Dateline France, 5 June 1990 Report 21 My folks came to visit us after attending a meeting in England just before Easter. The Saturday before Easter we took them to see St. Chapelle and Notre-Dame in Paris. It was a busy weekend in the city. Lots of British tourists on holiday, come to wear loud clothes, sit in bars and drink beer. Why someplace like, say, Manchester wouldn't have sufficed for them, I can't say. The church of St. Chapelle is on an island in the Seine, and a police constabulary and law courts have been built around it. Hence, your bags are searched and you are frisked with a metal detector when you go in. The church is known for its windows. You enter through the crypt, then ascend to the main floor. You are confronted with the illusion that the church is nothing but stained glass. There is indeed a lot of glass, but also the supporting columns are shaped to block almost none of the view of the windows when standing in the center. St. Chapelle was built in the 13th century, but after the revolution it was converted into an archive. The bottom rows of windows and 12 statues of the apostles that ring the church were removed to make space for shelves. Most of the statues were later retrieved, but the glass ended up in museums and private collections. The lower windows now there are replacements. From St. Chapelle we walked to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. This was our second visit. The interior had quite a different feel to it, as almost all the lights had been turned off from Good Friday to Easter morning. It gave us an idea for what the interior must be been like normally, in the times before electric lighting. On the way home on the train, Sarah found someone holding a very calm cat, and she spent the entire 1/2 hour trip stroking it (and the entire walk home from the station asking for a cat). Not to miss an opportunity, Kaye and I left the kids with the grandparents after Easter and set off on our own towards the southwest of France. Much of our trip was spent in the Aquitaine region. This region has been much disputed between France and England over the centuries. Eleanor, the queen of the kingdom of Aquitaine, first married Louis VII of France. They failed to produce an heir, who would have united Aquitaine and France. Eleanor divorced Louis, and married Henry Plantagenet, of Anjou, in 1154. he soon became Henry II of England, bringing the region under the English crown. Our first stop was the port of La Rochelle. The French managed to capture this part of Aquitaine by 1224. But French possession was not to last. The French king Charles IV died without a direct heir. Philip VI of Valois, nephew of a former king, was nominated by the nobles to be king. Edward III of England, maternal grandson of the same king, thought he should be king of France. (The French didn't buy this, as the French crown follows patriarchal lines.) The Hundred (and thirty) Years War resulted, and a treaty ceded La Rochelle to the English in 1360. However, by 1372, things weren't going so well for the English, so the town fathers arranged to deliver the town into the hands of the king of France (Charles V) in exchange for some guarantees of independence in local governance. La Rochelle demonstrated its independence from the crown by later becoming a stronghold for Protestants--the Huguenots--in France. We stayed near a pair of tower, St. Nicolas Tower and the Chain Tower, that guarded the entrance to the port. There used to be a great chain stretched between them at night, to prevent the passage of boats. We visited St. Nicolas Tower, whose thick walls hold a network of stairways and passages. This tower is not built on anything particularly solid, and leans slightly to the east. There are exhibits tracing the history of the port from ancient times to modern day dredging. The most interesting part was the blockade of the harbor in 1627-28. Cardinal Richlieu didn't like La Rochelle being a protestant stronghold. So, the French army laid siege to it on land. But, being a port, that wasn't going to do much good if ships could still sailing in. After hearing several plans, Richlieu decided on one that involved building a dike across the far reaches of the harbor. It had a wood framework, and was filled with rock, with a small opening where the main channel was. That opening had a short wall in front of it, which made it slow going to take any ship through. The French brought in warships to defend the dike, and also mounted cannons atop it. The leaders of La Rochelle appealed to the English for help. The English came twice, and had ideas of bombarding the dike and then blowing parts of it with explosives, but they never really got close enough to do much damage. La Rochelle eventually capitulated. There is also a third tower, Lantern Tower, a little north of the other two. Other things we saw in the town included the Cathedral, the town hall (which is the most interesting building, architecturally, in the city) and the church of St. Saveur. This last church had most