Walking in SW France

Walking through "La France Profonde"

(with some additional observations on two southwestern French cities)

David Jenness    June 2011

On a walking path in the Dordogne, the other month, I realized that I was feeling like a contemplative deer.  We were moving, Ken and I, along an ambling trail through woods and farmland, sometimes skirting a field, sometimes stepping over a tiny stream; and everything was silent, shaded, and with an awareness of subtle motion, external to us -- as the sun went under a cloud and then slid out again and as the level of the path changed slightly up and down.  In the far distance, a spire in a tiny town, in the near distance the remnants of a stone wall, in the mid-distance, cows, staffage in a Corot landscape.  A branch might graze one’s arm, minutely.  A sound -- a bird.   Some spot of brightness up ahead, not yet identified, perhaps a silvery bush, perhaps an odd-shaped slice of sky, perhaps just the effect of dappled light.  

The contextual element, known to humans but not to deer, was that the route itself was very old: it had been there for centuries, most of it looking the same as it had in the 1800’s.  France has this remarkable system -- not unique in Europe, but highly developed -- of official trails, known not as sentiers, the normal word for trail, but as grandes randonées (GR), on the national scale, or grandes randonées du pays, on the regional or provincial level (pays here meaning countryside).  Of course, in France, there would need to be a special nomenclature, together with detailed maps, hiking guides to be followed almost step by step, carefully coded blazes on the trees. 

I think it is essentially right to say that the trails came first.  Today, as you cover a GR or GRP, you pass irregularly, randomly almost, from a grassy path over a field to a dirt track spongy with composted leaves, then through a copse, briefly onto a packed-down double track used by farm equipment, thence to a one-lane blacktop roadway connecting two tiny hamlets, to a stretch of official D-numbered roadways (that is, with départemental status), and back and forth and back and forth.  Sometimes the trail makes use, for a time, of more recent ways, but these roads and newer tracks borrowed the paths, not the other way round.  Sometimes the book tells you that you are using a voie royale, and you can see that it must be true: the path is just wide enough, just smoothed enough, to have been used by carriages on King’s or intendant’s business in the 1700s. 

It took two of us to keep the course.  Each form of trail uses a distinct set of painted blazes, set no further apart than every few hundred meters (if things are going well) on a tree trunk, a post, the corner of a stone wall, or, in a village, on the edge of a storage barn.  The blazes are, France being France, well systematized, except that, especially on the edge of a town, modernity intervenes so that the blaze you need will be obliterated by a parked panel truck, may have been placed on the edge of a building now worn by weather, or will have to share space with a speed or curve symbol, since there are no trees right there for the marking.  Where two possibilities of equivalent size or similar composition cross, and one of these may not in fact be the trail, the blaze you see next may have an X marked through it, whose meaning is: This looks like the trail, but isn’t.  A good example of how a negative can impart more information that a positive instance.

Red and white GR "X" blaze indicating "Don't go this way"

The GR blazes involve a pair of red and white stripes, and I, alas, am red/green colorblind.   So Ken was the blaze spotter, and I was the book-holder.  For each GR there is a minutely detailed guide, a page of which covers a few kilometers of walking. I mean by ‘detailed’: something like, At the farm named de la Rouselle [old farms in Southwest France have family or historical names], walk through the main yard; after the pigsty turn right.  Proceed 200 meters, and find a grassy path toward the chestnut trees beyond a field, turn left.  Just before the trees, follow along the plowed field to the south.  When you see the gravel pit, go through the gate.  Once in the woods, follow the dirt path for 500 meters, until you see (the hamlet Y) in the distance.  Cross the tiny stream on a natural set of stones, veer right.  And so on -- all in French, and in specialized French at that, using terms you would not normally think to use in such contexts (achever, franchir, emprunter, hameau, goudronné, se faufiler, une friche -- in this context, respectively, get to, cross, make use of, hamlet, paved, lead into, fallow field).  Opposite each page of text is a swatch of map copied from official IGN French series (scale 1: 25,000) that corresponds to the page of text, with the trail marked out on it.   The very act, the process, of walking was for us normally silent.  When you are away from everywhere your job is to put one foot ahead of the other, you tend not to chatter.  Our conversation, such as it was, consisted of: Here it says, watch for the ruisseau … do you have the blaze?   Or, There’s a blaze, but it leads over a farmer’s field, does the book say that’s right?

