required is available in the village, and in the worst case, there are good private clinics in Carcassonne. That is not the case in many of the most remote villages in France. Every summer the news reports how dire the situation is each August when the few doctors that work in the hinterlands leave. It is now very difficult to find a substitute to care for patients in the villages in August, when virtually all of France is on vacation.
I am lucky that I did not decide to live in the Massif Central or one of France's other mountainous areas, where a ten minute walk to the doctor's would have been impossible. French medical care (as I hope my account has demonstrated) is among the best in the world, particularly when it comes to basic care. Unfortunately, because of the hardships associated with living in remote areas, medical school graduates don't want to work there. So this summer, the news will again report on the dangerousness of August for the inhabitants of mountain villages.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
The Marble Festival
June 13-14, 2015
This year is the 15th year of the annual Fete du Marbre in Caunes. I first saw the sculptures created for the festival when I first came here three years ago. Some are impossible to miss, like the rampant horse's head at the top of the main drag, Avenue du Minervois. There's also an abstract and a sculpture of what look like panda bears on the lawn by the parking area in the middle of the village.
And that does not begin to exhaust the number of pieces created over the years. In fact, there is a sentier du marbre, a "marble walk", that begins on the other side of Avenue du Minervois, across from the figure of the wild horse, on a road called l'allee du Carriere. That path takes the hiker past some of the new houses built on the outskirts of the village, an area that does not enjoy the historical landmark designation houses in the old part of the village do. For that reason, some call the area "the Italian area" (le cartier des Italiens), in a nod to the ethnic origins of many of the newcomers. The name could also be a nod to the fact that the giant blocks of marble quarried further up the road are shipped to Carrara to be polished and shaped.
Past the smaller houses on the allee du Carriere, the statues come into view. The newest "Goutte de Vie" ("drop of life"), was inaugurated yesterday. It is an ovoid of red marble placed on a metal plinth shaped like flower petals. The statue might be imagined to be a fat drop of water about to fall from faucet, shrinking and curving inward to the size of a smaller drop at the statue's top. I suppose it took a lot of work to form the shape from the block of marble where it began its life, but it is not one of my favorite among the marble artworks. Although it shares with most of the pieces on the path an abstract organizing principle, which may explain my indifference.
My lack of enthusiasm for most of the works on the marble walk is probably due to my ignorance about the difficulties facing those who would sculpt marble. What little I know is largely derived from reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Wallace's fictional biography of Michelangelo, as a teenager. Specifically, through the book I learned, if nothing else, that by starting to shape a block of marble with a hammer blow to the wrong area it can be ruined. In which case, most of the Caunois sculptors were very careful.
There is one scupture on the path, however, that astonishes. That is a giant statue of a lion, made from a giant rectangular block with a horizontal axis. The lion is sculpted in the style of the ancient Assyrians. The lion is two dimensional, the fur of the head and the fetlocks sculpted in geometric repeats, the head flat, the eyes two perfect circles within circles, the whole effect one of power and authority. The lion statue, inaugurated in 2000, was the first of the statues to represent the festival.
I intended for Beau and I to walk up to the marble quarry and start along the allee du Carriere, but after going a ways, the mechanized toy train rented for the festival arrives. We board and I pay 3 Euros for the privilege. The driver is a former vineyard owner who abandoned the metier. He tells us this for the price of the trip, pointing out, as we wind up the hill, that the fields we see growing wild are former vineyards, become fallow when wine-growing ceased to be profitable.
He might have said the same thing about the business of quarrying marble. During the course of my visit to la carriere du Roy (the historic quarry); and the modern one cheek-by-jowl with it, that quarrying marble has not been profitable for years. The polishing of marble is now done by machine, an advance in occupational safety. However, even if there were a safe way for individuals to avoid dying of silicosis from inhaling marble dust, there's little demand for Caunes' marble.
Two men now work at the active quarry; from three hundred in its heyday. The men are smicards --minimum wage workers. The French forest service owns the land, which grants a private company the concession to quarry marble in Caunes in return for a specified price. However, there is more marble quarried than there is demand for it. As a result, the quarry has a large inventory of blocks standing unused. The inventory is not commensurate to the demand because in order to maintain the concession, the forest service requires the company to quarry a minimum of blocks a year.
Other materials have taken the place of marble in homes. And there is considerable wastage even when a block is sold. My guide tells me that 85% of what is quarried is unusable for construction of baths or counters or tiles, should there be a demand for them. The unusable parts of the blocks are crushed and become gravel. Indeed Xavier, my guide (a retired paleontologist from Paris), tells me to take as a souvenir of my visit my pick of the marble fragments lying in a pile at the end of the tour.
"There are cycles of demand and supply", Xavier tells me as we look over the quarry, which is pharaonic in size. "There are sixteen quarries ready for use here when the market for marble comes back. And an inexhaustible supply in addition to that --enough for a thousand years. So the holders of the concession will not give it up."
The world of marble is a small one: marble is polished in Carrara and in Cairo. And until the twentieth century the material was quarried the same way for 2500 years. Finding the fissure in the marble, men would work at detaching the piece from its bed, using tree trunks as levers to add pressure and widen the crack. In the twentieth century a diamond coated wire began to be used to hasten the extraction of the blocks.
When Louis XIV built Versailles he used Caunois red marble for the columns of the Grand Trianon. At the time it took six men a week to prepare a cylindrical piece of marble that would be sculpted into an artful column in Tours in the Loire Valley. Today it could be done in a fraction of the time, but no one wants them.
This year is the 15th year of the annual Fete du Marbre in Caunes. I first saw the sculptures created for the festival when I first came here three years ago. Some are impossible to miss, like the rampant horse's head at the top of the main drag, Avenue du Minervois. There's also an abstract and a sculpture of what look like panda bears on the lawn by the parking area in the middle of the village.
And that does not begin to exhaust the number of pieces created over the years. In fact, there is a sentier du marbre, a "marble walk", that begins on the other side of Avenue du Minervois, across from the figure of the wild horse, on a road called l'allee du Carriere. That path takes the hiker past some of the new houses built on the outskirts of the village, an area that does not enjoy the historical landmark designation houses in the old part of the village do. For that reason, some call the area "the Italian area" (le cartier des Italiens), in a nod to the ethnic origins of many of the newcomers. The name could also be a nod to the fact that the giant blocks of marble quarried further up the road are shipped to Carrara to be polished and shaped.
Past the smaller houses on the allee du Carriere, the statues come into view. The newest "Goutte de Vie" ("drop of life"), was inaugurated yesterday. It is an ovoid of red marble placed on a metal plinth shaped like flower petals. The statue might be imagined to be a fat drop of water about to fall from faucet, shrinking and curving inward to the size of a smaller drop at the statue's top. I suppose it took a lot of work to form the shape from the block of marble where it began its life, but it is not one of my favorite among the marble artworks. Although it shares with most of the pieces on the path an abstract organizing principle, which may explain my indifference.
My lack of enthusiasm for most of the works on the marble walk is probably due to my ignorance about the difficulties facing those who would sculpt marble. What little I know is largely derived from reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Wallace's fictional biography of Michelangelo, as a teenager. Specifically, through the book I learned, if nothing else, that by starting to shape a block of marble with a hammer blow to the wrong area it can be ruined. In which case, most of the Caunois sculptors were very careful.
There is one scupture on the path, however, that astonishes. That is a giant statue of a lion, made from a giant rectangular block with a horizontal axis. The lion is sculpted in the style of the ancient Assyrians. The lion is two dimensional, the fur of the head and the fetlocks sculpted in geometric repeats, the head flat, the eyes two perfect circles within circles, the whole effect one of power and authority. The lion statue, inaugurated in 2000, was the first of the statues to represent the festival.