of its walls pulled down in 1568 by the protestants to make walls to protect the city. Richlieu had those walls torn down in 1628. Many of the streets are arcaded, which was nice to have during the rain we got the second day. The food was interesting there. My favorite dish was mouclade, which is mussels in a cream sauce flavored by saffron or curry. We watched people in other restaurants consuming huge plates of shellfish, of which generally less than a third had been cooked. I thought it might be interesting to order, but Kaye stated she did not care to watch me "slurping green slugs." We continued down the southwest coast of France, which has a lot in common with the southwest coast of Oregon: scrubby pines, sand hills, and gorse. We spent a night in Biarritz, which must just be a zoo in the height of the summer season. It wasn't bad when we were there. There are beautiful rocky cliffs there, with paths all through them, and a footbridge leading to some offshore rocks. We had a room with an ocean view and a "Murphy bidet"--it folded up when not in use. At the restaurant we ate in, I noticed that the lady next to me had brought her cat, who was napping on her lap. When the lady got up to leave, the cat jumped into my lap, and the lady left. It took me a minute to figure out that the cat belonged to the restaurant and would sleep in any sympathetic lap. Basque country extends east from Biarritz, and we bought a Basque tart and some Basque candy, both featuring almonds. On the way out of Biarritz, we went to Bayonne to see the Basque museum there, which turned out to be closed for repairs. We visited the cathedral there, which was quite dark inside, but had nice painting around the apse. Outside, we peeked into a cloister that ran along one side. Before leaving we bought a loaf of local bread, shaped something like a harp, from a bakery where the brass door handles were in the shape of croissants. We continued northeast across the marshes and forests of Gascony. I'm told that the forests aren't natural, which isn't hard to believe when you see how all the pine trees are in straight rows. Gascony is a traditional sheepherding region, and I saw from postcards that some shepherds wore stilts. This explained the joke behind the 7-ft high toilet in the exhibit of "Unfindable Objects" by Carelman. It was labeled "for Landais [Gascon] shepherds." When I returned to work, I started asking around for why the shepherds wore stilts in the first place. I got many, nondefinitive, answers. Someone said there were lots of snakes there. Another said that there is quicksand in the marshes. Two answers made references to the dense scrubby bushes that grow there, one say the stilts were to step over them, the other saying that the stilts helped the sheep see the shepherd above the shrubs. My favorite answer, though, was "How else are they going to reach the toilets?" Once we got out of the marshes, we had miles of tree-lined roads, which I really enjoy driving on. We ended up that night in Bergerac, which has little to do with Cyrano de Bergerac. However, the town figures that publicity is publicity, and has adopted him as town mascot anyway. Bergerac seemed like a well-financed town. The old part was well kept up, with lots of pedestrian streets, and the museums looked well cared for. We had been seeing these dark wood barns with shutters on the way into town, which turned out to be for drying tobacco. Bergerac is the center of France's tobacco growing region, and hence has a museum of tobacco. It mainly deals with the history of use of tobacco, and not with modern processing methods. Lots of antique pipes, and pipes from other cultures. When tobacco was first introduced to Europe, it was mainly used in the form of snuff. It was formed into hard rolls, and grated as needed on snuff graters. Upstairs was a "pipe pantograph", which could mill 14 wooden pipes at a time from a metal model (usually of some famous face). Adjoining the tobacco museum was a museum of village history. We also took a quick spin through a museum on wine, cooperage and boatbuilding museum. These were other natural industries for Bergerac, it being on a river in the middle of the Bordeaux region. We visited the church of St. Jacques there as well, and had a brief look at some wooden cloisters. Dinner that night was in a building from the middle ages, with our dinner cooked over a fire of old grape vines. Bergerac in the Dordogne valley. Kaye and I thought this was a wonderful region, as beautiful and interesting as the Loire valley, mile for mile. The Dordogne is not much known by Americans, but it is much frequented by the British, who often have summer or retirement houses there. (We met one at dinner one night. The house he bought needed a little work-- strong outer walls and roof, but the floor was mainly gone. Known in the trade as "a charming fixer-upper".) We were taken for Brits most places we went. We spent our last day of the trip driving up the valley from Bergerac to Souillac. (Many of the towns of the region