Jelin in France

The author

Steve Jelin's travelogue in France, Fall, 2004.


Jelin in France
December 20, 2004


Arrival / Paris

After a smooth, half-empty, on-time, American Airlines flight to Paris (rendered only slightly irritable by the Harry Potter movie and the $5 charge for beer or wine), I found myself on a $62 taxi ride in full rush-hour from Charles de Gaulle to my hotel. It was redeemed by my taxi driver, a Cambodian emigre with a mini-series life story, who had left Phnom Pen in the Pol Pot time as the child of Catholic intellectuals, eventually married and converted to Judaism, and confessed (in response to my rather forward question) that it was probably harder in today's France to be religiously Jewish Orthodox than racially Asian. He attributed France's attitudes to a cynical economic policy premised on the need for Islam's oil and trade more than to an essential distaste for Israel and a deep vein of traditional anti-Semitism (which was my hypothesis). It was one of the more provocative dialogues with a cabbie that I have ever had.

The comfortable, if not exactly charm-laden Hotel Mercure-Suffren Tour Eiffel is felicitously 3 blocks from the giant tinker toy, and right around the corner from the now-vanished Hotel de la Bourdonnais where I stayed in 1952 on my very first trip to Europe. The great Mandala doth indeed turn. It is also 4 blocks from the Seine and the Pont Alma which makes for easy walking almost everywhere. The Eiffel Tower, alas, now twinkles like a giant Xmas ornament for 10 minutes every hour of darkness, a bicentennial left-over of dubious aesthetic value. The traffic is far worse than even a scant 5 years ago. And the people in my group are once again a cacophony of geriatric whiners and wheezers and screechers, shouting rural American (red state) attitudes and opinions into one anothers' hearing aids. I shall spend a lot of time on my own.

After a 4 hour nap, an evening stroll, 4 glasses of kir at a cocktail/briefing, a hot soak, 12 hours more of sleep, and a fine breakfast (except for the startlingly weak coffee), I spent the morning at useful chores...e.g. getting an opera ticket at the nearby Theatre Champs Elysees, finding train schedules for my post-cruise wanderings, buying a France Telecom phone card, and taking a long ride in bright sunshine atop an open-air bus, down the Left Bank, past the Latin Quarter and the two river Iles. It was a delectable and relaxed way to let Paris seep back into my pores and consciousness. I then strolled for several hours back up the Right Bank, watching pretty women dressed in truly absurd clothing and positively alarming footwear (spike heels and sharp elongated toes look more like alien weaponry than shoes). Many dogs, mostly leashless but properly obedient, albeit a bit spirit-less. Big labs and tiny, wind-up Asian miniatures seem to have replaced in current fashion the far preferable, albeit often gussied up poodles of temps perdu. I will save the museums.

Today was just too beautiful not to be out and about. Besides, mooching aimlessly in Paris gives one that tingling discovery of history that wandering thru the Pere Lachaise Cemetery does, without tombstones. Here Simone Weil lived. There Edmond Rostand died. Here Jean Paul Sartre lived. There Ernest Hemingway... Gertrude Stein...Erik Satie...Camille Saint Saens. Here, unexpectedly, is St Clothilde, where Cesar Frank was organist. It has the same effect on me as the stones of Venice did on John Ruskin. And despite the tonnage of unretrieved dog poop, and the ineffably rude Parisians, it is a glory....though still on my A-list for a neutron bomb if I could figure out how to eliminate all the Parisians without hurting the dogs and the perfectly square-trimmed chestnut trees. I established that I shall be unable to see cousin Nadine Lecat and her family during this visit, as they are off for a long weekend, but we shall get together when I come back to Paris in a few weeks.

Today began with a late breakfast, during which I learned thanks to my Red Sox cap of the Good Guys whipping the Pin-striped devils. And all morning, people (mostly American students, of which Paris is chock-full, but even one gendarme at the National Assembly and one vegetable-seller on the Rue Grenelle) congratulated me on the "victoire historique". It was Bill Murray/surreal. I spent the entire day once again walking, first to the d'Orsay, where every visit produces at least one revelation...this time a remarkable painting by Rousseau le Douanier called "WAR". I had always thought of his works as slithery snakes and bug-eyed, Goonzer-esque beasties, peeking through menacingly fanciful foliage. This painting, which presages Picasso's Guernica amazingly, is of a horrific, demonic white angel shrieking astride a flying black horse over a vast field of mutilated corpses. In its almost cartoon style, primitive yet brutal, it s absolutely riveting. I then focussed for the first time on the strange, vacant facial expressions in "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe", and realized anew how many truly uninteresting paintings Gauguin and Toulouse Lautrec and Sisley and Delacroix and Courbet managed to execute. I discovered one masterpiece by the far-less-known Caillebotte, in this case a snow scene with more shadings and gradations of white than Cezanne had blues.

It was a lovely day, marred only by the discovery that absolutely every institution in this city refuses to accept my oh-so-cleverly pre-purchased travelers cheques denominated in Euros. I ended up going to an exchange office and having to pay 3% commission to redeem them into Euros. However, I foiled the avaricious French anyway, because, since I bought them, the Euro has risen 7% against the dollar. At least I can still certify that it is very easy to get screwed for money in the City of Light. Knowing that the concept of "epater les bourgeois" is a Paris credo, I suppose I should not have been too surprised at the production of "Incoronazione di Poppaea". It began when I got shoved by a really rude audience into the theatre, alongside a mind-boggling couple, silver-haired, sixtyish at least, in full evening formal wear, she carrying a beaded reticule and he carrying their two black motorcycle helmets. One can only hallucinate their ride to and from home.

Any production of Monteverdi's opera admittedly yearns for some livening up. 3 and a half hours of even well-sung Baroque music is, as I suspect my porcine tour group might say, "a shit load of Monteverdi". But this production...servants dressed as Michael Jackson in black leather, or as Austin Powers in pink, feathered drag, a counter-tenor swigging alternately from a bottle of Absolut vodka and a bottle of pink Pepto-Bismol, costumes that ranged from early Elizabethan to new street punk to Gianni Versace in an asylum. Admittedly, it is rare to find3 sopranos worth listening to who are shapely enough and gutsy enough to strip down to their bras and panties and wriggle around in sheer teddies from Victoria's Secret. But the whole thing, including Seneca's suicide with a Glock 9 MM in front of a TV camera, was so trumped up and distracting, that it effectively spoiled a very well sung and played musical evening. Clearly even Paris can sink into the pit of excess, even or chic which it claims to have invented, perfected, defined and monopolized.

Today I awoke late again, to a 4th consecutive day of autumn sunshine, and walked thru the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. I spent an hour in the special exhibit of Italians at the French Court, mostly because it dwelt at length on Fontainbleau which I shall be visiting for the first time next week. Then I wallowed in the French, Italian and Spanish galleries, trying to evade the pushy student tour groups, the hordes of Japanese (I thought their economy had gone south!) blocking only the "big 3" (Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and Venus di Milo) and missing the spooky Riberas, the ravishing Bellinis, and the shadowy Caravaggios and Zurburans. It is an exhausting museum but a helluva way to spend a day. A late night stroll in lovely twinkling lights and balmy breezes, a quick re-pack for tomorrow's bag pick-up and another fine night's sleep. The hotel is at least well-sound-proofed.

After a morning group bus-ride, and a walk thru the Marais where I was able to escape and wander thru Victor Hugo's house and the Carnevalet Museum and then to find a small branch of Fauchon (compensating for my having skipped my usual pilgrimage to the Madeleine store), we got to our ship, the Bizet. It is comfortable beyond my wildest hopes.


Aboard Ship

My single room is in fact a spacious double with picture windows, lots of closets, CNN and British World TV and a free movie channel which alas seems to specialize in Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, but I have my own DV player and 22 movies I actually want to see. I can even control the temperature! Nursing an icy bourbon, a sat on the upper deck in warm sunshine, as we drifted through Paris, through 3 locks, past splendid river-side homes with grand lawns and gardens, long walking and cycling paths and over-arching willows, past regal swans in couples and self-assured cormorant in swarms. It was all so perfect, blissful and quiet, like a private yacht in paradise, until the madding crowd finished demolishing the dessert table (putting much of it into their purses, lest they starve before dinner) and heaved themselves top-side to take photos and screech things like "Oh, look...it says Ford!"

The only single women on the trip, I think, seem to be sisters or clones (can you clone a crone?) weighing in at prox 350 lbs (or kilos...it mattereth not). They are from Los Alamos, which is a wee bit destabilizing. A stone deaf man whose hearing aids and wrist-watch all stopped working this morning (could it be some radiational activity from the Los Alamos behemoths?) was so pathetic, asking the time and not hearing the answers, that I lent him my spare watch, which at last sight he was struggling hard to rest. If I can just find some quietude outside of my cabin, this could be a lovely week.

