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Carcassonne: La Bastide and La Cité Médiévale

I fell behind a day somewhere in there, and since I expect to have lots more to do once I reach Avignon tomorrow I figured I’d write a short bulletin covering today in order to be all caught up when I wake up tomorrow.

Friday was my last full day in Avignon. In the morning we had a meandering conversation after breakfast that somehow branched off from yesterday’s visit to the caves with the bear logo. I ended up telling the same story that I told at Franco’s wedding about the poorly-executed 1993 hiking trip to Mount Marcy in which we arrived way after dark and botched the operation of hanging our food packs from a tree to keep it away from bears. A bear had a successful game of pinata during the night and claimed some peanut butter and a bag of hard candy, but thankfully left us the rest of our food. On the way down a park ranger stopped us to confirm we were the folks who’d had a problem with a bear, and then gave us a lecture on the best tool you have to protect your food against bears. That was the set-up for the famous ranger line “It starts with R …” It turns out the ranger was thinking of “rope”, but we had fun coming up with all kinds of other options on the rest of the hike out (“rifle”, “repellant”, “ranger”, etc.)

I had fairly little trouble recounting this story in French, except for the fact that “rope” in French is cord, which starts with C and not R. How do you translate that part of the story elegantly ? The words fusil, bombe and forestier don’t all start with the same letter. Looking at it now I see two out of the three start with F, and so I could use ficeler (to tie up) to tell the rope part of the story and swap out fumée (smoke) for bombe (repellant). But on the fly all I could do was translate everything one-for-one and acknowledge that the alliteration plays better in English.

Other than that, we spent some time on pronunciation of vowel sounds, which is one of my weakest points. No matter how many times one tells me, I forget that the indefinite article un (“a” or the number “one”) is pronounced like the in- of incroyable and not like the -eu of peu probable. I also mangle the distinction between the -en-, -an-, and -on- sounds: menton and montant sound the same to me, both in my ear and in my mouth, and I can never remember how to say meringue or bilingue. Éliane gave me clear demonstrations of vowels made with the mouth in a smile, vowels made with an open, round mouth, and vowels made with an vertically-elongated mouth with the chin dropped.

We cut the morning lesson short to take a day trip to Carcassonne. I was already there Monday night, but it turned out I had gotten entirely the wrong impression of the city. First of all, there’s two halves of the city, on opposite sides of the Aude river. The ancient walled city and fortified castle of Carcassonne, the one featured in the eponymous board game, lies on the southeast bank of the river. The more modern city, called La Bastide, is on the northwest bank (they joined to become one municipality less than 200 years ago). And not only did I visit the modern rather than the ancient city earlier in the week, I somehow missed the more notable parts of La Bastide.

I corrected that on this visit, guided by Éliane and accompanied by Benjamin. We strolled through more interesting parts of La Bastide and they explained to me the history of the two settlements, the cathedral, and the deployment of the massive development grant that the new city received in 2015 to revitalize tourism in the more modern city. Then we drove over the river and up the hill to the medieval Cité of Carcassonne, walked around it a bit and ate lunch in a low-key restaurant. It was a more friendly, social conversation rather than the explicitly pedagogical sessions I’ve had all week with Éliane over breakfast. We joked a lot about their difficulties with certain English pronunciations and found in passing certain fairly common English words that they did not know. Benjamin and I compared return-to-office experiences post-Covid and talked a bit about the value of learning how to craft effective prompts for the ChatGPTs of the world.

After lunch I said goodbye to Éliane and Benjamin for the day and continued to explore the old city on my own. Well, first I went online and found a hotel that advertised having free wifi and rentable coworking space. You see, there was a meeting of the Board of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, and since it was the first meeting since I was elected to the Board I didn’t want to miss it. The very nice people at the Hôtel de la Cité told me that if all I wanted was to use the WiFi and have a quiet place to sit for my meeting, there was no charge. They escorted me to a good-sized professional meeting room, and I took my Zoom call on my phone for an hour. I’ll have to remember to write a good review for the hotel on the internets.

My meeting successfully concluded (though low on phone battery) I continued my tour of medieval Carcassonnne. It’s the largest walled medieval city in Europe and the towers and ramparts are quite remarkable. Of course, I learned that much of it was in ruins by 1800 as first the shifting of the Spanish border to the south (away from Carcassonne) around 1600 and then the French Revolution from 1789 onwards had diminished the city’s standing, both in political and physical terms. A lot of the old city had been taken apart and carried over the river to serve as construction material for the new city. Napoleon set in motion a multi-decade restoration project directed largely by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who chose a particular period in the city’s thousand-plus year history and decided that was the reference point that should be put back in place.

So much of what I walked today was not original, making the old city as much a stage set as a real historic site. But it doesn’t feel at all tacky, and the style is quite consistent throughout which helps it avoid any Disney sense. I took a self-guided audio tour of the Château and the Ramparts, then wandered the streets of the enclosed city on my own for a while before getting dinner in a pleasant outdoor café. I hadn’t really planned on staying all day when we’d left in the morning, so I didn’t have a book or puzzles with me, and I regrettably passed up a chance to buy one of the handful of Carcassonne inspired real French novels from the Château gift shop. There wasn’t a real bookstore anywhere in the medieval city, and my phone was running low on batteries, so over dinner I had to content myself with reading a free guide to the region I picked up at the Tourism Office. I drank a glass of kir cassis and a beer, and ate a plate of spiced pork brochettes and some french fries. 

I took a taxi home after dinner and got back around 8:45pm. I’ve been writing ever since, but it’s definitely time for bed now. I can pack in the morning.

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Carcassonne: Lexical nuances and les Grottes Limousis

Thursday morning was spent in a full three hour conversation session at the breakfast table. There’s a French expression ne pas y aller par quatre chemins, which translates literally as “not going there by four roads”, but which corresponds to the English expression “not beat around the bush”. As in English, it’s almost always used in the negative: je n’y vais pas par quatre chemins =  “I’m not going to beat around the bush”. Nobody ever declares “I’m going to bea around the bush”. But I feel like I need an expression close to the affirmative y aller par quatre chemins to describe my typical pattern in these sessions (and in the ones I have with my French professor at home). Something like “wide-ranging” in English, or perhaps “spiraling wildly out of control”.

For example, we started discussing how the village of Pezens had fared during Covid, and Éliane recounted how many shops had closed permanently, and the one business that opened just before Covid succeeded only by turning itself into a store that made and sold masks. I in turn related how Newton businesses had fared, and described the odd phenomenon of a coffee shop / flower store that opened right on my corner, some six or nine months after Covid started. This strayed into an enumeration of the several businesses that had operated in that building in the 20 years we’ve lived in the neighborhood, and ended up contrasting the otherwise residential area with the little commercial center half-a-mile further down the road. In that cluster of shops there is a Dunkin’ Donuts.

This lead to a discussion of the best French equivalent of “to dunk” (tremper), and after a brief detour to describe the “Time to make the donuts / I made the donuts” ad campaign of the 1980’s and to work out the best French translation of the current ad campaign “America runs on Dunkin”, an exploration of the multiple other senses of the word tremper. I already knew that in the passive (être trempé) it also means “to be soaking wet”, but before I could get to confirming if there was more to the word, I had to make sub-detour to explore the best way to say “standing out in the rain”. After all, how else does one end up soaking wet ? The problem is, as far as I can tell there’s no great equivalent verb for “to stand”. One can stand up (se lever), one can order a group to stand (debout les garcons), one can be standing (être debout), one can remain standing (rester debout), but there’s no verb with debout as its root. The best translation of “he stood out in the rain for an hour” is «il s’est tenu debout pendant une heure» where the verb tenir is more literally “to hold”. So this is really “he held himself erect for an hour”. After which, if it’s been raining, il est trempé.

