April 30, 2012
Adapting
I start the morning preparing for an 11:00 a.m. meeting with Fabrice Busconi, a real estate agent I made an appointment with the Thursday of my arrival in Marseille, and confirmed by e-mail. It is pouring rain, but not unpleasant.
Not to be late, I am there at ten minutes of eleven. Fabrice has not yet gotten into the office. I am told to come back in fifteen minutes. I stop to have something to eat at a cafe down the street and return at ten minutes after: Fabrice has not arrived. Madame Pautasso, the lady fielding calls leaves a message on his cellphone, and I prepare to wait.
Fortunately, Fabrice comes in at 11:25 a.m. The traffic into the Vieux Port and the Canabiere is always horrendous, and no one is ever on time. However, I am delighted to see Fabrice, who sets about explaining to me the nuances of renting and buying apartments in Marseille.
To start with renting apartments, the real estate broker gets one month's rent as his fee, and the landlord asks for a month's rent as a security deposit in addition to the first month's rent in advance. The contract is made for a year's duration, but the renter has the option of cancelling it two months in advance, at no charge. As in the United States, provided the property has not sustained any damage during the rental period, the deposit will be returned.
My thought is that I might rent for a while, then buy an apartment. Fabrice has no problem with this, and having explained how the rental market works, proceeds to give me an overview of what is available currently that I might be interested in. He shows me several apartments for sale, two of which have terraces with views, something I would want. The prices are quite affordable. He tells me not to open a bank account until I am ready to purchase, as not every bank will offer a mortgage on every property. Then he refers me to his collegue, Marguerite, in the next office, to talk to me about rentals.
The first thing Marguerite asks me is whether I pay taxes in France. When I say, "No", and that I intend to keep paying my taxes to the United States, she tells me that she cannot help me. Foncia only works with individuals who file their income taxes in France. Setting aside why this is, I ask what I might do in this case. She refers me to a colleague who works with foreigners in search of rentals. I relay this news to Fabrice, who tells me that colleague is reliable, although in the end, he may not be necessary to the process if I return to Marseille in September (as I plan to do) and find something I like. If a seller agrees to sign the French equivalent of a letter of intent, the buyer has three months to obtain a mortgage. If no mortgage is obtainable, there is no obligation on the buyer's part. If a mortgage is obtained, the letter of intention is converted into a contract of sale which is finalized and a closing date set.
Fabrice has suggested that I familiarize myself with two neighborhoods where I might enjoy living, Place Sebastopol, which requires that I take the Metro, and the Ballon des Auffes, which I can walk to. The Ballon des Auffes is a hill below which is an area where makers of ropes, at one time Provencal, later Spanish and Italian, lived. Fonfon's, a restaurant known for its boullaibaise, is at the base of the Ballon des Auffres. I walk down the winding staircase to a creek filled with brightly-colored fishing boats. Fonfon's is a few steps away. I have been told that it is wise to reserve in advance, but the 37 Euro price of boullaibaise for one, puts me off, and I walk back up the stairs. Not far away in the Sofitel is a restaurant with a splendid view of the harbor, Les Trois Forts. I have been told it is wonderful, but dining alone in an expensive restaurant is not something I enjoy, so again, I move on.
What I want to see is the ruin of the Abbaye Saint Victor, which Joseph Garibaldi depicted in one of the paintings I saw at the Palais des Arts. It was originally built in 450 A.D., as a monastery and convent by John Cassian, an abbot who endorsed the Semipelagian heresy, a belief that man's wlll can work without God's grace to bring man to God. Semipelagianism was a sort of compromise between the thinking of Saint Augustine, who argued that God's grace along with man's will, lead men to salvation; and Pelagius' view that man alone can save himself. Saint Augustine's view is central Roman Catholic theology: so after John Cassian's was declared heresy, and after the Saracens destroyed the abbey in the seventh or eighth century, no rebuilding was done for centuries. However, in the first half of the eleventh century, Saint Wilfred rebuilt the monastery, which quickly recovered its former renown. While the abbey suffered numerous vicissitudes over the following centuries --the theft of its library volumes by commendatory abbots; the dissolution of the monastery in 1739; the French Revolution-- the church was made a minor basilica by Pope Pius XI in 1934. It is all that remains of the abbey complex. Interestingly, Blessed Guillaume Grimoard became Abbot of Saint Victor in 1361 and Pope Urban V at Avignon in 1362. He was not a Cardinal when elected and had no idea of his nomination when he was called to Avignon. He died in 1370 and was subsequently beatified.
The church is really three buildings in one, with pre-Christian tombs of children below the crypt, where Saint Victor, a soldier in the Crusades, is buried, and the basilica above. The crypt contains the statue of Notre Dame of the Confession, a statue carved in dark wood, and known as a Black Virgin. The statue is the object of veneration by the Marseillais, who carry her in candle-lit procession on Candlemas Day, which falls in February. Above, in the basilica, two recesses in the church contain relics of numerous saints, mostly obscure: Margaret Mary Alacoque and Rose are the only ones I recognize.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
April 29, 2012
Sarkozy for lunch
I travel about two hours to reach 75 rue Floralia, where Helene and Nicolas Masson live. Their son Erwan, 3, greets me at the door, followed by Juliette, 6. Both are happy to get a package each of banana-flavored chewing gum, and my two bottles of Cahors seem to be welcome.
Nicolas is an haut fonctionnaire, a high ranking government official. He works as a customs administrator for several towns in the vicinity of Marseille. One side of his family were pieds noirs from Oran, as French who settled in the North African colonies are known. (Oran, in Algeria, is where Albert Camus' novel, The Plague, is set.) Natalie's family is Breton, although she was raised with her three sisters and one brother in the suburbs of Paris.
Sunday lunch is an institution in France, traditionally when families get together. To be invited to join a family for the day --which is what is involved-- is a signal honor, and I am sensitive to the fact. Nicolas and Helene, however, treat me as if I were an old friend, Nicolas peppering me with questions about American politics and the economy, and I doing the same, vice-versa. All over some wonderful food and drink over many courses.
When I bring up Port du Bouc, where Jean-Luc Melenchon achieved his highest score in the first round of presidential elections, Nicolas --who is the customs administrator of that port-- explains that it is a small village with many pieds noirs, a group that tends to vote farther left than average, even within Socialist ranks. Within PACA --the Provence, Alpes, Cote d'Azur region--, there co-exist hard-Left and hard-Right strongholds, with the hard-Right being villages untouched by immigration, but xenophobic. (Marine Le Pen achieved the highest percentage of votes in a small village in Provence. Benarrides, not very far from Port de Bouc.)
Then again, the election, as Nicolas sees it, is less about ideology than the personality of Sarkozy, which whatever value his policies have, has lost him voters. He cites a few examples: by sending an SMS to a lieutenant during an audience with the Pope, he lost Catholic support. By divorcing while in office, he alienated a segment of the French voting public, including Catholics, that was unready to accept the idea of the President of the Republic divorcing while in office. The marital problems, or merely the inclination of the man in office to roam, were never on public view until Sarkozy. Francois Mitterand had an illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, with his mistress, but the relationship was never confirmed until his death; Jacques Chirac is a storied ladies' man, but remains married to Bernadette, his only wife. Despite their reputation for openness in sexual matters, vielle France is conservative when it comes to marriage and divorce.
Finally, the effort by Sarkozy to make all executive functions at the highest cabinet levels his own brief was a self-sabotage of a kind. The President made his Prime Minister, Francois Fillon a junior, rather than an independent manager of France's ministries --as had traditionally been the case, excepting for those concerned with foreign affairs. This move deprived Sarkozy of the cover previous Presidents had --when things went badly, the Prime Minister was dispensable. As a result, when the French economy faced a series of crises, starting in 2007, and continuing through to the present-- the President could not remain aloof. This has been Sarkozy's way of showing leadership, that he is in charge, and that he takes responsibility for what takes place during his administration. Because his temperament is mercurial, however, he has not generated a sense of calm, that someone who knows what to do is in charge.
And perhaps that is what the French --like most modern electorates-- have always sought in a President, to know that someone can do for them what needs to be done so that they can go on living the way that they do. Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to tell them that that status quo is crumbling around them, but to them, he, not the world economy is the problem. Had he not been so inclined to seem to enjoy having extravagantly wealthy friends --his trip on Vincent Bollore's yacht shortly after his election in 2007 is frequently mentioned, along with the victory celebration at another redoubt of money, restaurant Fouquet-- Sarkozy would have been more convincing in this role.
Regarding Marine Le Pen and the immigration question, Nicolas touches on the complexities inherent in the problem: Who is an immigrant that the law ought to control? Who is not French? France is a country that has always experienced waves of immigration, from Italians at the turn of the 19th to the 20th, to Poles during the Second World War, to North Africans after it. Each previous group has been among those most vocal in denouncing the new immigrants.
Sarkozy, the son of Hungarian immigrants, may correctly be signaling that France's frontiers need to be guarded against those who are engaging in criminal activities of all types, but the emphasis in his campaign on the immigration question is an effort to siphon off votes from Marine Le Pen. While Francois Hollande may have been maladroit in proposing that legal immigrants resident in France, and paying taxes here have the right to vote, that position may not be the self-inflicted wound Sarkozy's camp hopes. Francois Mitterand, --to whom Hollande likens himself frequently-- admitted during his campaign in 1981 that he was against the death penalty, and was, notwithstanding, elected President, Once in office, he abrogated the death penalty and was reelected for a second seven-year term, serving as President for a total of fourteen years.
In sum, the French can be very broad-minded about all sorts of things in the background of a candidate for President if the candidate has qualities the French believe presidential: gravitas, erudition, aloofness, and noblesse oblige . The French president is a sort of king, and a king must be dignified and know his place. Nicolas Sarkozy is too familiar, not cultivated enough, too aggressive. Anyone who believes this --as Nicolas and Helene Masson do-- anticipates that "le petit Nicolas" --as Sarkozy is derisively known, after the character in a children's book who is at once egocentric and naive-- thinks he will go down to defeat May 6.
Sarkozy for lunch
I travel about two hours to reach 75 rue Floralia, where Helene and Nicolas Masson live. Their son Erwan, 3, greets me at the door, followed by Juliette, 6. Both are happy to get a package each of banana-flavored chewing gum, and my two bottles of Cahors seem to be welcome.
Nicolas is an haut fonctionnaire, a high ranking government official. He works as a customs administrator for several towns in the vicinity of Marseille. One side of his family were pieds noirs from Oran, as French who settled in the North African colonies are known. (Oran, in Algeria, is where Albert Camus' novel, The Plague, is set.) Natalie's family is Breton, although she was raised with her three sisters and one brother in the suburbs of Paris.
Sunday lunch is an institution in France, traditionally when families get together. To be invited to join a family for the day --which is what is involved-- is a signal honor, and I am sensitive to the fact. Nicolas and Helene, however, treat me as if I were an old friend, Nicolas peppering me with questions about American politics and the economy, and I doing the same, vice-versa. All over some wonderful food and drink over many courses.
When I bring up Port du Bouc, where Jean-Luc Melenchon achieved his highest score in the first round of presidential elections, Nicolas --who is the customs administrator of that port-- explains that it is a small village with many pieds noirs, a group that tends to vote farther left than average, even within Socialist ranks. Within PACA --the Provence, Alpes, Cote d'Azur region--, there co-exist hard-Left and hard-Right strongholds, with the hard-Right being villages untouched by immigration, but xenophobic. (Marine Le Pen achieved the highest percentage of votes in a small village in Provence. Benarrides, not very far from Port de Bouc.)
Then again, the election, as Nicolas sees it, is less about ideology than the personality of Sarkozy, which whatever value his policies have, has lost him voters. He cites a few examples: by sending an SMS to a lieutenant during an audience with the Pope, he lost Catholic support. By divorcing while in office, he alienated a segment of the French voting public, including Catholics, that was unready to accept the idea of the President of the Republic divorcing while in office. The marital problems, or merely the inclination of the man in office to roam, were never on public view until Sarkozy. Francois Mitterand had an illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, with his mistress, but the relationship was never confirmed until his death; Jacques Chirac is a storied ladies' man, but remains married to Bernadette, his only wife. Despite their reputation for openness in sexual matters, vielle France is conservative when it comes to marriage and divorce.
Finally, the effort by Sarkozy to make all executive functions at the highest cabinet levels his own brief was a self-sabotage of a kind. The President made his Prime Minister, Francois Fillon a junior, rather than an independent manager of France's ministries --as had traditionally been the case, excepting for those concerned with foreign affairs. This move deprived Sarkozy of the cover previous Presidents had --when things went badly, the Prime Minister was dispensable. As a result, when the French economy faced a series of crises, starting in 2007, and continuing through to the present-- the President could not remain aloof. This has been Sarkozy's way of showing leadership, that he is in charge, and that he takes responsibility for what takes place during his administration. Because his temperament is mercurial, however, he has not generated a sense of calm, that someone who knows what to do is in charge.
And perhaps that is what the French --like most modern electorates-- have always sought in a President, to know that someone can do for them what needs to be done so that they can go on living the way that they do. Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to tell them that that status quo is crumbling around them, but to them, he, not the world economy is the problem. Had he not been so inclined to seem to enjoy having extravagantly wealthy friends --his trip on Vincent Bollore's yacht shortly after his election in 2007 is frequently mentioned, along with the victory celebration at another redoubt of money, restaurant Fouquet-- Sarkozy would have been more convincing in this role.
Regarding Marine Le Pen and the immigration question, Nicolas touches on the complexities inherent in the problem: Who is an immigrant that the law ought to control? Who is not French? France is a country that has always experienced waves of immigration, from Italians at the turn of the 19th to the 20th, to Poles during the Second World War, to North Africans after it. Each previous group has been among those most vocal in denouncing the new immigrants.
Sarkozy, the son of Hungarian immigrants, may correctly be signaling that France's frontiers need to be guarded against those who are engaging in criminal activities of all types, but the emphasis in his campaign on the immigration question is an effort to siphon off votes from Marine Le Pen. While Francois Hollande may have been maladroit in proposing that legal immigrants resident in France, and paying taxes here have the right to vote, that position may not be the self-inflicted wound Sarkozy's camp hopes. Francois Mitterand, --to whom Hollande likens himself frequently-- admitted during his campaign in 1981 that he was against the death penalty, and was, notwithstanding, elected President, Once in office, he abrogated the death penalty and was reelected for a second seven-year term, serving as President for a total of fourteen years.
In sum, the French can be very broad-minded about all sorts of things in the background of a candidate for President if the candidate has qualities the French believe presidential: gravitas, erudition, aloofness, and noblesse oblige . The French president is a sort of king, and a king must be dignified and know his place. Nicolas Sarkozy is too familiar, not cultivated enough, too aggressive. Anyone who believes this --as Nicolas and Helene Masson do-- anticipates that "le petit Nicolas" --as Sarkozy is derisively known, after the character in a children's book who is at once egocentric and naive-- thinks he will go down to defeat May 6.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
April 28, 2012
Marseille
I sleep well, rising at about 7:30 a.m., opening the windows to let in the sun. It is cloudier than yesterday, but still warm. I stick my head out the balcony window to see what is going on in the street, like a good Marseillaise, and see that the fruit and vegetable market across the street is already open. I check my correspondence and after eating a banana and a pain raisin, purchased yesterday at the Petit Casino (franchised convenience stores found throughout France), I am off.
I head for the port to see whether it will be possible to go to the Calanques today: nothing doing, the winds are too high, although there is a boat that will make an hour's tour along the harbor, leaving at 10:00 a.m. I sign on, and rush to buy a coffee across the street before departure.
I board easily enough, and make for the top deck. We are underway shortly in the sunshine, in a high breeze. The skipper points out La Cathedrale Majore, the Chateau d'If (where Dumas began The Count of Monte Cristo), the village of Goudes, and many other sights, including the French Foreign Legion post on an island near the Prado beach. It is an hour very well spent, although the spray occasionally showers the top deck, spurring the least seaworthy to abandon the deck. I, however, think it is all wonderful, the sun, the sky, the spray.
Back at the hotel to freshen up, I send out some more e-mails, one of which is a response to an invitation from Helene Masson to come for Sunday lunch. This is a signal honor --to be invited to dine en famille is very unusual for the French, who, compared to Americans, are much less quick to invite new acquaintances over. I promised to bring some wine, so I want advice on what would be acceptable, as well as to ask whether I might bring some candy over for Juliette and her brother, _____.
While awaiting Helene's response, I will go to the Palais des Arts to see the show of paintings by Joseph Garibaldi, whose estimated two thousand views paintings, are mostly of Marseille.
It takes longer to get there than I expected, because although I follow the map and walk through Cour Julien, there are no signs to guide me. The Cour Julien is a narrow street off the Canebiere, where jobbers sell overstocks of cleaning supplies, preserved food, and household sundries. At its end it opens on to a small triangular plaza, where a fruit and vegetable market has been set up around buildings whose ground floors house tiny cafes with outdoor chairs and tables, all of them full of Maghrebien men of all ages, nothing but men. On account of the heat, I have removed a light cotton long-sleeved shirt, underneath which I am wearing a sleeveless, form-fitting top. I feel immediately self-conscious and walk out of the plaza as quickly as possible, passing a few woman covered from head to toe out shopping for their families.
I walk to the Prefecture du Police and ask the policeman on guard, but he just tells me he has no idea where the museum is, and that I cannot stand there. I move and walk around the building, finding myself in front of an arc of metal, a sign cast in iron rising above rue Rostand, announcing that it is the gateway to the Quartier des Antiquaires. I stroll its length, but everything is closed.
Except for a shop at the end of a tiny covered alley, Le Cyrano, a used bookstore. Hundreds of books of all types are piled on top of tables in the alley, which I had originally taken for a small mechanic's garage. I walk to the back, where a ruddy, robust Maghrebien introduces himself and starts asking questions about who I am and how I came to be in his shop.
His name is Francis, and he bought the bookstore about ten years ago. He explains that everything is chaos outside, but inside, the departments are organized. He has a great collection of French magazines from the 1950s, and a number of esoteric books in paper covers --which is how books is France are always published initially. He loves American literature, particularly Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Walt Whitman ("I contain multitudes" he quotes in French). He also is fascinated by California, Route 66 and Haight-Ashbury and its bands: the Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Springfield, Joni Mitchell. I buy a nicely covered book relating the history of the trial of Marie Antoinette for five euros, and am invited to come back for tea or coffee, and some sweets. Francis is a colossus of literary devotion.
I leave the Quartier des Antiquaires no closer to the Palais des Artes, beginning the search again, retracing my steps towards the Cour Julien. I am climbing up a hill --Marseille has many heights-- and after crossing a street, I catch sight of a building which looks like it might be the museum. I see a young woman turn in to a path through the gate, and follow her. I find myself walking through an inactive petanque court, next to which an active game, including women, is in progress. I ask a man on the sidelines the way to the entrance to the museum, but as he picks one of the small bowling balls with which the game is played, he tells me he has no idea, but that I ought to walk around the building.
I try to do this, but once more, find myself ascending a height without any sense of where I am. I spy to young women sitting on a doorstep smoking, and walk over to ask them for directions. After conferring, they instruct me to go back where came and look for a sign indicating a right turn. This I do, and find myself in front of a building covered in scaffolding, cars parked in front almost to the opposite wall, with no obvious entrance. However, I see a white piece of paper on a door, so I sidle over. I find a gate open and suddenly I am in a small flea market, specializing in comic books, DVDs and long-playing records. I ask one of the vendors where the museum entrance might be, and am pointed towards a gate buried at the end of the market. I walk through it and enter the courtyard, which has become a construction site.
The sign says "Use the door to the right", so I walk over to the second set of steps and walk up the steps and through an open door into a entrance hall leading to a grand staircase in two parts with a svelte statue placed at the break between them. Up the second flight of stairs, through a pair of wooden doors, and I am inside the exhibition space for the Garibaldi exhibit. A stylishly dressed woman, all in black, wearing wonderful jewelry, probably in her late sixties, is lecturing on Garibaldi.