I intended for Beau and I to walk up to the marble quarry and start along the allee du Carriere, but after going a ways, the mechanized toy train rented for the festival arrives. We board and I pay 3 Euros for the privilege. The driver is a former vineyard owner who abandoned the metier. He tells us this for the price of the trip, pointing out, as we wind up the hill, that the fields we see growing wild are former vineyards, become fallow when wine-growing ceased to be profitable.
He might have said the same thing about the business of quarrying marble. During the course of my visit to la carriere du Roy (the historic quarry); and the modern one cheek-by-jowl with it, that quarrying marble has not been profitable for years. The polishing of marble is now done by machine, an advance in occupational safety. However, even if there were a safe way for individuals to avoid dying of silicosis from inhaling marble dust, there's little demand for Caunes' marble.
Two men now work at the active quarry; from three hundred in its heyday. The men are smicards --minimum wage workers. The French forest service owns the land, which grants a private company the concession to quarry marble in Caunes in return for a specified price. However, there is more marble quarried than there is demand for it. As a result, the quarry has a large inventory of blocks standing unused. The inventory is not commensurate to the demand because in order to maintain the concession, the forest service requires the company to quarry a minimum of blocks a year.
Other materials have taken the place of marble in homes. And there is considerable wastage even when a block is sold. My guide tells me that 85% of what is quarried is unusable for construction of baths or counters or tiles, should there be a demand for them. The unusable parts of the blocks are crushed and become gravel. Indeed Xavier, my guide (a retired paleontologist from Paris), tells me to take as a souvenir of my visit my pick of the marble fragments lying in a pile at the end of the tour.
"There are cycles of demand and supply", Xavier tells me as we look over the quarry, which is pharaonic in size. "There are sixteen quarries ready for use here when the market for marble comes back. And an inexhaustible supply in addition to that --enough for a thousand years. So the holders of the concession will not give it up."
The world of marble is a small one: marble is polished in Carrara and in Cairo. And until the twentieth century the material was quarried the same way for 2500 years. Finding the fissure in the marble, men would work at detaching the piece from its bed, using tree trunks as levers to add pressure and widen the crack. In the twentieth century a diamond coated wire began to be used to hasten the extraction of the blocks.
When Louis XIV built Versailles he used Caunois red marble for the columns of the Grand Trianon. At the time it took six men a week to prepare a cylindrical piece of marble that would be sculpted into an artful column in Tours in the Loire Valley. Today it could be done in a fraction of the time, but no one wants them.
"Peter le feu"
Sunday, June 14, 2015
(Post not recommended for readers squeamish about bodily functions.)
I am no fan of barnyard language or scatological humor, but the use of the French verb "peter" --to fart (accent "aigu" over the first 'e', which I can't insert here) has been puzzling me for some time.
The French use the verb in colloquial speech all the time. Each time I have heard it used, I get the sense of it from the expression on the face of the speaker, although I've been puzzled by how a bodily function that most people in the English-speaking world try to avoid mentioning can have such a prominent place in the minds of our friends from l'Hexagone.
Of course, the English-speaking world had no equivalent to Le Petomane. Le Petomane was a famous musical hall star, "particularly celebrated for his remarkable mastery of his abdominal muscles, which allowed him to spurt gas at will" ("particulièrement célèbre pour sa remarquable maîtrise de ses muscles abdominaux qui lui permettait de lâcher des gaz à volonté") as his entry in Wikipedia tells us. Born in Marseille in 1857 he lived until 1945, dying in nearby Toulon, the connection between his remarkable skill and his longevity never having been firmly established.
A glance at reverso.net, the online dictionary, reveals that "peter le feu" means "to be in top form". Which, pace le Petomane (one of whose tricks it was), means literally, "to fart fire".
Another use of the verb "peter" links it with the word for panic, trouille, becoming "peter le trouille", "to be scared to death".
Peter des flammes, means something has turned nasty, while peter plus haut que son cul, means to think too highly of oneself. And peter dans la sole, a fishy reference, means "to be rolling in money", The possibilites of peter seem inexhaustible, the logic inventive.
The etymology of the word suggests that its origins may be related to another word in French, petard. Petard means "explosive", or, "firecracker". That would make peter something closer to "to go off with a bang", although none of the translations of the English phrase into contemporary French use the verb.
--So much for sanitizing peter.
Walking to the grocery store last week, standing in front of her bed and breakfast (which the French call a gite), I come across Francine, the mother of one of my friends in Caunes. A very formal, serious woman in her eighties, she lives with her husband in a house built flush against the old walls of Caunes, with a back garden and a shed put to agricultural purposes when the area was more rural.
Francine compliments me on the color of my lipstick and observes that I look younger this year than last. She asks whether I've changed my hair color, or is my apparent youthfulness due to something else? I reply that last year, when I was setting up the house, was stressful, whereas this year I'm able to relax.
Hearing me, she replies, Peut-etre! Mais cette année tu petes!
--Well, if she says so.
(Post not recommended for readers squeamish about bodily functions.)
I am no fan of barnyard language or scatological humor, but the use of the French verb "peter" --to fart (accent "aigu" over the first 'e', which I can't insert here) has been puzzling me for some time.
The French use the verb in colloquial speech all the time. Each time I have heard it used, I get the sense of it from the expression on the face of the speaker, although I've been puzzled by how a bodily function that most people in the English-speaking world try to avoid mentioning can have such a prominent place in the minds of our friends from l'Hexagone.
Of course, the English-speaking world had no equivalent to Le Petomane. Le Petomane was a famous musical hall star, "particularly celebrated for his remarkable mastery of his abdominal muscles, which allowed him to spurt gas at will" ("particulièrement célèbre pour sa remarquable maîtrise de ses muscles abdominaux qui lui permettait de lâcher des gaz à volonté") as his entry in Wikipedia tells us. Born in Marseille in 1857 he lived until 1945, dying in nearby Toulon, the connection between his remarkable skill and his longevity never having been firmly established.
A glance at reverso.net, the online dictionary, reveals that "peter le feu" means "to be in top form". Which, pace le Petomane (one of whose tricks it was), means literally, "to fart fire".
Another use of the verb "peter" links it with the word for panic, trouille, becoming "peter le trouille", "to be scared to death".
Peter des flammes, means something has turned nasty, while peter plus haut que son cul, means to think too highly of oneself. And peter dans la sole, a fishy reference, means "to be rolling in money", The possibilites of peter seem inexhaustible, the logic inventive.
The etymology of the word suggests that its origins may be related to another word in French, petard. Petard means "explosive", or, "firecracker". That would make peter something closer to "to go off with a bang", although none of the translations of the English phrase into contemporary French use the verb.
--So much for sanitizing peter.
Walking to the grocery store last week, standing in front of her bed and breakfast (which the French call a gite), I come across Francine, the mother of one of my friends in Caunes. A very formal, serious woman in her eighties, she lives with her husband in a house built flush against the old walls of Caunes, with a back garden and a shed put to agricultural purposes when the area was more rural.
Francine compliments me on the color of my lipstick and observes that I look younger this year than last. She asks whether I've changed my hair color, or is my apparent youthfulness due to something else? I reply that last year, when I was setting up the house, was stressful, whereas this year I'm able to relax.
Hearing me, she replies, Peut-etre! Mais cette année tu petes!