The one splendidly hazardous aspect is the food...both at the buffet lunch and the superb 4 course dinner with wines. It is really worth eating (which is the magic question I keep asking myself when I travel). Examples: dinner started with a creamed fresh broccoli soup, with creme fraiche and a whisper of Pernod, moved on to a superb individual Quiche, thence to a filet of hake in a creamy saffron sauce drizzled quite imaginatively with dark, unsweetened chocolate, and a depraved mocha torte topped with a dollop of espresso ice cream and 3 puddles of diverse sauces. I shall try to live thru this. A late night, moon-lighted stroll through the little port of Corbeille, with no lights, broken pavements, and lots of louche, dredlocked, young Africans lounging about smoking something, was scant penance for my gustatory sins and cholesterol anxieties. Mea Maxima culpa...and it is only Day 1.

This morning a group tour to Fontainebleau, an interesting sweep of over 600 years of royal tastes an styles, monograms of Kings and Queens and "favorites", again made pleasing by the unusually benign weather that mad the Le Notre gardens glisten. Compared to Versailles, it is kind of a starter chateau...and while not quite cozy or homey, it does have a kind of comprehensibility. Then I struck off on my own (skipping lunch may be one solution to the big problem) for a noon mass in the small 12th century church of Saint Spire, in the center of Corbeille. The priest and 97% of the congregation were black African; and, when he came up the aisle he stopped to greet me, the all-too-apparent stranger in the midst, we ha a most interesting chat. Most of his congregants were from Mali, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire and Bikina Fasso (in sum, the old French Equatorial Africa of my childhood maps). They work mainly in the factories that ring Paris, but live some 45 minute away by train or bus to afford housing. Their numbers reached a critical enough mass about 5 years ago, after some 25 years of increasing immigration under fairly lenient special laws for former colonies, that they began to develop their own infra-structure, shop-owners, beauticians, markets, etc. But now they are being pushed out by a recent torrent of Eastern Europeans, mostly Romanian Gypsies, who are flooding across the new EU borders, living in trailer parks of vans (as is Roma tradition), working for lower wages, transmuting the society racially and the pecking order as well, and bringing all kinds of racial and ethnic tensions and hostilities to a little corner of the Ile de France.

France is a remarkable, often over-looked polyglot. It has the largest Jewish community in Europe (prox 700,000), many from North Africa and Eastern Europe and Russia. it has the largest Muslim community in Europe (prox 1.6 million), mostly from former colonies in North Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, etc. And now an avalanche of Eastern Europeans from the 10 new EU members, irresistably drawn by the high wage scale, the generous social welfare benefits, the free education and health care. I suppose it is no wonder that the French and the Germans are pressuring Italy and Spain to staunch the flow of illegals from Africa (the so-called Malta Express), which is an almost impossible task given the shorelines of those countries. It is also why they don't even want to talk about Turkey joining the EU (though they damn well better face up to that historically critical issue, and soon), given its huge and still growing population (in 10 more years it will be larger than even the united Germany), its religion whether it be perceived as a secular Islamic state or not, and its totally porous borders with Iraq, Iran, Syria and god knows whatever other flash-points and danger-zones. It really is not an easy question.

I just had a delectable, strangely complex (lots of vegetables) salade nicoise for lunch avoiding the dangers and mobs surrounding the buffet table. It was marred by the most appalling table conversation imaginable, dominated by a geezer from Dartmouth (College, that is!) and another from Duke (University, that is!) who were commiserating with each other on how the Haitians (the "N" word was actually used twice!) and Cubans were screwing up Florida and lots of the rest of America too by taking "our" jobs and using our schools and welfare programs. The fact that these neanderthals were assumedly educated somehow made it all the worse. Stifling the impulse to tell them to jump into and pollute the Seine, I simply left the table, but I felt compromised, defeated, embarrassed and ashamed. Bush is going to win the election, and I am seriously unhappy.

I did find a quiet spot on deck, from which to watch Sunday on the Seine...swans and small sail boats, young people sculling, while on the riverbanks old men fished and families picknicked, dogs and kids gambolled, and an immense variety of house-boats (many bedecked with pots of geraniums and small cars and tables and chairs) rode happily at anchor on the calmly flowing river. It really evokes all the inspirations for all the painters from early Barbizon thru the 19th century, except of course that the closer one gets to Paris the more palatial and often grotesque the house-boats become. Neither Lily King's nor Penelope Fitzgerald's houseboat novels prepared me for the sheer number and staggering extravagance of some of these floating mansions (rather redolent of Nantucket harbor in July!)

Dinner was again a cardio-vascular gauntlet...foie gras, a rich fish course, a daube of beef in bordeaux sauce, lots of cheeses, lots of chocolates. But best of all, I sat by chance with some nice people, a retired Presbyterian minister from St Paul, and a retired Lutheran minister from northern California, their wives, and a Scots-born, Tampa-residing, recently divorced petrochemical engineer...all bright, lively, well-read, politically aware, and very compatible. We may have found a dinner group! I also got a shot at the email equipment, usually monopolized for long periods of time by people playing masturbatory bridge or haranguing their grand-children. So, on balance an easy and pleasing day...though we are cruising West toward England and the Channel, and they skies look as though they are starting to cloud over. The French say all bad things come from across the Channel. Of course they conveniently forget that on two occasions in the past century some rather good things (disguised and Brits, Canadians and Americans) came across the Channel and pulled all that delectable French bacon out of the siZzling fires. Let's just assume, charitably, that they were only referring to weather.



Touring


It was 15 degrees cooler but still sunny and dry for our lovely morning perambulation of Auvers sur Oise, where Vincent van Gogh spent the last 70 days of his hapless and perpetually disappointing life in order to be under the obviously not-watchful-enough eye of the famously pictured Dr. Gachet. This then is where he lived in a long, thin room over the local tavern (both also painted famously), managed to create 78 canvasses, grow hopelessly despondent, and finally shoot himself in the woods and crawl back to his bed to die alone. He and his brother, Theo, are buried side-by-side; and the town has put up very tastefully reproductions of his numerous pleine air paintings besides the locations pictured...Daubigny's garden, the church, the town steps, the tavern, the city hall. It is all quite low-key; and none of it quite makes up for the shabby treatment the tragic painter received from the locals...even in death, when the local priest refused to lend Theo a hearse to transport the suicide's body. So, he was laid out on a table in the tavern, covered with a little dirt, surrounded by all his last paintings. Theo told the few friends to help themselves, but no one took anything so Dr Gachet rolled them up and took them home. His son eventually found them in a closet and gave them to the d'Orsay. It is a sad story that haunts the town. Lots of tourists, though. Dead famous people are always good for business.

This morning in chilly fog, quite appropriately Japanese in feeling, we set off for Giverny, where the far-longer-lived, mostly lionized, twice-married Claude Monet
spent 43 of his 86 years painting, pontificating and driving his numerous gardeners nuts with his landscaping passions. The mist eventually lifted, leaving the Japanese bridge and the willow-hung lily pond eerily lovely...far more spectral and Asiatic than his paintings of them. The house is chock=a=block full of Hiroshige prints, old family photos, and sets of country faience. It was a nice enough visit, with a delightful gift-shop. For me the problem is that Monet always only painted "pretty". There is never any tension or angst or suffering or even aesthetic discord. Pretty always seems easy, even when technically masterful...my same hang-up with Watteau, who also knew how to paint very well.

A walk around Vernon, with its 9th century begun/16th century finished church, and its few streets of surviving 14th century timbered houses teetering at hazardously rakish angles from the vertical, was nice; and a nap on the upper deck whilst the hogs were at the lunch trough, and then while they all went to an unimaginable French lesson, proved a fine decision. The afternoon passed reading Patricia Highsmith (thx millefois to Jim Doyle for this excellent discovery...she of Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train). Then a cocktail party given by the Captain for "Inner Circle" (Frequent Grand Circle veterans); dinner at the Captain's table...escargots, John Dory in truffle cream and crepes suzettes...and a long moonlight walk around the village of Les Andelys, a magical half-timbered, Norman style town (peering through the lace curtains one can see the timbering inside as well as out) from the 17th Century. Some of the houses still have carved wooden saints and figures and gargoyles on their facades, which I have never seen before. The streets are cobbled, clean, narrow and winding. The parish church in the center is small, unfussy Norman, and eerily lighted at night. Along the river are some palatial mansions and gardens. One can literally smell the money...and indeed on inquiry it turns out to be one of the famous Nantucket/Southampton-esque getaway places for the rich merchants of Rouen and lots of show biz celebrities from Paris. Even in the moonlight, with the ruins of Richard the Lion Hearted's great castle-keep barely etched against the sky, the special-ness of this place is palpable...a nice little discovery.

Today was spent roaming Rouen, which I last saw in 1952 when its famous cathedral, palace of justice, and most of its 15th and 16th century half-timbered Norman mansions were still unrepaired from terrific war damage (the Allied bombing of the Seine River bridges was not pin-point-accurate...just ask Lubbeck!). I remember the grimy cathedral facade, so unlike Monet's string of paintings, and there was scaffolding everywhere. Today it is an enchanting, clearly rich-again city. The cathedral, except for its central portal, has been cleaned; and in summertime a pointilliste son et lumiere show is projected onto it, based on Monet's changing colors at different times of day. By all reports, it is marvelous.