Standard GR red-and-white blaze, in this case, somewhat hidden by leaves

Part of the fun is that it’s like working on a picture puzzle all day long.  There is an added complexity.  Localities have their own circuits, sometimes many kilometers in length, and for these there are maps of lesser complexity that you get at the tourist office, perhaps with a mimeographed set of instructions, perhaps sometimes not.  GRs, GRPs, and these circuits sometimes coincide, and then you will see several sets of blazes along the path.  When everything is perfectly overlaid there is no problem, but sometimes one system of trail divagates in a surprising way from another, and you need to be alert.

Furthermore, there is hardly ever anyone to ask.  When you walk through a tiny village or a farmyard, yes, you may see someone working, and you can ask, Le grand sentier, est-ce par ici?  Once or twice, in the outskirts of a town where the blazes are hard to spot, you might hail in a car to seek reassurance.  But normally, there was simply no one around.  In 14 or so days of hiking (the major trails and the longish circuits), we met exactly two couples, four hikers.  [I exclude passing locals who were using a stretch of trail for utilitarian reasons, to get from one side of their farm to another or from the town to the fields.]  

I have some personal preferences when walking in the country.  This sort of point-to-point path-finding, this real-life puzzle solving, is more fun for me than simply to hump along the hiking routes in the huge American West, where typically there is just one trail which goes on for hours before coming to a junction with a second one.  With the French system, you need to keep your wits engaged.  I also like the variety.  One moment you are in sun, in the open, the next, in shade; one moment, on stones where you mind your footing, the next on flattened grass or forest duff.  I find deep woods, when it’s a cloudy day, sometimes dank, morbid.  In the French countryside, that never lasts long.  In a few minutes you are out in the open, with a faint drypoint sketch of a village appearing in the distance, something to head for that says, “Here people live, this place has a name.”  When I hike in the high Rockies, up at ten or eleven thousand feet, and the summertime vistas are of looming naked granite peaks, I find them awesome but ugly, and the experience somewhat scary: one really shouldn’t be here in all this wildness, miles from anywhere, perhaps in danger of falling or being struck by lightning.  It seems like an unnatural thing to do, an arbitrary task of endurance.  Or perhaps, to the contrary, it feels inhumane: no one has ever made a life up here.  The French countryside is, by definition, domesticated, though not picturesquely so.  I know that I could happily have lived on these gentle slopes, amidst these vines and fruit trees, tending my potager, four hundred years ago.

Sometimes the GR will bring you in sight of a chateau, demurely turreted, looking a bit like a pop-up in a coloring book.  It will date probably to the 1300s or 1400s, though it has been altered many times since then.  These are not the spectacular chateaux of the Loire valley, which are clamant rural palaces.  For the most part these are chateaux-forts, in essence fortified country castles with protected, usually walled, surrounds that gave refuge sometimes to an entire feudal village.  The windows and crenellations were not for gazing out of, not sites from which lovely damsels let down their long tresses, but places for artillery fire or for pots of boiling water or oil.

Many of the chateaux in southwest France are on even a more modest and more charming scale, amounting to what the French call gentilhommeries, the country mansions of higher officialdom or the lesser nobility.  They are lovely.  A characteristic of French country houses in general, and even historic urban mansions, is they do not sit up on footings.  The important rooms of the principal floor open directly out onto lawn, raked gravel, or a piece of formal garden.  (Think ‘French doors’.)  In this countryside, the outbuildings will be solid and pleasingly designed: a rough stone barn can be as handsome as a fine dressed-stone mansion.  But In the country, the structures are decoratively simpler than urban mansions, in that they have plain fronts without recesses or pilasters, and come without reliefs, and articulated cornices.

The chateaux-forts, by the way, are not quite the same thing as the principal buildings of bastides.  These are fortified towns that normally sit on the crest of a steep hill.  In the latter case, all the separate buildings, whether domestic or military in nature, cling onto a steep slope, arranged in terraced fashion within a tiered array of walls, the whole ensemble calculated to prevent the enemy from being able to scale the slopes.  At the top of bastide towns, you may indeed see the roof of a fortified chateau, but that structure was not primarily a residence, simply the operations center of the local lord, whose concern was war or defense, not home life.