The son of an Italian immigrant who worked for Noilly Prat, the vermouth maker, Garibaldi's talent was recognized at an early age and fostered by the company owner. Garibaldi met the Lyonnais painter Antoine Vollon, becoming a surrogate son and fervent disciple of this realist artist, mastering the tools of formal composition and the use of color to capture the life of the port where he was born. The paintings are dominated by brightly-colored sailboats, still under skies that can be pellucid or stormy. He was never avant-garde, never influence by the Impressionists, although he lived long enough to be (1863-1941). His paintings of the countryside are executed with the same mastery as the seascapes of Marseille and villages nearby, like Cassis, but they do not stand out as the harbor views do. The name of the exhibition is Le Midi Paisible --the Peaceful South, as in none of the paintings is there the slightest suggestion of anything other than the ordinary life of the region.
***
I return to the New Hotel Vieux Port to find that Helene has not only given me an idea of what wine to buy, but what candy. Her children would like a Malabar Jaune --banana-flavored bubble gum, available in any tabac for 20 centimes. I buy each child five pieces, have them put into a small bag, so that each has their own cache. A quick trip to Le Petit Casino and I am able to buy wine to have with the roast chicken Helene will cook --a Malbec from Cahors, in the Midi-Pyrenees, tannic and full.
I am due at the Masson household at 12:30 p.m., and it is never a good idea to be late, but there is a problem: rue Floralia-Rimet is so far out to the east of Marseille, it is in the direction of Cassis, and not even on my map. I was planning to go to Mass at the Cathedrale Majore, but I need to find somewhere closer, hopefully with an early morning mass.
Gael, the hotel receptionist who lives a few blocks away on rue Paillason, suggests that I might go over to Saint Ferreol, only a block away on the quai of the Vieux Port. I have seen this early Renaissance building, its white facade gleaming, and wondered whether it was an active church. I noticed only some Maghrebien beggars, when I passed it this morning on my way to the harbor tour boat.
The church is not only open, the six o'clock Mass is about to begin. My problem is solved: however far rue Floralia-Rimet is, I wlll have time to get there.
***
The church of Saint Ferreol honors a Greek missionary, who with his brother Saint Ferjeux, was persecuted by Diocletian, and beheaded in 212 A.D. The two brothers are the patron saints of Besancon, where I was a few weeks ago. The church was built by the Augustinian ("black") friars in 1447 where a convent formed by the Knights Templar used to be. It is small and simple and quickly fills up with local people, mostly elderly, but also a few young families.
Listening to a homily in French is still difficult for me, and when the prayers are said, I find myself either saying them in English or just listening. The liturgy has just changed, and I was learning the new form before I left, so it will take a while before I can follow. At the giving of the "Peace", the older Marseillaises in the church kiss each other --it is clear everyone knows everyone well, and gets along.
At the end of the Mass, I walk behind the small organ at the left of the altar to look at the bust of Saint Ferreol, dressed like a Roman centurion, large limpid eyes looking out. I pass the organist, an elderly lady in a hat, who asks me whether the service pleased me. "Yes", I say, and she takes my hand and asks me where I am from. When I tell her, she continues to hold my hand, and ask me all sorts of questions. As she is not going to let me go, I sit down next to her on the bench. The woman who acted as cantor comes over, and she tells her about me, as she does the next woman, and the priest who officiated the sacraments, and the priest homilist.
At the end of the Mass, I walk behind the small organ at the left of the altar to look at the bust of Saint Ferreol, dressed like a Roman centurion, large limpid eyes looking out. I pass the organist, an elderly lady in a hat, who asks me whether the service pleased me. "Yes", I say, and she takes my hand and asks me where I am from. When I tell her, she continues to hold my hand, and ask me all sorts of questions. As she is not going to let me go, I sit down next to her on the bench. The woman who acted as cantor comes over, and she tells her about me, as she does the next woman, and the priest who officiated the sacraments, and the priest homilist.
"How could you do that, come to Europe by yourself? --I would not have dared, I would not have dared", she says admiringly. "She's from America, she's from New York!"
I am quite the celebrity, and everyone is very kind, so I find myself laughing at their generosity of spirit. When I tell them how much I like Marseille, they beam. They are kindness itself --and everyone volunteers a word or two of English, that strange tongue.
Marseille
I sleep well, rising at about 7:30 a.m., opening the windows to let in the sun. It is cloudier than yesterday, but still warm. I stick my head out the balcony window to see what is going on in the street, like a good Marseillaise, and see that the fruit and vegetable market across the street is already open. I check my correspondence and after eating a banana and a pain raisin, purchased yesterday at the Petit Casino (franchised convenience stores found throughout France), I am off.
I head for the port to see whether it will be possible to go to the Calanques today: nothing doing, the winds are too high, although there is a boat that will make an hour's tour along the harbor, leaving at 10:00 a.m. I sign on, and rush to buy a coffee across the street before departure.
I board easily enough, and make for the top deck. We are underway shortly in the sunshine, in a high breeze. The skipper points out La Cathedrale Majore, the Chateau d'If (where Dumas began The Count of Monte Cristo), the village of Goudes, and many other sights, including the French Foreign Legion post on an island near the Prado beach. It is an hour very well spent, although the spray occasionally showers the top deck, spurring the least seaworthy to abandon the deck. I, however, think it is all wonderful, the sun, the sky, the spray.
Back at the hotel to freshen up, I send out some more e-mails, one of which is a response to an invitation from Helene Masson to come for Sunday lunch. This is a signal honor --to be invited to dine en famille is very unusual for the French, who, compared to Americans, are much less quick to invite new acquaintances over. I promised to bring some wine, so I want advice on what would be acceptable, as well as to ask whether I might bring some candy over for Juliette and her brother, _____.
While awaiting Helene's response, I will go to the Palais des Arts to see the show of paintings by Joseph Garibaldi, whose estimated two thousand views paintings, are mostly of Marseille.
It takes longer to get there than I expected, because although I follow the map and walk through Cour Julien, there are no signs to guide me. The Cour Julien is a narrow street off the Canebiere, where jobbers sell overstocks of cleaning supplies, preserved food, and household sundries. At its end it opens on to a small triangular plaza, where a fruit and vegetable market has been set up around buildings whose ground floors house tiny cafes with outdoor chairs and tables, all of them full of Maghrebien men of all ages, nothing but men. On account of the heat, I have removed a light cotton long-sleeved shirt, underneath which I am wearing a sleeveless, form-fitting top. I feel immediately self-conscious and walk out of the plaza as quickly as possible, passing a few woman covered from head to toe out shopping for their families.
I walk to the Prefecture du Police and ask the policeman on guard, but he just tells me he has no idea where the museum is, and that I cannot stand there. I move and walk around the building, finding myself in front of an arc of metal, a sign cast in iron rising above rue Rostand, announcing that it is the gateway to the Quartier des Antiquaires. I stroll its length, but everything is closed.
Except for a shop at the end of a tiny covered alley, Le Cyrano, a used bookstore. Hundreds of books of all types are piled on top of tables in the alley, which I had originally taken for a small mechanic's garage. I walk to the back, where a ruddy, robust Maghrebien introduces himself and starts asking questions about who I am and how I came to be in his shop.
His name is Francis, and he bought the bookstore about ten years ago. He explains that everything is chaos outside, but inside, the departments are organized. He has a great collection of French magazines from the 1950s, and a number of esoteric books in paper covers --which is how books is France are always published initially. He loves American literature, particularly Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Walt Whitman ("I contain multitudes" he quotes in French). He also is fascinated by California, Route 66 and Haight-Ashbury and its bands: the Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Springfield, Joni Mitchell. I buy a nicely covered book relating the history of the trial of Marie Antoinette for five euros, and am invited to come back for tea or coffee, and some sweets. Francis is a colossus of literary devotion.
I leave the Quartier des Antiquaires no closer to the Palais des Artes, beginning the search again, retracing my steps towards the Cour Julien. I am climbing up a hill --Marseille has many heights-- and after crossing a street, I catch sight of a building which looks like it might be the museum. I see a young woman turn in to a path through the gate, and follow her. I find myself walking through an inactive petanque court, next to which an active game, including women, is in progress. I ask a man on the sidelines the way to the entrance to the museum, but as he picks one of the small bowling balls with which the game is played, he tells me he has no idea, but that I ought to walk around the building.
I try to do this, but once more, find myself ascending a height without any sense of where I am. I spy to young women sitting on a doorstep smoking, and walk over to ask them for directions. After conferring, they instruct me to go back where came and look for a sign indicating a right turn. This I do, and find myself in front of a building covered in scaffolding, cars parked in front almost to the opposite wall, with no obvious entrance. However, I see a white piece of paper on a door, so I sidle over. I find a gate open and suddenly I am in a small flea market, specializing in comic books, DVDs and long-playing records. I ask one of the vendors where the museum entrance might be, and am pointed towards a gate buried at the end of the market. I walk through it and enter the courtyard, which has become a construction site.
The sign says "Use the door to the right", so I walk over to the second set of steps and walk up the steps and through an open door into a entrance hall leading to a grand staircase in two parts with a svelte statue placed at the break between them. Up the second flight of stairs, through a pair of wooden doors, and I am inside the exhibition space for the Garibaldi exhibit. A stylishly dressed woman, all in black, wearing wonderful jewelry, probably in her late sixties, is lecturing on Garibaldi.
The son of an Italian immigrant who worked for Noilly Prat, the vermouth maker, Garibaldi's talent was recognized at an early age and fostered by the company owner. Garibaldi met the Lyonnais painter Antoine Vollon, becoming a surrogate son and fervent disciple of this realist artist, mastering the tools of formal composition and the use of color to capture the life of the port where he was born. The paintings are dominated by brightly-colored sailboats, still under skies that can be pellucid or stormy. He was never avant-garde, never influence by the Impressionists, although he lived long enough to be (1863-1941). His paintings of the countryside are executed with the same mastery as the seascapes of Marseille and villages nearby, like Cassis, but they do not stand out as the harbor views do. The name of the exhibition is Le Midi Paisible --the Peaceful South, as in none of the paintings is there the slightest suggestion of anything other than the ordinary life of the region.
***
I return to the New Hotel Vieux Port to find that Helene has not only given me an idea of what wine to buy, but what candy. Her children would like a Malabar Jaune --banana-flavored bubble gum, available in any tabac for 20 centimes. I buy each child five pieces, have them put into a small bag, so that each has their own cache. A quick trip to Le Petit Casino and I am able to buy wine to have with the roast chicken Helene will cook --a Malbec from Cahors, in the Midi-Pyrenees, tannic and full.
I am due at the Masson household at 12:30 p.m., and it is never a good idea to be late, but there is a problem: rue Floralia-Rimet is so far out to the east of Marseille, it is in the direction of Cassis, and not even on my map. I was planning to go to Mass at the Cathedrale Majore, but I need to find somewhere closer, hopefully with an early morning mass.
Gael, the hotel receptionist who lives a few blocks away on rue Paillason, suggests that I might go over to Saint Ferreol, only a block away on the quai of the Vieux Port. I have seen this early Renaissance building, its white facade gleaming, and wondered whether it was an active church. I noticed only some Maghrebien beggars, when I passed it this morning on my way to the harbor tour boat.
The church is not only open, the six o'clock Mass is about to begin. My problem is solved: however far rue Floralia-Rimet is, I wlll have time to get there.
***
The church of Saint Ferreol honors a Greek missionary, who with his brother Saint Ferjeux, was persecuted by Diocletian, and beheaded in 212 A.D. The two brothers are the patron saints of Besancon, where I was a few weeks ago. The church was built by the Augustinian ("black") friars in 1447 where a convent formed by the Knights Templar used to be. It is small and simple and quickly fills up with local people, mostly elderly, but also a few young families.
Listening to a homily in French is still difficult for me, and when the prayers are said, I find myself either saying them in English or just listening. The liturgy has just changed, and I was learning the new form before I left, so it will take a while before I can follow. At the giving of the "Peace", the older Marseillaises in the church kiss each other --it is clear everyone knows everyone well, and gets along.
At the end of the Mass, I walk behind the small organ at the left of the altar to look at the bust of Saint Ferreol, dressed like a Roman centurion, large limpid eyes looking out. I pass the organist, an elderly lady in a hat, who asks me whether the service pleased me. "Yes", I say, and she takes my hand and asks me where I am from. When I tell her, she continues to hold my hand, and ask me all sorts of questions. As she is not going to let me go, I sit down next to her on the bench. The woman who acted as cantor comes over, and she tells her about me, as she does the next woman, and the priest who officiated the sacraments, and the priest homilist.
At the end of the Mass, I walk behind the small organ at the left of the altar to look at the bust of Saint Ferreol, dressed like a Roman centurion, large limpid eyes looking out. I pass the organist, an elderly lady in a hat, who asks me whether the service pleased me. "Yes", I say, and she takes my hand and asks me where I am from. When I tell her, she continues to hold my hand, and ask me all sorts of questions. As she is not going to let me go, I sit down next to her on the bench. The woman who acted as cantor comes over, and she tells her about me, as she does the next woman, and the priest who officiated the sacraments, and the priest homilist.
"How could you do that, come to Europe by yourself? --I would not have dared, I would not have dared", she says admiringly. "She's from America, she's from New York!"
I am quite the celebrity, and everyone is very kind, so I find myself laughing at their generosity of spirit. When I tell them how much I like Marseille, they beam. They are kindness itself --and everyone volunteers a word or two of English, that strange tongue.
Friday, April 27, 2012
April 27, 2012
Marseille
I don't know what to expect of Marseille: I have heard that it is dirty, crime-rdden, full of hooligans, many of them Maghrebien. The Front National has done well here, but it is also an area with a storied working-class culture associated with the port, as anyone who knows Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy (Marius, Fanny, and Cesar) will tell you.
I arrive at the Saint Charles station, which is enclosed in glass and again, ivory marble. I exit the station and move to the Taxi stand before being picked up Monsieur Foulot, a friendly taxidriver, who gives me some advice right off the bat:
Stay away from the area to the left of the Opera late at night. It's full of thieves. That's why I only drive in the day.
My hotel is the New Hotel Vieux Port. Again, I don't know what to expect: will it be seedy, full of rusty ships, old soaks, snarling rummies, out-or-work longshoremen? I am dropped off at the curb of rue Reine Elisabeth because the taxi cannot go any further. Monsieur Foulot points out the hotel, gives me his card, and tells me to call him if I need a taxi --or advice. The sun is shining brightly --which is already an improvement on the cold spring of the last six weeks. It is supposed to be warm and sunny all day and for the next few days.
The hotel is clean and well-appointed. The staff is young, friendly and helpful. My room, with new furniture in a modern style in an agreeably dark wood, has two French windows and balconies and looks out on to the pedestrianized plaza. The desk is large, and features an espresso machine that makes Nespresso. Most important of all, I can hear the sounds of the street --the police sirens, the motorscooters, the dogs barking, the hum of people --this is a city, with a capital "C".
I drop my things, freshen up briefly and go outside: the Vieux Port is now a vast marina for pleasure boats. Several hundred sailing boats and teams of tour boats to the Calanques --the coves along the Mediterranean as far as Cassis-- fill the U-shaped harbor. Julia Child (the woman who brought French cooking to Americans through her television program, The French Chef) and her husband Paul, lived for in Marseille after the Second World War. The Childs had a small apartment in the Vieux Port, which she recollects in her memoir, My Life in France.
I know Marseille is not the same as it was after the War, but I hope that I won't be disappointed, I tell myself as I fall asleep, promising to get up early tomorrow to make the most of the day.
***
The first thing I do is to take the #21 bus to the highest point in Marseille to see the basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde. The church features a giant gilded statue of Mary that watches over the harbor. This incarnation of Mary is the object of great devotion and inside the church --which is more Byzantine than Roman-- paintings and models of ships testify to the prayers to her of those whose lives depend on the sea.
The enormous plaza below the church offers a view of the entire city from all directions, the harbor as well as the low-lying mountains behind to the interior. It is towards the mountains I go next, on the #61 bus to see La Cite Radieuse, Le Corbusier's housing development for those of moderate income. It was designed to provide everything a community might need --bakery, greegrocer, bookstore, beauty salon, take-out food-- all one floor.
On that floor is also a restaurant with a view over the mountains, Le Ventre de l'Architecte. It is there I have lunch with Helene Masson, a teacher of English to post-baccalaureate students preparing for the entrance examination for admission to one of the France's engineering schools. (English is required for admission now.) Helene and her daughter Juliette, are on their way to lunch at the restaurant when I ask them for directions, which leads Helene to ask me to join them.
After lunch we go for coffee in Helene's car to Bar David in the eighth district of Marseille, the most post in the city. It is by the beach, and full of fashionable people enjoying the sunshine. The district is also home to Marseille's foreign consulates, as well as to many government buildings. After, I take the #83 bus back to the Vieux Port and enjoy the ride along the Corniche in the sunshine.
***
Back at the hotel, I need to plan for dinner: the lunch, while a demonstration of the aesthetic heights achievable by a dedicated chef, has not been very filling, which is the irony of such restaurants: small plates, big check. Now I want a real meal, and I think it will be cous cous. Marseille is home to a large North African population, and I know the names of some fancy Maghrebien restaurants, but I want something inexpensive. i ask Gael, the young woman working the reception desk at the hotel, for a recommendation.
She suggests a Tunisian restaurant down the street from her apartment on rue Pavillion, off Saint Ferreol, which is off the Canebiere, the major shopping street a block away from the hotel. I find the restaurant easily --it is quite small and the few tables outside are taken. I sit inside and order a lamb cous-cous.
I am not disappointed. The cous cous is warm and savory, served in the traditional earthenware dish with a bowl of broth and vegetables for sauce on the side. I finish every bite. After, I have two pieces of a North African sweetcake made of sesame seeds and dates. I choose this dessert after seeing two young boys, relatives of the owners, twins about five years old, tuck behind the vitrine featuring the sweets on display and scarf two for themselves. The sweets are very good. My total bill comes to eight euros and fifty centimes, about one-eighth the cost of lunch. --I will be back.
For dessert I have a sweet made of sesame seeds and dates. I get the idea from two little boys, twins, relatives of the owner, who although seated with family outside, trot back into the restaurant behind the vitrine with sweets, and scarf two before their parents can stop them. They have very good taste, in my view: I like their choice of sweets.
My entire meal comes to eight euros fifty centimes, an eighth of what I spent at lunch. I will be back.
Marseille
I don't know what to expect of Marseille: I have heard that it is dirty, crime-rdden, full of hooligans, many of them Maghrebien. The Front National has done well here, but it is also an area with a storied working-class culture associated with the port, as anyone who knows Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy (Marius, Fanny, and Cesar) will tell you.
I arrive at the Saint Charles station, which is enclosed in glass and again, ivory marble. I exit the station and move to the Taxi stand before being picked up Monsieur Foulot, a friendly taxidriver, who gives me some advice right off the bat:
Stay away from the area to the left of the Opera late at night. It's full of thieves. That's why I only drive in the day.
My hotel is the New Hotel Vieux Port. Again, I don't know what to expect: will it be seedy, full of rusty ships, old soaks, snarling rummies, out-or-work longshoremen? I am dropped off at the curb of rue Reine Elisabeth because the taxi cannot go any further. Monsieur Foulot points out the hotel, gives me his card, and tells me to call him if I need a taxi --or advice. The sun is shining brightly --which is already an improvement on the cold spring of the last six weeks. It is supposed to be warm and sunny all day and for the next few days.
The hotel is clean and well-appointed. The staff is young, friendly and helpful. My room, with new furniture in a modern style in an agreeably dark wood, has two French windows and balconies and looks out on to the pedestrianized plaza. The desk is large, and features an espresso machine that makes Nespresso. Most important of all, I can hear the sounds of the street --the police sirens, the motorscooters, the dogs barking, the hum of people --this is a city, with a capital "C".