Great, back to tremper. Definitely it means “to dunk”, and in the passive “to be drenched”, but central to the concept is liquid. If you’re making chocolate half-covered strawberries, you definitely use tremper to describe dipping the strawberry in the melted chocolate. But if you are making powdered donuts, you can’t use tremper to describe placing the plain donut in the powdered sugar. That’s more simply mettre (“to put”) or poser (“to place”). How about saupoudrer ? No, that’s only if you sprinkle the sugar over the donut. After the fact, is the donut trempé de sucre ? Absolutely not ! Again trempé is only for liquids. The donut is enrobé de sucre. Aha, but what about a breaded fish or veal cutlet ? Simple, there’s a special verb for that: paner (from pain = “bread”). And before you put the fish in the breadcrumbs, you coat it with flour (the action is fariner). So the sequence for breading fish (dip in flour, dip in egg mixture, dip in bread crumbs) becomes fariner, tremper, paner. 

Ah, I say, but the verbs fariner and paner feel like they are cheating. They describe the end result, but are vague about the mechanism. Are you simply pressing the fish into the flour / bread-crumbs ? The cooking verb I know in English for this is “to dredge”, where you are physically pulling the fish filet through the powdered grain. Great, now I had to explain “to dredge” in French, which I tried to do by analogy with the other use of that verb in English, “to dredge the harbor” or “to dredge the canal”. But how do you explain what a dredge is ? Well, it’s sort of like plowing a field, right? You’ve got a blade, and you’re trying to cut a channel into the earth. So, what’s the word for “plow” in French ? Oh, oh ! I know this one. Three letters, starts with “SO_” … it’s, it’s… Yeah, that’s right, I’ve been doing French crossword puzzles for a couple years now, and this is a frequent crossword puzzle word. A little more wracking of my brain and I remember: soc ! Woot! … Except Éliane has never heard of the word soc.

So it’s back to the basic explanation of the thing I’m talking about, the tool with the blade that the farmer guides, pulled by a couple of oxen (damn, what’s the word for ox? It’s not vache and it’s not taureau, … oh right, boeuf [actually, it’s probably buffle]), to cut a trench in the ground. Well, it turns out the word for “a plow” is “la charrue”; the word soc is just a particular piece of the plow assembly, a sort of crossbar that turns the earth while cutting. (As an aside, in the afternoon I read the French Wikipedia page about the plow and its really fascinating technology). OK, we got “plow”. Back to dredging the harbor, you know, pulling a plow-like thing behind a boat to deepen an underwater channel. Éliane informs me that the French word for this is draguer, like a dragnet.

Great, I ask, can you use that verb to translate “dredge the fish in the flour” ? «J’ai dragué le poisson en farine» ? At this, Éliane exploded in laughter, and indeed I knew why. You see, the French verb draguer, which indeed literally means “to drag” in the sense of pulling a scoop through the channel or pulling a net through the water to catch fish, is a commonly used verb in the slang expression draguer les nanas or draguer les filles = “to cruise for chicks” or “to chase skirts”. So one would reveal rather particular sexual fetishes if one said «Hier soir, j’ai dragué les poissons dans ma cuisine». Bringing the morning’s lesson to a close, Éliane observed that the verb one uses to describe mollifying an angry lover, attendrir un amant, is also the right verb one uses when softening meat before cooking it. So while draguer les poissons is socially unacceptable, nobody will raise an eyebrow if your preference is attendrir le bœuf.

We took an hour break before lunch, which was a simple penne pasta à la bolognaise.

After lunch Éliane took me to Les grottes Limousis, a network of limestone caves in the nearby Black Mountains. It’s a well-managed national tourism site, as the caves contain many interesting geological formations and paleontological artifacts. There were lots of stalagmites, stalactites, and columns, as well as pools of water and thin streams of water falling down from the ceiling or trickling along the walls. It was all quite extensive and varied, but I wasn’t all that impressed by it first. I saw many similar installations in the Tarn valley region of south / central France back in 1992, as well as some in Israel years later, and so by now I am a bit jaded (no pun intended). 

However the deepest part of the cave featured something new and spectacular, a formation known as le lustre d’aragonite (“the aragonite chandelier”). It’s a three-dimensional fractal structure of branching mineral spines, some 10 meters high and 4 meters wide. The largest known structure of its kind in the world, it formed over millions of years through a process similar to stalactite formation, with drops of water from the ceiling running down the structure and leaving behind small mineral deposits that accrete over time. However in this case, the flow was very, very slow, so instead of the simple broad spike growing downward, the microdroplets were somehow borne in all directions and the minerals grew out in all directions, ramifying and sub-ramifying over the years. The curators present this treasure in quite dramatic fashion, guiding groups of visitors into a dimly lit gallery and launching a coordinated music and light show that spot illuminates different parts of the large space in time with the classical organ music. As the show culminates, the lights turn to the lustre d’argonite and the group gets to see it shine out from the darkness without warning. It was quite imaginative and very well executed. Definitely vaut le voyage as they say. 

One final coda to the story of the visit to the caves. Afterwards there was a small wine tasting in the gift shop followed by the opportunity to purchase any of the four wines. All four offerings, one red and three apéritifs, were branded with the Grotte Limousis logo and the name La Caverne de L’Ours, and the wine is actually aged in bottles stored in the constantly 14°C caves. The logo is a bear claw, because there are in the caves several preserved markings where ancient bears long ago scratched deep markings in the cave walls. The three apéritifs have irreverent names playing off this theme: Pipi d’ours (bear piss), Coucougnettes (cutesy name for testicles) and Galipettes (on the playground, “somersaults”; but in the adult bedroom, sexual gymnastics).

I tasted the red wine and one of the aperitifs. I won’t say they were terrible, but I’ll let you decide if that is because they were OK or because I am a polite visitor in a foreign country.

I was pretty tired by the time we got home. I walked into the village around 6pm to get cheese, fruit, sausages and pastries for a picnic dinner which I ate later in the evening. Then I went to bed early. I have one more full day in Pezens / Carcassonne / Occitanie, then I leave Saturday morning for Avignon. 

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Carcassonne: Two Restaurants and a Bicycle Adventure

2023-07-05

Wednesday was a day with many small episodes plus one small adventure.

After the usual breakfast conversation Éliane and I set to work on correcting / revising my translation of the English text from my aspirational website www.frenchtheaterproject.com. We took as a starting point the first draft of the translation (un premier jet) that I’d made Tuesday with the aid of Google Docs’ automatic grammar and spelling corrections. Even so, it had a lot of basic errors around gender and number, around de vs des, and so forth. Beyond that a number of the sentences had to be reworked as my translations were sometimes plodding and cumbersome, and sometimes too highfalutin or full of imagery. Upon reflection, that’s probably the case as well for the original text I wrote in English eight months ago. There’s not a lot of text on the site, so we got through it fairly rapidly. I’ve yet to update the site, but I hope to do so before long.

After the translation exercise, Benjamin joined us for a short game of Scrabble. The French version of the game has a different distribution of letter frequency in the tiles and a different assignment of points to each letter, but the rules are otherwise the same. I was pleased to find I could play fairly effortlessly, at least in terms of finding legal moves that used five or six of my tiles each turn. We weren’t keeping score, and I wasn’t trying to optimize points, so I’m not making any judgment on how skilled a French Scrabble player I might be. But I definitely have the ability to find plenty of valid words that I could place from each rack. Being in the habit of doing French crosswords definitely helped, as those feature lots of words of 2-8 letters, and often have to use words that fit well in constrained grids. I might see if I can find an online French Scrabble platform where I can play against robots or even other players. I bet I could learn a lot of words that way.