Bastide village of Domme, near Sarlat-la-Canèda

The countryside chateaux tend to date from the long period of English-French struggle for control of Aquitaine, while the fortified towns tend to date to a later time, that of the Wars of Religion. 

In recent years, rich English or Americans have bought up the chateaux, and even entire bastides, for fanciful residences redolent of a romantic past.  The new owners invariably set about complicating the roofs and adding turrets, corner towers, and other three-dimensional furbelows to make their castles look more like those in the story-books.  With all modern comforts, of course.  If at home a man’s house is his castle, here a man’s castle is his demesne.  The effect can be a bit precious, but a little touch of Disney is, one has to admit, sometimes nice to see.

To recall that this is, indeed, historic Aquitaine is to sense the strongly regional history, probably more evident by walking than in driving through modern day towns.  This region, spanning several modern départments, did not become definitively ‘French’ until the end of the Hundred Years War, about 1453, and did not cleave to Catholicism (it having become a hotbed of Protestantism) until late into the 1600s (some would say, if then).  In fact, there is a sense in which my claim to have been immersed in La France Profonde is misleading.  In my title, I was alluding to remote corners, where people have seldom felt connected to national systems and where the prospect of ever traveling to Paris would seem bizarre. Of course there is now national TV, but I noticed that the predominant regional paper, Le SudOuest, carried little national news.  Especially to the south and east, toward Languedoc rather than the Perigord, there is a strong Occitan presence in place-names, building styles, and foodstuffs, and a keen awareness of Occitan culture (Occitan as a language is closely related to Catalan).  One often sees the word pech on signs and maps: this is the local historic name for a habitation on top of a small hill (not a bastide, but simply a village), and it is not a French word.  

An excellent English writer on the region, Freda White, mentions that when she first lived in the Dordogne, in the 1950s, and began to know the villagers, she had occasion eventually to ask about the War.  They said it was tough, hard times, and fuel and hard goods was difficult to get -- but that they tried to do their best, even to the extent of taking in “the French,” meaning refugees from the Germans in the north and Vichy to the East.  Even today many villages seem so hermetic that you feel life has changed little since the Middle Ages.  White, referring back to the time of the religious wars, tells a delightful story of two villages some 15 kilometers apart, the residents of which were vassals of different feudal lords.  There was a tradition of rivalry.  One night, the men of village A decided to mount a raid and take village B.  By chance, on the same night, the men of village B decided to capture village A.  The two raiding parties took different paths (perhaps using those that we used), and each party captured the target town easily.  There was no resistance, because in each village the men were absent.  In the morning they assessed the situation, and everybody went home.

Incidentally, in Bordeaux there is a superb museum of Aquitanian history and archaeology, one of the best I have ever encountered in its presentation of prehistory going back to the Neolithic.  It is very good also on the great days of Bordeaux as the most important trading and maritime town in Europe, during the late 1500s and the 1600s.  But the museum fails, for reasons not clear to me, to cover the period of English – French competition for possession of Aquitaine in the period 1200 to 1400.  (I wanted to say to the director, Surely you geste.) ) 

Revenir à nos moutons.  Somewhere on a cultivated property or in a woods, in this part of France, you may come across a borie, a small conical structure with a stone roof and one tiny door, meant for a shepherd to shelter in, perhaps with a couple of newborn sheep, eat some bread and cheese, and sleep overnight if the storm continued.  There are also the famous stone pigeon-cotes, elaborately fashioned in mini-storeys of pierced stone, sometimes with tiny balconies and delightful finials.  Sometimes, at their most complicated, they are set into the corner of an old storage shed in order that, not only would the pigeons come home at night to roost, but via an attached chute their droppings would provide fertilizer for the farm.  These cotes were significant in social and economic terms.  If you were a landed farmer, a kind of rural bourgeois, as opposed to a metayer (a tenant farmer), an active pigeon-cote showed that you were the active proprietor, the tax-paying holder of that land.  If the pigeon-cote was falling apart or abandoned, you had given up or were on the way to losing your property.