I also roamed the Maclou area, a fine but shut 13th century church, a large timbered courtyard ornamented with skeletons an skulls and dancing devils of considerable vivacity...it was the rather sportif communal charnel house during the Black Death of 1542, lots of narrow streets of teetering houses containing art galleries and antiquaries. Even the McDonalds is in an antique building, discreetly signed. The great, serene, superbly proportioned high Gothic Church of St Ouen was covered in exterior scaffolding...but inside it was elegant and quiet. Back at the cathedral, we were treated to a private organ recital of Pachelbel, Frescobaldi and Bach, which though not played on the great organ was still very pleasing. A cold wind and clouds, though so far no rain, have appeared. Just in time for our outdoorsy day at Omaha Beach tomorrow...though truly I have no complaints to voice about the weather.

The day trip to Arromanches, Omaha Beach and the huge American Cemetery, all recently spruced up and beautifully planted for the 60th Anniversary of D-Day, was warm and sunny after an ominous night of wind and rain. We had 3 veterans of the invasion in our group, and their wreath-laying was simple and quite moving, with a trumpeter playing taps and the group singing the national anthem. Then we were each given a small bunch of red, white and blue flowers, and the name and grave site of a soldier to find and remember. I then went to the computer center to try to look up Carla's father, John Fitch, who was I know killed in Europe but I was not certain if it were at D-Day or in the Battle of the Bulge. The only two graves under that name were of an aviator buried in Belgium and from California and an infantryman buried in Holland and from Minnesota. Besides her Dad's remains may well have been repatriated, as over half the fatalities were. So I struck out. But I put some flowers on the graves of 3 Jewish vets, buried side-by-side; and then took a long, rather melancholy walk in the surf on Omaha Beach. It was warm and bright, there were few waves, and I was able to contemplate in relative silence the immense concrete caissons of the great artificial harbor that the allies built in England and towed to France for assembly. One does not often realize that the logistics of D-Day were as awe-inspiring as the sacrifices.

Then we drove back to Caudebec across the impressive Bretonne Bridge. On a whim I went to the little local church, which was closed; but a young man who was restoring the organ opened it for me, and was so astonished that anyone (much less an American!) was actually interested in the organ that he took a half-hour to tell me all about it. It turns out (my good fortune) that the original rank of pipes are in fact the oldest extant in France, dating from the 1430's. The carved wooden casing is considered the finest Renaissance organ case in Europe; and even the rnks that were added in the early 18th Century to expand the range are by a famous organ builder whose name fled past me in a torrent of enthusiastically rapid French. The young man's father and grandfather were both well-known organ restorers, spanning over 100 years between them. It was a delightful incursion into an arcane world, and all I could think of was how much Jonathan Ambrosino would have enjoyed it.

Today again the nocturnal rains scrubbed the air fresh and clean and crisp, though they eliminated any chance to enjoy the sail to Honfleur on deck. But this morning we were able to stroll the cobbled streets of this historic, albeit rather precious, fishing port, from which Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain set sail, before the silting up of the Seine estuary forced Francois I to build Le Havre across the mouth of the river on the Channel. Today it is a tourist and weekend resort of such cutesy chic that it is reminiscent of Nantucket. Its diversity of architecture from its centuries of popularity and wealth include half-timbered Norman (some of them 6 stories high and very narrow), slate-covered (a passing style unique to this area), grandiose Renaissance (reflecting 800 years of the salt trade and fishing fortunes)...now mostly turned into swanky gift shoppes, art galleries, craft boutiques, calvados caves and more cafes and quai-side seafood bistros than one could imagine. There is a small, charming yacht basin, filled with Parisian weekend follies. Lots of small, pretty, pricey hotels catering heavily to English tourists for whom France still seems a bargain, a quaint and odd wooden church with two naves built just after the end of the Hundred Years War by the boatwrights who only knew how to build ships...ergo this looks a lot like a sailboat...due primarily to the fact that all the stone-masons were busy for years repairing roads and bridges. There are small museums devoted to Eugene Boudin, whose seascapes attracted tout Paris to the beaches and Monet to the light, and to Eric Satie, a local son. As it was all-Saints weekend, the place was jammed along the harbor with British families gorging on oysters and mussels and swilling Kronenbourg and Pommeau. Despite the cutesiness of it, which is all too familiar, I liked it a lot.

Besides Nantucket may have had Melville, but it never hosted Daubigny or Monet or Baudelaire or de Musset. A sun-drenched walk-about, and an enchanting visit to the Musee Satie, an almost magical, Da-da-ist fusion of his music with film clips of his ballets and quirky moving sculptures like flying pears and bowing monkeys and women falling out of windows, and lots of quotations from him and about him by his artsy circle of the Parisian twenties, all in a series of reconstructed stage sets of rooms and bistros where he had spent his time. It was a whacky, surrealist tableau vivant...and precisely right!

The bus ride to Caen was frustrating because our destination was Francois Mitterand's mixed media mish-mash memorial to peace for which we by-passed the two great abbeys where William the Conqueror and his wife, Mathilda of Flanders are buried and where the 200 foot long Bayeux Tapestry (actually an embroidery, I am told) of William's conquest of England is displayed. I really would have loved to pay my respects to the man who courted his wife by storming into her father's court, dragging her around by the hair and kicking her repeatedly, thereby founding the French school of courtship and love-making.

But instead we went to the Peace Memorial. Every French Prime minister seems to feel compelled to leave behind some huge building (an "edifice complex"?) with his name stuck on it. The most interesting piece of this one, besides a fine gift shop, was a powerful film docudrama, entirely without words, all composed of archival footage, shown on a huge split screen...Allies on one side, Germans on the other, preparing for D-Day and then experiencing the invasion. As young men on both sides smiled, waved, smoked and then died, the entire screen dissolved ultimately to a color shot of Omaha Beach as it is today, in all its serenity, exactly as I had just walked on it yesterday. It was very touching. Then 4 more hours on the bus to Paris, a night at the Airport Sofitel, and an early morning train and Metro to the Gare d'Austerlitz where I nestled happily onto a TGV train for my solo intermezzo between group trips. 6 hours later, having researched what I wanted to see in Toulouse and finished another Patricia Highsmith "Ripley" novel, I was happily ensconced in an Etap/Accor hotel hard-by the Toulouse railroad station, watching BBC world news after a steaming, soaking bath. So far, so good.

Toulouse may prove to be a 3-day visit to a 1-day town. Part of the problem is that absolutely everything is closed for the extended all-Saints weekend (how many saints are there, anyway? Besides the French don't go to Church...they go on vacations), excepting only the Tourist Office which informs you that everything is closed and the Churches which I suppose wouldn't dare close in case some very elderly penitent decides to wander in. So I visited the huge brick Basilica of St Sernin, begun in 1080 to service the hordes of pilgrims headed to Santiago di Campostela in that extraordinary migration that served to cosmopolitanize a lot of Europe with its exchanges of goods and services and ideas along the way. St Sernin is the largest brick church in Europe, and its enormous piers supporting its brick arches are remarkable indeed. Toulouse's brick masons became famous everywhere, and the entire city is basically built of a lovely rose-hued brick that became its signature as well as an export commodity of considerable importance.

Then on to the huge, square Jacobin Church and Monastery where Thomas Aquinas is buried and which served as the 13th Century headquarters for the Roman Catholic suppression of the Albigensian Heresy (named for the nearby town of Albi in whose church it was preached and the Cathars who espoused it. What really happened is that a bunch of Southern Frenchmen thought the Roman Church had got far too worldly, debauched and money-grubbing, and they said so. For their pains they got Simon de Monfort (he of the famous Parliament) and his Albigensian Crusaders from Northern France, who were always looking for an excuse to rape and pillage. They swept down, burnt the locals to a crisp and stole everything in sight, all of course with the Papal blessings needed to confirm title to whatever was taken. Actually, I rather like the story in its simplified form. My 5 hour walk, however, wore thin in the chill, grey weather. Sadly there is no opera or concert while I am in town. I'm glad I brought my DVD player and movies. The only people around seem to be a few British tourists, for whom the weather may actually be an acceptable change from home, and a lot of louche Algerian/Tunisians leaning against bus-signs, smoking something and eyeing everyone quite predatorily. That sounds paranoid. Too much Patricia Highsmith.

The chill gave way around 9:30 AM to a splendid Southern French sun, just in time for me to finish a 12-hour sleep and walk into town cautiously (not the Algerians, the mounds of dog poop). Toulouse, for all its medieval significance, feels like a city of 19th century merchant mansions, with an occasional odd church like the really spooky La Taur, that looks like Merlin and Morgan le Fay are brewing potions inside its gloom. The street signs are all in French and Spanish, which reminds you how far south you actually are. And much of the working population, sweeping streets and readying shops and cafes, seem to be black Africans from the former French Equatorial colonies. Africa seems to have contributed a very significant portion of the local population.