--Well, if she says so.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
A Life Less Ordinary
Thursday, June 11, 2015
I am in the middle of my second week in Caunes, and find myself astonished by how little I am accomplishing, compared to the pace I set myself in New York City.
In the great city, the offerings --theatre, movies, museums, concerts, "one off" events, restaurants -- motivate contact with other people, as much as the desire to see friends does. When I was in the "swim" of life in New York City, it was second nature to consult the Times to find out what their critics had found worthwhile. This went on all the time I was living all the year in New York City, it's. part of the process of forming one's tastes: I don't like rock music, I like jazz more --but not all types of jazz, I like orchestra concerts, I like chamber music more, I love opera.
At a certain point, though --at least in my case-- having seen and heard many performers, many of them "great", the excitement about new ones isn't there. The same thing is true of new art exhibits, and many of the new movies.
I don't like the jostling crowds at either the "Met" opera or the "Met" museum. I don't like the conversion of museums into retail shopping outlets. I don't like the crush of theatre goers heading for the bar at intermission, arms flailing to get the bartender's attention before the last ring of the "end of intermission" bell. (At least in London, somehow the bartenders get everyone served quickly, and you can bring your drink to the seat.) And few restaurants' menus are so compelling that I want to break my habit of eating very simply --and alone, mainly. All that used to excite me has paled, in other words.
What I do like is seeing the vista from my terrace here, the forest stretching out before me, La Montagne Noir behind, the Pyrenees, too, on a clear day. Every day I find something to delight me: a kid grazing, its glance all innocence and friendly interest as Beau and I approach, on our way home, our wonderment mutual. The little bird that has made a birdhouse in the eaves of the space outside my garage its temporary refuge. Another bird, this one with a "clicking" song, that, startled, flies from my clothesline to the branch opposite to stay close to its former perch. The ponies that mow my neighbor's grass for a few weeks a year and who fascinate Beau. The scent of jazmin, and the scent of oleander, which cascade over the gates of the houses and the walls of the paths of Caunes. Rosemary, too, grows wild --along the steps leading to the parking lot in the center of Caunes. You have only to squeeze a branch with your hand for the plant's scent to cling to your fingers.
The noises of cars and trucks and planes are infrequently heard. There are motorbikes --they are cheap modes of transportation for those who can't afford a car. However, drivers here --whether of motorbikes or cars-- are not given to honking their horns, unlike New York drivers. The necessary aggressiveness of New Yorkers would be out of place here, not to mention useless --nothing happens any faster than it has to.
"Quiet" is a value in the minds of most of the people who live here. The other day I was talking with the father of Robert, who runs La Marbrerie, the one restaurant in town that is open seven days a week, and the only one that has WiFi. Robert's father is eight-three and never left Caunes, earning his living in construction. He has very, very few teeth, but is robust in appearance, as you would expect from someone who worked a job that requires physical endurance. We were talking about Caunes' oldest residents, people in their nineties who can still read a newspaper and get themselves a cup of coffee. Like the mother of Roselyne Amen, the retired emergency room nurse.
Roselyne's mother has a mane of white hair she wears in a sort of loose pompadour. While she does not look like a marathoner, she doesn't look frail either. Every time I've met her she remembers me and says, "Ah, yes! Roselyn told me about you --you're the woman from New York! How are you?"
Recounting this encounter to Robert's father, he pointed out that it was the way of life in Caunes that contributed to the longevity of its villagers.
"It's really the fountain of youth here!" he said, laughing.
So here I am in Caunes, doing not much of anything, vaguely wondering "What comes next?" and not worrying too much about it --as a Caunois would do.
I am in the middle of my second week in Caunes, and find myself astonished by how little I am accomplishing, compared to the pace I set myself in New York City.
In the great city, the offerings --theatre, movies, museums, concerts, "one off" events, restaurants -- motivate contact with other people, as much as the desire to see friends does. When I was in the "swim" of life in New York City, it was second nature to consult the Times to find out what their critics had found worthwhile. This went on all the time I was living all the year in New York City, it's. part of the process of forming one's tastes: I don't like rock music, I like jazz more --but not all types of jazz, I like orchestra concerts, I like chamber music more, I love opera.
At a certain point, though --at least in my case-- having seen and heard many performers, many of them "great", the excitement about new ones isn't there. The same thing is true of new art exhibits, and many of the new movies.
I don't like the jostling crowds at either the "Met" opera or the "Met" museum. I don't like the conversion of museums into retail shopping outlets. I don't like the crush of theatre goers heading for the bar at intermission, arms flailing to get the bartender's attention before the last ring of the "end of intermission" bell. (At least in London, somehow the bartenders get everyone served quickly, and you can bring your drink to the seat.) And few restaurants' menus are so compelling that I want to break my habit of eating very simply --and alone, mainly. All that used to excite me has paled, in other words.
What I do like is seeing the vista from my terrace here, the forest stretching out before me, La Montagne Noir behind, the Pyrenees, too, on a clear day. Every day I find something to delight me: a kid grazing, its glance all innocence and friendly interest as Beau and I approach, on our way home, our wonderment mutual. The little bird that has made a birdhouse in the eaves of the space outside my garage its temporary refuge. Another bird, this one with a "clicking" song, that, startled, flies from my clothesline to the branch opposite to stay close to its former perch. The ponies that mow my neighbor's grass for a few weeks a year and who fascinate Beau. The scent of jazmin, and the scent of oleander, which cascade over the gates of the houses and the walls of the paths of Caunes. Rosemary, too, grows wild --along the steps leading to the parking lot in the center of Caunes. You have only to squeeze a branch with your hand for the plant's scent to cling to your fingers.
The noises of cars and trucks and planes are infrequently heard. There are motorbikes --they are cheap modes of transportation for those who can't afford a car. However, drivers here --whether of motorbikes or cars-- are not given to honking their horns, unlike New York drivers. The necessary aggressiveness of New Yorkers would be out of place here, not to mention useless --nothing happens any faster than it has to.
"Quiet" is a value in the minds of most of the people who live here. The other day I was talking with the father of Robert, who runs La Marbrerie, the one restaurant in town that is open seven days a week, and the only one that has WiFi. Robert's father is eight-three and never left Caunes, earning his living in construction. He has very, very few teeth, but is robust in appearance, as you would expect from someone who worked a job that requires physical endurance. We were talking about Caunes' oldest residents, people in their nineties who can still read a newspaper and get themselves a cup of coffee. Like the mother of Roselyne Amen, the retired emergency room nurse.
Roselyne's mother has a mane of white hair she wears in a sort of loose pompadour. While she does not look like a marathoner, she doesn't look frail either. Every time I've met her she remembers me and says, "Ah, yes! Roselyn told me about you --you're the woman from New York! How are you?"
Recounting this encounter to Robert's father, he pointed out that it was the way of life in Caunes that contributed to the longevity of its villagers.
"It's really the fountain of youth here!" he said, laughing.
So here I am in Caunes, doing not much of anything, vaguely wondering "What comes next?" and not worrying too much about it --as a Caunois would do.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Beau Est Malade
June 10, 2015
I have become friends with Chantal, a woman who lives down the street from me, on rue de la Charite. Chantal earns some money by selling beautifully embroidered bags for all sorts of purposes: vide-poches to put earrings, cuff links and the like atop a dresser; trousses with zippers to keep make-up and other small items in; decorative pillows, laundry bags and even purses.
Born in Algeria, she lived for many years in the countryside outside Marseille. Her two children grown, she lives, for the moment, in the house of a childhood friend, her meagre resources (she is divorced) making it necessary to accept her friend's charity. She lives there with Baboun, her large black dog, now elderly.