                                        A "borie" or shepherd's hut, near Béynac (Dordogne)                                     A very old pigeonnier, near Belvès (Dordogne)

The track may frequently bring you past the door of ancient Romanesque chapel or deconsecrated church.  The door will probably be open or openable.  Inside you find bare walls, sometimes modestly vaulted, a decaying wooden organ loft, and from time to time some quite spectacular fresco, well preserved because the structure is so off-the-path that it hasn’t been desecrated.  Sometimes the chapel belonged to the chateau, but it may have simply been the village church in a hamlet that no longer exists.  There is an ineffable peace in these vacant bare structures, occasionally underscored by the contrast, in a corner, of a huddle of dried flowers or a tiny memorial marker -- not religious, not a shrine, just a sign that someone has been remembered back through the years.

In the countryside and in small country towns, barns and outbuildings, sometimes even houses and small churches, will be roofed in lauze style.  The slopes of the roof are covered in hand-size flattish pieces of shale, using the principle but not the materials of tiling: one element assiduously overlapping another so that rain and snow cannot seep through.  Even locals do not understand, or so they say, how the stones have stayed in place, on steep roof slopes, for decades or centuries.  There is no mortar, no pins, no caulking -- not at least that is visible from outside.  Nor is there any sign that entire roof slopes have been re-covered, for that’s what would be involved if some of the stones were to fall, there being no easy way to replace single stones.

If like me you enjoy walking through what I have called a domesticated landscape, the knowledge that you are approaching a village, known since medieval times, gives a new spring to your step.  Indeed, there is the village, with the roofs, the shy square tower of the Romanesque church, the old protective wall.  As you walk through the fields and orchards outside the town, you may stop and help yourself to handfuls of ripe cherries or occasionally apricots, overhanging the road and thus available, we reasoned, to passersby.  Yet it all seems odder and odder the closer you get.  There is no noise, no tractors in the field, no women gardening, no men fixing a barn.  You enter the village, and all the structures are shut up, the place empty, the church locked, the boulangerie shuttered.  It is not absolute: there are just enough signs of life to let you know that the village is not in fact abandoned.  The houses, for example, will have a two or three open windows on the ground level, and a sleeping dog in the doorway, and wash on the line -- but otherwise, and certainly on the upper floor, the volets are all shut.  This on a lovely day when you might expect Madame to be airing her house.   “Where are the people?” we would wonder.  There is the vegetable garden, but no one is weeding it.  There are hayfields, with cylindrical haystacks, but no men are at work.  Is the village under a spell?

Queen Anne cherries ripe for the picking and overhanging the path on a circuit walk out of Domme (Dordogne)

To be sure, in a larger village, one bar may be active, with a few older men drinking (beer, mostly, in this part of France).  Once in a while, a child may pass along on a bike or a housewife may open her kitchen door to shake out a cloth.  But still it is strange.  We’re not speaking about the midday fermature but about mid-morning or mid-afternoon.  It can also be difficult for the traveler.  Rural French are highly protective of their homes, and tend to secure them to outside view.  One doesn’t casually knock on a closed door, even when you know there is someone inside.  The only really dislikable behavior I encountered in our recent visit was when I did bring myself to knock on a door, in a town where we really had to find out whether there was a place to stay.  A fierce old man unclasped his window and peered out.  I started with elaborate politeness: Je vous prie pardon, Monsieur … and he yelled back at me, clearly furious at being disturbed. Pardon, Monsieur, pardon, he mocked en haute voix.  And slammed the door in my face.  It was nasty, as shocking as when you smile idly at someone on the street in New York, and they come at you with obscenities. 

Fortunately, by chance, as I walked the empty streets a pleasant young woman came out into her yard, and was happy enough to tell me that there was a chambres d’hôte, a kind of farm-stay, about a kilometer outside the town.  She even walked out into the street to show me the turning.  If she hadn’t, I don’t know what we would have done.  In principle, a GR brings you, every 10 to 20 kilometers, into a town with some kind of overnight accommodation and source of food.  The GR system is not intended for overnight camping, nor could we have carried the necessary gear.  But the guide was at least six years out of date.  Sometimes you will find yourself in a village, quite remarkable historically or well known in the books for its unspoiled beauty -- and there will be, literally, nowhere to stay.  Especially at midday, or on a weekend, there may be no foodstore, let alone a café.  Once, in what was definitely a town, not a village, the tourist signage at the outskirt showed the familiar symbol promising a place to sleep, but the one ‘hotel’ had been closed for five years, the owners of the one locally sanctioned chambres d’hôte were off at a music festival in a distant town, and the other possible accommodation was questionable because owned by North Africans.  All this we learned from the nice young owner of the one bar that was open.  He had beer or liquor to offer, but no food of any kind.  The other bar had closed the week previously, and he had only opened the day before.  He was sympathetic, but of course no Frenchman would dream of saying, “Come on upstairs and borrow a piece of floor to sleep on.“