I drop my things, freshen up briefly and go outside: the Vieux Port is now a vast marina for pleasure boats. Several hundred sailing boats and teams of tour boats to the Calanques --the coves along the Mediterranean as far as Cassis-- fill the U-shaped harbor. Julia Child (the woman who brought French cooking to Americans through her television program, The French Chef) and her husband Paul, lived for in Marseille after the Second World War. The Childs had a small apartment in the Vieux Port, which she recollects in her memoir, My Life in France.
I know Marseille is not the same as it was after the War, but I hope that I won't be disappointed, I tell myself as I fall asleep, promising to get up early tomorrow to make the most of the day.
***
The first thing I do is to take the #21 bus to the highest point in Marseille to see the basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde. The church features a giant gilded statue of Mary that watches over the harbor. This incarnation of Mary is the object of great devotion and inside the church --which is more Byzantine than Roman-- paintings and models of ships testify to the prayers to her of those whose lives depend on the sea.
The enormous plaza below the church offers a view of the entire city from all directions, the harbor as well as the low-lying mountains behind to the interior. It is towards the mountains I go next, on the #61 bus to see La Cite Radieuse, Le Corbusier's housing development for those of moderate income. It was designed to provide everything a community might need --bakery, greegrocer, bookstore, beauty salon, take-out food-- all one floor.
On that floor is also a restaurant with a view over the mountains, Le Ventre de l'Architecte. It is there I have lunch with Helene Masson, a teacher of English to post-baccalaureate students preparing for the entrance examination for admission to one of the France's engineering schools. (English is required for admission now.) Helene and her daughter Juliette, are on their way to lunch at the restaurant when I ask them for directions, which leads Helene to ask me to join them.
After lunch we go for coffee in Helene's car to Bar David in the eighth district of Marseille, the most post in the city. It is by the beach, and full of fashionable people enjoying the sunshine. The district is also home to Marseille's foreign consulates, as well as to many government buildings. After, I take the #83 bus back to the Vieux Port and enjoy the ride along the Corniche in the sunshine.
***
Back at the hotel, I need to plan for dinner: the lunch, while a demonstration of the aesthetic heights achievable by a dedicated chef, has not been very filling, which is the irony of such restaurants: small plates, big check. Now I want a real meal, and I think it will be cous cous. Marseille is home to a large North African population, and I know the names of some fancy Maghrebien restaurants, but I want something inexpensive. i ask Gael, the young woman working the reception desk at the hotel, for a recommendation.
She suggests a Tunisian restaurant down the street from her apartment on rue Pavillion, off Saint Ferreol, which is off the Canebiere, the major shopping street a block away from the hotel. I find the restaurant easily --it is quite small and the few tables outside are taken. I sit inside and order a lamb cous-cous.
I am not disappointed. The cous cous is warm and savory, served in the traditional earthenware dish with a bowl of broth and vegetables for sauce on the side. I finish every bite. After, I have two pieces of a North African sweetcake made of sesame seeds and dates. I choose this dessert after seeing two young boys, relatives of the owners, twins about five years old, tuck behind the vitrine featuring the sweets on display and scarf two for themselves. The sweets are very good. My total bill comes to eight euros and fifty centimes, about one-eighth the cost of lunch. --I will be back.
For dessert I have a sweet made of sesame seeds and dates. I get the idea from two little boys, twins, relatives of the owner, who although seated with family outside, trot back into the restaurant behind the vitrine with sweets, and scarf two before their parents can stop them. They have very good taste, in my view: I like their choice of sweets.
My entire meal comes to eight euros fifty centimes, an eighth of what I spent at lunch. I will be back.
April 26, 2012
Nimes
The Palace of the Popes
The Musee du Petit Palais
Faced with the choice of travelling to Nimes in the morning via train sans bicycle or with, I opt to leave the bicycle at the hotel. The choice was the right one: Nimes is a city to savor.
First off, it is remarkably clean. Its facades, made of the same ivory stone as the amphitheater in Arles, sparkle. It is also laid out on an axis leading to the Jardins de la Fontaine, past the enormous Roman theatre, L'Arene, past La Maison Carree, a Roman temple whose dimensions are square, past Les Quais de la Fontaine, the canals leading to the gardens which are plush with green.
The gardens are terraced, and lead to a summit where in 15 B.C. the Romans built Le Tour Magne, one of a chain of towers along the city's seven kilometers of ramparts. Climbing up the 140 steps is not too difficult, and the view over all of Nimes is well worth it. The gardens themselves are reminiscent of Paris' Luxembourg Gardens: beautifully laid out, with gravel walk ways, large gates with gilded decoration, they are of a piece with the rest of the city. The spirit is ancien regime, rather than medieval, as in Avignon.
Yet Rome lives on in Nimes as more than a relic, as it does in Arles. There is a statue of Augustus Caesar one of the largest squares, as well as a gate named after him; one of the streets off the Quais is called rue Agrippa, and Roman ornamentation faces of mythological beings above doorways, are common. Nimes was, along with much of Provence, one of Rome's happier conquests.
I buy two fougasses from a patisserie on the Avenue Victor Hugo, leading to the Maison Carree, but it is nothing like the one I had in Besancon: it is baked nut brown, flaky as a millefeuille, and peppered with tiny bits of ham, slightly salty. In a word: lunch. if I had to do it again, I would make Nimes my base, rather than Avignon, which despite the fascination of its history, is rough at the edges of the old town and only more so beyond.
I enjoy walking around Nimes, whose streets are straightly laid out. Walking along rue du Mareschal, the iron balconies, each one elaborately forged in lacy patterns, some with figures as well --one featuring a winged angel with breasts like Brigitte Bardot's-- is no small pleasure. In contrast with the sinuous, winding streets of Arles and Avignon, so often silent and forbidding.
***
I come back to Avignon from Nimes in the early evening. I decide to relax and visit Michel Peyaud, where I ate so well the previous night.
Dinner there turns out to be more like the Mad Hatter's tea party than a restaurant meal. I planned to spend the meal reading Le Figaro, a center-right newspaper, but it is not to be. A corpulent elderly woman from the neighborhood, braless, loose top over trousers with a broken zipper (--she shows me), comes in and is seated across the way from me, which becomes an occasion for us to spend the evening chatting. She tells me (among many other things) that she didn't vote in the first round, but may vote for Sarkozy in the second, because she thinks him very smart.
An African woman from Gabon, statuesque and dressed in stone-washed jeans and a parti-colored top, long hair, bangs, and showy jewelry, arrives and sits in the back. Some time later a tall man enters. The elderly woman, stops him dead in his tracks by saying,
"Are you looking for someone to marry?"
He says "no", politely and is seated between her and the woman from Gabon. Later I look up and see that the woman from Gabon (whom I saw eating a steak at her table) is sitting across from him at his table. Meanwhile, the elderly woman is having another glass of champagne.
"I could sit home and drink a glass of champagne, but what for? To look at myself in the mirror? One has to make the effort to go out." She is eighty-three years old and lived in Quebec with her husband, an engineer who died twenty years ago in a car crash.
She keeps saying out loud "How handsome he is!" in reference to Michel, which is very funny, because Michel is a lovely human being of great good will, but only a mother could call him handsome. It seems clear from the way the she goes on, and the way Michel goes in and out of the kitchen, nonplussed, that this scene is replayed whenever the woman comes by, which is at least once a week.
He has great patience with her, but my meal over and paid for, as I leave, he admits quietly that when she has a glass or two more, she can be tiresome. He walks me to the door of the restaurant and the street and shakes my hand before I turn to walk to my hotel. In Old France (la vielle France) --a phrase that evokes a gentler time in the country-- it was customary to do so.
***
I pack the next morning and have a few hours before the 2:16 p.m. train, which I planned so as to save the best for last: the visit to the Palace of the Popes and the Musee du Petit Palais, both on the Place Palais, great plaza in Avignon.
There were five Popes and five "anti-Popes" during the sixty-seven years (1309-1376) that the Papacy was established in Avignon. The details of the Great Schism are matters for scholars, but the legacy of the Avignon popes is a gift to the world. The Palace was expanded during the century to its present size, which is one of the most beautiful of Gothic buildings and the largest Gothic palace in Europe (15,000 square meters). The Grand Chapel alone, which is 52 metres long, 15 metres wide and 20 metres high, with enormous windows to let in the sun, is a poem of exaltation in stone.
April 26, 2012
Nimes, the Palace of the Popes, and the Musee du Petit Palais
Faced with the choice of travelling to Nimes in the morning via train sans bicycle or with, I opt to leave the bicycle at the hotel. The choice was the right one: Nimes is a city to savor.
First off, it is remarkably clean. Its facades, made of the same ivory stone as the amphitheater in Arles, sparkle. It is also laid out on an axis leading to the Jardins de la Fontaine, past the enormous Roman theatre, L'Arene, past La Maison Carree, a Roman temple whose dimensions are square, past Les Quais de la Fontaine, the canals leading to the gardens which are plush with green.
The gardens are terraced, and lead to a summit where in 15 B.C. the Romans built Le Tour Magne, one of a chain of towers along the city's seven kilometers of ramparts. Climbing up the 140 steps is not too difficult, and the view over all of Nimes is well worth it. The gardens themselves are reminiscent of Paris' Luxembourg Gardens: beautifully laid out, with gravel walk ways, large gates with gilded decoration, they are of a piece with the rest of the city. The spirit is ancien regime, rather than medieval, as in Avignon.
Yet Rome lives on in Nimes as more than a relic, as it does in Arles. There is a statue of Augustus Caesar one of the largest squares, as well as a gate named after him; one of the streets off the Quais is called rue Agrippa, and Roman ornamentation faces of mythological beings above doorways, are common. Nimes was, along with much of Provence, one of Rome's happier conquests.
I buy two fougasses from a patisserie on the Avenue Victor Hugo, leading to the Maison Carree, but it is nothing like the one I had in Besancon: it is baked nut brown, flaky as a millefeuille, and peppered with tiny bits of ham, slightly salty. In a word: lunch. if I had to do it again, I would make Nimes my base, rather than Avignon, which despite the fascination of its history, is rough at the edges of the old town and only more so beyond.
I enjoy walking around Nimes, whose streets are straightly laid out. Walking along rue du Mareschal, the iron balconies, each one elaborately forged in lacy patterns, some with figures as well --one featuring a winged angel with breasts like Brigitte Bardot's-- is no small pleasure. In contrast with the sinuous, winding streets of Arles and Avignon, so often silent and forbidding.
***
I come back to Avignon from Nimes in the early evening. I decide to relax and visit Michel Peyaud, where I ate so well the previous night.
Dinner there turns out to be more like the Mad Hatter's tea party than a restaurant meal. I planned to spend the meal reading Le Figaro, a center-right newspaper, but it is not to be. A corpulent elderly woman from the neighborhood, braless, loose top over trousers with a broken zipper (--she shows me), comes in and is seated across the way from me, which becomes an occasion for us to spend the evening chatting. She tells me (among many other things) that she didn't vote in the first round, but may vote for Sarkozy in the second, because she thinks him very smart.
An African woman from Gabon, statuesque and dressed in stone-washed jeans and a parti-colored top, long hair, bangs, and showy jewelry, arrives and sits in the back. Some time later a tall man enters. The elderly woman, stops him dead in his tracks by saying,
"Are you looking for someone to marry?"
He says "no", politely and is seated between her and the woman from Gabon. Later I look up and see that the woman from Gabon (whom I saw eating a steak at her table) is sitting across from him at his table. Meanwhile, the elderly woman is having another glass of champagne.
"I could sit home and drink a glass of champagne, but what for? To look at myself in the mirror? One has to make the effort to go out." She is eighty-three years old and lived in Quebec with her husband, an engineer who died twenty years ago in a car crash.
She keeps saying out loud "How handsome he is!" in reference to Michel, which is very funny, because Michel is a lovely human being of great good will, but only a mother could call him handsome. It seems clear from the way the she goes on, and the way Michel goes in and out of the kitchen, nonplussed, that this scene is replayed whenever the woman comes by, which is at least once a week.
He has great patience with her, but my meal over and paid for, as I leave, he admits quietly that when she has a glass or two more, she can be tiresome. He walks me to the door of the restaurant and the street and shakes my hand before I turn to walk to my hotel. In Old France (la vielle France) --a phrase that evokes a gentler time in the country-- it was customary to do so.
***
I pack the next morning and have a few hours before the 2:16 p.m. train, which I planned so as to save the best for last: the visit to the Palace of the Popes and the Musee du Petit Palais, both on the Place Palais, great plaza in Avignon.
There were five Popes and five "anti-Popes" during the sixty-seven years (1309-1376) that the Papacy was established in Avignon. The details of the Great Schism are matters for scholars, but the legacy of the Avignon popes is a gift to the world. The Palace was expanded during the century to its present size, which is one of the most beautiful of Gothic buildings and the largest Gothic palace in Europe (15,000 square meters). The Grand Chapel alone, which is 52 metres long, 15 metres wide and 20 metres high, with enormous windows to let in the sun, is a poem of exaltation in stone.
Complementing the Palace of the Popes is the Musee du Petit Palais, also on the Place du Palais. This is a collection of paintings in the International Gothic, Italian "primitive" and Avignon Renaissance styles. There are sixteen rooms of paintings and a separate space for special exhibitions. I have never seen so many small paintings on wood or panel for private devotion.
A Boticelli Mother and Child has pride of place in one of the rooms. The painter's Mary is a delicate-featured blond girl, about to give her milk to the robust infant she holds. Boticelli depicts a Mary utterly innocent of the circumstances of the conception of her son, a child-bride. The painter suggests perhaps, that at one time Mary was barely a woman, with an infant to feed. Boticelli captures Mary looking a bit awkward as she is about to offer her milk, perhaps again hinting that as with the infant, the transformation was yet to come.
Nimes
The Palace of the Popes
The Musee du Petit Palais
Faced with the choice of travelling to Nimes in the morning via train sans bicycle or with, I opt to leave the bicycle at the hotel. The choice was the right one: Nimes is a city to savor.
First off, it is remarkably clean. Its facades, made of the same ivory stone as the amphitheater in Arles, sparkle. It is also laid out on an axis leading to the Jardins de la Fontaine, past the enormous Roman theatre, L'Arene, past La Maison Carree, a Roman temple whose dimensions are square, past Les Quais de la Fontaine, the canals leading to the gardens which are plush with green.
The gardens are terraced, and lead to a summit where in 15 B.C. the Romans built Le Tour Magne, one of a chain of towers along the city's seven kilometers of ramparts. Climbing up the 140 steps is not too difficult, and the view over all of Nimes is well worth it. The gardens themselves are reminiscent of Paris' Luxembourg Gardens: beautifully laid out, with gravel walk ways, large gates with gilded decoration, they are of a piece with the rest of the city. The spirit is ancien regime, rather than medieval, as in Avignon.
Yet Rome lives on in Nimes as more than a relic, as it does in Arles. There is a statue of Augustus Caesar one of the largest squares, as well as a gate named after him; one of the streets off the Quais is called rue Agrippa, and Roman ornamentation faces of mythological beings above doorways, are common. Nimes was, along with much of Provence, one of Rome's happier conquests.
I buy two fougasses from a patisserie on the Avenue Victor Hugo, leading to the Maison Carree, but it is nothing like the one I had in Besancon: it is baked nut brown, flaky as a millefeuille, and peppered with tiny bits of ham, slightly salty. In a word: lunch. if I had to do it again, I would make Nimes my base, rather than Avignon, which despite the fascination of its history, is rough at the edges of the old town and only more so beyond.
I enjoy walking around Nimes, whose streets are straightly laid out. Walking along rue du Mareschal, the iron balconies, each one elaborately forged in lacy patterns, some with figures as well --one featuring a winged angel with breasts like Brigitte Bardot's-- is no small pleasure. In contrast with the sinuous, winding streets of Arles and Avignon, so often silent and forbidding.
***
I come back to Avignon from Nimes in the early evening. I decide to relax and visit Michel Peyaud, where I ate so well the previous night.
Dinner there turns out to be more like the Mad Hatter's tea party than a restaurant meal. I planned to spend the meal reading Le Figaro, a center-right newspaper, but it is not to be. A corpulent elderly woman from the neighborhood, braless, loose top over trousers with a broken zipper (--she shows me), comes in and is seated across the way from me, which becomes an occasion for us to spend the evening chatting. She tells me (among many other things) that she didn't vote in the first round, but may vote for Sarkozy in the second, because she thinks him very smart.
An African woman from Gabon, statuesque and dressed in stone-washed jeans and a parti-colored top, long hair, bangs, and showy jewelry, arrives and sits in the back. Some time later a tall man enters. The elderly woman, stops him dead in his tracks by saying,
"Are you looking for someone to marry?"
He says "no", politely and is seated between her and the woman from Gabon. Later I look up and see that the woman from Gabon (whom I saw eating a steak at her table) is sitting across from him at his table. Meanwhile, the elderly woman is having another glass of champagne.
"I could sit home and drink a glass of champagne, but what for? To look at myself in the mirror? One has to make the effort to go out." She is eighty-three years old and lived in Quebec with her husband, an engineer who died twenty years ago in a car crash.
She keeps saying out loud "How handsome he is!" in reference to Michel, which is very funny, because Michel is a lovely human being of great good will, but only a mother could call him handsome. It seems clear from the way the she goes on, and the way Michel goes in and out of the kitchen, nonplussed, that this scene is replayed whenever the woman comes by, which is at least once a week.
He has great patience with her, but my meal over and paid for, as I leave, he admits quietly that when she has a glass or two more, she can be tiresome. He walks me to the door of the restaurant and the street and shakes my hand before I turn to walk to my hotel. In Old France (la vielle France) --a phrase that evokes a gentler time in the country-- it was customary to do so.
***
I pack the next morning and have a few hours before the 2:16 p.m. train, which I planned so as to save the best for last: the visit to the Palace of the Popes and the Musee du Petit Palais, both on the Place Palais, great plaza in Avignon.
There were five Popes and five "anti-Popes" during the sixty-seven years (1309-1376) that the Papacy was established in Avignon. The details of the Great Schism are matters for scholars, but the legacy of the Avignon popes is a gift to the world. The Palace was expanded during the century to its present size, which is one of the most beautiful of Gothic buildings and the largest Gothic palace in Europe (15,000 square meters). The Grand Chapel alone, which is 52 metres long, 15 metres wide and 20 metres high, with enormous windows to let in the sun, is a poem of exaltation in stone.
April 26, 2012
Nimes, the Palace of the Popes, and the Musee du Petit Palais
Faced with the choice of travelling to Nimes in the morning via train sans bicycle or with, I opt to leave the bicycle at the hotel. The choice was the right one: Nimes is a city to savor.
First off, it is remarkably clean. Its facades, made of the same ivory stone as the amphitheater in Arles, sparkle. It is also laid out on an axis leading to the Jardins de la Fontaine, past the enormous Roman theatre, L'Arene, past La Maison Carree, a Roman temple whose dimensions are square, past Les Quais de la Fontaine, the canals leading to the gardens which are plush with green.
The gardens are terraced, and lead to a summit where in 15 B.C. the Romans built Le Tour Magne, one of a chain of towers along the city's seven kilometers of ramparts. Climbing up the 140 steps is not too difficult, and the view over all of Nimes is well worth it. The gardens themselves are reminiscent of Paris' Luxembourg Gardens: beautifully laid out, with gravel walk ways, large gates with gilded decoration, they are of a piece with the rest of the city. The spirit is ancien regime, rather than medieval, as in Avignon.
Yet Rome lives on in Nimes as more than a relic, as it does in Arles. There is a statue of Augustus Caesar one of the largest squares, as well as a gate named after him; one of the streets off the Quais is called rue Agrippa, and Roman ornamentation faces of mythological beings above doorways, are common. Nimes was, along with much of Provence, one of Rome's happier conquests.
I buy two fougasses from a patisserie on the Avenue Victor Hugo, leading to the Maison Carree, but it is nothing like the one I had in Besancon: it is baked nut brown, flaky as a millefeuille, and peppered with tiny bits of ham, slightly salty. In a word: lunch. if I had to do it again, I would make Nimes my base, rather than Avignon, which despite the fascination of its history, is rough at the edges of the old town and only more so beyond.