The much-vaunted, relatively new Fondation Bemberg, a private museum housed in a grand mansion, made for a nice long walk. It is an odd collection. M. Bemberg had a great affinity for, and even a good eye for one or two painters. He managed to acquire 3 extraordinary Cranach the Elders out of a total of 8 or 9, one (maybe the only) great Dufy that is almost lost in the 11 others which are trivial and nearly silly, two breath-taking Bonnards but out of a room-full of 30-plus which does not make for a great average, one splendid Rouault and a few genuine curiosities like a self-portrait of and by Sarah Bernhardt. The problem is that there is so much surrounding Renaissance and Fauve trash that one could easily dismiss it all and walk out and miss the goodies. For me the learning experience was Louis Valtat, a prolific painter who lived for almost 100 years until 1952. He painted one sensational street-scene all in Cezanne's palette and style of infinite shadings of blues, and one Arlesienne olive grove that out-van Gogh's Vincent at his very best. Alas, when Valtat struck out in search of his very own style, he became superficial and deadly, which apparently struck a responsive chord in the soul of M. Bemberg, who collected him by the room-full, along with a lot of Fantin Latours, Vlamincks and stuff. One really lovely Beach-scene by Boudin, but then I had just come from that very promenade in Honfleur. The other private museum, that I walked half-way across this quite large city to visit, was closed on Tuesdays which seemed almost as eccentric as the Moorish pavillion that the owner (a rich 30-year-old collector of Asian antiquities, who was shot by his deranged mistress) left to the city, to the bafflement of the scandalized citizenry. Still it made for a nice stroll along the Garonne and the barge canal. I bought cheese, a baguette and some pears, and shall return to the hotel to watch the presidential calamity unfold through the filter of BBC World. If it is as grim as I anticipate, I also have some calvados.

Awoke to the final tallies, and reached Howard by phone at his daughter's. He had left me two messages at the hotel which the desk "staff"...an adolescent doing her nails ceaselessly and a warty crone eating salami constantly...neglected or refused to pass along to me. But by 9AM we were in his car, en route to a long and lovely day driving around Perigord and the Dordogne looking at 18th and 19th Century farm houses, all built of local stone, with walled gardens full of blooming roses, many with swimming pools and guest cottages (which Howard wanted if possible), with wine cellars and old chestnut panelling, and grand armoires and fireplaces, and friendly dogs and lots of vineyards. The realtor, whom we met in Cazals, a charming market town in the Cahors wine region, was a lovely English lady in her thirties, whose firm is all British and specializes in the booming market for vacation and retirement properties in this region which is effectively just across the Channel and with great air connections from Toulouse to all parts of Britain.

To the English, the prices here are cheap and the wine-filled, sun-drenched lifestyle appealing. Howard was looking in the $400,000 range and wanted separate accommodations for his mother-in-law and space (and perhaps a pool) for visiting grandchildren, space for a small garden, and walking distance to a village for shopping. He had lots of choices. My personal favorite needed some work, but it had a walkin wine cellar built into the huge oak barrels that had once stored the wine. it smelled delectably of old woods and tannins, and had a carved sign over the door that read "La Chappelle"...so at least here was one small church that someone attended regularly. It also came with an annual entitlement of 100 bottles plus unlimited table grapes from the vineyard lease.

Whilst Howard prowled around and asked serious questions, I played tug-of-war and fetch with Lichen, a delightful French bull terrier, all black and brown wiggle and snuffle. The whole day went that way, punctuated by a fine bistro lunch of braised duck and frites and good local wine. We ended late, at a student place (Toulouse has some 30,000 at its University, many from abroad) in a narrow cobbled lane near the dramatically illuminated Pont Neuf over the Garonne.

We both had steak in a meaux mustard sauce and some good Cahors wine, and talked about everything for several hours...our childhoods, educations, divorces, kids, tastes in literature and politics. Howard is a rare and special, witty and incisive treasure of a person, who all-too-modestly describes his O.B.E. as "other blokes' efforts". His pioneering work in nuclear safety clearly is all his own. His eldest son is a brilliant, 30 year old physicist, who is seriously bi-polar and refuses any treatment. He uses a lot of pot and alcohol which has already pushed him dangerously over the edge and into institutions twice, but the drugs they dosed him with were so numbing and deadening that he flatly refuses them. Howard is frustrated and angry, heart-broken and fearful for Alex's life but doesn't know what to do. It is all so hurtfully familiar, but the only obvious suggestions I could offer were things the doctors had already come up with. A judicial declaration of incompetence and forced hospitalization under guardianship is just too terrible for Howard to face. He is such a sweet guy, who is I fear facing a lot of heart-ache. He actually said something startling and helpful and beautiful to me when we were talking about Bemy. It is a thought I never had before. He said "It sounds as if she lived a remarkable and full life...just too quickly." I have been thinking about it ever since and find it somewhat comforting.

It is really quite extraordinary how a casual conversation between Anne and me at our birthday/traditional supper, and this British couple who just happened to be sitting at the table next to us, visiting Boston and introducing themselves in quite uncharacteristic fashion, should result in a brand new friendship of such genuine intensity. One does not expect to make new buddies and have adventures like this at the age of 70. The chain of circumstances can produce good bindings, too. So there, Patricia Highsmith! Another long stroll back to the Hotel and I am done with Toulouse, not really worth the detour except for the day with Howard. But then, how often does one get to shop for exotic real estate in a lovely countryside, snoop quite legitimately through antique houses, ask people about the old muskets and sabres hanging on the walls and the ancestral portraits. It really was worth the detour!


Armagnac Chateau

First glitch...I got to the train with time to spare, hopped aboard the Bordeaux express for the one-hour trip to Agen, got off and found no Dave Dappolonia. So I phoned his house. No answer. So I phoned his distillery office. An English-speaking, or more accurately sniveling clerk said he had never received and therefore never transmitted my arrival time. He did not apologize. He simply said, one could almost here the nonchalant shrug, that sometimes the message machine doesn't work. I very nearly asked him if he might have felt any more involvement if the message had been an order for 5000 cases of Armagnac, but his ennui seemed resolute and impermeable. I did at least ascertain that Dave was in fact in France and simply out somewhere. Sniveler suggested I keep phoning the house. I suggested he damn well find Dave and tell him I am waiting at the station where I had no intention of spending the next 3 days. That's where things now stand...or more precisely sit, on a hard wooden bench. I may go have a beer or a pizza or both.

Three hours and 20 minutes later, Dave and Eileen arrived 20 minutes ahead of my originally scheduled arrival time, having been mooching about Agen, killing time, for 3 hours. Then began a totally wonderful 2 and a half days! The hour-long ride from Agen to their chateau turned into a 2 and a half hour meander, as we stopped at several exquisite Gascon bastides (small medieval fortified villages), some now grown to market towns around half-timbered and stone central squares. My absolute favorite, called Larresingle, consisted of no more than 20 tall, narrow houses built along the inside of the 3-foot-thick stone walls of a fortress with a tall, windowless, partly ruined central tower. Each house had a rose garden and the entire bastide had been saved and restored by "the Committee of Boston", a group of 1920's benefactors according to a modest plaque that included 2 Welds, 2 Forbes and a Lodge. It was all so perfect, I immediately wanted to buy the central tower and live in the top of it like some great seigneurial owl...save for the fact that it is 3 hours from everything, including airport, hospital, opera house or super market. One can actually get to a train station, a bread store and a small vegetable market in less than an hour. The fantasy has receded.

Then it was on to David and Eileen's "place"...an absolutely superb small chateau of perhaps 20 rooms, built in the early 18th century on 12th century foundations of a pilgrim's abbey, in the severely classical, one floor, grand courtyard style known as "chartreuse" or "charter house". It is designated "Chateau St. Aubin" and was described in the French "House Beautiful" a one of the 1000 most beautiful homes in France. It includes 200 acres of vineyards, rolling woodlands and wheat and corn fields, a huge chais with giant oaken barrels containing 300,000 bottles worth of excellent (trust me!) Armagnac that is evaporating at 3% a year because the market is so depressed that it apparently doesn't pay to bottle and ship it. There is a beautiful orangerie wing, a
privet-enclosed swimming pool, and a rose terrace with a view all the way to the
Pyrenees, 60 miles south. In the morning mists it is a view worthy of a black and white Kurosawa film.

There is a guest house used by the staff, a lovely cook/housekeeper and her competent husband. And the entire main house was redone within the past 10 years in exquisite Euro-chic style by David's partners, a Swedish entrepreneur who owns the Kelt liquor enterprise and a French marketing executive who hasn't quite figured out how to sell Armagnac. They are not getting along at all well, and David would like to sell out or find new partners. We spent a fair amount of time kicking around fanciful schemes. The place can be bought for an astonishingly cheap 2 million Euros (based on the Dordogne farm houses) and costs about $80,000 a year to keep up. If one could sell off the Armagnac for even $10 a bottle (after costs of bottling, labeling and shipping) one could own the place outright, pocket a nice profit and lease out the vineyards to cover the operating costs. David rents the place for $5000 a week in the summer, which is stupefyingly reasonable. The problem is, with either owning or occupying or even renting it...you are a 20 minute drive to Eauze for a loaf of bread and almost 3 hours to Toulouse or Bordeaux.