We cut our game short to drive to Lastours, a small town near la Montagne Noire, where we had lunch at a 1-star Michelin restaurant (un restaurant gastronomique) named Le Puits Du Trésor. Éliane and Benjamin had an appointment in town at 3pm, so we opted for the simple menu découverte (starter, main course, dessert) rather than any of the more elaborate tasting menus. Even so, the chef sent us eight or ten other small plates throughout lunch in addition to the nominal three courses of the menu. I can’t even being to recall them all, but the ingredients were quite varied: artichoke, celery leaves, sweet potato, date-and-banana paste, pistachio, small anchovy-and-chocolate croutons, mini carrot cakes, truffled butter, dried pork liver, marshmallow, apricots, and more. Plus a bunch of edible flowers and little mini-vegetable like things I hadn’t seen before and can’t name in French or English. The three featured courses were good, but blended in with the parade.

The only downside to the meal was that we were under a time limit, and so everything felt rushed even though we arrived around 12:15. The restaurant probably thought we were ungrateful and even rude as we wolfed down some of the later offerings and didn’t linger over wine or have coffee at the end. Ah, well. We hurried out and Éliane and Benjamin dropped me off at the house on the way to their next engagement.

I spent the afternoon doing laundry and making my first plans for Avignon shows. Mostly I consulted Télérama’s pre-review of the festival and bought a ticket for anything they awarded three stars (or rather, three Ts). I didn’t look ahead much, but just went down the list and bought tickets sequentially, choosing dates more or less at random. But I couldn’t help notice a pattern – the majority of the highly rated shows were playing at just 2 theaters (out of over 100): La Scala Provence and 11-Avignon. I saw a number of shows at the first of these last year and there were at least a couple that stood out as excellent. I don’t recall seeing anything at 11-Avignon. But I wonder if there isn’t some kind of bias, perhaps as simple as which theaters host shows that can be seen in advance. I also purchased a ticket for a five-hour show that is part of the IN Festival at the recommendation of a theater professor I met at Avignon last year. In all, I’ve got tickets for eight shows so far and plenty of free slots in my calendar. So I’ll ask around for word-of-mouth recommendations.

Around 7:40pm I borrowed a bicycle from my hosts and returned to L’Orgeril winery at Pennautier where Éliane had taken me Tuesday. They operate a restaurant named La Table Cave du Château which Éliane recommended. The ride there, about 4 or 5 kilometers, was a little nerve wracking. The Google directions didn’t line up with reality — it had me cycling along “roads” that were little more than rutted tracks that ran through fields of nearby farms, and then had me cutting across open space where even Google didn’t claim there was a road. I ended up back tracking a little to take longer though more legitimate roads to the restaurant. I arrived some 15 minutes late but the restaurant folks were completely unphased.

Dinner was simple but tasty: “mediterranean” gazpacho with feta cheese, black Angus beef grilled with potatoes and zucchini, and a chocolate-crusted tart of apricots with meringue. It was served with an inferior glass of red wine from the winery. I’ve rarely had bad wine in France, but I’m beginning to think that the area around Carcassonne is not great for wine (I’ve tried a few others and they are consistently ordinary). For the second time in one day I felt rushed at the end of a meal, this time because night was falling and I had to ride home. Sunset was around 9:40p and dusk lasted until around 10:00 pm, but I didn’t have any lights on my bike. I took a different route, again encountered fields where Google maps told me there would be roads, doubled back, and ended up riding on the 60 kph departmental road for some 800 meters. I was covered with sweat and a bit amped up on adrenaline when I got home shortly after 10pm, so I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. I’m writing this on Thursday, as I didn’t feel up to writing last night.

Two restaurant meals in one day is too many. Tonight I’m going to have a simple picnic for dinner.

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Carcassonne Bulletin: a job offer and Sexygénaires

Happy Independence Day to one and all! No celebrations here, but I will partake in the French festivities 10 days from now.

I woke up to a wonderful email offering me a volunteer post at the Festival Avignon ! I’ll be helping out as a box-office assistant for one of the shows of the Festival OFF (think “fringe festival”). It’s the usual kind of box-office thing: selling tickets at the door, distributing Will Call tickets to folks who purchased in advance, answering basic information questions. I’ll be working for 60 or 90 minutes before each show, 6 days a week. It’s a very small job, and it’s unofficial, but I’m delighted to have the experience. I’ve already started practicing saying «Je vous souhaite un bon spectacle, Madame.»

The job came about through a combination of being in the right place at the right time and being relentlessly outgoing. Last year in Avignon I hatched the crazy idea of trying to bring a French play to perform in Boston. At the time I spoke with a number of companies, an agent, one or two playwrights. After I got home I did a bunch more legwork to develop the idea, created an LLC for the venture, threw together a basic website (www.frenchtheaterproject.com), spoke to a bunch of relevant French and American cultural players, and tried to make something happen. So the only concrete thing that has come out of it is the theater club at the French Library, but I’ve decided these things take time to build. 

One of the companies that pursued this idea with the farthest is named La Ruche Musicale,  producers of the show Contretemps. I saw the show twice, had breakfast with a production assistant and the company’s president, swapped several emails, and even developed a proposal with them. In the end, things didn’t come together (yet?) for a Boston engagement, but we stayed in contact. A couple days ago I sent an email reminding them of my plans to be in Avignon again this month and proposing we get together (they are reprising Contretemps this summer at Avignon). As an aside, I offered that if by any chance they could use an extra hand to help out with the show, I’d be happy to volunteer in any capacity they liked. And sure enough, today came the response that indeed they find themselves unexpectedly short-handed, and if I was willing to work the box office on the schedule outlined above, they’d be grateful for the extra staff. Absolutely made my day.

So I expect to have interesting insights this year from the other side of the desk, and perhaps will get to do some socializing with one or more members of their company. We will see. Last time I worked a retail counter was 1990 at Holy Cross College bookstore: it was a temp job I was able to do because they started a week or two before Harvard did, so I was available for their start-of-year rush.

Starting from that high-point, the rest of the day here was OK. After usual breakfast and conversation qua instruction, we headed out to the cinéma in Carcassonne to see a morning screening of a recently released film. Éliane selected something likely to have a lot of slang or familiar language, which is something I identified to her as an area I struggle with. We saw Sexygénaires, starring Thierry Lhermitte and Patrick Timsit, in a sleek but totally empty theater (11am on a Tuesday not being peak movie hours). The film was a mix of a broad comedy and a reflection on life in one’s sixties. Michel (Thierry Lhermitte), age 65, is a struggling hotel owner, grandfather, and widower in Bandol, 50 km southeast of Marseille. With the hotel on the brink of insolvency, he goes to Paris to ask his friend Denis (Patrick Timsit), also in his 60s, to buy out his share of their jointly owned Paris restaurant.

It turns out that Denis has been keeping Michel in the dark, but the restaurant didn’t survive Covid. This could happen under any management, one imagines, but it is completely believable that it happened to Denis, who is an unsympathetic and coarse clown, a low-class parasite of the first order. Harder to believe is that Denis now makes ends meet by working as … a model in television and print advertising ? Somehow the industry keeps hiring him even though he is an obnoxious schlump of a character. Michel accompanies Denis to one of his photo-shoots where an agent spots Michel and discovers his fine figure and handsome visage. Apparently 60 is the new sexy for advertising luxury goods like watches or tuxedos.

Michel stays in Paris for a few weeks while his windfall modeling career flourishes, Denis’s tanks, and the hotel limps along under the interim management of Jean-Claude, another sixty-year-old of their childhood friends. Michel has a couple of romantic interests – a thirty-something in Paris and a sixty-something long-time friend, recently divorced, in Bandol. Finally something happens to make Michel realize what’s important in life. He quits modeling, returns to Bandol, sells the hotel, pays off his debts, invests in a small ice-cream store, and pursues a relationship with the age-peer divorcée. Ah, to be sixty and sexy.

A pretty formulaic, mediocre film, one that can’t be rescued simply by the fact of being French. I’m not sure it was all that effective as a language-learning tool, either. I understood enough of the dialogue to follow the story with minimal difficulty, but at the same time I was missing easily 20% of the lines. There were no captions (in any language) and so if I heard a word or expression I didn’t understand, I had nothing to help me remember it later so I could ask Éliane. We couldn’t pause the film, of course, and even in a theater all to ourselves I didn’t find it attractive to pose questions for each mumbled line or slang expression that I missed. But a good reminder of how far I have to go in oral comprehension, and how big a difference there is between French audio books, read with professional diction, and French film or television, delivered in a more realistic manner.