I enjoy walking around Nimes, whose streets are straightly laid out. Walking along rue du Mareschal, the iron balconies, each one elaborately forged in lacy patterns, some with figures as well --one featuring a winged angel with breasts like Brigitte Bardot's-- is no small pleasure. In contrast with the sinuous, winding streets of Arles and Avignon, so often silent and forbidding.
***
I come back to Avignon from Nimes in the early evening. I decide to relax and visit Michel Peyaud, where I ate so well the previous night.
Dinner there turns out to be more like the Mad Hatter's tea party than a restaurant meal. I planned to spend the meal reading Le Figaro, a center-right newspaper, but it is not to be. A corpulent elderly woman from the neighborhood, braless, loose top over trousers with a broken zipper (--she shows me), comes in and is seated across the way from me, which becomes an occasion for us to spend the evening chatting. She tells me (among many other things) that she didn't vote in the first round, but may vote for Sarkozy in the second, because she thinks him very smart.
An African woman from Gabon, statuesque and dressed in stone-washed jeans and a parti-colored top, long hair, bangs, and showy jewelry, arrives and sits in the back. Some time later a tall man enters. The elderly woman, stops him dead in his tracks by saying,
"Are you looking for someone to marry?"
He says "no", politely and is seated between her and the woman from Gabon. Later I look up and see that the woman from Gabon (whom I saw eating a steak at her table) is sitting across from him at his table. Meanwhile, the elderly woman is having another glass of champagne.
"I could sit home and drink a glass of champagne, but what for? To look at myself in the mirror? One has to make the effort to go out." She is eighty-three years old and lived in Quebec with her husband, an engineer who died twenty years ago in a car crash.
She keeps saying out loud "How handsome he is!" in reference to Michel, which is very funny, because Michel is a lovely human being of great good will, but only a mother could call him handsome. It seems clear from the way the she goes on, and the way Michel goes in and out of the kitchen, nonplussed, that this scene is replayed whenever the woman comes by, which is at least once a week.
He has great patience with her, but my meal over and paid for, as I leave, he admits quietly that when she has a glass or two more, she can be tiresome. He walks me to the door of the restaurant and the street and shakes my hand before I turn to walk to my hotel. In Old France (la vielle France) --a phrase that evokes a gentler time in the country-- it was customary to do so.
***
I pack the next morning and have a few hours before the 2:16 p.m. train, which I planned so as to save the best for last: the visit to the Palace of the Popes and the Musee du Petit Palais, both on the Place Palais, great plaza in Avignon.
There were five Popes and five "anti-Popes" during the sixty-seven years (1309-1376) that the Papacy was established in Avignon. The details of the Great Schism are matters for scholars, but the legacy of the Avignon popes is a gift to the world. The Palace was expanded during the century to its present size, which is one of the most beautiful of Gothic buildings and the largest Gothic palace in Europe (15,000 square meters). The Grand Chapel alone, which is 52 metres long, 15 metres wide and 20 metres high, with enormous windows to let in the sun, is a poem of exaltation in stone.
Complementing the Palace of the Popes is the Musee du Petit Palais, also on the Place du Palais. This is a collection of paintings in the International Gothic, Italian "primitive" and Avignon Renaissance styles. There are sixteen rooms of paintings and a separate space for special exhibitions. I have never seen so many small paintings on wood or panel for private devotion.
A Boticelli Mother and Child has pride of place in one of the rooms. The painter's Mary is a delicate-featured blond girl, about to give her milk to the robust infant she holds. Boticelli depicts a Mary utterly innocent of the circumstances of the conception of her son, a child-bride. The painter suggests perhaps, that at one time Mary was barely a woman, with an infant to feed. Boticelli captures Mary looking a bit awkward as she is about to offer her milk, perhaps again hinting that as with the infant, the transformation was yet to come.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
April 24, 2012
What La Provence Had To Say About The Elections
La Provence is a regional paper that covers local topics of interest to those living in the five of the seven departements of Provence, Gard, Bouches-du-Rhone, Vaucluse, Alpes de Haute-Provence, and Hautes-Alpes. (Alpes Maritimes and Var are the other two.)
La Provence has, without fear or favor, given voice to Sunday's electoral results, in the region, which leaned 2-1 rightward, with Sarkozy and Le Pen in first and second place in each of the departements and Le Pen besting Sarkozy in one out of five.
Within the region, certain towns stand out: Bedarrides, where Le Pen received 41% of the vote. Port-de-Bouc, where Melenchon, at the other end of the political spectrum, received 36.47%, both figures representing the largest percentage for each in any district in France. In Saint Gilles, near Gard, where Le Pen received 25.51% to Sarkozy's 24.86%, native-born French voters and North African immigrants give their reaction to Le Pen's higher than expected numbers. The town of Arles, which stayed resolutely Socialist, amid a sea of Frontistes in the Arles region overall, congratulates itself on the high voting tallies for the Socialist and Communist candidates. Finally, in Tarascon, a Front National candidate offers her own analysis of Le Pen's success, and her own in the next legislative elections.
In Bedarrides, a village of 5,209 with little rime, the Le Peniste vote is explained as premptive: We are a village of Gauls! It's a matter of prevention! We don't want problems here, so we vote FN to prevent them. We are not troubled, but we act before it can happen."
In Port-le-Bouc on the Mediterranean, a community of about 18,000, the Communist candidate has traditionally done well, so Melenchon's success is not surprising. Many will vote the for Hollande, the front-running Socialist, but do so out of "republican discipline" with a view to later winning sixty seats in the Assemblee Nationale (France's equivalent of the House of Representatives), and forcing Hollande "to pursue a politics of the Left". Residents of Port-de-Bouc have suffered the consequences of closure of naval shipyards and the loss of 4,000 jobs. Unlike Bedarrides, "we are not a village of Gauls, we clearly hope that the French people might have a say in their future."
In Gard, where Le Pen achieved her only first-place finish in the first round, some Gardois are ashamed of the association. The FN has strong support in the region, as manifested by the election of a Front National candidate for Mayor in 1991. If Le Pen hadn't been first, I would have been surprised, says one voter. Another, without specifying for whom she voted, says It was a vote of we who are fed up, a way of slamming the fist on the table! Because we are sick of the 25 robberiies that take place here every week, sick of the thefts from our businesses, sick of watching "them" deal drugs in our city, sick of seeing "them" drive around in their fancy cars, while they don't work. --By which are meant "Arabs", or more specifically, North Africans.
Speaking for the Magrebine (North African) community Abdel, Mounir, Radouane and Keamel, seated at a cafe in a North African area in Saint GIlles strike a conciliatory note. People base their judgments on cliches, but they do not understand that our children do not want the same life we have, to work in the fields for a miserable salary. but there is no work for them. There is an ordinary racism here that would have you think that there is a lot of tension between the communities, but there is none. The North African community participates in the local culture, although we don't integrate. What keeps everything from boiling over? It's simple: it's called hypocrisy.
By contrast, politics in the town of Arles, where the Francois Hollande won easily, seem tame. Arles is an island of Socialism in a sea of Sarkozy and Le Pen voters in the larger Arles region. The big loser in the election there is Francois Bayrou of the Movement Democratique,, who received 2,500 fewer votes this year than he did in 2007 (French presidents serve for five years.) His numbers dropped from 13.53% to 5.34%, making him the biggest loser in the first round in Arles.
Finally, Falerie Laupies, Frontiste candidate for the Assemblee Nationale sees Sunday's vote as a legitimisation of the Front National's program, placing it on a par with the Socialist Party and Sarkozy's UMP. She iis running in Tarascon, a village near Arles, which is chiefly known for being where Soleiado, the manufacturer of ready-to-wear and home furnishings based on Provençal traditional patterns, is located.
Such a diversity of views within one region needs some explaining as voters for Le Pen and Melenchon have similar socio-economic backgrounds. In fact, a certain number of Le Pen's voters vote Socialist in the second round. Why? A pollster on television explains that for working class voters not attracted to membership in one of the hard-left parties (Communist, Trotskyist) are attracted to the patriotic message of the Front National. Le Pen having failed to win entry to the second round, a certain percentage of those voters will vote Socialist because the Socialist Party, rather than UMP, is closer to their thinking on issues like health care and housing, issues the French call le dimension social.
What La Provence Had To Say About The Elections
La Provence is a regional paper that covers local topics of interest to those living in the five of the seven departements of Provence, Gard, Bouches-du-Rhone, Vaucluse, Alpes de Haute-Provence, and Hautes-Alpes. (Alpes Maritimes and Var are the other two.)
La Provence has, without fear or favor, given voice to Sunday's electoral results, in the region, which leaned 2-1 rightward, with Sarkozy and Le Pen in first and second place in each of the departements and Le Pen besting Sarkozy in one out of five.
Within the region, certain towns stand out: Bedarrides, where Le Pen received 41% of the vote. Port-de-Bouc, where Melenchon, at the other end of the political spectrum, received 36.47%, both figures representing the largest percentage for each in any district in France. In Saint Gilles, near Gard, where Le Pen received 25.51% to Sarkozy's 24.86%, native-born French voters and North African immigrants give their reaction to Le Pen's higher than expected numbers. The town of Arles, which stayed resolutely Socialist, amid a sea of Frontistes in the Arles region overall, congratulates itself on the high voting tallies for the Socialist and Communist candidates. Finally, in Tarascon, a Front National candidate offers her own analysis of Le Pen's success, and her own in the next legislative elections.
In Bedarrides, a village of 5,209 with little rime, the Le Peniste vote is explained as premptive: We are a village of Gauls! It's a matter of prevention! We don't want problems here, so we vote FN to prevent them. We are not troubled, but we act before it can happen."
In Port-le-Bouc on the Mediterranean, a community of about 18,000, the Communist candidate has traditionally done well, so Melenchon's success is not surprising. Many will vote the for Hollande, the front-running Socialist, but do so out of "republican discipline" with a view to later winning sixty seats in the Assemblee Nationale (France's equivalent of the House of Representatives), and forcing Hollande "to pursue a politics of the Left". Residents of Port-de-Bouc have suffered the consequences of closure of naval shipyards and the loss of 4,000 jobs. Unlike Bedarrides, "we are not a village of Gauls, we clearly hope that the French people might have a say in their future."
In Gard, where Le Pen achieved her only first-place finish in the first round, some Gardois are ashamed of the association. The FN has strong support in the region, as manifested by the election of a Front National candidate for Mayor in 1991. If Le Pen hadn't been first, I would have been surprised, says one voter. Another, without specifying for whom she voted, says It was a vote of we who are fed up, a way of slamming the fist on the table! Because we are sick of the 25 robberiies that take place here every week, sick of the thefts from our businesses, sick of watching "them" deal drugs in our city, sick of seeing "them" drive around in their fancy cars, while they don't work. --By which are meant "Arabs", or more specifically, North Africans.
Speaking for the Magrebine (North African) community Abdel, Mounir, Radouane and Keamel, seated at a cafe in a North African area in Saint GIlles strike a conciliatory note. People base their judgments on cliches, but they do not understand that our children do not want the same life we have, to work in the fields for a miserable salary. but there is no work for them. There is an ordinary racism here that would have you think that there is a lot of tension between the communities, but there is none. The North African community participates in the local culture, although we don't integrate. What keeps everything from boiling over? It's simple: it's called hypocrisy.
By contrast, politics in the town of Arles, where the Francois Hollande won easily, seem tame. Arles is an island of Socialism in a sea of Sarkozy and Le Pen voters in the larger Arles region. The big loser in the election there is Francois Bayrou of the Movement Democratique,, who received 2,500 fewer votes this year than he did in 2007 (French presidents serve for five years.) His numbers dropped from 13.53% to 5.34%, making him the biggest loser in the first round in Arles.
Finally, Falerie Laupies, Frontiste candidate for the Assemblee Nationale sees Sunday's vote as a legitimisation of the Front National's program, placing it on a par with the Socialist Party and Sarkozy's UMP. She iis running in Tarascon, a village near Arles, which is chiefly known for being where Soleiado, the manufacturer of ready-to-wear and home furnishings based on Provençal traditional patterns, is located.
Such a diversity of views within one region needs some explaining as voters for Le Pen and Melenchon have similar socio-economic backgrounds. In fact, a certain number of Le Pen's voters vote Socialist in the second round. Why? A pollster on television explains that for working class voters not attracted to membership in one of the hard-left parties (Communist, Trotskyist) are attracted to the patriotic message of the Front National. Le Pen having failed to win entry to the second round, a certain percentage of those voters will vote Socialist because the Socialist Party, rather than UMP, is closer to their thinking on issues like health care and housing, issues the French call le dimension social.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
(1 )Avignon to Arles
(2) First round final vote totals
I set out at 8:00 a.m. for Arles, but take the wrong right turn and travel through one of the banlieues Achille warned me about, only realizing with certainty my mistake when i reach a dump. Turning around I return where I started, go one block further, turniing onto Boulevard St. Ruf, where I began my ride to Saint Remy yesterday.
Saint Remy is nineteen kilometers from Avignon, but Arles, closer to the Mediterranean, is thirty-four. I reach the outer limits of the town by 11:15 a.m., having stopped only once, at a Routiers, a truck stop, where the woman in charge makes me an espresso, then lets me help myself to croissants and pain chocolats while she returns to doing her sums. I make my way to the Tourist Office on Boulevard des Lices, the main street and lock my bike up. The town has many Roman monuments; it is also known for its bullfights, which take place during the feria Holy Week and in September.
I walk Rue de Laure until I reach the Roman amphitheater; it has been cleaned recently, so its ivory stones gleam in the sun. All around it are small restaurants and ice cream stands. The amphitheater is a smaller Roman Coliseum, although unlike Rome, where the hotels and apartments nearby are the most expensive in Rome, here the buildings, are not new, and not renovated. Living next to the amphitheater is more like living next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia than living La Dolce Vita in Rome --the amphitheater is just that big ruin across the way from folks.
I walk Rue de Laure until I reach the Roman amphitheater; it has been cleaned recently, so its ivory stones gleam in the sun. All around it are small restaurants and ice cream stands. The amphitheater is a smaller Roman Coliseum, although unlike Rome, where the hotels and apartments nearby are the most expensive in Rome, here the buildings, are not new, and not renovated. Living next to the amphitheater is more like living next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia than living La Dolce Vita in Rome --the amphitheater is just that big ruin across the way from folks.
The old tow of Arles looks unapologetically backward: the buildings, many dilapidated, look no different from what they did when Van Gogh lived there. The narrow streets wind up hill and down, to the Rhone's edge (modern Arles rises on the opposite bank). There Summer Gardens are cheek by jowl with the ruins: there is a sense of time standing still.
La Maison Jaune ("The Yellow House"), where Van Gogh lived, no longer exists: it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War. The Hotel Dieu, the charity hospital where Van Gogh was treated after he cut off his ear lobe has been preserved and is now a public space. It looks as it did when Van Gogh painted it: a cloister courtyard with yellow arches and a central garden of brightly colored flowers. Located in the middle of town, it cannot compare with the peacefulness of Saint Remy. Parts of the old town look more like Andalusia than they do the South of France. Arles, with its Spanish influences, evokes Goya, that painter of human cruelty and suffering, more than it does Provence, its location in Provençal notwithstanding.
***
The final numbers for the lection appear in today's papers: Hollande, 28.63%,; Sarkozy, 27.18%; Marine Le Pen, 17.89%; J.L. Melenchon, 11.10%; Francois Bayrou, 9.13%; Eva Joly, 2.31%; Dupon-Aignan, 1.79%;, Poutou, 1.15%, N Arthaud, 0.56%, and Cheminade, .025%.
Sarkozy's margin is much closer than originally thought. He is asking for three debates in the next two weeks, debates Hollande will not accede to unless something dramatic happens in the next few days to reveal him weaker than Sunday's results suggest. Nonetheless, because pollsters overestimated Melenchon's appeal, and underestimated Le Pen's, no winner can be predicted on May 2. While leaders of the Front National might urge Le Pen's voters not to switch to Sarkozy, in fact those voters may not be content to have made their protest in the first round, and abandoning theory vote for Sarkozy as the least bad of the two candidates.
Assessment by leading economists of what the future holds for the French are dispiriting: real estate prices down 15-30%; savings accounts barely keepi up with inflation, and the French are reluctant to invest in company shares, their fear of losing it all being greater than their appetite for risk.
Talking to people who work in restaurants and hotels, to young people working as interns (stagiares) it is obvious that people work less and have more time off, but the balance seems to have tipped: whereas before the benefits provided by the state, along with a moderately paid, job guaranteed for life, added up to a comfortable way of life for many tioday more and more people work part-time without benefits, and young people agree to work as volunteers for a company that pays them nothing and is unlikely to hire them when the internship ends. Obtaining internships is the only way to get a job, but with mkore interns than jobs, that majority that is working for nothing and will have no job is losing patience, hence the high numbers for Melenchon among those between 18 and 25.
Conversely, looking at the voting results in the South of France, where immigration is at its highest, Sarkozy caries the day in four out of five departments by 1-3 percentage points, taking Bouches-du Rhome, Vaucluse, Alpes de haute Provence, and Haute-Alpes. However, Marine Le Pen is a close second, and in Gard (a department which includes the old Roman town of Nimes), she bests him, the only department in all of France where she is victor.
Everyone is making analogies to Mitterand in 1981, including Hollande, but there has been no rising up of the Left, as was predicted. Instead, there has been a surge rightward --not a given, because in 2007 the Front National underperformed, receiving only 10% of the vote, instead of the projected 12-!3%. many of ts voters are small business owners, semi-skilled laborers from small towns, sick of seeing the France of their parents --those thirty years when things got a little better each year-- now just a memory.
France is a country that values labor, that enshrines highly skilled workers across the spectrum: fine art restorers, but also butchers and bakers and taxi drivers and santitation men. There is a deep-seated belief on the part of many French that whatever your metier, if you exercise it well, that you as an individual with a skilled trade, are owed a certain respect, a view which is not so often celebrated in the United States. That attitude is under attack by those who would like to make France more efficient to make it more competitive --and indeed, it may be the only way for France's citizens to continue to enjoy the quality of life a majority of them have had. It is nonetheless painful to watch the ordinary struggles of people torn between living as part of small communities, as France has traditionally done --and becoming part of a larger, more impersonal world, whose only advantage is that no one will fall further behind.
Charles Dietz, my physicist friend, stated clearly the view of many French confronted with the choice: rather than admit foreign influences strange to French ways, perhaps it is better to live a little less well, but to stick to one's principles and die with one's own (mourir avec ses siens).
(1 )Avignon to Arles
(2) First round final vote totals
I set out at 8:00 a.m. for Arles, but take the wrong right turn and travel through one of the banlieues Achille warned me about, only realizing with certainty my mistake when i reach a dump. Turning around I return where I started, go one block further, turniing onto Boulevard St. Ruf, where I began my ride to Saint Remy yesterday.
Saint Remy is nineteen kilometers from Avignon, but Arles, closer to the Mediterranean, is thirty-four. I reach the outer limits of the town by 11:15 a.m., having stopped only once, at a Routiers, a truck stop, where the woman in charge makes me an espresso, then lets me help myself to croissants and pain chocolats while she returns to doing her sums. I make my way to the Tourist Office on Boulevard des Lices, the main street and lock my bike up. The town has many Roman monuments; it is also known for its bullfights, which take place during the feria Holy Week and in September.
I walk Rue de Laure until I reach the Roman amphitheater; it has been cleaned recently, so its ivory stones gleam in the sun. All around it are small restaurants and ice cream stands. The amphitheater is a smaller Roman Coliseum, although unlike Rome, where the hotels and apartments nearby are the most expensive in Rome, here the buildings, are not new, and not renovated. Living next to the amphitheater is more like living next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia than living La Dolce Vita in Rome --the amphitheater is just that big ruin across the way from folks.