It is puzzling also, sometimes, to intuit the time cycle of the lived day in a rural town.  Even in quite an important town, contrary to our assumption about “country folk,” activity can be late to get started.  The boulangerie may not open until 8:30 or so, and if it’s a Sunday or a holiday it may not open at all.  If you need a coffee (as I do) in the morning, it will have to be in the bar of your hotel, for there is nothing open in the town streets -- and even at your hotel, you won’t get it before 8 o’clock.  All this is frustrating to walkers who want to be up and off early and who assume that, each morning, we can buy some fresh bread, cheese, sausage to take with us on the trail.  We made it work, but it wasn’t always easy.  Even in a tourist mecca like Sarlat, an important market center and food town, things open late and close early.  At least in Sarlat, the boulangeries are active early in the morning, and we found one enterprising woman who was smart enough to set up tables on the sidewalk outside her establishment and to provide le petit café as well.  But in Sarlat, also, we discovered, uncomfortably, that the two-star hotels, even if they have rooms unsold, close up at 8 p.m.  After that, you have to turn to the upscale hotels, perhaps a Best Western at 100€ per night, and even they are shut by 10. 

The old joke about the midday closing, in France, was that the inhabitants of the town were all inside making babies.  This seems unlikely today.  The shut-up, vestigial towns show few signs of renewed life, and one remembers that France suffers from a serious decline in birth rate, especially in the provinces, which are indeed “depopulated” (a curious concept).  Where do the children, if there are any, go to school?  It was June, but we saw no village schools, and there are no local buses, connecting village to village, in southwest rural France.  Where is a vet to come tend to your sick cow?  If there is a chambres d’hôte, where does Madame get her supplies?   How much of this removal, in the towns, reflects an actual demographic status, how much an attitude or way of life?  Are the Italian provinces like this?  Villages in rural England are not, in my experience.  I suppose you’d figure it all out if you had time to do more than just pass through.  I’ll have to, if I am to realize my fantasy of living part of the year in one of these secretive houses in a medieval town, blind to the street, with a swimming pool out behind the orchard.  Here I will pass tranquil days – although of course knowing the four or five interesting people in town and having drinks every other late afternoon. 

Alors!  no matter how mysterious the villages and small towns may be, their names can be delightful: St Cirq LaPopie, St Antonin Noble Val, Leguillac de Cercles, St Avit le Sénieur (sic), Papoule.  

Churches

In a far province like Dordogne or the Lot, away from the famous sites illustrated in the histories of art, you find yourself revising your mental textbook on architectural style.  Things don’t quite fit the schema you carry in mind.  In church-building, the Romanesque lasted longer than it did in the North, and the transition to the Gothic, in this region, is ambiguous.  This church, the guidebook may tell us, is early 14th, yet in its rather low nave the vaulting is still more round than pointed, and takes off directly from rounded drum piers, with only very simple ‘squashed’ capitals (the bean-bag shape) as the first move in its gravitational gambit.  And there are no side aisles.  So it must be Romanesque -- except that the lack of side aisles was a feature only of early Romanesque.  (Side aisles were not needed with single barrel vaulting, but this church shows intersecting vaults.)  On the other hand, the choir and apse are unmistakably Gothic; that portion must have come later.  The main door is deeply recessed, with multiple invaginations of elaborate carving in late ecclesiastical style, and with no tympanum -- also characteristic of Gothic; but over the main portal is a long arcade, which is usually earlier.  Did they feel, after the eastern end was finally finished, that they had to go back now and create a Gothic portal under their Romanesque façade?