One cannot live (very long, anyway) by Armagnac alone, even delectable aged Armagnac sipped on a terrace looking south to the Pyrenees. One can only watch so many old ladies with bad teeth force-feeding unhappy ducks and geese (even the "new" "kinder" method looks pretty awful). And you can only survive the killingly rich diet ( the 4 food groups being foie gras, duck confit, armagnac and red wine) for at best a week a year, followed by an equal time spent in penance and fasting. It is also, as I thing Dave and Eileen have discovered, a rather lonely place, even if you like reading, water-coloring, riding about on a tractor and roaming the hillsides with dogs. Even with so much guest space, it is a helluva schlepp (18 hours or so from Boston) for friends to come visit, and quite isolated if you don't import companions. And it commits you to visiting and revisiting the same place.

So...dismissing the notion of buying into this glorious property...we spent the next 2 days riding around. We visited a marvelous old Greek gentlemen who distills his own Armagnac in a 120-year-old, hand-controlled, wood-fired, brass and copper alembic that looks like the original Rube Goldberg model...it is in fact the same constant distilling equipment that is used in Provence to distill perfume essences, We went to market towns and had pastis with David's buddies who are mainly tavern proprietors....petted lots of dogs, warded off many ferociously noisy guard-geese who fortunately do back down, albeit loudly, if you don't retreat. The local accent is hard to understand, part Basque, part Languedoc, with "G" sounds stuck onto the end of all words ending in "N" and many "C" and "X" and "QY" endings that I am not sure how to pronounce.

The local bull fights are Basque-style, which consists of a bunch of guys doing acrobatics on and around and over and thru the horns of cows and sometimes bulls. It ain't no corrida, but no one gets hurt or killed, either. The entire visit was slightly surreal and entirely magical. I kept looking around the rose terrace for Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright in chiffon and big hats. And the sleeping in pitch darkness and total quiet was glorious. And the dinners of directly transferred-into-veins cholesterol, disguised as sausages of donkey and deer and goat and duck or everything else drenched in duck confit, were like drowning voluntarily in a lake of lard. Clearly Steve Jelin would go bonkers here in 10 days, and probably end up dead as a force-fed goose but without the commercial value. Still, the extraordinarily gracious hospitality was rare and special and memorable.

Bordeaux

We drove toward Bordeaux through the Sauterne region, which is flat and less scenic, and whose greatest Chateau d'Yquem is so fenced off and protected and guarded that you can only glimpse its silhouette. I did learn that the Vintners in Bordeaux plant rose bushes at the end of their rows of vines, not for aesthetics, but because they react much sooner than the vines to certain blights, and thus provide a kind of early warning system that treatment is needed. I also cam up with the hare-brained notion of using the beautifully twisted and tortured old vines, which the Brussels EU pays to have cut down and replaced, not for firewood but for inexpensive and quite chic sculptures (both indoor and outdoor). What yuppie boutique or wine store could resist a coffee table piece that is unique and comes (for a limited time...i.e. until the 300,000 bottles are used up!) with a
complimentary bottle of aged Armagnac and a beautiful certificate testifying that the sculpture and the brandy are from the same vineyard in Gascony. All this for a bargain $99.95. We could even hit the gift shows and the TV Marketeers, assuming we could find one with a French accent like Charles Boyer's. You may yet see at least 2 samples on Main Street in Nantucket, if David follows through on his threat to bring back vines to play around with. Directly across from the Bordeaux train station, David and Eileen dropped me in front of the Hotel Faisan, an acceptable and convenient 2-star, and I bid them a most grateful adieu until we rendezvous on Nantucket over Thanksgiving.

Within 30 minutes I was checked in and out for a 4 hour walk around old Bordeaux , a sprawling riverine port full of grand, rich 18th and 19th century mansions, newly cleaned customs houses and the bourse, a few flamboyant Gothic spires and bell towers, some vestigial medieval arches and gates, and an enormous amount of quai-side restoration and road construction and urban rehab. It was grand to walk and gawk in bright sunshine. The Boulevards and grand squares are very Parisian and handsome, and the whole city center exudes prosperity and historic affluence.

Tomorrow I will attack the museums.

Eight and a half hours of walking...all around this handsome city, which looks as if Baron Haussman had relaid it at the same time and in the same fashion as he did the Paris 16th and 17th arrondissements. The Cathedral of Ste Anne was cavernous if not beautiful. The Contemporary Arts Museum, housed in a grand, stone-arched warehouse built at the time of Napoleon to receive and tax the vast quantities of goods pouring into France from her colonies in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, the South Pacific and what little was left of Canada, had mounted a quirky but extraordinarily entertaining show built around the French national sport...eating. There were towers of beer cans, lakes of foil wrappers, all the usual cliches. But then there were two big tables set for 8, one before the meal and perfect in its formality...the other after the meal, a mess of dirt, spills, stains, snuffed cigarettes...both tilted vertically, framed in lucite and hung on the wall. There were photos of abbatoirs, with super-imposed images of fat little kids and Burger King counters. My two favorites were: (1) a mechanically powered nude woman emerging from a tub of butter and sinking back into it, over and over again, hypnotically, slowly, repulsively; and (2) a chain of washing machines, all linked, with assorted undergarments being fed into one end and at the other end a large tube excreting what for all the world looked like a huge pile of human excrement. Epater les bourgeois, indeed!

Two giggling 6 year-olds and I seemed to be the only ones who really appreciated it! As if to further underscore the national fetish, the Musee des Beaux Arts had a big show of Baroque food paintings, mounted around 3 huge ceramic table settings of every conceivable 17th century edible. It was all quite realistic, and technically quite accomplished, but I couldn't quite shake the images of the butter lady and the laundry machines. One had to go to the permanent collection to wallow in even worse stuff...portraits of very homely nobility (and one would assume these were flattering or meant to be) and a lot of buxom, bare-breasted women throwing down their scythes and baguettes and taking up arms and banners for the glory of France. It was almost as funny as the butter lady. Interesting, if not artistic, were the numerous scenes of Bordeaux harbor, its riverbanks not lined with great limestones palaces but a forest of masted ships and a jumble of bustling commerce in food stuffs and wine and cloth and grain, the very same quais that I have been wandering on in the 19th century grandeur, as they are now prepped with underground garages, expressway exits and pedestrian walkways of cafes and bistros for the tastes of the 21st century. The separate Gallerie des Beaux Arts had a show of the Blue Rider group, with its focus on Gabriele Munter, Kandinsky's protege and mistress. It was barely OK.

However, the synagogue, dating from 1824 was a sephardic treasure, reminiscent of Central Synagogue in New York and Plum Street in Cincinnati, but not as Victorian gussied-up as either. 1000 families now belong, for the first time since 1900, many of them North Africans from Tunis and Algiers and Tangiers. Bordeaux had a huge and very wealthy Jewish community from the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Iberia, as it was a quick and easy place to flee to and a great trading entrepot. This lasted into the 1940's when the Nazis and Vichy collaborators did their thing. The man who showed me about was knowledgeable, interesting and very pleased that a stranger would walk in and express interest in this rather unvisited side-street house of worship. Besides I think he was brain-dead from having taught Sunday school all morning.

I then found a public phone and reached Jamil, my tour leader, to remind him as he had requested not to forget to bring my big suitcase from the Paris airport hotel to Blois, an accommodation that permitted me to travel relatively light (not my strong suit) on this little excursion around Western France. I was just as glad the Museum of Decorative Arts was closed, and I punctuated the 45 minute walk back to the hotel with a spartan, healthy, almost dietetic plate of Veal Bordelaise and a glass of Bordeaux. When in Rome, and all that. My VietNamese waiter was not busy and eager to talk, had wanted Kerry to win because he hates all wars, and was thrilled that I had been to Hanoi, his home. He talked his way quite elegantly into a good tip...a quickly assimilated Viet.

Loire Valley

Awoke early to chill fog, which persisted the whole train ride to past Angouleme, Tours, Poitiers and to Blois, where it actually teetered on the brink of turning to drizzle but graciously held off for my 15 minute walk to my Loire-front hotel, another charmless but well-situated, full-service Grand Circle choice. They must have a deal with the huge Accor chain. Thank God we are not state-side where Accor owns Motel 6. Alas, coming out of the station, my suitcase handle snapped off, which made pulling it down the hill to the river quite awkward. France really is surprisingly insensitive to the needs of travelers in general and the handicapped in particular. Even Parisian stations (the big inter-city ones) have lots of steps, few if any elevators, no retro-fitted escalators. I do not know how people in wheel chairs or on crutches manage. One would have thought that a country of such self-congratulatory sensitivity, and with so many centuries of war-wounded, would have been more pioneering in this area as is Britain.