I walk Rue de Laure until I reach the Roman amphitheater; it has been cleaned recently, so its ivory stones gleam in the sun. All around it are small restaurants and ice cream stands. The amphitheater is a smaller Roman Coliseum, although unlike Rome, where the hotels and apartments nearby are the most expensive in Rome, here the buildings, are not new, and not renovated. Living next to the amphitheater is more like living next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia than living La Dolce Vita in Rome --the amphitheater is just that big ruin across the way from folks.
The old tow of Arles looks unapologetically backward: the buildings, many dilapidated, look no different from what they did when Van Gogh lived there. The narrow streets wind up hill and down, to the Rhone's edge (modern Arles rises on the opposite bank). There Summer Gardens are cheek by jowl with the ruins: there is a sense of time standing still.
La Maison Jaune ("The Yellow House"), where Van Gogh lived, no longer exists: it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War. The Hotel Dieu, the charity hospital where Van Gogh was treated after he cut off his ear lobe has been preserved and is now a public space. It looks as it did when Van Gogh painted it: a cloister courtyard with yellow arches and a central garden of brightly colored flowers. Located in the middle of town, it cannot compare with the peacefulness of Saint Remy. Parts of the old town look more like Andalusia than they do the South of France. Arles, with its Spanish influences, evokes Goya, that painter of human cruelty and suffering, more than it does Provence, its location in Provençal notwithstanding.
***
The final numbers for the lection appear in today's papers: Hollande, 28.63%,; Sarkozy, 27.18%; Marine Le Pen, 17.89%; J.L. Melenchon, 11.10%; Francois Bayrou, 9.13%; Eva Joly, 2.31%; Dupon-Aignan, 1.79%;, Poutou, 1.15%, N Arthaud, 0.56%, and Cheminade, .025%.
Sarkozy's margin is much closer than originally thought. He is asking for three debates in the next two weeks, debates Hollande will not accede to unless something dramatic happens in the next few days to reveal him weaker than Sunday's results suggest. Nonetheless, because pollsters overestimated Melenchon's appeal, and underestimated Le Pen's, no winner can be predicted on May 2. While leaders of the Front National might urge Le Pen's voters not to switch to Sarkozy, in fact those voters may not be content to have made their protest in the first round, and abandoning theory vote for Sarkozy as the least bad of the two candidates.
Assessment by leading economists of what the future holds for the French are dispiriting: real estate prices down 15-30%; savings accounts barely keepi up with inflation, and the French are reluctant to invest in company shares, their fear of losing it all being greater than their appetite for risk.
Talking to people who work in restaurants and hotels, to young people working as interns (stagiares) it is obvious that people work less and have more time off, but the balance seems to have tipped: whereas before the benefits provided by the state, along with a moderately paid, job guaranteed for life, added up to a comfortable way of life for many tioday more and more people work part-time without benefits, and young people agree to work as volunteers for a company that pays them nothing and is unlikely to hire them when the internship ends. Obtaining internships is the only way to get a job, but with mkore interns than jobs, that majority that is working for nothing and will have no job is losing patience, hence the high numbers for Melenchon among those between 18 and 25.
Conversely, looking at the voting results in the South of France, where immigration is at its highest, Sarkozy caries the day in four out of five departments by 1-3 percentage points, taking Bouches-du Rhome, Vaucluse, Alpes de haute Provence, and Haute-Alpes. However, Marine Le Pen is a close second, and in Gard (a department which includes the old Roman town of Nimes), she bests him, the only department in all of France where she is victor.
Everyone is making analogies to Mitterand in 1981, including Hollande, but there has been no rising up of the Left, as was predicted. Instead, there has been a surge rightward --not a given, because in 2007 the Front National underperformed, receiving only 10% of the vote, instead of the projected 12-!3%. many of ts voters are small business owners, semi-skilled laborers from small towns, sick of seeing the France of their parents --those thirty years when things got a little better each year-- now just a memory.
France is a country that values labor, that enshrines highly skilled workers across the spectrum: fine art restorers, but also butchers and bakers and taxi drivers and santitation men. There is a deep-seated belief on the part of many French that whatever your metier, if you exercise it well, that you as an individual with a skilled trade, are owed a certain respect, a view which is not so often celebrated in the United States. That attitude is under attack by those who would like to make France more efficient to make it more competitive --and indeed, it may be the only way for France's citizens to continue to enjoy the quality of life a majority of them have had. It is nonetheless painful to watch the ordinary struggles of people torn between living as part of small communities, as France has traditionally done --and becoming part of a larger, more impersonal world, whose only advantage is that no one will fall further behind.
Charles Dietz, my physicist friend, stated clearly the view of many French confronted with the choice: rather than admit foreign influences strange to French ways, perhaps it is better to live a little less well, but to stick to one's principles and die with one's own (mourir avec ses siens).
Monday, April 23, 2012
April 23, 2012
Avignon to Saint Remy
I find Provence Bike, off Boulevard Saint Ruf, near the bus station, easily. Philippe, the owner, quickly outfits me with everything I might need for my three days in the area: mountain bike with 24 speeds, maps of routes I might take, placed in a plastic cover that can attach to the bike handle so I don't need to search for maps in my knapsack; teardrop helmet, pump, repair kit and lock for the bicycle. All for 38 Euros, in my mind, a very reasonable fee.
I set off for Saint Remy, 25 kilometers away, braving the single file of traffic until I reach the turnoff for Saint Remy at Rognonans. From there I have the road pretty much to myself until I arrive in Saint Remy. The bicycle's sophisticated derailers work easily, and I am able to adjust my speed as I need, so when my left ankle starts to bother me, I can adjust and continue. The only thing that really bothers me is the constant wind, the mistral, which never blows enough to threaten my progress, but never lets up, either.
I reach Saint Remy within an hour, more of less, or leaving Avignon, arriving at one-thirty p.m. I chat a little with a bus driver from Marseille parked on the road to the hospital of Saint Paul up the road, who has brought a Royal Caribbean cruise line tour to the town. He gives me a bottle of water from his cache and I offer to buy him a coffee in thanks, which he refuses.
I find the local tourist office closed: everyone in town is at lunch until two p.m., just as in Besancon, Beaune and Avignon. I lock my bicycle up near the entrance to the Tourist Office and walk around a bit. I discover the Roman arch and walk through it to a small street with many shops selling traditional Provencal products, then turn back and walk into a cafe, where I have a very good cafe au lait until the Tourist Office opens.
Coming back to the Tourist Office shortly after 2 p.m., the head of the office shows me the route to the Hospital of Saint Paul de Mausole, where Van Gogh voluntarily committed himself after, having chopped off his ear lobe in Arles, his behavior alarmed the Arlesiens enough for most of the town to sign a petition calling for his removal. I can cycle there or I can go on foot. Being ready to contemplate return home by local bus, I tell the lady I will walk. She asks me where I parked my bike, and when I indicate the spot in the parking lot she tells me my bike is stationed next to her vehicle, and that is OK.
I start walking in the indicated direction, but as usual, am a bit anxious about whether I have taken the right path. I encounter a young man of about twenty years of age, fair-skinned and Maghrebien --of Algerian or Moroccan origin-- who is walking up to the hospital himself. I ask if I can walk with him, and we fall into conversation.
His mother works at the psychiatric hospital, which is still serving the needs of those with major mental illnesses. As he walks, he smokes a cigarette he rolled himself, which is almost smoked through: it slips out of his fingers once or twice on the walk up to Saint Paul, about which he is nonplussed, lighting up again. His name is Achille, the French for Achilles. When I tell him that I am staying in Avignon, he warns me to be very careful, there are a lot of robberies, especially around the bus station, not far from my hotel. He tells me that there are also a lot of robberies in Saint Remy and Arles, although Marseille is worse. When I ask him whether the crime is caused by drugs, he nods his head affirmatively.
"People in the HLMs (the abbreviation for the housing projects in which a majority of the immigrants from North Africa live throughout France) buy and sell a lot of drugs --in the United States you have crack and heroin, and we have those too, but most people there smoke shit."
Achille uses the same word as in English to describe this drug, with which I am unfamiliar.
"It is a resin of the marijuana plant that is made into balls and smoked. It leaves the smoker very calm, very relaxed."
"It is a resin of the marijuana plant that is made into balls and smoked. It leaves the smoker very calm, very relaxed."
We commiserate briefly about the ravages of drugs in both our countries, as by now we are at the main gate of the hospital. Achille points out the entrance to the old hospital, which can be visited, and I shake his hand ,and thank him for his help. (After my visit to the hospital, he passes me on the road back, calling out Au revoir! from his motorbike.)
***
The hospital of Saint Paul de Mausole, a conversion of the original Benedictine abbey, was a place of refuge for those, like Van Gogh, suffering from psychiatric maladies doctors were helpless to treat. There were a variety of treatments --frequently more tortures than remedies-- that were imposed on patients. The day was structured strictly to assure outward predictability to those whose minds had bent capriciously towards hallucinations, violent impulses and attacks of deep melancholy. At the time of Van Gogh's commitment --which lasted fifty-three weeks, from May 1888 to May 1889, the hospital was considered one of the most advanced in France in the treatment of psychiatric maladies.
There were no drugs available to assuage the psychic distress of patients, but the beauty of the site was for Van Gogh, a place where he was able to paint productively. Leaving the hospital he once more plunged into a nightmare world, which led to him shooting himself, from whose wounds he died after three days. He was thirty-seven. His brother Theo, who had been his chief support throughout, killed himself a few months later.
The Van Gogh family, which had been active either as Protestant preachers or art dealers for a few generations, was afflicted with epilepsy. Van Gogh's father was an inflexible man, whose rigidity of opinion was a source of rebellion by Vincent. His mother buried four of her seven children before her own death at an advanced age. The family lived an isolated life in their native village, in which the majority of residents were Catholic, rather than Protestant. Vincent was taciturn, although always given to occupy himself with drawing, when he was not studying the prescribed course. During his lifetime he managed to master four languages. Notwithstanding, his emotional life was circumscribed by his inability to successfully integrate his desires for companionship with the attitudes required to make friends and keep them. He was frustrated in his loves, and his competition with Gauguin, who had come to Provence to work at his brother Theo's invitation, exacerbated his tendency to hostility.
At the age of thirty-five, he began to have psychotic hallucinations. This tendency was exacerbated by his consumption of tobacco and absinthe, a narcotic liquid that induced visions. He ate poorly and was, in addition to his already serious predisposition to mental illness, physically not strong. He was idealistic in his hopes --he hoped, before he took up painting-- to be a pastor. His unstable temperament led those who could have approved him for assignment to a parish to reject his applications. When he began to paint he did so in a fury of productivity: eight hundred paintings and one-hundred fifty drawings, not one of which was every sold in his lifetime.
I, who have never much cared for Van Gogh, am so moved by the details of his story, that I stop in the chapel of the abbey to say a prayer for all those living and enduring suffering from mental illness. It is brought home forcibly to me the greatness of his accomplishment, as the abbey --while not owning any originals by the painter-- has used laminated reproductions of many works not usually seen in New York, where the Museum of Modern Art has pride of place as a repository of Van Gogh. Van Gogh made paintings of field workers inspired by Millet, he produced another painting of a man and a horse inspired by Delacroix --clearly there are a multitude of paintings to be known in his catalogue raisonne. Looking out the window of the room organized to simulate Van Gogh's; to see below the lovely garden, with its neatly organized rows of rosemary and other herbs, is to understand how peaceful the environment created for him was.
Indeed, everything the eye takes in now is unchanged from the perfect inspiration Cezanne, Van Gogh and others found in Provence. As with all great painters of landscape, the beauty of the depiction has about it not just an extraordinary "painterliness" in itself, but a faithfulness in the depiction of the actual landscape, that makes coming upon the trees and fields for the first time a verification, rather than a discovery, of their beauty.
I am so inspired by my trip to Saint Remy, I think I will bicycle to Arles tomorrow, to see La Maison Jaune, where Van Gogh lived before his interment in Saint Remy. It seems curious that I should have seen Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh in Arles and find myself driven to visit these places where Van Gogh lived and worked. The film, it seemed to me, presented a distorted picture of his life, imagining him as a sort of idiot savant debauche. Yet after visiting Saint Paul de Mausole, I feel a profound sense of sadness, an admixture of pity and admiration for him.
Avignon to Saint Remy
I find Provence Bike, off Boulevard Saint Ruf, near the bus station, easily. Philippe, the owner, quickly outfits me with everything I might need for my three days in the area: mountain bike with 24 speeds, maps of routes I might take, placed in a plastic cover that can attach to the bike handle so I don't need to search for maps in my knapsack; teardrop helmet, pump, repair kit and lock for the bicycle. All for 38 Euros, in my mind, a very reasonable fee.
I set off for Saint Remy, 25 kilometers away, braving the single file of traffic until I reach the turnoff for Saint Remy at Rognonans. From there I have the road pretty much to myself until I arrive in Saint Remy. The bicycle's sophisticated derailers work easily, and I am able to adjust my speed as I need, so when my left ankle starts to bother me, I can adjust and continue. The only thing that really bothers me is the constant wind, the mistral, which never blows enough to threaten my progress, but never lets up, either.
I reach Saint Remy within an hour, more of less, or leaving Avignon, arriving at one-thirty p.m. I chat a little with a bus driver from Marseille parked on the road to the hospital of Saint Paul up the road, who has brought a Royal Caribbean cruise line tour to the town. He gives me a bottle of water from his cache and I offer to buy him a coffee in thanks, which he refuses.
I find the local tourist office closed: everyone in town is at lunch until two p.m., just as in Besancon, Beaune and Avignon. I lock my bicycle up near the entrance to the Tourist Office and walk around a bit. I discover the Roman arch and walk through it to a small street with many shops selling traditional Provencal products, then turn back and walk into a cafe, where I have a very good cafe au lait until the Tourist Office opens.
Coming back to the Tourist Office shortly after 2 p.m., the head of the office shows me the route to the Hospital of Saint Paul de Mausole, where Van Gogh voluntarily committed himself after, having chopped off his ear lobe in Arles, his behavior alarmed the Arlesiens enough for most of the town to sign a petition calling for his removal. I can cycle there or I can go on foot. Being ready to contemplate return home by local bus, I tell the lady I will walk. She asks me where I parked my bike, and when I indicate the spot in the parking lot she tells me my bike is stationed next to her vehicle, and that is OK.
I start walking in the indicated direction, but as usual, am a bit anxious about whether I have taken the right path. I encounter a young man of about twenty years of age, fair-skinned and Maghrebien --of Algerian or Moroccan origin-- who is walking up to the hospital himself. I ask if I can walk with him, and we fall into conversation.
His mother works at the psychiatric hospital, which is still serving the needs of those with major mental illnesses. As he walks, he smokes a cigarette he rolled himself, which is almost smoked through: it slips out of his fingers once or twice on the walk up to Saint Paul, about which he is nonplussed, lighting up again. His name is Achille, the French for Achilles. When I tell him that I am staying in Avignon, he warns me to be very careful, there are a lot of robberies, especially around the bus station, not far from my hotel. He tells me that there are also a lot of robberies in Saint Remy and Arles, although Marseille is worse. When I ask him whether the crime is caused by drugs, he nods his head affirmatively.
"People in the HLMs (the abbreviation for the housing projects in which a majority of the immigrants from North Africa live throughout France) buy and sell a lot of drugs --in the United States you have crack and heroin, and we have those too, but most people there smoke shit."
Achille uses the same word as in English to describe this drug, with which I am unfamiliar.
"It is a resin of the marijuana plant that is made into balls and smoked. It leaves the smoker very calm, very relaxed."
"It is a resin of the marijuana plant that is made into balls and smoked. It leaves the smoker very calm, very relaxed."
We commiserate briefly about the ravages of drugs in both our countries, as by now we are at the main gate of the hospital. Achille points out the entrance to the old hospital, which can be visited, and I shake his hand ,and thank him for his help. (After my visit to the hospital, he passes me on the road back, calling out Au revoir! from his motorbike.)
***
The hospital of Saint Paul de Mausole, a conversion of the original Benedictine abbey, was a place of refuge for those, like Van Gogh, suffering from psychiatric maladies doctors were helpless to treat. There were a variety of treatments --frequently more tortures than remedies-- that were imposed on patients. The day was structured strictly to assure outward predictability to those whose minds had bent capriciously towards hallucinations, violent impulses and attacks of deep melancholy. At the time of Van Gogh's commitment --which lasted fifty-three weeks, from May 1888 to May 1889, the hospital was considered one of the most advanced in France in the treatment of psychiatric maladies.
There were no drugs available to assuage the psychic distress of patients, but the beauty of the site was for Van Gogh, a place where he was able to paint productively. Leaving the hospital he once more plunged into a nightmare world, which led to him shooting himself, from whose wounds he died after three days. He was thirty-seven. His brother Theo, who had been his chief support throughout, killed himself a few months later.
The Van Gogh family, which had been active either as Protestant preachers or art dealers for a few generations, was afflicted with epilepsy. Van Gogh's father was an inflexible man, whose rigidity of opinion was a source of rebellion by Vincent. His mother buried four of her seven children before her own death at an advanced age. The family lived an isolated life in their native village, in which the majority of residents were Catholic, rather than Protestant. Vincent was taciturn, although always given to occupy himself with drawing, when he was not studying the prescribed course. During his lifetime he managed to master four languages. Notwithstanding, his emotional life was circumscribed by his inability to successfully integrate his desires for companionship with the attitudes required to make friends and keep them. He was frustrated in his loves, and his competition with Gauguin, who had come to Provence to work at his brother Theo's invitation, exacerbated his tendency to hostility.
At the age of thirty-five, he began to have psychotic hallucinations. This tendency was exacerbated by his consumption of tobacco and absinthe, a narcotic liquid that induced visions. He ate poorly and was, in addition to his already serious predisposition to mental illness, physically not strong. He was idealistic in his hopes --he hoped, before he took up painting-- to be a pastor. His unstable temperament led those who could have approved him for assignment to a parish to reject his applications. When he began to paint he did so in a fury of productivity: eight hundred paintings and one-hundred fifty drawings, not one of which was every sold in his lifetime.
I, who have never much cared for Van Gogh, am so moved by the details of his story, that I stop in the chapel of the abbey to say a prayer for all those living and enduring suffering from mental illness. It is brought home forcibly to me the greatness of his accomplishment, as the abbey --while not owning any originals by the painter-- has used laminated reproductions of many works not usually seen in New York, where the Museum of Modern Art has pride of place as a repository of Van Gogh. Van Gogh made paintings of field workers inspired by Millet, he produced another painting of a man and a horse inspired by Delacroix --clearly there are a multitude of paintings to be known in his catalogue raisonne. Looking out the window of the room organized to simulate Van Gogh's; to see below the lovely garden, with its neatly organized rows of rosemary and other herbs, is to understand how peaceful the environment created for him was.
Indeed, everything the eye takes in now is unchanged from the perfect inspiration Cezanne, Van Gogh and others found in Provence. As with all great painters of landscape, the beauty of the depiction has about it not just an extraordinary "painterliness" in itself, but a faithfulness in the depiction of the actual landscape, that makes coming upon the trees and fields for the first time a verification, rather than a discovery, of their beauty.
I am so inspired by my trip to Saint Remy, I think I will bicycle to Arles tomorrow, to see La Maison Jaune, where Van Gogh lived before his interment in Saint Remy. It seems curious that I should have seen Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh in Arles and find myself driven to visit these places where Van Gogh lived and worked. The film, it seemed to me, presented a distorted picture of his life, imagining him as a sort of idiot savant debauche. Yet after visiting Saint Paul de Mausole, I feel a profound sense of sadness, an admixture of pity and admiration for him.
Avignon
Monday, April 23, 2012
After weeks of wet weather elsewhere, it seems impossible that the sun should be shining brightly, but it is: the south is blessed.
Speaking of blessings, yesterday's Mass at Nortre Dame des Doms, the church adjoining the Palais des Papes, was elegant and something special. A group of Slovak Catholic priests and nuns were visiting, so the church's normal contingent, four priests plus a nun or two, was supplemented by an equal contingent of Slovakian religious. The Mass will be conducted in Latin, French and Slovakian, with the liturgy in Latin, the readings in French, and also Slovakian.