Abbey church of Cadouin (between Sarlat and Bergerac): Facade

Of course the historical abstracted architectural sequence in France is different from that in Italy.  Italy scarcely had a Gothic period, moving rather abruptly from late Romanesque to the expressive Classical revival decorative style and the broad confrontational facades, with pilasters and attached capitals, together with complicated fenestration, that we think of as “Renaissance.”   [Venetian Gothic, a blend of northern and Byzantine styles, is of course a misnomer, as indeed is Gothic.  And Milan is in a sort of weird Lombard Gothic]  There is hardly any Renaissance transition in southwest France, at least in architectural aspect.  However, the entire interior of the nave of the enormous cathedral church in Albi is dense with a deep-blue painted foliate pattern, and there is in addition a magnificent fresco of the saved and the damned that would do Masolino proud.  Up to the crossing, the style is, one has to admit, Florentine.  It turns out the bishop imported Italian fresco painters to finish the interior.  The eastern end of the interior, beyond the transept, is visually another world, since it is occupied by one of the longest and most flamboyant Gothic choirs you will ever see.  The outer walls of this edifice (interior to the cathedral itself, of course) are carved with hundreds of Biblical images in a soft sort of soapstone.  The inner walls are lined with gorgeously carved wooden stalls, like an English cathedral.  The entire high Gothic choir is separated from the rest of the cathedral by a huge screen, complexly carved and pierced into flowers and plant shapes, fashioned from a soft pale limestone.  Amazing and in its way beautiful, although the material itself looks to me like rotten white cheese.

Cathedral of Ste-Cécile, Albi:  Choir screen and "heavenly blue" ceiling of the cathedral

The quite astounding exterior of the cathedral at Albi is astoundingly tall.  It is shaped like an upside-down bathtub, built entirely of a rosy-red brick, and is almost entirely devoid of windows, though with slits and discontinuous parapets instead.  It looks like a fortress, or possibly a prison.  Romanesque for sure.  But in its extreme verticality and severity, it is Norman Romanesque.  In general, many churches and castles in this region tend toward the Norman building style, composed of uninterrupted brick with military elements.  [The late, decorative aspect of this style, softened and foliate, is I think known as Angevin.  You see this particular balance -- aggressive truculent construction with softened and foliated decorative touches -- in the more northerly provinces of once-English France, around Anjou, Poitou, and in Normandy, but seldom in the Southwest as far as I can tell -- the choir screen at Albi being an exception.]

Cathedral of Ste-Cécile, Albi: Battlement form of the exterior

There is another spectacular cathedral nearby, St Sernin in Toulouse, and this one is in the books: Janssen has it, as the largest Romanesque ecclesiastical structure in Europe.  Its most beautiful feature is at the eastern end, where beyond the ambulatory lie a dozen or so honeycombed half-round apsidal chapels.  Where, in the Romanesque period, did this inspiration come from?  The Toulouse cathedral is otherwise as pure, sober, and eloquent as a Romanesque religious structure can be.

A word about cloisters.  There is something ineffably lovely about a cloister, no matter how faded or decayed.  French cloisters have commonly suffered, because after the Revolution the Jacobins swept through and knocked off the faces of all the saints and kings on the carved capitals along the porticos.  Even today, to see that brings a pang; no matter the depth of one’s secular commitment, such actions are inhumane, they testify to the compulsion of those in power to obliterate what came before.   A sense of shock and loss obtains even at the great cloister at Moissac, which is one of the most beautiful anywhere.  Fortunately, the carvers loved to represent animals from the Bible and from myth, so that the capitals are still remarkable.  For my taste, however, English or Portuguese cloisters are the sweetest, because generally they are laid out with paths along the cardinal directions and sometimes on the diagonal, and in the center there will be a decorated well-head or a sinuously carved column.  French, and some of Italian, cloisters are bare on the interior ground, perhaps with worn grass, perhaps with raked gravel.  It makes it harder to imagine monks pacing with interlaced hands and downturned eyes, murmuring prayers as they perambulate.  

And while I am being critical … One does wonder, in the most Catholic countries, about what belief in religion does to the human sense of visual beauty and proportion.  In this part of the world there are many religious interiors so eloquently plain and pure in their spatial character as to bring tears to the eyes -- until you notice (as for example at the great abbey church at St Avit) the enormous post-Baroque oil paintings, 60 by 100 inches or more, desecrating (in one’s secular view) the plain, glowing, surfaces.  Then tears born from beauty turn to tears of rage.  What possesses people to order up these oleaginous spectacles, to show off these disgusting representations?  What are they thinking of when they hang a framed photo of the priest, looking like the village simpleton?  A similar reaction, a sense of outrage, comes while one is strolling through the most serene and touching graveyards, and finds, alas, messages to the dear departed inscribed on the tombstones, often in an illiterate’s script and featuring the literary merits of a high school yearbook.