We came back to the house and I read stories to Éliane’s daughter while her parents prepared lunch. The 18-month-old walks confidently, but doesn’t yet speak a word. So interacting with her is more of a one-way conversation than I was anticipating. Still, I think she’s taken a liking to me and I’m hearing in passing words that are particular to young childhood. I read her a version of Le Chat botté (originally written by Charles Perrault) and also a modern adaptation of La Poule aux œufs d’or (originally by LaFontaine). She smiled and giggled throughout as she sat next to me in her stroller, but was pretty much in her own world and not paying attention to the story. But I enjoyed myself.

After lunch I took a break to write and read, and then at 5pm we went to a nearby winery for a private wine tasting. I’ve done several wine tastings in France and in the US, and this one was fairly ordinary, both in terms of wine and in terms of narration / conversation. The winery is named Château de Pennautier and is part of a large group named Lorgeril. They’ve been operating since 1620 and currently produce over 3 million bottles of wine each year. I’m not particularly knowledgeable or discerning in wine, but it turns out I can distinguish between wines made at this scale and wines from small producers. Or maybe they simply served me unremarkable wines.

I went into the village after the wine tasting and picked up a few things at the grocery and the bakery (open today at 6:45p in the afternoon). Dinner was on my own, leftover pizza, some new fruit and some new cheese. I think I’ll post this, go have my chocolate croissant for dessert, and call it a night.

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Carcassonne Bulletin: Day 2

A quieter day today, anchored at the house in Pezens. I had breakfast at 9am with Éliane on the porch, which transitioned seamlessly into a long conversational lesson. Around 11am we drove to the village of Castelnaudary to visit the market there for a vocabulary lesson. I spent most of the time naming things I saw and pointing out things I didn’t know the French words for. This probably puts too great an emphasis on nouns at the expense of verbs and adjectives, but what can you do? 

There turns out to be no simple single word for “rack”, but rather a number of different words depending on what role it’s playing. A bike rack on the back of a car is a porte-vélo. The rack of propane cylinders at the gas station is an étalage. The rack that clothes hang from, either for sale or for drying, is an étendoir. The rack of metal-banded wrist watches arrayed against a velour backing is a présentoir. Similarly with wheeled apparatus for moving cargo by hand (un chariot de course vs un diablo vs un lève-charge vs un transpalette). Not sure how effective it was as a learning activity – will I really remember these things without reinforcement? – but it made for a change of scenery.

After lunch with Éliane and her household (husband Benjamin, brother-in-law William, and 18-month old daughter), I rested a bit and then walked into the village to explore for a bit. Pezens is a village of just 1800 people, and there’s not a lot of businesses there: a tabac (open), a superette (open), a pizza shop (take-out only), a bakery (closed Mondays), a wine shop (didn’t check if open) and a hotel/bar (closed permanently). I bought myself a snack at the superette and made a small picnic for myself at the table outside: an apricot, a nectarine, a crottin de chèvre (small, hard goat cheese), and a handful of fagot (long, thin dried sausages). Very tasty. Then I strolled around the rest of the village: a small church (closed), a small library (closed), the foyer municipal (closed), the post-office (closed), a small war memorial (open? It was outside). 

When I returned I remarked to Éliane about how quiet it was. She informed me that in the south of France, a lot of businesses operate on Saturdays but take Sunday and Monday as their weekend. Even so, I was surprised by the paucity of shops compared with Roye, the place where Éliane lived 5 years ago. She pointed out that Roye was a small town with 6,000 people while Pezens is just a village of 1,800. “A village considers itself lucky if it has a bakery,” she said. I still haven’t been to the bakery, but I will try to get there tomorrow.

Éliane drove me into the city of Carcassonne in the evening so I could get some dinner. It was also very quiet, and I was tired. I spent a little time wandering the plaza just over the canal (same Canal du Midi) from the train station, then headed over to the Place Carnot a few blocks away. I had some nondescript vegetarian lasagna and a glass of unremarkable rosé and an anonymous outdoor café on the square, then walked back to the train station and took a taxi back to Éliane’s. Got to sleep at 10:30pm and slept through the night — a more normal schedule and a more tranquil one. 

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Carcassonne bulletin: Day 1

2023-07-02

I woke this morning at a reasonable hour, packed up my suitcase, left my bags with the hotelkeeper and headed out for another look at the town. The rest of the tour at https://www.a-ticket-to-ride.com/visiter-toulouse/ didn’t interest me much (and I’d already passed by most of the remaining stops, besides) so instead I made a plan to visit two of the markets and the Canal du Midi.

My first stop was the Marché de Saint-Aubin, so named because it occupies the entire length of the street that surrounds the Saint-Aubin church. The market operates on Sundays only, but is quite extensive. There were well over 100 vendors, maybe more, selling a wider variety of goods than I’m used to seeing at open-air markets. There were the usual staples: fruits, vegetables, cheese, meats, eggs, poultry, breads, olive oil, wine, dried fruits and nuts, olives, spices, honey, jam. Intermixed with these were a variety of more regional or ethnic offerings: enormous pans of cooked seafood, paella, vietnamese rolls, syrian breads, armenian dishes, honey soaked desserts, morrocan foods, belgian waffles, empanadas, macaron, and more. And together with the foods, there were many more durable items: knives and sharpeners, dresses, polished stones, hats, antiques, shopping caddies, wall paper, baskets, and mattresses. 

Before canvassing the market I had a cup of coffee at a café, which claimed to be a pizzeria, but which was serving the standard coffee and croissants Sunday morning. Something like a third of the patrons were speaking Arabic, which was in line with the surroundings. From what I could tell this was an ethnically mixed, working class neighborhood; there were few tourists visible. A light rain fell on-and-off, though the weather didn’t seem to deter anybody. There were many, many people but not so many that it felt crowded. It was fairly subdued, an ordinary Sunday morning rather than a festival. 

I walked the full circuit market twice, looking at everything, tasting a few proffered samples. Each vendor had either set up tables under one or more tents or was operating from a special-purpose trailer designed for showing their wears. Most every vendor was doing a steady business, but some had lines 20 people long while others had no lines. It wasn’t a question of the kind of goods sold, simply some vegetable merchants were preferred over others, some bread stands were oversubscribed, etc. The prices were quite low throughout (e.g. 0,70€ for a croissant), though I didn’t see a link between prices and line length. I bought a waffle made from pre-sweetened batter that came off the iron golden and sticky. It was delicious, crispy and slightly caramelized, far better than the ones I find in the U.S. (either spongy or cardboard).

After visiting Marché de Saint-Aubin I walked over to the permanent, covered market, Marché Victor Hugo. Along the way a French twenty-something walking with several buddies passed me and then turned back around to call «Quel beau chapeau ! Franchement, je voudrais le même.» (“What a great hat! Really, I want one just like that.”). It occurred to me that he could be pulling my leg, but he seemed sincere, and his companions did not break stride or snicker. Given that I’ve gotten similar comments on the hat in the U.S., I’m inclined to take it at face value. I bought the hat 18 months ago in Boston from a shop named Salmagundi. It’s a simple pale-yellow straw hat with a brown ribbon. I’ve seen many similar ones in France, first last summer in Avignon and then again this weekend in Toulouse. The going price around here seems to be 10€, though I paid considerably more for it in the States. 

As I walked from one market to the other at a leisurely pace, it occurred to me that I know a lot of French words for “wander”: flâner, errer, arpenter, balader, sillonner, trainer. For some, I know certain nuances, but others not. For example, «sillonner» is more like “criss-cross”, while «arpenter» is more like “stride”, and «trainer» is more like “drag” or the yiddish “schlep”. Probably «flâner» and «errer» are the closest to a pure “wander”, thought I don’t know what subtleties either of those words carry. Funny how long it takes for vocabulary to grow, and also funny how many words the French have for walking somewhat aimlessly.