His age notwithstanding, Baboun retains a liveliness that makes him and Beau natural companions. I have taken to walking Beau on the path towards the fields with Chantal and Baboun a few times a week in the late evening, just before dark. It is cool then, and the path, a cut between the fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, leads to a stream above which can be seen the remnants of the old bridge to Trausse, now impassable. Years ago the bridge was a shortcut to Trausse, but during a period of heavy rain, the flooding loosened the bridge's supports, so that it is now sealed off to traffic.
The result is that the first part of the walk ends in a locale that would have inspired Romantic artists in love with ruins to render the scene in all its poetic beauty. Baboun loves to descend to the stream below and cool off, Chantal tells me, suggesting Beau might like to do so too. However, Beau is too small to manage the effort safely, so hangs back.
Beau is not too small, though, to imitate Baboun in eating the grasses around the cherry trees nearby. Chantal has been picking the cherries off the trees before they rot, as whoever owns the land seems uninterested in culling them. In small villages, when land is not actively managed, gleaners appear. Technically, gleaning is only allowed after the harvest is brought in, but with many people living on limited means, land is put to whatever purpose those willing to work it see fit to engage in, the legalities be damned.
For instance, there is a poulailler --a chicken coop, complete with hens laying eggs, and a rooster-- flourishing in the land behind the back of my house. Further down, in a declivity in the land, there are potagers --vegetable gardens. A few times a week, a young man drives his van past the easement behind my house and that of my neighbor, to tend to his onions. So Chantal's taking of the cherries from trees that belong to someone else is far from unusual. She picks a tree and harvests the fruit, making jams and that easy-to-make pastry called a clafoutis from her hoard. Anyone who has a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking has probably made a clafoutis from Julia Child's recipe.
But clafoutis here come with the cherries in the cake unpitted. --Even in restaurants, the dessert is served that way. Julia Child renders the recipe with greater sophistication in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with pitted fruit, but clafoutis are quick desserts made with pancake batter. So the fruit is rarely pitted, the consumer beware!
Chantal having culled the cherries she wants and put them into a small sack, we return the way we came and I leave her at my door. Beau and I have a quiet evening and turn in at about 11:30 p.m.
At 1:30 a.m. I am awakened by the sound of Beau retching. He has something in his throat he can't get out. His breathing is unaffected, but something caught in the throat may require an emergency visit to the veterinary hospital in Carcassonne a half hour away. I sit up most of the night with Beau, who about 5:00 a.m., finally vomits up food and the offending substance --the grasses he consumed in imitation of Baboun on our earlier outing.
Returning to bed, I awake an hour later than usual and wonder whether Beau will be able to swallow his food this morning, and whether I need to drive him to the veterinarian two towns away, in Rieux Fortunately, that is not the case: Beau swallows his fish oil capsule and the salmon treat I give him with it without the least problem. I give him a bit less food as a precautionary measure: he eats everything quickly.
--And promptly starts hopping around like a jack rabbit, running around the house, as he is wont to do mornings. What a relief!
I have become friends with Chantal, a woman who lives down the street from me, on rue de la Charite. Chantal earns some money by selling beautifully embroidered bags for all sorts of purposes: vide-poches to put earrings, cuff links and the like atop a dresser; trousses with zippers to keep make-up and other small items in; decorative pillows, laundry bags and even purses.
Born in Algeria, she lived for many years in the countryside outside Marseille. Her two children grown, she lives, for the moment, in the house of a childhood friend, her meagre resources (she is divorced) making it necessary to accept her friend's charity. She lives there with Baboun, her large black dog, now elderly.
His age notwithstanding, Baboun retains a liveliness that makes him and Beau natural companions. I have taken to walking Beau on the path towards the fields with Chantal and Baboun a few times a week in the late evening, just before dark. It is cool then, and the path, a cut between the fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, leads to a stream above which can be seen the remnants of the old bridge to Trausse, now impassable. Years ago the bridge was a shortcut to Trausse, but during a period of heavy rain, the flooding loosened the bridge's supports, so that it is now sealed off to traffic.
The result is that the first part of the walk ends in a locale that would have inspired Romantic artists in love with ruins to render the scene in all its poetic beauty. Baboun loves to descend to the stream below and cool off, Chantal tells me, suggesting Beau might like to do so too. However, Beau is too small to manage the effort safely, so hangs back.
Beau is not too small, though, to imitate Baboun in eating the grasses around the cherry trees nearby. Chantal has been picking the cherries off the trees before they rot, as whoever owns the land seems uninterested in culling them. In small villages, when land is not actively managed, gleaners appear. Technically, gleaning is only allowed after the harvest is brought in, but with many people living on limited means, land is put to whatever purpose those willing to work it see fit to engage in, the legalities be damned.
For instance, there is a poulailler --a chicken coop, complete with hens laying eggs, and a rooster-- flourishing in the land behind the back of my house. Further down, in a declivity in the land, there are potagers --vegetable gardens. A few times a week, a young man drives his van past the easement behind my house and that of my neighbor, to tend to his onions. So Chantal's taking of the cherries from trees that belong to someone else is far from unusual. She picks a tree and harvests the fruit, making jams and that easy-to-make pastry called a clafoutis from her hoard. Anyone who has a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking has probably made a clafoutis from Julia Child's recipe.
But clafoutis here come with the cherries in the cake unpitted. --Even in restaurants, the dessert is served that way. Julia Child renders the recipe with greater sophistication in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with pitted fruit, but clafoutis are quick desserts made with pancake batter. So the fruit is rarely pitted, the consumer beware!
Chantal having culled the cherries she wants and put them into a small sack, we return the way we came and I leave her at my door. Beau and I have a quiet evening and turn in at about 11:30 p.m.
At 1:30 a.m. I am awakened by the sound of Beau retching. He has something in his throat he can't get out. His breathing is unaffected, but something caught in the throat may require an emergency visit to the veterinary hospital in Carcassonne a half hour away. I sit up most of the night with Beau, who about 5:00 a.m., finally vomits up food and the offending substance --the grasses he consumed in imitation of Baboun on our earlier outing.
Returning to bed, I awake an hour later than usual and wonder whether Beau will be able to swallow his food this morning, and whether I need to drive him to the veterinarian two towns away, in Rieux Fortunately, that is not the case: Beau swallows his fish oil capsule and the salmon treat I give him with it without the least problem. I give him a bit less food as a precautionary measure: he eats everything quickly.
--And promptly starts hopping around like a jack rabbit, running around the house, as he is wont to do mornings. What a relief!
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
The Death Of Jean Germain
June 9, 2015
The name of Jean Germain may not mean anything to you, but if you lived in the ancient city of Tours, in the Loire Valley, you knew him as your Mayor. Jean Germain was a serious man --he was Mayor of Tours for nineteen years, a Senator in the Assemblee Nationale, and a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. The latter distinction is given to a politician only after 20 years of public service and a demonstration of his "eminent merits" to be so recognized.
A part of the fabric of Tourangeau life (citizens of Tours are called Tourangeaux if they are men, and Tourangelles if they are women), he was highly regarded. Yet on Tuesday, April 7, 2015, he took his own life, turning on the engine of his car, parked in its garage in the house he lived. He was 67 years old and was about to be called to testify in a political corruption trial. There was a suicide note in the car, which spoke of the injustice and dishonor which drove him to kill himself:
«Des indications me laissent penser que, alors que les faits n’ont pas eu lieu, le ministère public va requérir à mon encontre pour des raisons plutôt politiques. C’est insupportable. Autant, je peux reconnaître des erreurs, des manques de discernement. Autant, il m’est impossible d’accepter sans broncher cette forfaiture, rendue possible par les actions de Madame Han et les mensonges peureux de Monsieur Lemarchand. Leur conscience les poursuivra.