Blois is a totally magical small city, and not just for its remarkable Chateau which served pretty much as the Valois capital of France for almost 350 years. It is so full of history...from Catharine di Medici and her marvelous little inlaid-wood studiolo (I wonder if she had seen that of the Duke of Urbino!) full of treadle operated secret compartments containing, if you believe Dumas, poisons and jewels and love letters, to her 3rd son, Henri III, who dressed in black women's clothing, wore earrings, and had 45 very devoted young male attendants who also dressed in feminine attire and were scornfully called "mignons du roi", giving rise to our phrase "the King's minions". This of course was all OK since his Queen only wore men's clothes and, not surprisingly, bore him no children. It is interesting to stand on the very spot where the Duc de Guise was murdered, where Louis XIV was born, where Leonardo da Vinci first met Francois I. It makes history and familiar fiction somehow palpable. And outside the chateau there are narrow cobbled streets and steps that lead to wine shops specializing in Vouvray and to the Romanesque church of St Nicholas from the 12th Century.

Indeed, if one wanted to live within 60 miles of Paris and did not care too much about the beach or the opera, this would make for a lovely pied a terre in France...centrally located, mild in climate, and oozing charm and history. And a fixer-upper chateau in the area can be bought for about a cool million, for which you get 20-plus bedrooms (how many bathrooms is an interesting and unmentioned issue) and a money pit of staggering dimensions. But also oozing charm and history. There is a reasonable cultural life, a long tradition of artists and artisans, besides being the home of white asparagus and drinkable white wine. Magnolia trees thrive, as do catalpas and roses. And it was the clock-making capital of the world until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when all the Huguenots packed up their skills and moved to Switzerland. Incidental intelligence. Good for quiz shows.

Today, under grey skies (but with no rain falling...the dollar is falling far worse) we toured 3 chateaux: (1) glorious Chenonceau, full of lovely paintings and furnishings and tapestries, and intimately redolent of Francois I, Diane de Poitiers, Catharine di Medici and her 3 childless sons (which ended the Valois and ushered in the Bourbons...and a good thing, too...who could comfortably order a Jack Daniels Valois on the rocks?) It is a wonderfully harmonious piece of architecture, even though it famed arched bridge over the river and the grand hall on top of it, and the companion formal parterres were all built at different times by different architects(2)Then on to the obscenely large Chambord, a testimonial to fiscal extravagance (Francois kept right on building turrets and spiral staircases when he couldn't afford to ransom his two son from Spain...but then first things first, non?) It claims the dubious distinction of having inspired Louis XIV to go it one better and build Versaiiles, another pomposity. (3) and lastly, after a charming lunch of poached Loire River salmon and leeks in a dilled hollandaise, we were given a tour of the still-privately-owned and inhabited Cheverny, a small, pure and classical house set in a hunting park with a pack of 140 hounds who expressed zero interest in us and seem to spend most of their time humping one another. Apparently this is one of the last hold-out bastions of stag-hunting without guns...dogs, bows and arrows and long knives are used. It may be authentic but it sounds quite horrible and cruel. The 30-ish Marquis lives there with wife and 2 young sons and manages the property and the hunts, which are invitational and expensive. He also caters meals for tour groups like us. It gives a new meaning to "landed gentry".

Despite a grey, rainy start, the next day turned into a grand success. Just as our bus came within view of the distinctively different (one Norman/Romanesque, one flamboyant Gothic) spires of Chartres Cathedral, the sun broke radiantly through to turn the world's most famous windows into sapphires and rubies of almost painful brilliance for us. When I was here 52 years ago, I remember my disappointment that most of them were still boarded up and being re-installed after their removal to safety during World War II.

Now a second cleaning, removing some harmful protective coating that was installed in the 50''s, is almost half completed; and about two-thirds of the outside stonework has been carefully cleaned, revealing statuary of astounding detail and fascination, and even some of the original paint colors. It is now truly one of the cultural sights of a lifetime, enormously enhanced by Grand Circle's springing (they finally got it right!) for the doyen of all Chartres medievalists, Malcolm Miller to give us a private hour and a half lecture tour of the windows, the facades and the floor labyrinth.

They also gave us a full half day to wander and wonder at leisure. Miller is a witty, snobby, curmudgeonly cross between Sir Kenneth Clark and Malcolm Muggeridge. His lecture, which was dazzling, was punctuated by a diatribe against George Bush and another against the Da Vinci Code and all such pop=trash, inaccurate, distorting Medieval gibberish. It was delicious, though I think it shocked some of the group thereby becoming all the better. I also learned why the largest and most gorgeous cathedral in Europe is out in the boonies, albeit in the middle of the fertile bread-basket of the Ile de France. It is because Chartres, to this very day, in the still-preserved 8th century crypt under the altar, is the repository of one of Christianity's holiest relics and pilgrimage objects, a length of torn silk cloth called "the veil of the Virgin Mary", supposedly found by the first great New Testament tracker and finder, the Byzantine Empress Helena, Constantine's mother, and a convert to Christianity . It was sent as a gift by the Empress Irene to Charlemagne after his defeat of the Moors at the Battle of Tours in 742. His son, Charles the Bald, gave it to Chartres, which thereby became a huge and prosperous pilgrimage site and the center for the Cult of Mary for all of Europe. Pilgrims and money poured in, et voila!

Paris Encore

I reached Nadine and Jean Phillippe on the first try, and we are booked for dinners twice. I nestled into the 4-star comfort of the Sofitel Rive Gauche, far and away the nicest hotel of the trip, and beautifully situated for my purposes of walking to all the places I couldn't get to easily on my earlier Paris interlude.

I awoke to a beautiful sunrise pink sky over the skyline of Paris. I am on the 9th floor looking out upon the ugly Tour Montparnasse, offset by the domes of the Pantheon, the Sorbonne (both very nearby) and the distant Invalides and Eiffel Tower. The hotel sits between the weirdly named Sante Prison and the historic St Anne's Lunatic Asylum, just a half-hour stroll down the Boul Mich and the Boulevard St Germain to the Cluny Museum, the Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Seine and the 2 Iles. Another 15 minutes and I am the Centre Pompidou or the Bastille Opera House. At least 5000 people were lined up at the Center for Arab Culture for the Pharaonic Exhibit (it is Armistice Weekend and again no one is working); so I headed straight for the Opera Box Office where I was early but 7th in line, and got tickets for Saturday night and Sunday matinee. Then I roamed the Ile St Louis and the Ile de la Cite, Notre Dame, the Ste Chappelle, and lots of book stalls along the student-filled Boulevard Saint Michel. I ended up tired and headed for a late dinner with Nadine so I indulged in an afternoon nap. Vive la France!

Highlights of my 3 days in Paris: first, aberrant but grand sunshine and mildly brisk weather...even the flower stalls sparkled as if the roses and cyclamen knew they had better soak it all up quickly. Second a superb dinner with Nadine and Jean Phillippe at Bistro 17, a fine wood-panelled restaurant that was well worth the two Metro changes, but whose cholesterol index (foie gras, sweetbreads in mustard cream, and a creme brulee) had to have hit a new high. Jean Phillippe graciously drove me back to the hotel and I slept like a bouche de Noel. Saturday a long walk in the Luxembourg gardens, petting dogs, reading the truly superb International Herald Trib. My Red Sox cap still draws bravos.

Then a mid-afternoon visit to the Cluny for a half-hour contemplation of the rose-colored millefleurs and the smile-inducing serenity of the lady and the Unicorn Tapestries...followed by a one hour concert of medieval Catalan troubadour music played and sung by a 7 person group utilizing some of the strangest period instruments I have ever seen ( a small, foot-long, crank-handled hurdy gurdy, a miniature bagpipe of truly asthmatic force, and a flat, marimba or dulcimer-like sentrillon which is played by striking the strings with tiny mallets). Except for the counter-tenor who kept slipping into a falsetto, it was all quite fine and great fun, especially in the medieval hall of the best medieval museum in the world. Then a beer and choucroute (cholesterol free!!) , though the beer that I discovered is far too good to be sin-less. It is Dutch, called Navigator, and comes in 8% and 11% strengths. It is nutty, dark and potent...a perfect preparation for the Dialogue of the Carmelites at the huge, modern Opera Bastille.

It is admittedly very user-friendly, with comfortable seats, lots of leg-room, good sight-lines and acoustics, a great stage with double turntables like Vienna's, plenty of elevators and toilets, and relatively unobtrusive super-titles (though I fail to see the need for them when the opera is, as almost every opera in France is forced to be, sung in French). Alas it is also quite sterile and corporate in feeling, and I miss the grandeur and elegance of the Opera Garnier. Double alas, for the ho-hum singing except for Dawn Upshaw who was a radiant Blanche, and especially for the lethargic (or at least nonchalant) conducting of the highly regarded Ken Nagano. It made for a pretty torpid musical experience, which is a shame because the opera itself, though hardly filled with action and movement, does have some lovely stuff in it. I heard Regine Crespin sing it a very long time ago, and loved it. My tolerance level may have been higher then. I wonder if there is an inverse ratio betwixt tolerance and cholesterol. The hour-long stroll along the student-jammed, motorcycle-craze, Saturday night, holiday weekend, Boul Mich, with huge lines at every late movie house and enough accumulated cigarette smoke to kill the chestnut trees was delectably local. I shall sleep well again.