The Marché Victor Hugo was indoors, smaller (maybe 40 stalls), more modern, more ordinary, and more well-to-do. There were a few novelties relative to Saint-Aubin, but not a lot. The butcher stall sold a wider variety of meat products, including both fresh and aged pigs feet, aged cow feet, and also veal feet. Plenty of different cuts of fresh meat. Another vendor sold rabbit, whole and hind-quarters. Another stall featured hundreds of roast chickens (and an active rotisserie oven) one could choose from. There was a shop selling prize-winning aged ham, either thin slices priced by the pound, or a whole leg of jambon for 220€. There were a couple dozen of them at that price hanging from the ceiling. I wonder if anyone ever buys it in that quantity.

When I left the market it was raining again, more heavily now. I stood with a number of people under the arcade of the market building, waiting for a break in the rain. Next to me, a professional-looking woman in her early late 50s or so was talking in French with a younger friend of some kind, a well-dressed young man in his 20s. I couldn’t help but overhear the topic was how he could overcome his difficulties in learning English, which he expressed needing to master in order to advance in his job. Perhaps rudely, I started listening deliberately, and after five minutes I ventured to insert myself in the conversation and observed (in French) that I had encountered in learning French all the problems that the man avowed in learning English. 

I’m not sure why I jumped in other than a general desire to interact with real French people and skin thickened by resolve and a baseline learned extroversion. But I’m very glad I did, as I earned with my bravery a delightful 20 minute conversation in French, followed by a 10 minute conversation in English. It turns out the woman was Nicole Yardeni Garbarsky, an adjoint to the Mayor of Toulouse responsible for music offerings by the city. She is also a practicing dentist, and married to an ex-patriot ENT doctor from New York, Eli Yardeni. 

In just a brief time, and with minimal prompting from me, Mme Garbarsky told me her story.  Her parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to France via Germany, arriving in Toulouse in 1939. They spoke Yiddish at home before coming to France, and a mix of Yiddish and French to Mme Yardeni Garbarsky as she was growing up. She met her husband when she was in dental school in Toulouse and he was in medical school there. She explained to the 20-something fellow (Florian, a purchaser for one of the aerospace companies here in Toulouse) that the experience of growing up in a family that was trying to assimilate, and then marrying a man from yet another country, prompted her to do a lot of thinking about how to learn both another language and another culture. Florian nodded along.

Just to keep the conversation going, I observed that I had been at the Saint-Aubin market earlier and that it was considerably different. Mme Garbarsky nodded vigorously and then gave me her impressions on the characters and socio-economic make up of the several markets in Toulouse (those two but also Marché Cristal and Marché de l’Aveyron at the Capitole. While I described Marché Saint-Aubit above as “working class” and “multi-cultural”, she described it as having a self-consciously political identity — “on the left” she clarified, in case I’d missed it. I confessed that I hadn’t seen anything that struck me as particularly political and she asked “Did you see folks passing out leaflets ?” I replied I had, but had not taken any nor noted what they were about. “Ah,” she said, “Political.”

Mme Garbasky’s husband emerged from the market and joined us, which occasioned a switch to English. I’m sure he was quite fluent in French, but after she introduced me (and got my name for the first time), he started speaking in English and I decided it would be weird to insist on speaking French with a native New Yorker (with a thick, classic New York Jewish accent). We talked for another 10 minutes, and then they announced they had to go as they were attending the opera in Toulouse later that afternoon. Mme Garbasky asked for my card, and I was glad that I’d thought to put a couple in my pocket this morning. She smiled broadly when she saw my French Theater Project logo — and promptly asked if it covered music as well, and if I could get Google to fund it.

One last note on that encounter. I’m always pleased when French people tell me that I speak French well – though of course many, many of them speak English notably better than I speak French. But Mme Garbarsky made a remark that could be somewhat ambiguous. When she introduced me to her husband, she told him I had lived in France for 10 years. I corrected her gently, and clarified that I had been studying French for the past 10 years after putting it aside post high-school. The only reason she knew the 10 year figure is that she’d asked me about my history with the language 20 minutes earlier and I gave her the information. So while I’m flattered to think she could have believed I’d lived in France for 10 years based on my French fluency, it’s also quite possible that I garbled the story so badly that I communicated to her I’d lived in France for 10 years rather than that I’d visited several times in the past 10 years. I think I’ll stick with the version of the story that puts me in the best light.

The rain had cleared up by the time we parted company, so I headed west to the spot on the map marked “Canal du Midi”. Of course, the canal runs for some 240 km from the Garonne river in Toulouse all the way to the port city of Sète on the Mediterranean. It’s been a working navigational canal since before the Revolution. The point on the map corresponded to a pair of canal locks that were fun to look at. There were a couple of guys in their twenties fishing from the bank further up, which surprised me as I don’t usually think of fish living in a canal. Looking at it, I was reminded of the George Simenon novel Le Charretier de la Providence, which takes as its setting a different canal (le canal latéral à la Marne, due east of Paris), and from which I learned a whole bunch of canal-specific vocabulary and practice. There were walking trails next to the canal du Midi, so I walked a bit before turning around and heading to the hotel.

I recovered my bags, walked to the Matabiau train station, bought some new crossword puzzles, had a cup of bad coffee, and took the train to Carcassonne. The train was quite full (it’s the start of July vacations) but the ride was uneventful. Éliane met me at the station and we drove to her house. I renewed my acquaintance with her husband Benjamin (Lonnie and I did a homestay language study with Éliane in 2018 when she and Benjamin lived near Compiègne in the north) and I got to meet their 18-month-old daughter for the first time. We sat on the deck overlooking a pool and talked for an hour or two in the afternoon sun, catching up on five years of events and reviewing the plans for the week. Then business time was over and family time started, a.k.a it was politely indicated to me that I was on my own for dinner tonight. This was not a surprise, as the stay is advertised as half-pension, not full-pension, and it was similar the last time I stayed and studied with Éliane.

It turns out that they don’t live in Carcassonne proper, but in a small village named Pezens northwest of Caracssonne. It’s pretty sleepy, with just a handful of shops. The only place open for dinner on a Sunday night was an unremarkable pizza joint that was only serving takeout. So I took myself a pizza back to the student apartment (which occupies the bottom floor of Éliane’s house and has a kitchen). The pizza was adequate, but I think next time I’ll accept Éliane’s offer to drive me into Carcassonne in the late afternoon and then take a taxi back after dinner. This will give me a greater range of dinner options, and is what her car-less students usually do.

After dinner I was fairly sleepy and turned in early — 9pm. I slept for a few hours, then woke up and finished writing this bulletin. It’s 2AM now — I’ll post it and then try to get a decent second helping of sleep so I can be up and ready for our 9am breakfast. Hooray for biphasic sleeping !

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Toulouse Bulletin

I’m in France for a few weeks, enjoying a much-needed summer vacation. It’s been a while since I posted anything to the blog, let’s see if I can remedy that a few times during my trip.

I arrived in Toulouse on Friday morning, June 30, and had to wait in the airport for an extra hour for my baggage to arrive. My Boston flight landed in Paris, and I had only an hour to make the connecting flight. I sailed through customs and inter-terminal security, reaching my flight with 10 minutes to spare. My suitcase was not so lucky, and had to wait for the next CDG-TLS flight. Fortunately it was just an hour.

The seat next to me on the flight to Toulouse was a friendly, well-behaved 3-year old. She took a liking to me, and her Mom was OK with it, so I played and talked with her a bit during the one hour ride. Sang a few French kids songs I knew and animated her stuffed animal a bit (she kept dropping it on the floor beneath my seat). Good times.