end in `-ac', a suffix from Gallic. It was kind of a game to guess where the last `ac' town was going to be as we headed back north to Paris. We thought we'd seen the last one south of Limoges, but we were surprised to find signs for "Fnac" just outside Paris.) (That last was a pretty arcane joke.) It's very green and wooded in the Dordogne, with steep cliffs rising up from the river many places, often with a castle atop and a village glued to the side. Our first stop was to see the church at St. Cyprien, which was a short hike up the hill. The church is cut into the side of the hill, so there are windows only on one side of the nave. At Beynac, we hiked up to the top of the bluff to get a closer view of the castle there. The castle was closed for lunch, but we had wonderful view of the valley from nearby, including the rival castle across the valley. During the 100 Years War, they were at times held by French and English, at times both by the French or both by the English. (The Dordogne was also a stronghold of the French resistance in WWII. At the Army museum in Paris I say a picture of an armored car that a farmer from the Dordogne had secretly built in his barn.) Further up the valley is the village of Domme. While most of the castle towns had a lower part and an upper part, Domme is a walled city completely on top of a small plateau. There was a small museum of popular arts and traditions, with examples of old farm tools and household equipment. There are also limestone caves in the plateau under the town, and an entryway has been cut down to them from the central market. We toured those. Lots of stalagmites and stalactites had been broken off, as the caves had been known for hundreds of years, but there were still many impressive parts. There is also a fault line that runs through many of the chambers. Thus, many of columns had separated in the middle. In some cases the gap between the top and bottom parts of the column had been partially bridged by later deposition. The tour let us off on the face of the plateau, and we had to climb some rather narrow stairs to get back up to town. We didn't actually manage to get all the way to Souillac. We hit a detour that took us on some very back roads, and then we decided to take a shortcut back to the main road north. At times the road got down to one lane with no shoulders, and the towns were so small they had to share a beggar with the next village. But Kaye's navigating got us onto the main road okay. We had intended to drive all the way back to Paris that night, but when it started snowing as we were headed over some hills (this is after Easter, remember), we decided to stay someplace for the night and make it back to Paris in the morning. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Little Bits 1. I said in a past report that the basilica of St. Denis was an early example of Gothic architecture. I was reading in one of Kaye's books that it was indeed the first example (thought not the first church built completely in the Gothic style). 2. I met the French Minister of Research, M. Curien. He is a member of the board of directors of Altair, and Dave DeWitt and I were duly trotted out to meet him at a meeting called to announce the participation of Bull in Altair. (I'm only here as window dressing, you know.) 3. When Greta Garbo died, it was the top news story on the radio. The story was played about every 7-8 minutes all day. 4. The French take all creative endeavor seriously, it seems. Whereas a US TV critic would dismiss a film out of hand as being a B movie, a French reviewer will take the time to tell exactly what stinks about it--- the script, the actors, the cinematography, the direction or whatever-- and also point out the redeeming feature--"pretty shots of the mountains" or "the music is lively." In giving recommendations for which movies should be viewed by adolescents, violence is deemed much more unsuitable than nudity. I also heard a review of a new bande desinee (comic book) on the radio recently. 5. My folks took the kids to the Cousteau Undersea Park (the second visit for the kids). They were again impressed by it all, and came home and played divers all afternoon. They made mini-subs from cardboard boxes and created their own diving gear. Sarah's SCUBA gear was a plastic ketchup bottle attached to her back with a string, and her diving mask was two cups cut from a plastic egg carton and taped to her face. Luke wants to invent a computer game based on undersea exploration. 6. Can someone please fill me in on this new show "Twin Peaks" in a sentence or two? 7. Conversation with Luke, standing outside our bedroom door at 3 in the morning: "Igotossbteenmtoes" "What?" "I've got toss between my toes." "Huh?" "I've got toss between my toes." "You've got `toss' between your toes?" "Yeah." "Luke, what's `toss'?" "Tomato sauce." "You've got tomato sauce between your toes?" "Uh-huh." Fortunately, Kaye told him to get back in bed just as I was about to get up and help him wash his feet. He remembers nothing of this.