Today I strolled leisurely about the Marais, the Centre Pompidou, whose purposeful discordance with its surroundings reminds me of the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue...I like them both but not where they are. Then on to the Bastille for a dazzlingly sung and conducted "Ariadne auf Naxos" with a remarkable cast of young Russians mostly making Paris debuts. The Zerbinetta was to have been the vaunted Nathalie Dessaye who just made headlines canceling a big tour of Africa for health reasons. In her place, and as far as I and the rest of the audience was concerned the substitution can be permanent, was an extravagantly shapely, glamorous sexy blonde named Luba Petrova, who happened also to have a sensational voice (I hesitate to say "on top of" everything else). She sang most of the second act in a micro bikini and literally wowed the crowd. The production again was awfully contrived, involving driving a gratuitous stretch limo and a school bus onto the stage, and a lot of Hawaiian baseball shirts and sports caps. But this is Paris, et voila!

Then it was off on the Metro for a delightful dinner at the town house of Nathalie and Herve Barbaret, Nadine's eldest daughter who stayed with us in Weston about 25 years ago to perfect her English, and with whom Bemy stayed in Paris. Her truly excellent husband was in the diplomatic service in New Delhi for 4 years and two of their three delightful kids were born there. Herve is now in a government bureau involved with conserving and restoring historical monuments (rather following in Jean Phillippe's footsteps when he was briefly Minister of Culture after Andre Malraux under Giscard d'Estaing). He is a gracious, modest guy who speaks English beautifully as does Nathalie, and as do the kids from school in India, and the 9 year-old has just begun to learn Chinese (which I hope Jim's kids will do too...it is "their" century so let's all get prepared for it). The 9 year old has also just written a book, which his 6 year old brother has illustrated with crayon drawings and which beaming Grandpa has color photo-copied. It's delightful, but then so was the whole evening. Jean Phillippe and Nadine were also there, as was Nadine's sister, Marianne and her 30-ish son, a structural engineer now residing in Ft Lauderdale.

Nathalie now works in the finance department of Remy Martin (the only way to afford a private house in the very fashionable 16th), and she is going to think about my project to have Remy Martin go into the Armagnac business and buy up the 300,000 bottles, leaving Nathalie and me as co-owners of Chateau St Aubin, free and clear and with a fair amount left over as well. We all agreed that the fantasy involves a marketing problem, and I fear my resident maven, Jimmy, is totally consumed trying to market car batteries to even think about getting involved.

Burgougne

Up early to get to the Gare de Lyons and onto the TGV to Dijon. En route I ran into a situation that was so awful that I intruded. Laurie, a nice lady on the tour, who was taking a much-needed vacation from nursing an invalid husband, was paired as a room-mate with a seriously Alzheimer-riddled woman who not only understood little and remembered nothing from minute to minute, but who was also quite nasty and very clingy/dependent. It was like a cruel hoax, and Laurie was frantic. So I spoke to Jamil, our tour leader, and insisted that the boat was going to be 40% empty and they had an obligation to give Laurie a single room. They agreed, for indeed the poor lady should never have been accepted on the trip by Grand Circle, who had been "called and alerted" by the family that "there could be a problem"...never mind the total irresponsibility of the family in permitting Mummy dearest to go anywhere off-leash. For my efforts I got (1) a big hug from Laurie; (2) an invitation to dine at the Captain's table; (3) an up-graded cabin of my own with floor to ceiling sliding windows and a private balcony. Virtue, especially when combined with meddlesome-ness, can indeed bring its own rewards.

But not without a price. Four of the geezers and crones came up to me, asked if I worked for Grand Circle, refused to believe that I didn't, and were quite peevish that I wouldn't arrange for them to change cabins, too. I would not work for Grand Circle in any capacity except Lord High Executioner.

No time at all to see Dijon, which is too bad, as the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and Flanders fortified and embellished their capital with lots of rich stuff. Nadine and Jean Phillippe still keep a house there, from the days when Jean Phillippe was the Deputy from Dijon/Beaune. But the lovely ride along the Cote de Nuits and the Cote de Beaune, passing by all the famous properties, villages, domaines, chateaux, clos and negociants....Chambertin, Givry, La Romanee Conti, Chambolle Musigny, Aloxe Corton....was truly intoxicating without sipping a drop. My 3-hour wander about the town of Beaune produced the sad discovery that all the wines were double the price that they would have been in New Hampshire and even in Boston, due not so much to the climbing Euro but to the well-known avarice of the Burgundians.

So I comforted myself by buying a couple of wonderful silk neckties with the names of all the great wines embroidered on them. One can always spill a fine wine on them, or drool, if authenticity is needed. We then had a group luncheon at the Chateau de Chevigny, a truly appalling place owned by a man named Pont who caters to group tours, serves appalling wines and worse beef bourginon, collects motorcycles and airplanes with which he has totally junked up the grounds of what clearly was once a fine estate. Bonjour, tristesse. Whilst in Beaune, in a little, out-of-the-way wine shop, which I went into because they had in the window a 3000 Euro bottle of 1904 Chateau d'Yquem Sauterne, I found a 1989 bottle of Chateau Bellevue Figeac, with its distinctive gold label. It was the wine, though not the year, that we served in 1959 at Alice's and my wedding. That was a good year, whatever the after-taste. Then back on the bus to Chalon sur Saone, and onto the ship for an overnight cruise to Macon, a town with absolutely nothing to see except a statue of Alphonse Lamartine trying very hard to look like Lord Byron. I have zero idea why we stopped here, but I am now sitting on my balcony, sipping a calvados, and watching 3 very charming and large rats frolic along the rocks. It is better than thinking about Condoleeza Rice replacing Colin Powell.

Lyon has proved another disappointing tourism city...a monstrous basilica built to thank the Virgin for saving the city from the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War (does not the 1870's seem a bit late for that sort of thing?), it is a looney agglomeration of styles that don't cohere and a triumph of excess and money over taste and judgment. The Museum of Fabrics (silk being the foundation of the city's enormous prosperity, perhaps even more than wine) is small but worthwhile. Its highlights are the archives of designs and patterns from the original fabrics of Versailles and Fontainebleau, that enabled exact reproductions to be made...and I also enjoyed some ancient Egyptian, Coptic and Byzantine fabric fragments, including one astounding , entire , crinkled linen, long-sleeved gown from 2000 BC and one champleve embroidery of a centaur from 200AD. The decorative arts wing was rather leaden except for a few carved and gilded sedan chairs and one delightful open carriage in scarlet and gilt. A walk about, a little shopping, and a sigh that we will not be here tomorrow night when the Beaujolais Nouveau 2004 is released world-wide. This is the Greenwich Mean for that event, and
the whole town becomes a giant fire-works carnival and a son et lumiere as
well. Timing is everything.


Provence

After two totally squandered days cruising in drizzle, punctuated by pointless stops in Tournon (across the Rhone from Ton de Montrachet, where I actually bought a fine bottle...more to schlepp, but it is just replacing the Armagnac and Calvados which I gave away in Paris and have been drinking these last few days) and then in Villiers, a medieval village of at most 3000 that can be walked at leisure in 20 minutes. Grand Circle needs to re-think this itinerary a lot. We arrived in blinding sunshine and a biting Mistral (I am never sure where the North wind stops being the Mistral and starts being the Tramontana) in gorgeous Avignon. Home of Olivier Messiaen, the hot-air brothers Montgolfier, and 6 serious self-indulgent Popes who were either renegades or captives depending on the version, it owes its extravagant charm to the 19th Century restorations of Violette le Duc, who did the same for Carcassonne and Arles, which we see tomorrow. The immense Papal Palace is all the more impressive for having been stripped bare and left cavernously, spookily empty. I opted for a self-guided audio tour, which was excellent and even came with period music. Inadvertently I exited the wrong way, which led to a long, lovely walk down medieval streets and impasses, through a few fine 18th Century squares, and then all around the medieval walls, under the remnants of the children's song-bridge, and back along the swift-moving Rhone. The annual Avignon festival of theatre has resulted in the presence of quite a number of very up-market, small, exquisite hotels in grand mansions, which add to the town's special appeal. I even bought a T-shirt!

Intimate Arles, with its fine Roman ruins, and the far larger Aix en Provence with its splendid promenade of Catalpas and its 18th Century mansions along the Cours Mirabeau (named curiously in honor of a hideously deformed wife-rapist turned revolutionary demagogue... why not name it for the cultivated King Rene the Good?) were both pleasant in cool but sunny brightness. Weather is so central to one's response to a place. But my time spent in each was quite different. In Arles I wandered a half-hour along the City Walls on the Rhone to an artisan's fair, which in fact turned out to be a 5 Euro entrance fee to 4 huge tents where I spent almost 4 hours tasting 16 wines, 9 aperitifs (including 4 pastis, which I love) a dozen or more each of pates, confits, tapenades, artichoke caviars, glazed chestnuts, spiced almonds and olives and onions, and of course foie gras. It had to have been the cheapest and best smorgasbord in all of France, though I waddled more than walked back to the ship.