The signs lead me to believe that since the facts have not been taken into consideration, the prosecution will pursue me for largely political reasons. This is unbearable. I recognize I made errors, that I lacked discernment. Similarly, it is impossible for me to accept without flinching that abuse of authority, made possible by the actions of Madame Han and the frightening lies of Mr. Lemarchand. Their consciences will pursue them.
I know the harm that I am doing, the pain that I will cause those who love me. But one cannot let this systematic persecution unfold "normally", day to day. There are people for whom injustice and dishonor are unbearable. Be sure that I never embezzled a cent, that I did not enrich myself, that I always worked for what I thought was the happiness of the people of Tours. I leave this letter to those close to me, whom, I hope, will be able in this way, to understand.
What brought about Jean Germain's death? Opinions are divided, but the facts are not too complicated: within the Mayor's jurisdiction and under the direction of the Tourist Office (of which Monsieur Lemarchand was director), an office of Franco-Chinese Affairs was created. The head of the office was Lise Han, an enterprising woman born in Taiwan.
Lise Han persuaded Tours' Mayor and the director of the Tourist Office that if would be a great idea if Tours could increase the scope of its Chinese tourism by offering to facilitate "commitment ceremonies" for married Chinese couples who would like to re-enact their vows. The facilitation involved the Mayor, Jean Germain, reading out the words of the re-commitment of the couples to their marriages in French, then posing for a photograph with the couples, dressed as extravagantly as if they were being married again. The ceremony involved two hundred couples and was filmed and photographed.
What Lise Han did not tell City Hall was that as well as working for Tours, she also worked for the company who was selling the package "re-committment" trips. This came to light and Lise Han was asked to resign from the company, which she ostensibly did. However, she continued to play a behind-the-scenes role which permitted the company to pocket moneys that were arguably public.
The evidence was sufficient for the public prosecutor to bring a case for embezzlement of public funds against Lise Han and several others. Jean Germain, as the Mayor, was necessarily implicated. There is some question as to whether the Mayor was not naive in failing to question how Tours became such a desirable place for Chinese couples to "re-commit" en masse on one day. Then again, in France, sometimes relationships work to the disadvantage of judgment. Copinage --the practice of getting something through contacts-- is embedded in French life. Jean Germain might not have been corrupt, but he may have gotten caught in the web of others, particularly that of Lise Han.
Ms. Han is awaiting trial for embezzlement of public funds. She has said that she and Jean Germain were lovers. Yet there are no love letters, no tell-tale e-mails, or phone messages. Many see Han's claim as an attempt by her to spread the blame for the "Chinese Marriages" to the former Mayor, and in so doing, receive a shorter sentence when she is almost certainly found guilty of breaching the public trust and embezzling public funds.
Jean Germain looks, in all the photos available, as though he was genuinely happy to be the Mayor of Tours. Next year would have been his twentieth as Mayor. There would probably have been a big celebration, at which this public man would have been celebrated and honored as he would have wished, among the people he worked for. Some people say he killed himself because he was afraid of what would be revealed about his private life in the course of the trial. Others believe what he wrote in the note he left in his car: that death was preferable to dishonor.
The name of Jean Germain may not mean anything to you, but if you lived in the ancient city of Tours, in the Loire Valley, you knew him as your Mayor. Jean Germain was a serious man --he was Mayor of Tours for nineteen years, a Senator in the Assemblee Nationale, and a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. The latter distinction is given to a politician only after 20 years of public service and a demonstration of his "eminent merits" to be so recognized.
A part of the fabric of Tourangeau life (citizens of Tours are called Tourangeaux if they are men, and Tourangelles if they are women), he was highly regarded. Yet on Tuesday, April 7, 2015, he took his own life, turning on the engine of his car, parked in its garage in the house he lived. He was 67 years old and was about to be called to testify in a political corruption trial. There was a suicide note in the car, which spoke of the injustice and dishonor which drove him to kill himself:
«Des indications me laissent penser que, alors que les faits n’ont pas eu lieu, le ministère public va requérir à mon encontre pour des raisons plutôt politiques. C’est insupportable. Autant, je peux reconnaître des erreurs, des manques de discernement. Autant, il m’est impossible d’accepter sans broncher cette forfaiture, rendue possible par les actions de Madame Han et les mensonges peureux de Monsieur Lemarchand. Leur conscience les poursuivra.
Je sais le mal que je vais faire, la peine que je vais diffuser à ceux qui m’aiment. Mais on ne peut laisser la chasse systématique aux politiques se dérouler "normalement", quotidiennement. Il est des êtres, j’en suis sûr, pour lesquels l’injustice et le déshonneur sont insupportables. Soyez sûrs que je n’ai jamais détourné un centime, que je ne me suis pas enrichi, que j’ai toujours œuvré pour ce que je pensais être le bonheur des Tourangeaux. Je laisse ce courrier à mes proches qui, je l’espère, pourront comme ça comprendre».
Below is my translation of the note:
I know the harm that I am doing, the pain that I will cause those who love me. But one cannot let this systematic persecution unfold "normally", day to day. There are people for whom injustice and dishonor are unbearable. Be sure that I never embezzled a cent, that I did not enrich myself, that I always worked for what I thought was the happiness of the people of Tours. I leave this letter to those close to me, whom, I hope, will be able in this way, to understand.
What brought about Jean Germain's death? Opinions are divided, but the facts are not too complicated: within the Mayor's jurisdiction and under the direction of the Tourist Office (of which Monsieur Lemarchand was director), an office of Franco-Chinese Affairs was created. The head of the office was Lise Han, an enterprising woman born in Taiwan.
Lise Han persuaded Tours' Mayor and the director of the Tourist Office that if would be a great idea if Tours could increase the scope of its Chinese tourism by offering to facilitate "commitment ceremonies" for married Chinese couples who would like to re-enact their vows. The facilitation involved the Mayor, Jean Germain, reading out the words of the re-commitment of the couples to their marriages in French, then posing for a photograph with the couples, dressed as extravagantly as if they were being married again. The ceremony involved two hundred couples and was filmed and photographed.
What Lise Han did not tell City Hall was that as well as working for Tours, she also worked for the company who was selling the package "re-committment" trips. This came to light and Lise Han was asked to resign from the company, which she ostensibly did. However, she continued to play a behind-the-scenes role which permitted the company to pocket moneys that were arguably public.
The evidence was sufficient for the public prosecutor to bring a case for embezzlement of public funds against Lise Han and several others. Jean Germain, as the Mayor, was necessarily implicated. There is some question as to whether the Mayor was not naive in failing to question how Tours became such a desirable place for Chinese couples to "re-commit" en masse on one day. Then again, in France, sometimes relationships work to the disadvantage of judgment. Copinage --the practice of getting something through contacts-- is embedded in French life. Jean Germain might not have been corrupt, but he may have gotten caught in the web of others, particularly that of Lise Han.
Ms. Han is awaiting trial for embezzlement of public funds. She has said that she and Jean Germain were lovers. Yet there are no love letters, no tell-tale e-mails, or phone messages. Many see Han's claim as an attempt by her to spread the blame for the "Chinese Marriages" to the former Mayor, and in so doing, receive a shorter sentence when she is almost certainly found guilty of breaching the public trust and embezzling public funds.