Took the shuttle bus to Toulouse, walked 3 minutes to Hotel Héliot, left my bags with the clerk, and went to lunch at Café Maurice at Place Saint-Georges. It was OK, but the salmon tartare has about twice as much raw salmon as one can reasonably eat. I left much of it over. It was fairly chilly out (15C-18C, intermittent light drizzle), not great for a walking tour. I barely slept on the plane (though I did complete five or six French crosswords) and was exhausted, so despite best advice to the contrary, I went back to the hotel, checked in, and slept for seven hours.

For dinner I took the hotel clerk’s recommendation and ate at Le Bon Vivre on Place du Président Wilson. I had “gazpacho andalou” (which I would have called simply “gazpacho”) and breaded veal cutlet with noodles. The soup was very good, the pasta was excellent, and the veal was OK — again, far too much veal for one sitting. I don’t remember restaurants in France serving such large portions. The restaurant is very much a “farm to table” kind of place, featuring both local ingredients and local producers. I was seated facing a wall-mounted screen that ran a full series of marketing videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QGDvwIt64U. The sound was off, but the closed captions were on, so I got to practice my reading while watching the smiling faces of various farmers and cattle- and goat-raisers talk about their work and their relationship with the restaurant. It was very interesting, actually.

I had a little trouble going to sleep, but after reading (Les fiancés de l’hiver), I slept from about 1AM – 9AM on Saturday, July 1. I spent the morning writing up some long-overdue pre-work for my language immersion course that starts tomorrow. I ate lunch at The Flower’s Café on Pl. Roger Salengro: a “bagel” with mozzarella and sun-dried tomato and a side salad. I indulged in my first cup of coffee since leaving Boston (I figured mixing coffee and jet lag was not a good idea), and also a slice of almond tarte with berries in syrup for dessert. I probably should have skipped dessert, as I felt unpleasantly full for much of the afternoon.

After lunch it was still chilly, maybe 18-20, overcast and on-and-off drizzling. But it’s my last full day in Toulouse, so I toured the city anyway. I followed the self-paced walking tour that I found at Visiter Toulouse en 1 jour : les essentiels de la Ville Rose. :

  1. La place du Capitole: lots of people in a big open square in front of an 18th century capital building. Big and imposing. A lot of brick, which is quite common in Toulouse. Apparently much cheaper and more locally available than stone. Interesting “occidentie cross” of metal inlaid in the stone on the ground in the center of the square. Zodiac signs at each corner. I spent while looking at the ceiling fresque in the arcade opposite the Capitol. 29 panels painted in 1993 or so depicting various famous Toulousiens or events in Toulouse history. The panels at eye-level of each column of the arcade provided explanations.
  2. La rue de taur: I followed the blog’s recommendation and went to La Compagnie du Chocolat, purchased some crystallized violet leaves. Haven’t tried one yet. Had a nice chat with the shopkeep. Browsed briefly the various bookstores and open-air book stalls along the street.
  3. La bibliothèque du Périgord is a public library in a very nice, modern-ish building. I walked the length of the high-ceilinged, vaulted reading room. It was well populated with patrons, and very silent. Nice windows on either end, some interesting art over the entrance.
  4. La Basilique Saint-Sernin: the largest Romanesque (as opposed to Gothic) church in Europe, it was completed around 1120, making it 900 years old. I took the free guided visit led by a French-speaking seminarian. It’s a big place with a lot of relics and various small chapels and artworks. Nothing too remarkable, but I’ve never been one for churches. Still, it’s the jewel of Toulouse, so I figured it was worth 45 minutes. One curious thing I learned: if you look up the length of the nave from the fount at the very back, by the western door, you see that the fount is lined up with the door and with the center axis of the nave. But the altar and the canopy at the far other end, the eastern tip, is a bit off-center to the left. The guide asserted that this is the case in many latin-cross European churches, and so unlikely to be an accident. Apparently there is no firm record for why things were laid out this way, but the prevailing explanation is that the latin cross floor-plan of the churches represent the crucifixion,  with Chirst’s feet at the far end of the nave, Christ’s arms extended to the north and south transept, and Christ’s head at the apse. He is often represented in death with his head nodding down and to the left, and so correspondingly the apse was made to be off-center the left. Interesting phenomenon and evocative explanation.
  5. Arnaud Bernard, le quartier «street art»: Fairly underwhelming. I have a feeling I didn’t find the main parts where much art is visible. I didn’t look that hard.
  6. Le Couvent des Jacobins: I was getting tired at this point, and didn’t look to hard for this landmark. As it happens, I wandered by it on my way to somewhere else, but it was already closed for the day. Not much to see from the outside.

At that point, I had had enough for the day and gave up on the self-guided tour.

Somewhere during the tour I did a little shopping. I bought toothpaste at a Monoprix and tried to buy shampoo, but the selection was bewildering and too fancy. The Monoprix website offers basic shampoo, but I couldn’t find it in the store. Asked somebody unsuccessfully, then gave up. I later bought some at a Carrefour City without difficulty. I tried to buy a cleaning cloth for my glasses at Les Binocles Toulousaines, Rue Gabriel, but the very friendly man wouldn’t take my money. He insisted I take the high-quality cloth for free. I thanked him and chatted briefly before leaving. Around 6:30pm I bought 130 grams of a semi-soft cow cheese from Fromagerie Verlac, rue Arnaud Bernard, and a small loaf of bread at Maison Janin just next store.

I was headed for the Couvent de Jacobins when I decided I could use some social contact. My map showed me that I was not too far from a games store, Le Passe Temps, so I walked over there and asked if by any chance they knew of a game-salon or other store where one could sit and play games with others. I introduced the question and off-beat, but the sales person gave me a broad smile and said nothing could be more natural to ask in a games store. Friendly people, these Toulousians. He wrote out for me three places to go, two «Bars aux jeux» and one video game parlor. «BlastoDice» was in a part of town I walked through before, so instead I headed over to «Les Tricheurs» by the Garonne river.

Upon reaching the river, I discovered I had stumbled on … a WateRugby festival. Rugby is a big, big sport here in Toulouse, and in south-west France in general. Toulouse is hosting the Rugby World Cup 2023 in September, and there’s lots of signage everywhere. While I knew rugby was a thing, I had never encountered Water Rugby before. It’s a friendly, no-contact version of the sport played on large floating raft, with the river itself as the perimeter of the playing field. Players wear swim trunks and vault into the water cum end-zone to score a point. The organizers attach a long floating bridge for the teams to enter and exit the raft, then remove it for each 15-minute match. The ~7-person teams file on and off the raft for each match while several hundred fans watch and drink beer in stands erected on the bank of the river. There was a play-by-play announcer broadcasting over a loud-speaker, lots of food trucks and merchandise tents set up in the small park between the street and the river. The whole thing is a deliberately silly marketing event set up by various rugby organizations. Ridiculous.

I watched for a while, then headed over to Les Tricheurs. It was humming, with a couple dozen parties playing games and eating/drinking inside and out. I presented myself to the host and asked if he could help me find playing partners. He said something might turn up, but that he couldn’t really act as match-maker. I canvassed the place and made one attempt to offer myself as an additional player to a group that was just finishing, but without success. So I ordered a beer and sat at a table by myself for a bit, hoping someone suitable would turn up.

As luck would have it, a 50-year-old Frenchman named Fred showed up 20 minutes later under the mistaken understanding that there was an organized trivia night happening (it was slated for Monday, not Saturday). I saw my chance and invited him to play. We hit it off quite well and spent an enjoyable couple of hours talking and playing games (one was named Patchwork, I forget the name of the other). Fred arrived just last week in Toulouse, where he’ll be working for four months as an organizer of the Rugby World Cup. He was outgoing and friendly, and we swapped what we knew of Toulouse. He took my phone number, saying he might make the trip out to Avignon for a couple of days if he gets bored of Toulouse. He’s from Pays de la Loire, and hasn’t spent much time here in the south of France. I’ll be amused if he follows up.