The French prelates all wear white, the Slovakians black, reflecting their Orthodox roots. They process from the side of the altar up the set of stairs to the altar. One of the French priests, the eldest of all, his legs weak, has to be helped to a chair before the Mass starts. He sits at the altar, wearing a black biretta with a red pompom, as one of the Princes of the Church --another term for "Cardinal"-- would. Later, the French nun leading the singing tells me that he is not even a bishop --it is just that his head is cold, so he wears the hat. --Which he doffs, whenever the congregation bows or genuflects.
The church gradually fills, but by the time the Mass starts is standing room only. I arrived early, so I get a seat next to two Slovakian nuns a few rows from the altar, a perfect viewing gallery. To the left of me sit an elderly man and his grandson, a lively boy of perhaps three years. In front of him sits his wife and a granddaughter, and in front of her their son and daughter-in-law and another granddaughter. The boy is lively and happy to walk softly between the rows throughout the long Mass, which takes ninety minutes. His grandfather, is also fascinating to watch. Tall and dressed with a sobriety that suggests la vielle France --a world where men were the heads of families and took the responsibility seriously, if autocratically-- he chants the Latin liturgy by heart. He is, I think cut of the same tough cloth as the elderly priest, who has to be helped to walk to the pulpit, but once there, launches into his reading, voice at full throttle.
There is great use of incense: when the Host is elevated, a priest kneels on the stairs below the altar and swings the cense to bathe the sacrament in the smoke. The trio of bells are gently shaken during the Eucharistic prayer and before the egress at the end of the Mass, the censer is loaded again and swung ahead of the principal celebrants as they walk the center aisle towards the door, where they wait to greet the faithful. Walking out of the church in this direction, framed by the portal, is a large white stone crucifix bathed in the noon sunshine. It is juxtaposed against a niche of fine woods at the church's opposite end, at the altar, into which five oval portraits of the Avignon Popes have been set. The Church's flight to Avignon required some retrenchment insofar as the size of the new Vatican, but not in its magnificence, which persists. There is great use of incense: when the Host is elevated, a priest kneels on the stairs below the altar and swings the cense to bathe the sacrament in the smoke. The trio of bells are gently shaken during the Eucharistic prayer and before the egress at the end of the Mass, the censer is loaded again and swung ahead of the principal celebrants as they walk the center aisle towards the door, where they wait to greet the faithful. Walking out of the church in this direction, framed by the portal, is a large white stone crucifix bathed in the noon sunshine. It is juxtaposed against a niche of fine woods at the church's opposite end, at the altar, into which five oval portraits of the Avignon Popes have been set. The Church's flight to Avignon required some retrenchment insofar as the size of the new Vatican, but not in its magnificence, which persists.
***
After lunch on the square in front of the Palace of the Popes, I take the bus to Villeneuve. The maid making my bed has told me not to miss it, and to take advantage of the good weather Sunday. I do as I am told, and after a bus ride of thirty minutes, I am in Avignon Villeneuve. The fort here encloses an abbey known for its gardens, so I make the trek up the bumpy cobblestoned path to the fort on the height and buy a ticket to see the abbey, which is dedicated to Saint Casarie.
Saint Casarie was the wife of Valens, who became a bishop. She became a hermit and lived on the hill where the monastery was founded in recognition of her sanctity. The ruins of the original church, the gardens, and the view across the fields --which today extends as far as Mont Ventoux-- were well worth the trip. The rose garden is on many lists of "most beautiful gardens in France": the flowers are flanked by a border of rosemary.
I walk through the section of the abbey which features a resume of its history, and see the in the Collegiale in Villeneuve a portrait of Saint Casarie can be seen. I walk down to town, a matter of a few minutes, and find the church. It is jam-packed at five o'clock, almost every seat taken. I am welcomed inside by two gentlemen handing out leaflets --a free concert is about to begin. It is in celebration of an anniversary of French-Italian cultural cooperation and features Homilus, a choir from Avignon, singing liturgical chants from several centuries. The concert will be a "good hour" the gentlemen inform me. I have a bus to make in ninety minutes, but enough time, I figure, to make it to the bus stop by 6:15 p.m., in time to make the 6:23.
I am so glad I attended: the choir is spectacular. The French do this kind of singing very well, the precision liturgical music requires, the "bending" of tonalities being almost a specialty. Homilus' concert is a soothing hour of music performed in a space as old as some of the music sung, and I leave the church on light feet.
Unfortunately, my bus never shows up, so having light feet is a good thing, because I ultimately have to walk back to Avignon. Dreading what this might entail, I set off on a narrow road, stopping whenever I see another soul to ask whether I am on the right path for the bridge. However, the walk is actually a matter of twenty minutes, and --there is the famous Pont d'Avignon over the Rhone. Any French student of the 1950s learned the famous song:
Sur le pont
D'Avignon
L'on y danse
L'on y danse
Sur le pont
D'Avignon
L'on y danse
Tout en ronde.
The walk is an easy one, and I make my way back to the walls of Avignon, entering through one of its majestic gates. I realize that one thing I might do while here (I leave Thursday), is bicycle the circumference of the old city's gates: I had intended to rent a bicycle Monday, so this is more than possible.
Monday, April 23, 2012
After weeks of wet weather elsewhere, it seems impossible that the sun should be shining brightly, but it is: the south is blessed.
Speaking of blessings, yesterday's Mass at Nortre Dame des Doms, the church adjoining the Palais des Papes, was elegant and something special. A group of Slovak Catholic priests and nuns were visiting, so the church's normal contingent, four priests plus a nun or two, was supplemented by an equal contingent of Slovakian religious. The Mass will be conducted in Latin, French and Slovakian, with the liturgy in Latin, the readings in French, and also Slovakian.
The French prelates all wear white, the Slovakians black, reflecting their Orthodox roots. They process from the side of the altar up the set of stairs to the altar. One of the French priests, the eldest of all, his legs weak, has to be helped to a chair before the Mass starts. He sits at the altar, wearing a black biretta with a red pompom, as one of the Princes of the Church --another term for "Cardinal"-- would. Later, the French nun leading the singing tells me that he is not even a bishop --it is just that his head is cold, so he wears the hat. --Which he doffs, whenever the congregation bows or genuflects.
The church gradually fills, but by the time the Mass starts is standing room only. I arrived early, so I get a seat next to two Slovakian nuns a few rows from the altar, a perfect viewing gallery. To the left of me sit an elderly man and his grandson, a lively boy of perhaps three years. In front of him sits his wife and a granddaughter, and in front of her their son and daughter-in-law and another granddaughter. The boy is lively and happy to walk softly between the rows throughout the long Mass, which takes ninety minutes. His grandfather, is also fascinating to watch. Tall and dressed with a sobriety that suggests la vielle France --a world where men were the heads of families and took the responsibility seriously, if autocratically-- he chants the Latin liturgy by heart. He is, I think cut of the same tough cloth as the elderly priest, who has to be helped to walk to the pulpit, but once there, launches into his reading, voice at full throttle.
There is great use of incense: when the Host is elevated, a priest kneels on the stairs below the altar and swings the cense to bathe the sacrament in the smoke. The trio of bells are gently shaken during the Eucharistic prayer and before the egress at the end of the Mass, the censer is loaded again and swung ahead of the principal celebrants as they walk the center aisle towards the door, where they wait to greet the faithful. Walking out of the church in this direction, framed by the portal, is a large white stone crucifix bathed in the noon sunshine. It is juxtaposed against a niche of fine woods at the church's opposite end, at the altar, into which five oval portraits of the Avignon Popes have been set. The Church's flight to Avignon required some retrenchment insofar as the size of the new Vatican, but not in its magnificence, which persists. There is great use of incense: when the Host is elevated, a priest kneels on the stairs below the altar and swings the cense to bathe the sacrament in the smoke. The trio of bells are gently shaken during the Eucharistic prayer and before the egress at the end of the Mass, the censer is loaded again and swung ahead of the principal celebrants as they walk the center aisle towards the door, where they wait to greet the faithful. Walking out of the church in this direction, framed by the portal, is a large white stone crucifix bathed in the noon sunshine. It is juxtaposed against a niche of fine woods at the church's opposite end, at the altar, into which five oval portraits of the Avignon Popes have been set. The Church's flight to Avignon required some retrenchment insofar as the size of the new Vatican, but not in its magnificence, which persists.
***
After lunch on the square in front of the Palace of the Popes, I take the bus to Villeneuve. The maid making my bed has told me not to miss it, and to take advantage of the good weather Sunday. I do as I am told, and after a bus ride of thirty minutes, I am in Avignon Villeneuve. The fort here encloses an abbey known for its gardens, so I make the trek up the bumpy cobblestoned path to the fort on the height and buy a ticket to see the abbey, which is dedicated to Saint Casarie.
Saint Casarie was the wife of Valens, who became a bishop. She became a hermit and lived on the hill where the monastery was founded in recognition of her sanctity. The ruins of the original church, the gardens, and the view across the fields --which today extends as far as Mont Ventoux-- were well worth the trip. The rose garden is on many lists of "most beautiful gardens in France": the flowers are flanked by a border of rosemary.
I walk through the section of the abbey which features a resume of its history, and see the in the Collegiale in Villeneuve a portrait of Saint Casarie can be seen. I walk down to town, a matter of a few minutes, and find the church. It is jam-packed at five o'clock, almost every seat taken. I am welcomed inside by two gentlemen handing out leaflets --a free concert is about to begin. It is in celebration of an anniversary of French-Italian cultural cooperation and features Homilus, a choir from Avignon, singing liturgical chants from several centuries. The concert will be a "good hour" the gentlemen inform me. I have a bus to make in ninety minutes, but enough time, I figure, to make it to the bus stop by 6:15 p.m., in time to make the 6:23.
I am so glad I attended: the choir is spectacular. The French do this kind of singing very well, the precision liturgical music requires, the "bending" of tonalities being almost a specialty. Homilus' concert is a soothing hour of music performed in a space as old as some of the music sung, and I leave the church on light feet.
Unfortunately, my bus never shows up, so having light feet is a good thing, because I ultimately have to walk back to Avignon. Dreading what this might entail, I set off on a narrow road, stopping whenever I see another soul to ask whether I am on the right path for the bridge. However, the walk is actually a matter of twenty minutes, and --there is the famous Pont d'Avignon over the Rhone. Any French student of the 1950s learned the famous song:
Sur le pont
D'Avignon
L'on y danse
L'on y danse
Sur le pont
D'Avignon
L'on y danse
Tout en ronde.
The walk is an easy one, and I make my way back to the walls of Avignon, entering through one of its majestic gates. I realize that one thing I might do while here (I leave Thursday), is bicycle the circumference of the old city's gates: I had intended to rent a bicycle Monday, so this is more than possible.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Avignon
First round of the French elections
My hotel, the Avignon Grand Hotel, across the street from the Avignon Centre train station is, at 140 Euros a night, nothing to write home about: a two story motel really. My first room, 217, smells of paint, and the unprepossessing view of the parking lot and the train tracks does nothing for me, the medieval "tapestries" in the room notwithstanding. Having booked four nights in Avignon, could have been a mistake, if I am obligated to remain here.
I go back down to the front desk, where the amiable young man who greeted me is joined by another of the same mien. I expect a negation of my objection to the room, but both quickly agree --there has been a recent renovation and some rooms still smell of the paint-- they will show me another room. --And I am not obliged to stay beyond the first night.
I am taken to another room, which is an immediate improvement: simply made clean white linens on the beds, no paint smell. I am too tired to do anzthing but go to bed, and think about my possibilities in the morning.
I actually sleep quite well --the sheets are a soft cotton, the pillows, too. The room is a sort of suite with a sitting area and a full bath. I have a large balconz, that overlooks the hotel courtyard and part of the parking lot and the SNCF train station, but perhaps I can manage here without having to move. Certainly the connection for the train to Marseille will be a cinch from here, and the outlying area does not seem at all raffish, as the terminus of a line often can seem.
In the morning, the first thing I do is fill the bath and wash the clothes I wore yesterday in it. It had never occurred to me what a natural washing machine a bathtub is, particularly one with a rack from which clothes can be hung on hangers to dry. I wssh everything in the bath gel the hotel provides and quickly hang all to dry. If I am staying four nights everything --including the heavy socks I wear with my hiking boots-- will be dry before my departure.
it is Sunday, so I am off to Mass, and then to find out what I can about where those from Avignon will be voting today. The French system of voting still used paper ballots the last time I was able to observe, back when Chirac was running, but perhaps things have changed since then.
Election Day
Nothing has changed: the French still vote with paper ballots, and they are willing to give me a souvenir of my visit to the polling place: the envelope in which the voter --who must arrive with his identity card and a voting card to receive a chance to vote-- places his "vote" --a card with the name of his candidate, selected among the array of cards for all the candidates-- in the envelope, which he drops into a plastic bag in the voting booth. Whether the first round, decided tonight, will influence the result, remains to be seen. According to many observers, Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Front de Gauche candidate, was supposed to pull more voters from Francois Hollande than Marine Le Pen, the Front National candidate, would siphon off from Nicholas Sarkozy, suggesting a Socialist victory on May 6. However. With Francois Hollande receiving the most votes overall, 29.3%, Melenchon pulls only11%, while Le Pen pulls a surprising 18%, suggesting that if Le Pen's voters move to Sarkozy in the second round, he would be re-elected.
Then there is the rate of abstention: 22% of French voters have not bothered to vote, although the turnout is historically high. It was widely hoped --by people of good faith on the right as well as the left, that Marine Le Pen --whose policy prescriptions for France contemplate its departure from the European Union, a policy of autarchy, and anti-immigrant measures-- would be dealt a reversal. It was widely feared by many on the center right that Melenchon would exacerbate further France's inclination towards class warfare.
Francois Hollande, in acknowledging his status as winner of the first round, emphasizes what he describes as a strong turnout. The final numbers are Hollande 28.30%; Sarkozy 25.80%, a difference of 2.5% The next two weeks will be a battle by Sarkozy to grab as many of the voters who supported Le Pen as possible, while Hollande will turn his efforts to persuading Melenchon and Bayrou suporters to choose him. However, the winner of the first round has the advantage in the second: Hollande is more likely to pick up Melenchon and Bayrou's voters than Sarkozy is to pick up Le Pen's.
Sarkozy waits until Hollande has spoken to make his statement, his motorcade setting out from the Elysees Palace to La Mutualite, his party headquarters. The media chases the Presidential motorcade, with some of them asking rhetorically for the President to address a word to their viewers in advance of the formal address to suporters at headquarters. When Sarkozy arrives, he is greeted by a tumultuous crowd waving large French flags. His manner is dignified and gracious, attitudes not normally associated with Sarkozy in the minds of French voters. He takes the position that tomorrow the real campaign begins, demonstrating a determination that will have to serve him well in the next two weeks.
Avignon
First round of the French elections
My hotel, the Avignon Grand Hotel, across the street from the Avignon Centre train station is, at 140 Euros a night, nothing to write home about: a two story motel really. My first room, 217, smells of paint, and the unprepossessing view of the parking lot and the train tracks does nothing for me, the medieval "tapestries" in the room notwithstanding. Having booked four nights in Avignon, could have been a mistake, if I am obligated to remain here.
I go back down to the front desk, where the amiable young man who greeted me is joined by another of the same mien. I expect a negation of my objection to the room, but both quickly agree --there has been a recent renovation and some rooms still smell of the paint-- they will show me another room. --And I am not obliged to stay beyond the first night.
I am taken to another room, which is an immediate improvement: simply made clean white linens on the beds, no paint smell. I am too tired to do anzthing but go to bed, and think about my possibilities in the morning.
I actually sleep quite well --the sheets are a soft cotton, the pillows, too. The room is a sort of suite with a sitting area and a full bath. I have a large balconz, that overlooks the hotel courtyard and part of the parking lot and the SNCF train station, but perhaps I can manage here without having to move. Certainly the connection for the train to Marseille will be a cinch from here, and the outlying area does not seem at all raffish, as the terminus of a line often can seem.
In the morning, the first thing I do is fill the bath and wash the clothes I wore yesterday in it. It had never occurred to me what a natural washing machine a bathtub is, particularly one with a rack from which clothes can be hung on hangers to dry. I wssh everything in the bath gel the hotel provides and quickly hang all to dry. If I am staying four nights everything --including the heavy socks I wear with my hiking boots-- will be dry before my departure.
it is Sunday, so I am off to Mass, and then to find out what I can about where those from Avignon will be voting today. The French system of voting still used paper ballots the last time I was able to observe, back when Chirac was running, but perhaps things have changed since then.
Election Day
Nothing has changed: the French still vote with paper ballots, and they are willing to give me a souvenir of my visit to the polling place: the envelope in which the voter --who must arrive with his identity card and a voting card to receive a chance to vote-- places his "vote" --a card with the name of his candidate, selected among the array of cards for all the candidates-- in the envelope, which he drops into a plastic bag in the voting booth. Whether the first round, decided tonight, will influence the result, remains to be seen. According to many observers, Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Front de Gauche candidate, was supposed to pull more voters from Francois Hollande than Marine Le Pen, the Front National candidate, would siphon off from Nicholas Sarkozy, suggesting a Socialist victory on May 6. However. With Francois Hollande receiving the most votes overall, 29.3%, Melenchon pulls only11%, while Le Pen pulls a surprising 18%, suggesting that if Le Pen's voters move to Sarkozy in the second round, he would be re-elected.
Then there is the rate of abstention: 22% of French voters have not bothered to vote, although the turnout is historically high. It was widely hoped --by people of good faith on the right as well as the left, that Marine Le Pen --whose policy prescriptions for France contemplate its departure from the European Union, a policy of autarchy, and anti-immigrant measures-- would be dealt a reversal. It was widely feared by many on the center right that Melenchon would exacerbate further France's inclination towards class warfare.
Francois Hollande, in acknowledging his status as winner of the first round, emphasizes what he describes as a strong turnout. The final numbers are Hollande 28.30%; Sarkozy 25.80%, a difference of 2.5% The next two weeks will be a battle by Sarkozy to grab as many of the voters who supported Le Pen as possible, while Hollande will turn his efforts to persuading Melenchon and Bayrou suporters to choose him. However, the winner of the first round has the advantage in the second: Hollande is more likely to pick up Melenchon and Bayrou's voters than Sarkozy is to pick up Le Pen's.
Sarkozy waits until Hollande has spoken to make his statement, his motorcade setting out from the Elysees Palace to La Mutualite, his party headquarters. The media chases the Presidential motorcade, with some of them asking rhetorically for the President to address a word to their viewers in advance of the formal address to suporters at headquarters. When Sarkozy arrives, he is greeted by a tumultuous crowd waving large French flags. His manner is dignified and gracious, attitudes not normally associated with Sarkozy in the minds of French voters. He takes the position that tomorrow the real campaign begins, demonstrating a determination that will have to serve him well in the next two weeks.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
April 21, 2012
To Avignon
I am supposed to make a connection at Geneva at 2:59 p.m., but the trackwork between Nyot and Geneva means getting off at Nyot and riding another train one stop to Geneva. I miss the train for Valence by a long shot. I walk through French customs, --a hallway lit with fluorescent light where a sole woman sits at a desk but stops no one-- and mount the stairs to the platform. I find myself next to a tall young man with glasses and a stocking hat whom I remember from the train to Geneva.
I ask him whether he was trying to make the 2:59 and has it gone. "Yes", the next train will be at 3:29 p.m. I explain that I was supposed to go to Avignon via Valence, and would he know whether at Lyon I could get a train there? "Yes", he says, adding that when we get to Lyon he will show me what trains I can take.
His name is Charles Dietz, and he is a Ph.D. candidate in theoretical physics working for an international consortium of physicists, based in Geneva. He worked in Taiwan for two years before, and several other physics laboratories. He is traveling to Lyon, because that is where he votes.