Cities, en bref. 

 I shall touch only on two.Toulouse, in the old Languedoc: tawny, built of a warm brick that turns rosy at dusk, Iberian in feeling.  I had not known much about Toulouse, and assumed it was smaller than Bordeaux.  Actually, it is bigger, but its growth must have been mostly post-War.  The development of Toulouse was stopped dead in its tracks by the religious wars.   But it is today the prosperous center of the French aerospace industry, and has a large population of technologically oriented adults, together with a large population of students in its technical universities, which draw young Europeans from countries outside of France.  So it is sophisticated, hip, unstuffy, yet in its street life slow-paced, unselfconscious, ‘cool.’

It is an interesting city in that the center is a well-maintained, still active medieval town. stretching along and spreading up from the Garonne.  Nothing has changed over the centuries: timbered houses, crooked streets, small Romanesque churches, the fabulous St Sernin cathedral, a Gothic Dominican church, and outdoor restaurants serving cassoulet and other regional specialties, together with the big rough Cahors reds.  [Can you imagine, by the way, that it is possible to get tired of not only cassoulet (which is so rich it’s obviously dangerous), but of foie gras and duck, roasted, braised, confit-style?   We can assure you it’s true.  The modern city lies apart.  To be sure, there is the huge central Place du Capitôle, formed in the mid-1800s, along one edge of which sits a handsome neoclassical palace, broad but not overwhelming, that is now the mayoral or provincial seat.  Ringing the place are dozens of outdoor brasseries and cafes, where people sit not to look at the city but just to hang out.  The place is about the only visible sign, in central Toulouse, of official France.  You get the sense that both Paris and Toulouse must have liked it that way.  There is a fine private museum in a Renaissance mansion, whose collection ranges from an unusual, marvelous small domestic Carpaccio to a sensitive chalk drawing, the head of a boy, by Picasso, aged 20.  There is also a series of portraits, heads, by a 1500s Dutch painter, one Benson, hitherto unknown to me, and 35 Bonnards. The central market is a lot of fun.  Over-all, the city reminds me visually of Strasbourg with a meridional tone.  Not a city with world-class ‘culture,’ but an attractive one where I would happily stay longer.

I admire Bordeaux, but it makes me uneasy.  A few years ago, all of central and riverine Bordeaux became a UNESCO World Heritage site, which required it to tune up, trim up, improve transport and signage, and get rid of a lot of clutter and urban decay.  The riverside was more closely integrated into the heart of the city.  Even so, being there feels to me something like visiting a proud bourgeois family in its great North Shore mansion: the place is handsome, the garden elaborate, obviously there was lots of money, you dress for dinner -- but the business it was based on no longer exists, and the children have split for London and Los Angeles. 

To me, as a tourist arriving tabula rasa, Bordeaux feels overbuilt, a bit pompous.  It’s easy to understand why this should be so.  The city was, already in the 1500’s and 1600’s the most important, most dynamic, mercantile city in France.  It was the European center of commerce and trade with the New World -- especially the lower portion of the US, the French Caribbean, and the Gulf Coast.  (London and some northern French cities were oriented toward Canada and New England, but were actually lesser in terms of the volume of maritime trade.)   It was Bordeaux was that gathered, imported, trans-shipped, and traded timber and foodstuffs from interior France,  sugar and rum from the Indies, slaves from north and French Africa, wine exported to Britain.  One can see why it was the first foreign city, other than national capitals, in which the United States established a consulate.  It became enormously wealthy and important, and in its way formed a threat to Paris, with its own commercial power, its traditional English allegiances, and its local historical ties to a Girondin politics and a Huguenot ethic. 