Fred and I left the bar around 10:30pm, walked back towards the city center together until our paths diverged. I made myself a small picnic in my room consisting of bread and cheese, then wrote up this bulletin. Tomorrow I need to check out at 11am, and my train to Carcassonne doesn’t leave until 3:15pm, so I have some time to finish the rest of the Toulouse walking tour. Good night!

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Suck the marrow out of life

I had a French lesson this morning where I started by telling my teacher that I was tired after a busy weekend, and that I was frequently tired, and that perhaps it was because I was constantly trying “to suck the marrow out of life”. Of course, I could not remember the word for “marrow”, which is la moelle (pronounced more like the oi in la voile, but spelled with an oe). This segued to my explaining the reference, and then looking up the Thoreau quote and trying to translate it on the fly orally.

One thing led to another, and we spent the whole lesson constructing a translation of a paragraph-long excerpt of the essay. We discussed the nuances of the different vocabulary choices available to us and the grammatical structures that stayed true the original both in meaning and in register. There may be lighter ways to express these ideas in French, but of course Thoreau is rather ponderous in English, so I’m not sure that leavening him in translation does the reader a service.

Here’s the French translation we settled on:

Je suis parti dans la forêt car je désirais vivre délibérément, n’affronter que l’essence de la vie, et prouver si je ne pouvais apprendre ce qu’elle avait à enseigner, et ne pas, quand le moment de ma mort arriverait, découvrir ne pas avoir vécu. Je ne voulais pas vivre une fausse vie, la vie étant si chère; je ne voulais pas non plus me résigner à moins que cela soit absolument nécessaire. Je voulais vivre profondément et sucer toute la moelle de la vie, vivre aussi solidement et spartiatement afin de faire détaler tout ce qui n’était pas de la vie, de me frayer un large chemin et de raser de près, de coincer la vie et la simplifier à l’extrême.

And here’s the original Henry David Thoreau passage:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…

I haven’t gone looking for other French translations of this quote, though I’m sure they exist and they differ from mine. But as they say, «Traduire, c’est trahir».

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La rivière à l’envers: A pre-teen trek

La rivière à l’envers, by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, is a two-volume fantasy series published in 2000 and 2002 and aimed at a pre-teen or early-teen audience. In the first volume (named Tomek), an exotic teenager named Hannah walks into a small village general store and asks Tomek, the teen behind the counter, if he happens to have any water drawn from the river Qjar. Tomek’s store has nearly everything imaginable, but he’s never heard of Qjar and has no water from it. Hannah admits it was a long shot, buys a candy stick for one sou, and leaves. In the days that follow, Tomek can’t get Hannah off his mind, so eventually seeks out the village elder to get information on this river. The elder has heard only rumors of Qjar, located in some magical land far away, a land full of incomparable people, plants and animals. The river Qjar has two distinctive properties: it runs backwards, from the ocean to the mountain, and its waters can cure any illness. Tomek decides to leave his village and go in search of Hannah and the Qjar river.  His fig leaf reason? One sou is far too much to pay for a candy stick.

We get to follow Tomek on his 200 page trek across these mythical lands, meeting all the strange flora, fauna, and people who live there as well as various episodic characters who help Tomek on his quest. We pass with Tomek through La forêt de l’oubli, entry into which causes a person to be temporarily forgotten by all others. We follow him through a vast meadow of flowers, one of which issues a perfume that causes people to fall into a long-term sleep from which one can be awakened only by a magic phrase – but each victim’s rousing words are different. The neighboring community of perfume makers routinely hosts sleeping guests for months on end while round-the-clock shifts of volunteers read aloud to them from a vast library in hopes of finding just the right words (Tomek’s were «sous le ventre du crocodile»). And we follow Tomek as he takes to the sea and accidentally stumbles into L’île inexistante, a place shrouded in fog and always-in-flowing tides. Boats that arrive can never escape again … unless they can answer a riddle that Tomek divines at the last moment. 

It’s all kid stuff, and Tomek overcomes each obstacle with relatively little difficulty or tension. This is a storybook more than a thriller. It does paint a luxurious picture of each new landscape and fantastical ecosystem, which made it a great source of new vocabulary words for me. I find it rather curious that there are so many unfamiliar words, as they are presumably in the working receptive vocabulary of a 10 or 11 year old child. Here’s a collection of some of these words, without definitions.

  • se dégourdir
  • sucre d’orge
  • un bocal
  • laisser en plan
  • une échoppe
  • s’asseoir en tailleur
  • friandise
  • mâchouiller
  • dompter
  • un passe-montagne
  • la loutre
  • grappiller
  • badaglang
  • rapiécés
  • borgne
  • un miche de pain
  • rassasier
  • joncher
  • pardessus
  • queue leu leu
  • bancals
  • élancée
  • brinquebaler
  • bossus
  • une brassée
  • la croupe
  • la moelle
  • se dandiner
  • couche de fortune
  • balluchon
  • à votre guise
  • une passerine
  • sortilège
  • un moineau
  • piler
  • rondelette
  • rondeur
  • rêvasser
  • des vivats
  • en apparat
  • la liesse
  • jeu d’adresse
  • un pantin
  • se morfondre
  • jouer aux petits chevaux
  • drôles de pitres
  • à la dérive
  • aux embruns
  • pagnes
  • une étreinte
  • juteu
  • une natte
  • rebrousser
  • une brouette
  • un coup de jarret
  • un pitre
  • à qui mieux mieux
  • une pagaie
  • un lamantin
  • accroupi
  • barboter
  • s’ébrouer
  • escarpé
  • grassouillet

With a few chapters to go, Tomek does find Hannah, who has somehow acquired a giant living panda-bear pet. Together, they eventually find the headwaters of the Qjar with next to no drama. There’s no particular significance to the river’s flowing backwards, and they harvest a few drops of water so that Hannah can bring it home to heal … her pet songbird who’s really a princess trapped in a bird’s body. A bit random, but perhaps the author ran out of good ideas.

Mourlevat seems to have recognized that in the first-volume Hannah was little more than a motivating prop for Tomek’s story. So he wrote a second volume (named Hannah) in which a now elderly Hannah tells us all the adventures she was having on her own while Tomek was following her trail. A complete life with a dessert caravan that turns out to have been all a dream. A case of mistaken identity with a princess who will be kidnapped should she ever see her reflection. A trek across a mountain into a long-abandoned ghost-town with a centenarian. I found these adventures distinctly flatter and paler than Tomek’s, which reinforces my theory that the author ran out of good ideas after the first 150 pages of Tomek. I’m guessing he decided to write this sequel either for economic reasons or to try to make up for having relegated Hannah to second-class protagonist status in the first volume. Either way, the most valuable thing I got from Hannah was another clutch of vocabulary words. Here are some:

  • la rade
  • une marmite
  • déguerpi
  • détalé
  • menton en galoche
  • frayé
  • les hardes
  • prélasser
  • les bas
  • l’oseille (f)
  • ronchonner
  • ma dodue
  • une apparat
  • démordir
  • bougon
  • être en cheville avec
  • un psyché
  • le taillis
  • la rocaille
  • pisé
  • déglingué
  • rapiécée
  • ébréché
  • comme un coup de trique
  • dégrisé
  • un réduit

On the whole, I’m happy I read these 400 pages. It was light reading that went quickly, and it was good to reinforce a subdomain of outdoor vocabulary that I don’t often encounter in plays or news stories. Unremarkable, but unregretted.

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Drôle de genre and remettre en cause

The end of December is a time of personal reflection for many people, as we think back on what happened in this old year and make resolutions for the new. The French expression for self-reflection is se remettre en cause. The same expression, without the reflexive pronoun, is used for the re-examination of any matter, large or small, individual or societal. Indeed, French social and political thought has a strong strain of calling into question subjects that were previously thought of as settled, re-opening discussions that many thought closed. Based on my limited views of both countries, I’d say that France is overall a more radical society, while the United States has become decidedly more conservative over the past 50 years. The spirit of remettre en cause in France lies behind everything from calls to overhaul the retirement system to the alarming percentage of French people who swallow homeopathic remedies. The French constitution was amended 16 times from 1996 to 2008; the US Constitution was amended only once in the last 50 years — to ratify a proposal made in 1789 !