I ask him whether it seems strange to him, a French citizen, with his level of scientific accomplishment, to have to work abroad. That is where the situation presented itself, he says. In Geneva, he adds, although the organization is funded by the Chinese government, the collaboration is multi-national.
He asks me some new questions I have not heard before: "Why are Americans so afraid of the federal government?" "What good is it to have commissions that protect against discrimination, if (according to what I tell him) 80% of the findings of these agencies show there was no basis to believe discrimination occurred in the first place?"
I answer as best as I can, and then ask him "What policies would convince you to vote for one candidate over another tomorrow?"
"Someone who supports the free market, but with a social policy that is compassionate. But my worry is that one says he will do this, and elected, he doesn't."
"You still have to decide," I tell him. "Sartre said that 'Not to decide, is to decide', so you have to vote your preference, even if you know that ultimately, the promise may not be fulfilled. I think it will be Hollande who will ultimately win, although Sarkozy did accomplish reducing the debt more than projected this past year, for all the thanks he got for it--
"The French are impossible to govern," Charles explains I read Casanova's Memoirs once, the story of his travels through Europe, and his observations. He said that of all the people in all the countries he visited, no nation was more difficult to direct than the French--"
"--De Gaulle said "How can you govern a nation with 350 cheeses?", I add.
"Le Francais qui ne rale pas, c'est ne pas Francais" --the Frenchman who does not complain is not French, we both agree.
Sarkozy, though, inspires a hate that no politician I am familiar with, excepting Richard Nixon, inspires in his countrymen, I resume.
"He is not what the French think of as a President--" says Charles
"He is not an enarque", that is, a graduate of one of the elite French schools of public administration, I offer.
"When did Richard Nixon govern? The eighties?"
"He resigned in August of 1974. The French were very fond of him."
"And Henry Kissinger --did he work for him?"
"He negotiated the end of the Vietnam War with Le Duc Tho. Kissinger is still alive, stlll writing."
By this time, it is 5:30 p.m. and we have reached Lyon. Charles kindly takes me over to a place in the Lyon station where the departing trains are announced: there is a train to Avignon in fifty minutes, that will get me there near my original time of arrival. We exchange e-mail addresses, and say we will keep in touch.
Valence Ville
7:30 p.m.
The ride from Lyon is lovely: the sun makes more than a flickering appearance, bathing the rolling hills in its warmth. There is a noisy, elderly drunk a few rows down from me in the train car, but the Police have been through the car, lectured him to behave himself, and the train staff is keeping an eye out to make sure. His slurring can be heard through out the car, but he inconveniences no one, except when he briefly he blocks the path of a woman who needs to get by, who just shouts at him--"
"Mouvez! "
And he moves off, to a seat. --And he is asleep, dead drunk and asleep, in seconds. The train is modern, immaculate and well-lit, so this old soak, with his bleary eyes and stertorous cough, seems like someone out of Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Triology, out of place amid the gleaming fixtures; but surely, this is not the first time these seats have seen a Provencaux who had too much of the region's sun-kissed wines.
Donzere
We make a stop here next to a broad river. We still have to stop in Pierrelatte, Bollene-La-Croisere, Orange, Courthezon, Bedarrides, Sorgues-Chateaunuf du Pape; and finally, Avignon. The undulant hills and scrub, small fields in even rows, curving terra cotta roof tiles, olive trees --this is Provence, a soft and caressing landscape, stretching out like a soft yawn.
The train car is empty except for the old soak, who has nestled into a pair of seats, with his knapsack functioning as pillow. The train moves silently on its rails: outside, I spot a stray black dog, trotting prettily along the edge of a house: Pierrelatte is a provincial village, and although it is Saturday night, not much is going on. A bar, Les Ch'tis --named after the comic film about rubes from the north of France (a region whose people the French consider dumb and graceless) --seeks to cash in on the popularity of the film with Danny Boon, which was a major success in France a few years ago. I suppose the name is meant to suggest a lack of pretentiousness.
On my left, as the train goes by, I see what are clearly two nuclear reactors, and not too far from them, a single strip of windfarm, and powerlines strung everywhere. Looking down, smooth rows of purple-colored vegetable seedlings lie flush against the reddish soil. Night is falling, a vast spongy sky tinged with pink. It augurs a fine day tomorrow --it seems impossible to believe, after the weeks of damp. A giant gap in the clouds above might be Jacob's Ladder, so heavenly do the cumulus seem. In the empty train car, with liittle activity on the road alongside which the train passes, I might be a royal riding on a private train, the old soak my Jack Falstaff.
To Avignon
I am supposed to make a connection at Geneva at 2:59 p.m., but the trackwork between Nyot and Geneva means getting off at Nyot and riding another train one stop to Geneva. I miss the train for Valence by a long shot. I walk through French customs, --a hallway lit with fluorescent light where a sole woman sits at a desk but stops no one-- and mount the stairs to the platform. I find myself next to a tall young man with glasses and a stocking hat whom I remember from the train to Geneva.
I ask him whether he was trying to make the 2:59 and has it gone. "Yes", the next train will be at 3:29 p.m. I explain that I was supposed to go to Avignon via Valence, and would he know whether at Lyon I could get a train there? "Yes", he says, adding that when we get to Lyon he will show me what trains I can take.
His name is Charles Dietz, and he is a Ph.D. candidate in theoretical physics working for an international consortium of physicists, based in Geneva. He worked in Taiwan for two years before, and several other physics laboratories. He is traveling to Lyon, because that is where he votes.
I ask him whether it seems strange to him, a French citizen, with his level of scientific accomplishment, to have to work abroad. That is where the situation presented itself, he says. In Geneva, he adds, although the organization is funded by the Chinese government, the collaboration is multi-national.
He asks me some new questions I have not heard before: "Why are Americans so afraid of the federal government?" "What good is it to have commissions that protect against discrimination, if (according to what I tell him) 80% of the findings of these agencies show there was no basis to believe discrimination occurred in the first place?"
I answer as best as I can, and then ask him "What policies would convince you to vote for one candidate over another tomorrow?"
"Someone who supports the free market, but with a social policy that is compassionate. But my worry is that one says he will do this, and elected, he doesn't."
"You still have to decide," I tell him. "Sartre said that 'Not to decide, is to decide', so you have to vote your preference, even if you know that ultimately, the promise may not be fulfilled. I think it will be Hollande who will ultimately win, although Sarkozy did accomplish reducing the debt more than projected this past year, for all the thanks he got for it--
"The French are impossible to govern," Charles explains I read Casanova's Memoirs once, the story of his travels through Europe, and his observations. He said that of all the people in all the countries he visited, no nation was more difficult to direct than the French--"
"--De Gaulle said "How can you govern a nation with 350 cheeses?", I add.
"Le Francais qui ne rale pas, c'est ne pas Francais" --the Frenchman who does not complain is not French, we both agree.
Sarkozy, though, inspires a hate that no politician I am familiar with, excepting Richard Nixon, inspires in his countrymen, I resume.
"He is not what the French think of as a President--" says Charles
"He is not an enarque", that is, a graduate of one of the elite French schools of public administration, I offer.
"When did Richard Nixon govern? The eighties?"
"He resigned in August of 1974. The French were very fond of him."
"And Henry Kissinger --did he work for him?"
"He negotiated the end of the Vietnam War with Le Duc Tho. Kissinger is still alive, stlll writing."
By this time, it is 5:30 p.m. and we have reached Lyon. Charles kindly takes me over to a place in the Lyon station where the departing trains are announced: there is a train to Avignon in fifty minutes, that will get me there near my original time of arrival. We exchange e-mail addresses, and say we will keep in touch.
Valence Ville
7:30 p.m.
The ride from Lyon is lovely: the sun makes more than a flickering appearance, bathing the rolling hills in its warmth. There is a noisy, elderly drunk a few rows down from me in the train car, but the Police have been through the car, lectured him to behave himself, and the train staff is keeping an eye out to make sure. His slurring can be heard through out the car, but he inconveniences no one, except when he briefly he blocks the path of a woman who needs to get by, who just shouts at him--"
"Mouvez! "
And he moves off, to a seat. --And he is asleep, dead drunk and asleep, in seconds. The train is modern, immaculate and well-lit, so this old soak, with his bleary eyes and stertorous cough, seems like someone out of Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Triology, out of place amid the gleaming fixtures; but surely, this is not the first time these seats have seen a Provencaux who had too much of the region's sun-kissed wines.
Donzere
We make a stop here next to a broad river. We still have to stop in Pierrelatte, Bollene-La-Croisere, Orange, Courthezon, Bedarrides, Sorgues-Chateaunuf du Pape; and finally, Avignon. The undulant hills and scrub, small fields in even rows, curving terra cotta roof tiles, olive trees --this is Provence, a soft and caressing landscape, stretching out like a soft yawn.
The train car is empty except for the old soak, who has nestled into a pair of seats, with his knapsack functioning as pillow. The train moves silently on its rails: outside, I spot a stray black dog, trotting prettily along the edge of a house: Pierrelatte is a provincial village, and although it is Saturday night, not much is going on. A bar, Les Ch'tis --named after the comic film about rubes from the north of France (a region whose people the French consider dumb and graceless) --seeks to cash in on the popularity of the film with Danny Boon, which was a major success in France a few years ago. I suppose the name is meant to suggest a lack of pretentiousness.
On my left, as the train goes by, I see what are clearly two nuclear reactors, and not too far from them, a single strip of windfarm, and powerlines strung everywhere. Looking down, smooth rows of purple-colored vegetable seedlings lie flush against the reddish soil. Night is falling, a vast spongy sky tinged with pink. It augurs a fine day tomorrow --it seems impossible to believe, after the weeks of damp. A giant gap in the clouds above might be Jacob's Ladder, so heavenly do the cumulus seem. In the empty train car, with liittle activity on the road alongside which the train passes, I might be a royal riding on a private train, the old soak my Jack Falstaff.
April 20-21, 2012
Zurich
Swiss men know how to cook. They also know how to sew --they are taught both in school. This is a useful skill to have, even in cosmopolitan Zurich, because eating out is extremely expensive here. --As is everything, from a train ticket to a piece of chocolate. On the other hand, everything is of impeccable quality.
As to cooking, the fare is not elaborate, as French cooking is. The potato is a staple, which is supplemented with vegetables and meat, or eaten with cheese and bread. Switzerland is a country that exports its image as environmentally progressive, but also practices what it preaches. Middle-class housewives --and househusbands-- buy vegetables produced without pesticides, as well as fruits and vegetables whose source they know, over mass produced items, even if they are cheaper.
The cleanliness of the country is legendary, and in evidence even at the main train station. Today a blind tasting of coffees --Delizia, a Viennese roast sold by Migros (one of the two supermarket chains serving Switzerland, the other being Coop) versus Nespresso, the brand that pays the actor George Clooney to bring his inviting brunette self to bear on behalf of Nespresso's wildly expensive pre-fabricated coffee capsules.
The tasting is set up in the middle of the Hauptbahnhof, not far from the hanging multi-colored sculpture of a giant woman, by Nikki de Saint Phalle, that has graced the station for as long as I have been coming to Zurich. The display is sparkling white, the young women offering perfectly made cups of steaming hot Delizia and Nespresso are dressed in white too, and they are so fresh-faced and clean scrubbed --they might be workers in a biotech lab.
I am handed two large cups of coffee and sip each slowly, comparing the sensations as carefully as possible, seriously evaluating each cup several times. My judgment arrived at, I tell my hostess I am ready to make known my preference. I choose the cup in my right hand, which I am told to place on an inscribed circle on the tasting counter, above which a small screen registers my preference and in a few seconds, tells me which, Delizia or Nespresso, I prefer:
Delizia!
--"Hopp Schwyz!" cheers my hostess. "Go Switzerland!"
The free cups of coffee --which might have run a total of $10 USD had I enjoyed them at Sprungli, Zurich's famous cafe-- take some of the sting out of having had to pay a 20 Swiss franc fine on the way into town earlier.
This unfortunate occurrence was the result of my being pressed for time at the local train station. I rushed to buy a Tageskart, a day pass for local rains and buses, just making the 2:41 p.m. train. --The train system in Switzerland is self-monitoried: it is assumed that passengers buy tickets before boarding the train, frank them at the station to avoid re-use if train personnel does not reach them in time to punch the ticket. Indeed, this is the system throughout much of Europe.
I consider myself a law-abiding traveller, but I made a crucial mistake: instead of buying a day pass from Ruschlikon, my point of departure, to Zurich, good for 24 hours; I have bought a day pass for Wollishofen, about five Swiss francs total cost, versus 12.
Three train officials board the train shortly after the train pulls away from Ruschlikon. All are wearing chartreuse yellow vests with black stripes that announce that they are not conductors, but police. Unaware of my mistake, I happily hand my ticket to the youngest of the three, a man in his early thirties with closely cropped hair and boyish looks. He scrutinizes it carefully, screws his face up, and asks me where I am getting off:
"Zurich", I answer unsuspectingly. After discerning I am not fluent in German, he switches to English.
"This is not a ticket to Zurich, this is a ticket to Wollishofen."
"I will pay the difference."
"No, you cannot. There is a 75 Swiss franc fine for this."
"It was a mistake: I was hurrying to catch the train with one minute to go--"
"You can pay 20 Swiss francs, that would be OK"
"--But was an honest mistake--"
"--Or I can charge you 75 Swiss francs."
Twenty Swiss francs it is, and I have learned an important lesson about traveling in Switzerland: Never, but never, rush to buy a train ticket.
***
To give an idea of the cost of living in Switzerland, movies cost about twenty dollars a ticket. On the other hand, you have an assigned seat, which you can select. The trains are superb: it is easy to commute for ten minutes from one of the suburbs along either side of the Lake of Zurich, although the sunny side --where the zillionaires live live-- commands a premium.
To give an idea of the cost of living in Switzerland, movies cost about twenty dollars a ticket. On the other hand, you have an assigned seat, which you can select. The trains are superb: it is easy to commute for ten minutes from one of the suburbs along either side of the Lake of Zurich, although the sunny side --where the zillionaires live live-- commands a premium.
Notwithstanding, the less sunny side, where Ruschlikon lies, is not inexpensive by any standard. A modest house, newly built, overlooking the lake from the highest point of land on that side of the lake, sells for seven million Swiss francs. There is a housing shortage and many properties to not change hands on the open market, but by private arrangement.
Stone and wood and silvery metals are common building elements, an identifiably Swiss style with few decorative elements that is both austere and luxurious. Luxurious because individual fixtures in an apartment or house are usually state of the art, first quality materials and prohibitively expensive by U.S. standards. To take a small point, the shower fixtures will have inner mechanisms fabricated in metal, whereas in the U.S., even top-of-the line fixtures frequently contain less long-wearing plastic.
In homes and apartments, space is at a premium, so everything is compact, rather than sprawling, as in the U.S.. Giant television screens are not the norm in Switzerland, and watching movies on a computer, rather than a television screen, is not unusual, even for families.
If you live in an apartment building, you will sign up to use the washing machines at a specific time and date during the week, your neighbors staying out of the room then. The hours you may wash are limited to daylight hours, so as not to bother neighbors with the noise of the machines. Indeed, there is a story by fiction writer Max Frisch, "The Laundry Room Key", which pokes fun at the Swiss obsession with punctuality and quiet, which extends to talking loudly in the hallways of your apartment building.
Staying in Ruschlikon, I notice that my unshuttered bedroom window attracts the attention of neighbors across the way. Shutters are opened in the morning, closed in the evening, in full view of everyone. I know I do something similar in my apartment in New York, and I know anyone across the street can observe me, but no one there finds it interesting enough to stop and look, which is not the case in Ruschlikon. Observing myself observed, I firmly close the shutters and blinds in the evening: I want to make sure no one might see me change into my pyjamas, something I never consider in my apartment New York.
Lest this make all Swiss seem prisoners of rigid conformity, I must announce that there are notable exceptions. Across the way from my window an elderly man regularly sunbathes nude on his terrace in the warm weather. This would be of no moment to the Swiss, who consider property rights inviolable. However, the neighbors who live in the flat below --a Swiss, his Indian wife and their young son-- complain to the property manager. The Indian woman is particularly offended by the sight of a naked man's genitals on a daily basis, Swiss property laws notwithstanding. In the interest of avoiding conflict, the nudist neighbor --with whom the neighbors across the way have never spoken-- puts on shorts.
Adult males in good health must do a few weeks compulsory military service every year until they reach later life, a practice that probably honors Switzerland's history as a source of soldiers-for-hire in European wars, more than it contributes to the national defense.
Zurich
Swiss men know how to cook. They also know how to sew --they are taught both in school. This is a useful skill to have, even in cosmopolitan Zurich, because eating out is extremely expensive here. --As is everything, from a train ticket to a piece of chocolate. On the other hand, everything is of impeccable quality.
As to cooking, the fare is not elaborate, as French cooking is. The potato is a staple, which is supplemented with vegetables and meat, or eaten with cheese and bread. Switzerland is a country that exports its image as environmentally progressive, but also practices what it preaches. Middle-class housewives --and househusbands-- buy vegetables produced without pesticides, as well as fruits and vegetables whose source they know, over mass produced items, even if they are cheaper.
The cleanliness of the country is legendary, and in evidence even at the main train station. Today a blind tasting of coffees --Delizia, a Viennese roast sold by Migros (one of the two supermarket chains serving Switzerland, the other being Coop) versus Nespresso, the brand that pays the actor George Clooney to bring his inviting brunette self to bear on behalf of Nespresso's wildly expensive pre-fabricated coffee capsules.
The tasting is set up in the middle of the Hauptbahnhof, not far from the hanging multi-colored sculpture of a giant woman, by Nikki de Saint Phalle, that has graced the station for as long as I have been coming to Zurich. The display is sparkling white, the young women offering perfectly made cups of steaming hot Delizia and Nespresso are dressed in white too, and they are so fresh-faced and clean scrubbed --they might be workers in a biotech lab.
I am handed two large cups of coffee and sip each slowly, comparing the sensations as carefully as possible, seriously evaluating each cup several times. My judgment arrived at, I tell my hostess I am ready to make known my preference. I choose the cup in my right hand, which I am told to place on an inscribed circle on the tasting counter, above which a small screen registers my preference and in a few seconds, tells me which, Delizia or Nespresso, I prefer:
Delizia!
--"Hopp Schwyz!" cheers my hostess. "Go Switzerland!"
The free cups of coffee --which might have run a total of $10 USD had I enjoyed them at Sprungli, Zurich's famous cafe-- take some of the sting out of having had to pay a 20 Swiss franc fine on the way into town earlier.
This unfortunate occurrence was the result of my being pressed for time at the local train station. I rushed to buy a Tageskart, a day pass for local rains and buses, just making the 2:41 p.m. train. --The train system in Switzerland is self-monitoried: it is assumed that passengers buy tickets before boarding the train, frank them at the station to avoid re-use if train personnel does not reach them in time to punch the ticket. Indeed, this is the system throughout much of Europe.
I consider myself a law-abiding traveller, but I made a crucial mistake: instead of buying a day pass from Ruschlikon, my point of departure, to Zurich, good for 24 hours; I have bought a day pass for Wollishofen, about five Swiss francs total cost, versus 12.
Three train officials board the train shortly after the train pulls away from Ruschlikon. All are wearing chartreuse yellow vests with black stripes that announce that they are not conductors, but police. Unaware of my mistake, I happily hand my ticket to the youngest of the three, a man in his early thirties with closely cropped hair and boyish looks. He scrutinizes it carefully, screws his face up, and asks me where I am getting off:
"Zurich", I answer unsuspectingly. After discerning I am not fluent in German, he switches to English.
"This is not a ticket to Zurich, this is a ticket to Wollishofen."
"I will pay the difference."
"No, you cannot. There is a 75 Swiss franc fine for this."
"It was a mistake: I was hurrying to catch the train with one minute to go--"
"You can pay 20 Swiss francs, that would be OK"
"--But was an honest mistake--"
"--Or I can charge you 75 Swiss francs."