The trouble is, you don’t directly encounter this era in present-day Bordeaux.  The first spate of wealth meant the obliteration of most of the older city.  There are several nice early Gothic churches, a large but not very visually coherent cathedral, a couple of fine late-Renaissance ceremonial city gates.  If the city today maintained to some degree the sense of the life of the early-modern period, it would be fascinating.  But Bordeaux was essentially rebuilt to an official template in the 18th and 19th centuries.  In the 18th, while the city was still enormously rich, many thousands of hôtels particuliers were constructed along the river, lining the main thoroughfares, and bordering the squares and the parks.  They are all handsome -- three or four stories, mansarded roofs, symmetrical neoclassical facades with prominent corner masonry, Palladian windows, carved cornices and lintels, pilasters with plaster decoration and formal doorways, each featuring fanciful stucco faces in the keystones.  All are in creamy limestone.  The street lines are uniform, the heights of the mansions are unbroken as they recede down the avenues, the small places at intersections are all neatly fitted out -- and it is monotonous.  The urban variety that once occupied the center was wiped out, the twisty streets were straightened, all in the interest of formal upper-bourgeois and petit-noble rectitude.  Not bad at all to look at, especially from the river walks, but somewhat like Park Avenue or West End avenue, all of a time, all of a piece.  To put it in a more suitable French context: there is a splendid hemicircular Place de la Bourse midway along the river, looking for all the world like the Place Vendôme.  That was the point, but you get the impression, and the history books tell you you’re correct, that most of Bordeaux was planned and executed to look like Paris -- a Paris that was to look entirely like the Place Vendôme.  Bordeaux has a Neoclassic opera house, the Grand-Théâtre, of which it is very proud, as fine as the Paris Opéra, they say.  Yes, both theaters have majestic lobbies and stairs, grand Second Empire auditoriums -- and dozens of seats from which you cannot see the stage. The Beaux-Arts museum is “one of the ten best regional museums in France,” according to its own sign, which tells you a lot.  (It is ho-hum, except for a few superlative works, by van Dyke, Hals, Redon, Perugino, Delacroix, and a very few others.) 

Bordeaux fell into a slump in the early 19th century, when its transatlantic trade collapsed.  Dating from that period, a large Jardin Public looks very fine.  But more acclaim is given to a huge esplanade, the Quinconces, which leads down to the river from the central zone of elegant stores and fine restaurants.  The guidebook says it’s the largest urban park in Europe, and that may be.  But it must also be the most boring.  One third is a handsome grove, perfectly spaced, of plane trees surrounded by gravel, without a bench or a chair to break the effect.  I suppose you could lean against a tree.  The opposite third is a chock-a-block parking lot, the cars fitted neatly between the sycamores.  The central third is an enormous stretch of raked gravel, leading from a rather ridiculous monumental (that is, commemorative) c. 1900 fountain at the landward end to the highway along the river.  At the river margin stand two adorable little lantern towers, like a salt and pepper set, which must have held lanterns to signal sailing  ships.  The towers are adorable; everything else is a nullity, a big blank space to traverse when you have to get somewhere. 

Toward the end of the 19th c., Tourny went to work to ‘rationalize’  the decaying commercial center of the city by razing the clutter, by opening up avenues and creating vistas.  He overdid the job.  This is rather the way that Bordeaux, in general, feels, at least to me.  It is not a stage-set; it is not a city that has shrunk or been hollowed out.  The thousands of mansions are still used, with stores on the ground floor, apartments above.  The city is active at night, the women chic, the men prosperous, the restaurants excellent.  It is prosperous, though no longer dominant in commercial terms except for the business of wine.  It is visually harmonious.  But the city is too grand for its present way of life.  If it were human, I would call it an empty suit.

The give-away, to my mind, is the attempt to vie with Paris.  All that has a bad effect on me.  I am one of those rare persons who like every region and corner of France -- except Paris.  Left- bank Paris is fine.  But right-bank Paris was, in my view, done to death by that enemy of the people, Haussmann, and his ilk. [Haussmann had been prefect of Bordeaux, and was inspired by Tourny’s grand revision of that city.]  I dislike its Louis Quinze uniformity, its ponderous mansarded masonry palaces along straightened avenues, its predictable rond-points and vacuous vistas.  Most of it for me is a heavy, pompous bore.  Insofar as Bordeaux wanted to be, and became, like Paris, it leaves me out of sympathy.  Both cities speak to me of the bred-in-the-bone part of the French identity that longed always for la gloire.  We all know where that led.