Jean Germain looks, in all the photos available, as though he was genuinely happy to be the Mayor of Tours. Next year would have been his twentieth as Mayor. There would probably have been a big celebration, at which this public man would have been celebrated and honored as he would have wished, among the people he worked for. Some people say he killed himself because he was afraid of what would be revealed about his private life in the course of the trial. Others believe what he wrote in the note he left in his car: that death was preferable to dishonor.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
A Tridentine Mass For Corpus Christi
June 7, 2015
Madame Froment, the woman from La Redorte who cares for Beau when I travel, has had an awful six months. The roof of the house she bought there a few years ago caved in the week between Christmas and New Year's. The house had been represented in the documents of purchase as having no structural flaws, so she had grounds to sue the seller, but that prospect would not put a roof over head last winter. Just before she came to La Redorte Madame Froment left her job as a bank teller in Montauban after diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. Seeking a quieter, hopefully healthier life, she moved to La Redorte. Divorced, her two sons working far from La Redorte when the house collapsed, she had nowhere to go.
Through a friend, she learned of the convent of Augustinian nuns resident in Azille, a nearby village. She went to see the Mother Superior. The nuns accept guests, but Madame Froment could not pay for her room, so she offered to cook and clean for the convent instead. She and the Mother Superior agreed that Madame Froment could stay for a month on a trial basis.
The arrangement has worked out so well for both parties that Madame Froment has now been at the convent six months. Which I am glad about on a variety of levels: 1. Madame Froment has a roof over her head while she puts her house back together (she has gotten a judgment against the seller, but he is dragging his feet about making payments); 2. someone I value as a great caretaker of Beau has come back into the picture; and, 3. I have been given a window into the life of cloistered religious, which, as I have written before, has always intrigued me.
It turns out that the monastery where the nuns live (it was a monastery before it was a convent), is in the middle of Azille and on Sundays Mass is said there with a priest who comes from the abbey of Lagrasse, 30 minutes away by car. An October 17, 2009 article by Will Heaven in the Sunday Telegraph describes Lagrasse this way:
At first sight, many historians might also struggle to date the Canons Regular of the Mother of God, the religious order which today resides at Lagrasse and has for the last five years. They wear white soutanes and live according to the rule of St Augustine. Their liturgy is traditional, chanted, and in the Extraordinary Form. Yet the order was founded only in 1969.
Indeed, the priest celebrating the Mass is wearing (a) an alb (like a cassock or soutane, but in white); (b) a white lace surplice (a smock), (c) a stole (the priest's mark of office, worn when he is engaged in administering a sacrament), (d) a chasuble (an embroidered poncho), and a cope (a short cape with long sides) over that. He is served by a second priest, an extremely tall and thin young man, and eight altar boys. The oldest of these is tall and thin and so similar in appearance to the young priest, I think they are brothers. (They are not.) He is in charge of the seven other altar servers, who are all pre-adolescent boys.
Like the celebrant, everyone is wearing a white soutane, carefully ironed: one of the altar boys is the designated thurifer and has to swing a thurible (censer) throughout the Mass. Two boys hold the ends of the priest's chasuble where the ends of the fabric meet his shoulders. The purpose of this is so that when the priest raises the monstrance (the grand receptacle for the exposed communion wafer or Host) in his arms in adoration, the fabric of the chasuble does not impede the priest in raising his arms.
Two more boys, each to carry a pillar candle, stand to the sides of the altar. Another rings the sanctus bells during the adoration. The seventh boy passes to the assistant priest at the appropriate moment: (i) the chalice (into which the sacramental wine is poured); (ii) the paten (the dish onto which the sanctified wafers, taken out of the covered ciborium where they have been lying inside the tabernacle,, are placed); and, (iii) the communion plate (a dish traditionally held under the communicant's lips to catch crumbs).
Behind the altar, the nuns were chanting hymns before Mass began. In its urn, placed on the steps below the altar, was an aspergillum, a receptacle which holds holy water made of water and salt that has been blessed. The very back of the small chapel had a balcony passageway through whose recesses (above where the majority of the nuns sat) the oldest of the nuns could be glimpsed moving slowly across during the Mass. --Why? I cannot say, but it was disconcerting.
Corpus Christi, which commemorates the giving to mankind by Jesus of the Host that Catholics believe transmogrifies into the Body and Blood of Christ during the Mass, is always celebrated with all the stops pulled out, but the Mass at the convent is a spectacular example of this. After the 90-minute Mass, there is a procession around the interior of the cloister and its grounds with chanting and the monstrance, carried by the priest and sheltered from the sun by a specially designed processional umbrella, or umbrellino, leading the way. We reach a small altar placed inside a small white linen tent where more prayers are said before turning around and returning to the chapel. The nuns, the priests and the altar servers then disappear into the cloister.
Attending such a long Mass my mind goes in and out of focus, even when it is in English. The Mass I heard this morning was chanted in Latin in the Tridentine form, which prevailed from 1570 through 1962. This liturgy is now used mainly by religious orders I've heard the Tridentine rite once before, in London, at the Brompton Oratory. There the celebrants wear black under their white lace, and the effect is somber. In any Tridentine Mass the priest prepares the Eucharist with his back to the "faithful", as participants in the Mass are called. So the experience of the Tridentine Mass is quite different from that of the modern Mass, where the priest elevates the Host and the chalice before the people. As a result, many believe the Tridentine Mass elitist and excluding, although with the permission of the priest in charge in a particular parish, it can be said without violating canon law.
Celebrants and religious all in white, in a bare chapel painted white; with candles aplenty, sanctus bells, organ, a choir of young nuns, glimmering gilded monstrance and other items, the Latin Mass this morning was a thing of beauty. And a throwback to another era.
There was a homily: it was about the need for chastity. I can't say the message resounded with me. Although perhaps it was not meant to, particularly: the Tridentine Mass I heard this morning I heard as a guest of the convent, not as one of the faithful in a parish church. Then again the truth is that chastity is an intellectual and spiritual challenge for a modern man or woman.
"When I first came to the convent, I thought I was in another world, a sort of fairy tale", Madame Froment told me. "Living here six months, I realize that it is another world, but it is still a world made by humans, with all the weaknesses people outside the cloister have, if not expressed in the same way. The nuns and the priests have their follies and their illusions, just as we do . It's not a paradise at all, it's just a very special way of life."
Madame Froment, the woman from La Redorte who cares for Beau when I travel, has had an awful six months. The roof of the house she bought there a few years ago caved in the week between Christmas and New Year's. The house had been represented in the documents of purchase as having no structural flaws, so she had grounds to sue the seller, but that prospect would not put a roof over head last winter. Just before she came to La Redorte Madame Froment left her job as a bank teller in Montauban after diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. Seeking a quieter, hopefully healthier life, she moved to La Redorte. Divorced, her two sons working far from La Redorte when the house collapsed, she had nowhere to go.
Through a friend, she learned of the convent of Augustinian nuns resident in Azille, a nearby village. She went to see the Mother Superior. The nuns accept guests, but Madame Froment could not pay for her room, so she offered to cook and clean for the convent instead. She and the Mother Superior agreed that Madame Froment could stay for a month on a trial basis.
The arrangement has worked out so well for both parties that Madame Froment has now been at the convent six months. Which I am glad about on a variety of levels: 1. Madame Froment has a roof over her head while she puts her house back together (she has gotten a judgment against the seller, but he is dragging his feet about making payments); 2. someone I value as a great caretaker of Beau has come back into the picture; and, 3. I have been given a window into the life of cloistered religious, which, as I have written before, has always intrigued me.