Twenty Swiss francs it is, and I have learned an important lesson about traveling in Switzerland: Never, but never, rush to buy a train ticket.
***
To give an idea of the cost of living in Switzerland, movies cost about twenty dollars a ticket. On the other hand, you have an assigned seat, which you can select. The trains are superb: it is easy to commute for ten minutes from one of the suburbs along either side of the Lake of Zurich, although the sunny side --where the zillionaires live live-- commands a premium.
To give an idea of the cost of living in Switzerland, movies cost about twenty dollars a ticket. On the other hand, you have an assigned seat, which you can select. The trains are superb: it is easy to commute for ten minutes from one of the suburbs along either side of the Lake of Zurich, although the sunny side --where the zillionaires live live-- commands a premium.
Notwithstanding, the less sunny side, where Ruschlikon lies, is not inexpensive by any standard. A modest house, newly built, overlooking the lake from the highest point of land on that side of the lake, sells for seven million Swiss francs. There is a housing shortage and many properties to not change hands on the open market, but by private arrangement.
Stone and wood and silvery metals are common building elements, an identifiably Swiss style with few decorative elements that is both austere and luxurious. Luxurious because individual fixtures in an apartment or house are usually state of the art, first quality materials and prohibitively expensive by U.S. standards. To take a small point, the shower fixtures will have inner mechanisms fabricated in metal, whereas in the U.S., even top-of-the line fixtures frequently contain less long-wearing plastic.
In homes and apartments, space is at a premium, so everything is compact, rather than sprawling, as in the U.S.. Giant television screens are not the norm in Switzerland, and watching movies on a computer, rather than a television screen, is not unusual, even for families.
If you live in an apartment building, you will sign up to use the washing machines at a specific time and date during the week, your neighbors staying out of the room then. The hours you may wash are limited to daylight hours, so as not to bother neighbors with the noise of the machines. Indeed, there is a story by fiction writer Max Frisch, "The Laundry Room Key", which pokes fun at the Swiss obsession with punctuality and quiet, which extends to talking loudly in the hallways of your apartment building.
Staying in Ruschlikon, I notice that my unshuttered bedroom window attracts the attention of neighbors across the way. Shutters are opened in the morning, closed in the evening, in full view of everyone. I know I do something similar in my apartment in New York, and I know anyone across the street can observe me, but no one there finds it interesting enough to stop and look, which is not the case in Ruschlikon. Observing myself observed, I firmly close the shutters and blinds in the evening: I want to make sure no one might see me change into my pyjamas, something I never consider in my apartment New York.
Lest this make all Swiss seem prisoners of rigid conformity, I must announce that there are notable exceptions. Across the way from my window an elderly man regularly sunbathes nude on his terrace in the warm weather. This would be of no moment to the Swiss, who consider property rights inviolable. However, the neighbors who live in the flat below --a Swiss, his Indian wife and their young son-- complain to the property manager. The Indian woman is particularly offended by the sight of a naked man's genitals on a daily basis, Swiss property laws notwithstanding. In the interest of avoiding conflict, the nudist neighbor --with whom the neighbors across the way have never spoken-- puts on shorts.
Adult males in good health must do a few weeks compulsory military service every year until they reach later life, a practice that probably honors Switzerland's history as a source of soldiers-for-hire in European wars, more than it contributes to the national defense.
Thursday, April 17, 2012
Zurich
America Redux
I return to Zurich to pick up those items dropped at my friend Max's here, and to another cross-cultural discussion: it is prompted by my observation that in Austria when I withdrew funds from an automatic teller machine, no receipt was given.
"Well, Marta" my friend tells me, this is one of those things that Americans insist on that demonstrate the American unwillingness to consider equally valid another way of doing things, to think that 'If it is not done the American way, it is the wrong way.' The bank cannot calculate the exchange rate", he continues, "and debit your account on the day of the transaction instantaneously--"
"Wait a minute--", I reply hotly. "If I have an account in Austria denominated in Euros, how am I to verify that the bank has correctly debited my account? What proof do I have in the event of a discrepancy between my balance and the balance the bank says I have? In Switzerland, if you have an account denominated in Swiss Francs, don't you get a receipt indicating the amount after withdrawal?"
"It's true, in Switzerland, the bank gives you a receipt under those circumstances. However, in much of Europe, that is not the case."
"So the Swiss want that clarify, too--"
"Marta--" he says, rolling out the syllables of my name reproachfully, "This is why many transactions between the French and the Germans --or the Americans-- founder, because of this lack of willingness to see the situation from another point of view."
"I am offended" I say, much to his shock. "Americans want to know how a plan works out practically, it is not enough to know how it works out theoretically. "
This reminds me of the joke about the Frenchman presented with a plan to put implement something planned in theory --'OK, it works in practice' says the Frenchman, 'but how will it work in theory?' I start to tell the joke, but Max breaks in--
"I know the joke--" Max says, in an effort to bring this line of conversation to an end.
Imperturbable, I continue my Phillipic--
"Transparency as well as the practical consequences of a theory are values Americans believe create more opportunities for more people to be able to take up a possibility in the best way for their own purposes. It seems to me that the structural reforms necessary in Europe are in part so difficult because there are organized interests that prefer to avoid transparency, because it works against their interests, which have been long entrenched and not easily brought to light."
"It is true, structural reform seems unlikely to happen anytime soon", Max concedes, --but I am not yet done.
"--If Europe believes that the United States is too focused on the practical consequences of things and the details because they must insist on their way, wait until the Chinese are those asking the questions. The Chinese are even more given to working out the practical details of a proposal, and negotiating endlessly to their own advantage. They believe that Western culture has always been inferior to Western and that view has not changed.
I am in full sail now--
"Europeans write articles --as do Americans-- saying China has to take more of a role in solving the world's problems because it now is the #2 economy, but who says the Chinese must do so? When I ask Europeans whether they need to make any changes in their labor system or other aspects of their way of life in response to the challenge of China, everyone tells me that the China will implode. That is the sentiment I have heard all over Europe these weeks. It is what everyone I talk to wants to believe, but I cannot say whether that will be the case--"
"--I cannot judge, because I think that China is not transparent, so it is almost impossible for someone who does not speak fluent Chinese and living there to tell" Max observes modestly. --He spent years travelling to China and the rest of Asia as a banker and knows the country better than most of us.
"I agree with you, Max, but I find it ridiculous that Europe refuses to look to the threat to its institutions and the values on which they rest, that the deleveraging of the West's economy that has been underway since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 has brought about. The perception of many in the United States is that Europeans think us arrogant and unreasonable, but I do not think that you will find that you will be better treated by the Chinese. Anyway, our foreign policy now looks more towards Asia than Europe, so if Europe wants to continue to behave as if nothing has changed, and that it can continue to make of the United States the bogeyman and act independently, as before --you are welcome to your point of view--"
"I suppose it is a love-hate relationship", Max concludes wearily.
Zurich
America Redux
I return to Zurich to pick up those items dropped at my friend Max's here, and to another cross-cultural discussion: it is prompted by my observation that in Austria when I withdrew funds from an automatic teller machine, no receipt was given.
"Well, Marta" my friend tells me, this is one of those things that Americans insist on that demonstrate the American unwillingness to consider equally valid another way of doing things, to think that 'If it is not done the American way, it is the wrong way.' The bank cannot calculate the exchange rate", he continues, "and debit your account on the day of the transaction instantaneously--"
"Wait a minute--", I reply hotly. "If I have an account in Austria denominated in Euros, how am I to verify that the bank has correctly debited my account? What proof do I have in the event of a discrepancy between my balance and the balance the bank says I have? In Switzerland, if you have an account denominated in Swiss Francs, don't you get a receipt indicating the amount after withdrawal?"
"It's true, in Switzerland, the bank gives you a receipt under those circumstances. However, in much of Europe, that is not the case."
"So the Swiss want that clarify, too--"
"Marta--" he says, rolling out the syllables of my name reproachfully, "This is why many transactions between the French and the Germans --or the Americans-- founder, because of this lack of willingness to see the situation from another point of view."
"I am offended" I say, much to his shock. "Americans want to know how a plan works out practically, it is not enough to know how it works out theoretically. "
This reminds me of the joke about the Frenchman presented with a plan to put implement something planned in theory --'OK, it works in practice' says the Frenchman, 'but how will it work in theory?' I start to tell the joke, but Max breaks in--
"I know the joke--" Max says, in an effort to bring this line of conversation to an end.
Imperturbable, I continue my Phillipic--
"Transparency as well as the practical consequences of a theory are values Americans believe create more opportunities for more people to be able to take up a possibility in the best way for their own purposes. It seems to me that the structural reforms necessary in Europe are in part so difficult because there are organized interests that prefer to avoid transparency, because it works against their interests, which have been long entrenched and not easily brought to light."
"It is true, structural reform seems unlikely to happen anytime soon", Max concedes, --but I am not yet done.
"--If Europe believes that the United States is too focused on the practical consequences of things and the details because they must insist on their way, wait until the Chinese are those asking the questions. The Chinese are even more given to working out the practical details of a proposal, and negotiating endlessly to their own advantage. They believe that Western culture has always been inferior to Western and that view has not changed.
I am in full sail now--
"Europeans write articles --as do Americans-- saying China has to take more of a role in solving the world's problems because it now is the #2 economy, but who says the Chinese must do so? When I ask Europeans whether they need to make any changes in their labor system or other aspects of their way of life in response to the challenge of China, everyone tells me that the China will implode. That is the sentiment I have heard all over Europe these weeks. It is what everyone I talk to wants to believe, but I cannot say whether that will be the case--"
"--I cannot judge, because I think that China is not transparent, so it is almost impossible for someone who does not speak fluent Chinese and living there to tell" Max observes modestly. --He spent years travelling to China and the rest of Asia as a banker and knows the country better than most of us.
"I agree with you, Max, but I find it ridiculous that Europe refuses to look to the threat to its institutions and the values on which they rest, that the deleveraging of the West's economy that has been underway since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 has brought about. The perception of many in the United States is that Europeans think us arrogant and unreasonable, but I do not think that you will find that you will be better treated by the Chinese. Anyway, our foreign policy now looks more towards Asia than Europe, so if Europe wants to continue to behave as if nothing has changed, and that it can continue to make of the United States the bogeyman and act independently, as before --you are welcome to your point of view--"
"I suppose it is a love-hate relationship", Max concludes wearily.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday
April 17-19, 2012
Beaune, Burgundy, France
The cold has settled in, although in Beaune it is a bit drier than Besancon to the northeast. This town of 22,000 is justly praised for its charm --which owes a lot to the friendliness of its residents, as well as to the wines for which it is justly famous. Of course, here too, the upcoming election takes up the front pages: the "Gazette" features Francois Hollande in a thoughtful poser, and gives him two pages to explain his program. In the 2011 legislative elections, the Socialist Party picked up one seat, the UMP, Sarkozy's party, one seat, and various left-leaning parties Divers Partis de Gauche (DVG), three seats
Yet the town of Beaune is a comfortable, affluent area, not naturally Socialist territory. This is born out by the legislative election results: Denis Thomas, the head of the local tourist office, won the seat for Sarkozy last year. Beaune is part of the administrative department of Beaune Nord, which includes the town, as well as fourteen other communes, including those that comprise the famous Burgundy terroirs of Mersault, Pommard, and Volnay, with their costly wines.
Beune's small size, and long history, may explain why it has remained unspoiled for so long: the pale buildlings, three stories high, recall the small towns on which Balzac based his multi-volume French saga, The Human Comedy. Steeped in French medieval history --when sumptuary laws forbade the wearing of rich fabrics by those not of a status high enough to wear the purple --Beaune shies away from display, preferring the quiet discretion of a style that is known in France as bon chic, bon genre --B.C.B.G. for short-- "good taste, good family background"
Beaune is also known for the Hospice de Beaune, the charity hospital founded by Nicolas Rollin and his wife Guigone, wealthy Bouguignons when Burgundy included the Netherlands and Belgium, along with the area that comprises modern Burgundy. The Hospice was the first charity hospital founded in France, the predecessor of the Hotel Dieu, as all such charity hospitals came to be called. The building boasts a large interior courtyard with polychromed roof tiles laid out in patterns. Inside are the hospital beds where the poor were nursed until they either returned to health or died. The nurses were nuns with winged wimples the size of a toy sailboat. They were active at the Hospice until the 1950s, when the Hospice was turned into a museum and a new hospital built.
Aside from the furniture and instruments used at the medical facility, and the decoration of the adjoining chapel, the Hospice is also in possession of several tapestries made in Tournai, Belgium in the beginning of the 1500s, at the very end of the Middle Ages. One of them tells the story of Saint Eloi (c.588-660) (Saint Eligius in English), the goldsmith who became counselor to Dagobert, King of the Franks. Saint Eloi gave up gold and jewels to advocate for the poor and subjected himself to many austerities --such as wearing a hair shirt underneath a simple monk's robe. The tapestry in the Hospice is a milllefleurs design five centuries old, but its colors, and the depiction of the principal figures in the story are fresh and engaging, along with the minor figures --pairs of rabbits, birds of different types-- woven into the flowered background.
This tapestry is found in the last room on view in the Hospice, named after Roger van der Weyden, whose masterpiece, the Beaune altarpiece --interior and exterior-- is displayed as two panels in order to display van der Weyden's work in all its glory. The subject of the front of the altarpiece --the part meant to be displayed for the edification of all who saw it-- takes at its subject The Last Judgment. Christ enthroned is topmost, surrounded by saints and prophets. Below, an angel holds in one hand a balance, the right side of which sinks from the weight of the heavy sins of the naked sinner standing there. The left side, in contrast, rises, on account of the lack of serious sin of the equally naked, but more spiritually perfect, sinner whose fate is also in the balance. Beneath this image, a band of --again-- naked men and women, progress in the direction of heaven --at the right of the painting-- or hell, on the left. At the extreme left, bodies are falling into a pit. Flames lick the exposed buttocks of one woman, who flies into the pit head first.
The back of the altarpiece is two panels, one depicting Saint Anthony, the other Saint Sebastian, done in grisaille; and a portrait each of Nicholas Rollin and Guigone. I realize that I am standing in front of two portraits I have seen in reproduction countless times since I first clapped eyes on them in my college art history class, and apprehend better the truth of Huizinga's observation in The Waning Of The Middle Ages that visual spectacle and pageant, organized by the powerful, were meant to edify the understanding of those subject to them. Each, whether participant or spectator, rich lord or servant, was part of the order of things deigned by God, and so interdependent and essential to the other.
In an age when it was rare for anyone to be able to read, images told a story powerfully and directly in language everyone could understand: at the Last Judgement you stand naked before God, your soul in the balance: if your sins are heavy you will find yourself on the road to hell, with the pit the final destination from which there is no escape. If you comply with God's wishes, at the last, you will be helped up to heaven to be near God and the company of his saints.
Nicholas and Guigone Rollin's patronage of Roger van der Weyden's commission for the Beaune altarpiece was an endorsement of that understanding of the world and follows the form of medieval patronage, with all its status hierarchies. The Hospice de Beaune however, gave birth to an idea, the charity hospital, that has outlived them, and which enjoys considerable public support as a particularly French institution.
April 17-19, 2012
Beaune, Burgundy, France
The cold has settled in, although in Beaune it is a bit drier than Besancon to the northeast. This town of 22,000 is justly praised for its charm --which owes a lot to the friendliness of its residents, as well as to the wines for which it is justly famous. Of course, here too, the upcoming election takes up the front pages: the "Gazette" features Francois Hollande in a thoughtful poser, and gives him two pages to explain his program. In the 2011 legislative elections, the Socialist Party picked up one seat, the UMP, Sarkozy's party, one seat, and various left-leaning parties Divers Partis de Gauche (DVG), three seats
Yet the town of Beaune is a comfortable, affluent area, not naturally Socialist territory. This is born out by the legislative election results: Denis Thomas, the head of the local tourist office, won the seat for Sarkozy last year. Beaune is part of the administrative department of Beaune Nord, which includes the town, as well as fourteen other communes, including those that comprise the famous Burgundy terroirs of Mersault, Pommard, and Volnay, with their costly wines.
Beune's small size, and long history, may explain why it has remained unspoiled for so long: the pale buildlings, three stories high, recall the small towns on which Balzac based his multi-volume French saga, The Human Comedy. Steeped in French medieval history --when sumptuary laws forbade the wearing of rich fabrics by those not of a status high enough to wear the purple --Beaune shies away from display, preferring the quiet discretion of a style that is known in France as bon chic, bon genre --B.C.B.G. for short-- "good taste, good family background"
Beaune is also known for the Hospice de Beaune, the charity hospital founded by Nicolas Rollin and his wife Guigone, wealthy Bouguignons when Burgundy included the Netherlands and Belgium, along with the area that comprises modern Burgundy. The Hospice was the first charity hospital founded in France, the predecessor of the Hotel Dieu, as all such charity hospitals came to be called. The building boasts a large interior courtyard with polychromed roof tiles laid out in patterns. Inside are the hospital beds where the poor were nursed until they either returned to health or died. The nurses were nuns with winged wimples the size of a toy sailboat. They were active at the Hospice until the 1950s, when the Hospice was turned into a museum and a new hospital built.
Aside from the furniture and instruments used at the medical facility, and the decoration of the adjoining chapel, the Hospice is also in possession of several tapestries made in Tournai, Belgium in the beginning of the 1500s, at the very end of the Middle Ages. One of them tells the story of Saint Eloi (c.588-660) (Saint Eligius in English), the goldsmith who became counselor to Dagobert, King of the Franks. Saint Eloi gave up gold and jewels to advocate for the poor and subjected himself to many austerities --such as wearing a hair shirt underneath a simple monk's robe. The tapestry in the Hospice is a milllefleurs design five centuries old, but its colors, and the depiction of the principal figures in the story are fresh and engaging, along with the minor figures --pairs of rabbits, birds of different types-- woven into the flowered background.
This tapestry is found in the last room on view in the Hospice, named after Roger van der Weyden, whose masterpiece, the Beaune altarpiece --interior and exterior-- is displayed as two panels in order to display van der Weyden's work in all its glory. The subject of the front of the altarpiece --the part meant to be displayed for the edification of all who saw it-- takes at its subject The Last Judgment. Christ enthroned is topmost, surrounded by saints and prophets. Below, an angel holds in one hand a balance, the right side of which sinks from the weight of the heavy sins of the naked sinner standing there. The left side, in contrast, rises, on account of the lack of serious sin of the equally naked, but more spiritually perfect, sinner whose fate is also in the balance. Beneath this image, a band of --again-- naked men and women, progress in the direction of heaven --at the right of the painting-- or hell, on the left. At the extreme left, bodies are falling into a pit. Flames lick the exposed buttocks of one woman, who flies into the pit head first.
The back of the altarpiece is two panels, one depicting Saint Anthony, the other Saint Sebastian, done in grisaille; and a portrait each of Nicholas Rollin and Guigone. I realize that I am standing in front of two portraits I have seen in reproduction countless times since I first clapped eyes on them in my college art history class, and apprehend better the truth of Huizinga's observation in The Waning Of The Middle Ages that visual spectacle and pageant, organized by the powerful, were meant to edify the understanding of those subject to them. Each, whether participant or spectator, rich lord or servant, was part of the order of things deigned by God, and so interdependent and essential to the other.
In an age when it was rare for anyone to be able to read, images told a story powerfully and directly in language everyone could understand: at the Last Judgement you stand naked before God, your soul in the balance: if your sins are heavy you will find yourself on the road to hell, with the pit the final destination from which there is no escape. If you comply with God's wishes, at the last, you will be helped up to heaven to be near God and the company of his saints.
Nicholas and Guigone Rollin's patronage of Roger van der Weyden's commission for the Beaune altarpiece was an endorsement of that understanding of the world and follows the form of medieval patronage, with all its status hierarchies. The Hospice de Beaune however, gave birth to an idea, the charity hospital, that has outlived them, and which enjoys considerable public support as a particularly French institution.
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