In Aix I decided that I was brim-full of second-rate cathedrals (Chartres can really do that to you!) and museums (there are no Cezannes in his home town, only his modest home)...so I took off on a 45 minute ramble, through a Muslim neighborhood and flea market wherein the vistas of fully robed women holding up skimpy bras and panties was surreal, as well as a great challenge to the imagination).

My destination was the Fondation Vasarely, a splendid , giant, black-and-white geo-cube containing some 50 large works by the master of optic art and his rather more kinetic son. I even bought a serigraph that I had lusted after 35 years ago when I bought my "Labyrinth" and could not afford two. This is his famous "Zebra", alas this time signed only in the plate but nonetheless wonderful. Now is not the time to think about wall-space. Another few hours roaming student-filled streets (there are thousands here from all over the world) and then back onto the bus to swill a Navigator beer and watch Mt. Ste. Victoire slide by (it looks better in Cezannes), pay an obligatory visit to yet another allied cemetery (this has become a pet project of Grand Circle, and apparently a very smart marketing tool for the generation that it is seeking to attract), and watch the foliage change as we slid over the lower Alps. Far less beautiful is the range of high-rise condos that line the hills and shore-line between Marseilles and the Italian border. All those once-charming villages that I nostalgically recall from 1952, like St Tropez and VilleFranche now look like San Diego. The area still has good food, good weather, and mostly friendly Frenchmen (which is refreshing), but it has lost all appeal as a place for long-term visits. I am going to Monaco tomorrow, and have the name of a lawyer to consult about their residency requirements and tax laws...a notion that has been consuming me since the Bush re-election, about which I remain border-line distraught. But I don't think this is where I want to spend 6 months and a day each year. it looks like Cancun!

After the better part of a long day in glitzy, trivial Monaco, I know for sure that it is not for me...an over-priced, charmless, posturing, self-important little dink of a place with a gambling casino, a road race and a designer mall as its main attractions (besides its tax laws and money-laundering skills) and its current local icons, Tina Turner, Elton John, Johnny Depp and the indefatigably promiscuous Princess Stephanie who cannot seem to get over the fact that she drove Mom off a cliff. It has of late also become a big hit with Russian and Italian bankers and businessmen who plan to live here when they get out of jail. I bought a fine baseball cap, and a one-Euro chip at the Casino (I did exactly the same thing 52 years ago, only then I went to hear Edith Piaf sing!) so I can now make Olivia a truly funky pair of ear-rings for her Spice Girl phase.

Except for the exercise and the sunshine today was a touristic bust. The hour-long, sharply up-hill hike to Cimien, the suburb of Nice where Queen Victoria and a lot of exiled Russian nobility fled the winters and built stupefyingly huge belle epoque hotels like the Regina and apartment blocks like the Majestic, all with more wrought iron balconies and bare-breasted ladies holding up electrified torches that all the opera houses in the world, was not worth the trouble. Idid find a good view of a bizarre Indo-Moorish folly that some name-unknown rich American with an even richer Indian wife had Antoni Gaudi design and build for them. The Riviera seems to bring out that sort of thing in people. But the Musee Chagall was closed for renovations. And the Musee Matisse was crawling with more Japanese tour groups than the Louvre. Besides, I have reluctantly concluded (dare I admit this?) that I am increasingly finding Matisse silly and juvenile. Is this the onset of aesthetic crotchet or the certitude that comes as an entitlement of age? Is crotchetiness the first stage (at least linguistically) of crotch-itchiness? After all, pun presages punishment. You may detect that I am disconnecting from my surroundings now. I found two book stores with small sections of English language fiction, hidden in the back as if the bookseller was ashamed of it (like porno). So I am not forced to continue to read JM Coetzee's "Foe" (the first book of his that I have disliked).

Today's plan was to walk less, stay local and on relatively flat terrain. But the Fine Arts Museum is closed for repairs, though the Michelin suggests I am only missing a melange of third-rate stuff that Napoleon III shipped south to unclutter Paris. So, after a big, late breakfast, concentrating on outstanding pineapple and cantaloupe, I drifted in sunless chill to the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art, a great marble box of excellent space, sadly devoted to the American Pop school and its illegitimate off-spring, the "School of Nice" (Gag me to the max seems a propos!) Yves Klein's blue men, and someone named Ben who collects other people's epigrams and turns them into doodles and graffiti do not a museum make. The Warhol an Dine and Lichtenstein and Morris Louis didn't help much....but that may just be me. There was a whole gallery of photos of Christo's dubious achievements (he really was awfully wrapped up in himself!). The most entertaining were the 8 or 10 Nikki de Saint Phalle's figures, including one in the courtyard of a huge, mirrored Loch Ness Monster with a benign smile. There were lots of mechanical whirlygigs by Jean Tinguley...but ART? It all seems too obvious, facile, toy-like, and far too easy to do. What ever happened to difficult technical achievement? When does something become so simple-minded, unchallenging, statement-less that it becomes dismissable? I may go home and start making grapevine sculptures

Nice is the 5th largest city in France, and its airport is second only to Paris. It attracts 20 million tourists annually and has the highest percentage of retirees and pensioners in Europe. And all of them are out, in their wheel chairs and with their canes and walkers and companions and dogs, along the Promenade des Anglais the instant the sun appears. Fortunately for the almost equal number of roller bladers, joggers, bikers and skate-boarders, the elderly seem permanently installed on benches, resembling in a weird way some of the fixed-gaze plaster sculptures I have just seen. Sitting and staring ...between meals, of course. It probably accounts for the ambulance noises which I hear whenever I open my French windows to enjoy the lovely view across the tops of the palm trees to the more or less blue Mediterranean. Perhaps this is the new siren song.


Encounter

Without doubt the most delightful new encounter of the entire 6 weeks took place on British Air from Nice to Heathrow. I was seated next to an absolutely enchanting woman and her 8-year-old son. Her name is Jane Purrier and she is a dead-ringer for Kristin Scott Thomas (and that is just for openers). Daniel is the youngest of her 5 children from a just-ended marriage to an EU Ambassador whom she met and married at Cambridge, and from whom she recently separated because she fell wildly in love for the first time in her life and to her utter astonishment.

The lucky man, Didier, is the local doctor in the small, Maritime Alpine village of Maure, where she and her husband had bought a ski lodge so that all their kids would have a rallying place from their far-flung schools and universities, as his diplomatic postings had them living in 5 different capitals in 7 years. As Daniel did his bilingual homework, Jane and I had two hours of the rarest, frankest, most intimate conversation about our lives, our sorrows, our tastes, families, divorces...she loves opera, cross-country skiing, gardening, cooking, fiction and poetry. She read psychology at Cambridge but switched to become a simultaneous translator when her lawyer husband joined the diplomatic service, thinking that would be a more compatible and portable skill. She is fluent in 5 languages and I suspect witty and charming in all of them.

She was now en route to London for a long weekend, which has, since the clearly amicable and financially comfortable divorce, become an almost monthly ritual; as her ex-husband rents a large flat or hotel suite and all 5 kids come from wherever they are and, as Jane says, "we play family". The divorce has to have been as civilized as they come. She still loves her husband but he has always been a stereotypical Eton/Cambridge-lawyer/diplomat, passionless and career-oriented. She confesses that she saw herself very much that same way until, like a literal lightning bolt, she saw Didier (the lucky beast) and "la grande passion" overwhelmed all reason and common sense. He, too, is married with children, and was equally and simultaneously smitten. She is absolutely radiant with happiness, which makes her all the more enthusiastic and astonishingly attractive. We bonded so enjoyably that we are already planning to stay in touch and visit back and forth. Clearly this is a person with enormous spontaneity and people-affinity. In fact, I might even go up to meet Didier, of whom I am already insanely jealous, in March when I am in Corsica.

It is a miraculous experience to make a new "best friend" and feel supremely at ease with a stranger who does not seem strange or unknown...particularly at the age of 70, on a 2-hour flight, by total chance, at the end of 6 weeks spent among several large groups of uniformly unappealing companions. The highlights of this trip have been with Dave and Eileen Dappolonia (whom I first met dog-walking on Main Street), Howard Mcfadyen (whom I met in a Boston restaurant because we were sitting at adjoining tables) and Jane Purrier, all brand new friends whom I cannot imagine not knowing. All I know is that this is an inexplicable, exhilarating affirmation of all the reasons for traveling and remaining receptive to the new. Something truly marvelous just may, and occasionally does actually happen.


edited by Abbott Weiss
under the direction of the author, and I quote:

"Also, will you be able to eliminate the separate parts so that it becomes one seamlessly exquisite, riverine narrative like the Iliad. When can I start giving out the blogspot address to the eager, anxious, fidgeting multitudes. After all, the Beaujolais Nouveau has been released. Time's Schmuck of the Year has been announced. The whole world is waiting. STEVE"