I recently read two contemporary plays built around the theme of remettre en cause. Each one operates at two levels: an event happens within a family that causes them to revisit settled questions in a new light, which allows the playwright to re-examine a larger social issue together with the audience. The first play is Drôle de genre, by Jade-Rose Parker, which premiered at Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris, in February 2022 (I’ll write about the second, Demain la revanche, by Sébastien Thiéry, in another post).

Drôle de genre has the form of a drawing-room farce. It’s staged in the main room of an upscale apartment and has lots of biting dialogue with witty zingers reliably hitting the audience’s funny-bone without particularly injuring the other characters. There are people trying to stop each other from revealing information and lots of shouting. But all this disguises a more serious tragedy. In the opening lines of the play a woman in her fifties, Carla Dumon-Chapuny, tells her husband that she has cancer of … the prostate. This is her way of revealing, after 30 years of marriage, that she is transsexual and was born Carlos, a man. While the sexual reassignment surgeon did an excellent job on all the observable parts of her anatomy (even in the marital bed), the prostate was left in place.

Carla’s husband François is the mayor, nominally a man of the Left and a strong supporter of LGBTQ people, doesn’t take the news well at all. He’s incensed by the decades of deception, angry at Carla, and concerned for his political career (it’s election season). It turns out he’s more a supporter of other LGBTQ people, not of his own wife being trans. The revelation also forces him to reexamine their whole married life. Does this mean he’s gay? Should this change how he views their choice to adopt a daughter 25 years ago? Carla argues that she’s the very same person François has lived with all this time, so why should one medical letter with a diagnostic result change anything? But François isn’t interested in anything beyond limiting the damage to his political career. He forbids Carla from telling their daughter Louise, as much for his own sake as out of concern for her.

Speaking of Louise, she knocks on the door at the start of act two, come to dinner with her fiancé Rachon and a big announcement: she’s pregnant ! When Carla shares her news («Je suis un homme.»), Louise is lovingly supportive while François is even more angry and alienated from the whole family. But then Louise shares some more news: she’s decided to go in search of her birth parents to discover her origins and why they gave her up for adoption. This drives Carla and François back together in joint opposition, as they insist that they are Louise’s real parents, and she shouldn’t need anything more. In fact, she should be grateful they took her in and provided her with everything for years! Louise accuses Carla of hypocrisy:

Louise: Toi, tu as eu la chance de te trouver et tu as fait en sorte de devenir la personne que tu étais. Moi, je me cherche encore. Et j’ai besoin … Non, je n’ai pas «besoin», j’ai «envie» que vous me souteniez dans ma quête d’identité.

The dialogue gets more and more heated from there, Rachon gets himself in trouble too, and finally they each storm off one by one, to the exit door or the spare bedroom. Act two ends with Carla alone in the relational ruins of her living room, dancing the death scene from Swan Lake in a way «qui traduit à la fois le rejet, le désespoir, et la solitude».

Act three is short, though not sweet. It is an exact replay of act one, right up the point where Carla Dumon-Chapuny tells her husband that she has … un cancer du sein.

Noir. Le lac des Cygnes (thème principal) rugit, déchirant.

FIN

Sleep well, kiddos.

Overall I thought the play was an interesting effort to blend vaudeville farce with a serious treatment of a delicate subject. I think it has limited goals, and it succeeds on its own terms. Playwright Jade-Rose Parker stated «J’avais envie de faire une pièce grand public […] La comédie est un bon média pour cela. Drôle de genre n’est pas une pièce militante, […] mais j’espère qu’en sortant, il en reste quelque chose. Je voulais une pièce qui interroge, qui fasse réfléchir sur le monde d’aujourd’hui, et sur soi». The play is not terribly deep and the characters are barely more than their few traits, but Jade-Rose Parker’s writing is witty. Her jokes stay on the safe side of the wokisme line, though she doesn’t sugar-coat society’s continued failure to allow trans people to live openly without cost. This is her first produced play; should I have the occasion to see her next one, I’ll buy a ticket.

A few final notes, one language and one theatrical. When Carla first says to Louise that she is a man, her daughter at first misconstrues this as an announcement that Carla is biologically a woman who feels herself to be a man. Here’s the lines clarifying the situation:

Louise: Quoi ? Tu veux devenir un homme ?
Carla: Non, J’ÉTAIS un homme. (Se reprenant.) J’AI ÉTÉ un homme. Dans une autre vie, il y a très longtemps.
Louise: Quoi ? Tu veux devenir un homme ?
Carla: Non, J’ÉTAIS un homme. (Se reprenant.) J’AI ÉTÉ un homme. Dans une autre vie, il y a très longtemps.

The capitalization is rendered that way in the script, drawing the listener’s attention to the correction of which past tense to use. The best description I’ve heard yet of the distinction between the passé composé and imparfait is that the passé composé is a bounded tense, while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (another, less helpful phrasing I’ve heard for this is that the imparfait is for actions that were ongoing or continuous in the past). Carla’s first stab at explaining things uses the unbounded imparfait, but she corrects herself to the passé composé to emphasize definitively that her being a man has ended. I don’t know how you would translate that distinction cleanly – “No, I was a man … I used to be a man.” doesn’t cut it. The French version is a neat grammatical trick of dialogue that may not be available in English.

The theatrical note is this: Jade-Rose Parker indulges in a short bit of fourth-wall breaking during act two which I imagine is very effective. At the peak of his rage, François claims that by “passing herself off as his wife” for 30 years, Carla has effectively taken him hostage. When Carla points out this analogy is ridiculous, François asks the audience for validation:

Francois: […] Moi ça fait trente ans que (désignant Carla) cette personne me prend en otage !
Louise: PAPA! Tu ne crois pas que tu exagère ?
François: Moi j’exagère ? C’est la meilleure ! Moi, j’exagère ?? (À la régie.) RALLUMEZ LA SALLE !

La salle se rallume.

Rachon: Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites ?
François: Un sondage d’opinion ! (Au public.) Qui parmis vous pense que j’exagère ? (Rachon va pour protester, François lui impose le silence avec la main.) Je rappelle pour mémoire que ce monsieur (désignant Carla) se fait passer pour ma femme depouis plus de trente ans !
Carla: TU DÉBLOQUES !!!
François: On va très vite le savoir ! (Au public.) Allez-y, allez-y !!! Levez la main !
Carla: Non mais tu vois bien que les gens n’ont pas envie de participer à ton petit numéro pathétique !
François: (à une personne au premier rang) Monsieur, vous pensez que j’exagère ? Exprimez-vous, bon sang !
Rachon: Mais pfff !!! Mais évidemment, vous faites voter le carré or ! C’est du CSP+ ça, c’est votre électorat ! Non, si vous voulez vraiment sonder la France, il faut aller au fond, là-haut, dans les derniers rangs, sur les strapontins derrière le poteau ! Là où les places sont à dix balles, où ça sent le peuple, le chômage, la conserve premier prix !
François: (se retournant vers Rachon) Non mais vous êtes odieux ! Vous entendez ce que vous dites, un peu (À la régie.) Éteignez la salle !

I can envision the uncomfortable tension among the audience as each person tries to calculate whether an actual hand-raising response is expected, or whether they can sit as passive spectator. What exactly does not raising my hand endorse ? And if I do raise my hand, what have I just committed myself to in front of my friends and the community of theater-goers? It’s a microcosm of the real-world situation where we reveal our political convictions through inaction as much as through action. If it is this unsettling to be put on the spot in a theater performance, no wonder it can be so hard for some citizens to wrestle with these political issues in real life.

Happy remettre en cause, everybody.