It turns out that the monastery where the nuns live (it was a monastery before it was a convent), is in the middle of Azille and on Sundays Mass is said there with a priest who comes from the abbey of Lagrasse, 30 minutes away by car. An October 17, 2009 article by Will Heaven in the Sunday Telegraph describes Lagrasse this way:
At first sight, many historians might also struggle to date the Canons Regular of the Mother of God, the religious order which today resides at Lagrasse and has for the last five years. They wear white soutanes and live according to the rule of St Augustine. Their liturgy is traditional, chanted, and in the Extraordinary Form. Yet the order was founded only in 1969.
Indeed, the priest celebrating the Mass is wearing (a) an alb (like a cassock or soutane, but in white); (b) a white lace surplice (a smock), (c) a stole (the priest's mark of office, worn when he is engaged in administering a sacrament), (d) a chasuble (an embroidered poncho), and a cope (a short cape with long sides) over that. He is served by a second priest, an extremely tall and thin young man, and eight altar boys. The oldest of these is tall and thin and so similar in appearance to the young priest, I think they are brothers. (They are not.) He is in charge of the seven other altar servers, who are all pre-adolescent boys.
Like the celebrant, everyone is wearing a white soutane, carefully ironed: one of the altar boys is the designated thurifer and has to swing a thurible (censer) throughout the Mass. Two boys hold the ends of the priest's chasuble where the ends of the fabric meet his shoulders. The purpose of this is so that when the priest raises the monstrance (the grand receptacle for the exposed communion wafer or Host) in his arms in adoration, the fabric of the chasuble does not impede the priest in raising his arms.
Two more boys, each to carry a pillar candle, stand to the sides of the altar. Another rings the sanctus bells during the adoration. The seventh boy passes to the assistant priest at the appropriate moment: (i) the chalice (into which the sacramental wine is poured); (ii) the paten (the dish onto which the sanctified wafers, taken out of the covered ciborium where they have been lying inside the tabernacle,, are placed); and, (iii) the communion plate (a dish traditionally held under the communicant's lips to catch crumbs).
Behind the altar, the nuns were chanting hymns before Mass began. In its urn, placed on the steps below the altar, was an aspergillum, a receptacle which holds holy water made of water and salt that has been blessed. The very back of the small chapel had a balcony passageway through whose recesses (above where the majority of the nuns sat) the oldest of the nuns could be glimpsed moving slowly across during the Mass. --Why? I cannot say, but it was disconcerting.
Corpus Christi, which commemorates the giving to mankind by Jesus of the Host that Catholics believe transmogrifies into the Body and Blood of Christ during the Mass, is always celebrated with all the stops pulled out, but the Mass at the convent is a spectacular example of this. After the 90-minute Mass, there is a procession around the interior of the cloister and its grounds with chanting and the monstrance, carried by the priest and sheltered from the sun by a specially designed processional umbrella, or umbrellino, leading the way. We reach a small altar placed inside a small white linen tent where more prayers are said before turning around and returning to the chapel. The nuns, the priests and the altar servers then disappear into the cloister.
Attending such a long Mass my mind goes in and out of focus, even when it is in English. The Mass I heard this morning was chanted in Latin in the Tridentine form, which prevailed from 1570 through 1962. This liturgy is now used mainly by religious orders I've heard the Tridentine rite once before, in London, at the Brompton Oratory. There the celebrants wear black under their white lace, and the effect is somber. In any Tridentine Mass the priest prepares the Eucharist with his back to the "faithful", as participants in the Mass are called. So the experience of the Tridentine Mass is quite different from that of the modern Mass, where the priest elevates the Host and the chalice before the people. As a result, many believe the Tridentine Mass elitist and excluding, although with the permission of the priest in charge in a particular parish, it can be said without violating canon law.
Celebrants and religious all in white, in a bare chapel painted white; with candles aplenty, sanctus bells, organ, a choir of young nuns, glimmering gilded monstrance and other items, the Latin Mass this morning was a thing of beauty. And a throwback to another era.
There was a homily: it was about the need for chastity. I can't say the message resounded with me. Although perhaps it was not meant to, particularly: the Tridentine Mass I heard this morning I heard as a guest of the convent, not as one of the faithful in a parish church. Then again the truth is that chastity is an intellectual and spiritual challenge for a modern man or woman.
"When I first came to the convent, I thought I was in another world, a sort of fairy tale", Madame Froment told me. "Living here six months, I realize that it is another world, but it is still a world made by humans, with all the weaknesses people outside the cloister have, if not expressed in the same way. The nuns and the priests have their follies and their illusions, just as we do . It's not a paradise at all, it's just a very special way of life."
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Mishap Averted; A Morning At The Market In Carcassonne
June 6, 2015
In Saul Bellow's coming-of-age novel, The Adventures of Augie March, there is cameo appearance by a Frenchman, proprietor of a beauty salon for dogs. Augie, who is a great observer of others, less so of himself, observes how odd Chicago and America must always seem to a Frenchman.
Being in France, I have something in reverse of the same feeling Bellow ascribes to the French dog groomer. Things happen here I could not imagine happening in New York. This morning was a choice example of this.
I had a busy day planned: early arising, walk and feed Beau, then to Laetitia Salomon, the general practitioner in the village. To be able to work out at the gym while I'm here I'll need to have a statement from her that my health would permit exercise without restrictions. Like last year (when I needed the certificate to cycle with the Club de Cyclisme de Caunes-Minervois), Dr. Salomon asked me the same questions: did I have headaches, did I have shortness of breath or palpitations. She asked me to take off my shirt and felt the tone of my muscles before putting her stethoscope to my chest. "Yes", I am in good health and could proceed to the gym.
After exercising Beau and bringing him back home, I got in the car and drove to Carcassonne for the first time this year. I stopped to buy bread at a boulangerie at the Pont Rouge shopping center on the way: I think their bread is better and the selection broader than the boulangerie in Caunes. Bread purchase done, I took an exit that took me to that end of Carcassonne nearest the airport, which led me to the big LeClerc shopping center, which has a bigger selection that the Carrefour chain by the Pont Rouge, although the latter is closer.
I parked my car in the last lane of the shopping center parking and went inside for twenty minutes to shop. When I returned, my car was gone. Disappeared, vanished.
I locked the car, so how it could have been stolen so quickly was astonishing. I started to walk towards the entrance to the stores to notify the police, when I saw my car stopped at an angle, one bumper "kissing" that of a small station wagon with commercial markings. Standing next to it were a young couple and an older man. I recognized my car by the red license plate which is common to all rental cars.
I called out to the three and they waved and filled me in: my car, which seems not to have had the emergency brake on, had rolled across the flat surface of the parking lot fifteen feet, crossing a driving lane and coming to rest when it met the bumper of the station wagon.
Fortunately, there was no damage to the other car, nor mine. I offered to give the people my phone number, but they told me it was unnecessary, just keep my hand brake on whenever I was not behind the wheel. I went about my business, which involved going to the central post office in Carcassonne and parking the car by the banks of the Canal du Midi. As I pulled the brake up as hard as I could, I reflected on what would have happened had the incident happened there: visions of my Citroen being dredged from the canal danced in my head, and not pleasantly.
My business at the post office accomplished (buying a phone card for my French mobile), I made my way to the Saturday market, nearing its end as the clock approached noon. Place Carnot, the major pedestrian square in Carcassonne, was jammed with fruit and vegetable and flower sellers, as well as fromagers and butchers specializing in charcuterie. I bought cheeses and charcuterie and apricots, which are particularly good here. And a Vietnamese salad: a Vietnamese mother and daughter sell pre-prepared dishes from their homeland, which produces what is considered by many to be one of the great cuisines of the world. I bought a salad, then went on to La Ferme, the most exquisite --and expensive-- gourmet store in Carcassonne.
What makes a gourmet store exquisite in Carcassonne? In the several vitrines of La Ferme are displayed handsome sets of knives for every possible use: cutting cheese, boning chicken, chopping beef, hunting. That, however, is not what makes La Ferme exquisite, because several other stores on Carcassonne's toniest street, rue Verdun, also sell fine knives of every description, La Ferme is exquisite because in France's poorest department, the store offers items Parisians know and love: Kusmi Tea, single-malt whiskeys, coffees from Hediard. The prices, too, are comparable to those in Paris.
I decide that I would like to enjoy a very good coffee at home, and so go upstairs to the second floor, where coffees and teas and the items to make and enjoy them are on offer. Everything is of the first water. However, I always find that when I mount the stairs I have the feeling that the personnel is afraid that I might be a thief: I'm never left alone to enjoy browsing, but am followed by someone wearing the company smock, who hovers. I've already made the decision that although I could buy cheaper --and perhaps comparable-- coffee elsewhere-- I'll opt for 300 grams of Hediard's Cote d'Azur blend of beans (about 10.5 ounces). It's an extravagance, but by contrast, the bottle of rose costs five dollars. So not everything at La Ferme is outrageously expensive, just almost everything.
Shopping for the next few days done, I want to get out of Carcassonne. Last year I wrote that the town reminds me of a woman who hasn't changed her make-up in thirty years. Casting an appraising eye over the place again, I'm reminded of New Orleans, the Big Easy. There's something unhurried and indifferent about Carcassonne, which has no pretensions of being "hip", or "chic" or anything other than a place where people go about their business, such as it is. There's a hammam, there is a conservatory of classical music, and an Ecole des Beaux Arts, as well as a good bookstore that keeps abreast of all the major authors; but none of them have the gloss of a place where those seeking "what's next" in culture or the arts would be inclined to go.
That means that the experience of Carcassonne is unique in the absence of anything that you could ever dine out on: everything is provincial, even its precious aspirations. Living there would be intolerable, but taken in small doses, it provides a contrast to the simplicity of life in the countryside.
In Saul Bellow's coming-of-age novel, The Adventures of Augie March, there is cameo appearance by a Frenchman, proprietor of a beauty salon for dogs. Augie, who is a great observer of others, less so of himself, observes how odd Chicago and America must always seem to a Frenchman.
Being in France, I have something in reverse of the same feeling Bellow ascribes to the French dog groomer. Things happen here I could not imagine happening in New York. This morning was a choice example of this.
I had a busy day planned: early arising, walk and feed Beau, then to Laetitia Salomon, the general practitioner in the village. To be able to work out at the gym while I'm here I'll need to have a statement from her that my health would permit exercise without restrictions. Like last year (when I needed the certificate to cycle with the Club de Cyclisme de Caunes-Minervois), Dr. Salomon asked me the same questions: did I have headaches, did I have shortness of breath or palpitations. She asked me to take off my shirt and felt the tone of my muscles before putting her stethoscope to my chest. "Yes", I am in good health and could proceed to the gym.
After exercising Beau and bringing him back home, I got in the car and drove to Carcassonne for the first time this year. I stopped to buy bread at a boulangerie at the Pont Rouge shopping center on the way: I think their bread is better and the selection broader than the boulangerie in Caunes. Bread purchase done, I took an exit that took me to that end of Carcassonne nearest the airport, which led me to the big LeClerc shopping center, which has a bigger selection that the Carrefour chain by the Pont Rouge, although the latter is closer.
I parked my car in the last lane of the shopping center parking and went inside for twenty minutes to shop. When I returned, my car was gone. Disappeared, vanished.
I locked the car, so how it could have been stolen so quickly was astonishing. I started to walk towards the entrance to the stores to notify the police, when I saw my car stopped at an angle, one bumper "kissing" that of a small station wagon with commercial markings. Standing next to it were a young couple and an older man. I recognized my car by the red license plate which is common to all rental cars.
I called out to the three and they waved and filled me in: my car, which seems not to have had the emergency brake on, had rolled across the flat surface of the parking lot fifteen feet, crossing a driving lane and coming to rest when it met the bumper of the station wagon.
Fortunately, there was no damage to the other car, nor mine. I offered to give the people my phone number, but they told me it was unnecessary, just keep my hand brake on whenever I was not behind the wheel. I went about my business, which involved going to the central post office in Carcassonne and parking the car by the banks of the Canal du Midi. As I pulled the brake up as hard as I could, I reflected on what would have happened had the incident happened there: visions of my Citroen being dredged from the canal danced in my head, and not pleasantly.
My business at the post office accomplished (buying a phone card for my French mobile), I made my way to the Saturday market, nearing its end as the clock approached noon. Place Carnot, the major pedestrian square in Carcassonne, was jammed with fruit and vegetable and flower sellers, as well as fromagers and butchers specializing in charcuterie. I bought cheeses and charcuterie and apricots, which are particularly good here. And a Vietnamese salad: a Vietnamese mother and daughter sell pre-prepared dishes from their homeland, which produces what is considered by many to be one of the great cuisines of the world. I bought a salad, then went on to La Ferme, the most exquisite --and expensive-- gourmet store in Carcassonne.
What makes a gourmet store exquisite in Carcassonne? In the several vitrines of La Ferme are displayed handsome sets of knives for every possible use: cutting cheese, boning chicken, chopping beef, hunting. That, however, is not what makes La Ferme exquisite, because several other stores on Carcassonne's toniest street, rue Verdun, also sell fine knives of every description, La Ferme is exquisite because in France's poorest department, the store offers items Parisians know and love: Kusmi Tea, single-malt whiskeys, coffees from Hediard. The prices, too, are comparable to those in Paris.
I decide that I would like to enjoy a very good coffee at home, and so go upstairs to the second floor, where coffees and teas and the items to make and enjoy them are on offer. Everything is of the first water. However, I always find that when I mount the stairs I have the feeling that the personnel is afraid that I might be a thief: I'm never left alone to enjoy browsing, but am followed by someone wearing the company smock, who hovers. I've already made the decision that although I could buy cheaper --and perhaps comparable-- coffee elsewhere-- I'll opt for 300 grams of Hediard's Cote d'Azur blend of beans (about 10.5 ounces). It's an extravagance, but by contrast, the bottle of rose costs five dollars. So not everything at La Ferme is outrageously expensive, just almost everything.
Shopping for the next few days done, I want to get out of Carcassonne. Last year I wrote that the town reminds me of a woman who hasn't changed her make-up in thirty years. Casting an appraising eye over the place again, I'm reminded of New Orleans, the Big Easy. There's something unhurried and indifferent about Carcassonne, which has no pretensions of being "hip", or "chic" or anything other than a place where people go about their business, such as it is. There's a hammam, there is a conservatory of classical music, and an Ecole des Beaux Arts, as well as a good bookstore that keeps abreast of all the major authors; but none of them have the gloss of a place where those seeking "what's next" in culture or the arts would be inclined to go.
That means that the experience of Carcassonne is unique in the absence of anything that you could ever dine out on: everything is provincial, even its precious aspirations. Living there would be intolerable, but taken in small doses, it provides a contrast to the simplicity of life in the countryside.
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