Saint-Lizier, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, Seillans, Sète and Notre Dame des Neiges Monastery - last week of May, 2011.
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...from the Basque country to Ariège, the hills of Provence and back, with a detour to the Cevennes Mountains for a short monastic retreat.
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Driving eastward along the foot of the Pyrenees, we saw several of these country churches, for which the heavily forested Ariège Department is famous.  The bell towers have bulbuous roofs, like elongated onions covered in wooden shingles.  They remind me of the golden onion domes of Kiev, in Ukraine, but less rotund.
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At the ancient town of Saint Lizier, where there is an extraordinary medieval church.  Our little grey jeep with the trunk on top can be seen peeping up next to the village fountain.
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In the French "Midi" region west of the Rhone many cities and their churches and palaces are built of brick, which is why they are called "les villes roses".   This church is a mixture of brick and stone, as we can see in its beautiful Gothic gate, clearly added to the original Romanesque (early medieval) building later on.
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The apse is typically Romanesque - "romane" in French, which means "Roman-like", because it was an attempt to imitate the ancient Roman ruins with their semi-circular arches.  The walls were covered in 18th century murals until they were stripped off to reveal these precious and much more ancient frescoes.
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They were done by a group of itinerant Italian painters, who went from town to town offering their services to the local priests, in the Byzantine style of the time. In the dome we see a "Christ the Creator", which reminds me of the mosaics in the cathedrals of Venice and Sicily.

My photo is poor because of the light, but we can see that much of the colour and beauty of these frescoes has been preserved, partly thanks to the sheath of plaster put on them as a base for the later murals, for which we should be eternally grateful!  There were many such teams of wandering painters in the Middle Ages.  One of the rooms of the Alhambra Palace, in the Patio of the Lions, in Granada, Spain, was decorated by Italian artists, in a representational style which was forbidden to Islamic artists  (see "Hall of Kings" on my website www.vivagranada.com).  
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From the cloister we can admire the unusual, octagonal bell tower, made of brick and stone.
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The capitals, or column heads, are typically Romanesque,  made by unschooled local stone-cutters who strove to imitate the elaborate carvings they had seen elsewhere. Before the Gothic style, each region and town invented its own "way" of making churches, resulting in a great diversity of styles which was lost later on.  
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We can only guess what this  meant - many of the scenes shown weren't even religious, but showed the people's daily life, in anecdotal form.  What makes them so precious is their naive, primitive style, qualifying them as works of folk, or popular art.
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Down the hill and past the apse we roll, on the way to new adventures...
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...with money in our pocket, diesel in our tank and the snow glistening on the Pyrenees!  "El mundo es malo pero la vida es buena", as they fatalistically say on the other side of the mountains.
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Once our eyes were sated with art, our bellies started crying for something more substantial.  We looked for a local-people's sort of eating place on the outskirts of town - avoiding, as usual, the more decorated, "vieille auberge" sort of restaurant catering to visitors, and settled on a cosy spot in the modern section (between a car dealer's and a Macdonald's) which had as the "plat du jour" the best cassoulet I ever ate in my life.  
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The cook told us it was cooked three times, and, unusually, with beef rather than pork.  The meat was like candy that melted in your mouth.  Cassoulet usually has a sticky red sauce but this one was delicate and un-stodgy.
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August was so hungry he was weeping - see the big shiny tear on his left cheek - but he soon calmed down when he got into the sausage and beans I had been promising him.
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Excellent dessert too - all for 12.50 euros per person, wine not included.  This place is called the Chalet de Chanteraine but they told me that they usually only make cassoulet in wintertime.  We were lucky once more, it seems.
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Au revoir, Saint Lizier (seen in the rear view mirror).
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Further on, a strange sight appeared on the hillside.
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I thought it was a prehistoric graveyard but soon saw it represented the Calvary Hill with the stations of the cross - a pilgrimage shrine of some sort.  Later I read that it is called Notre Dame de Raynaude and was built a century ago by a priest who ran out of money and in despair had to stop the construction. An early Rockefeller - don't ask me who - was touring France at the time in his limousine and drove up to find out what was going on.  He liked the priest and ended up funding the completion of the works, Dieu merci!  And he wasn't even a Catholic...
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One surprise followed another.  Suddenly the road led us right into a gaping grotto in a rock mountain.
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We wondered where it would take us - and if we would ever come out.   This was no ordinary tunnel!
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As a guide book later explained, it is a natural cave that goes right through a small mountain.  Millions of years ago, the level of the land was much higher than today, and an underground stream worked its way through the rock.  When the earth around the mountain washed away, a gaping horizontal hole was left, providing prehistoric tribes with a cave to live in, and persecuted Protestants a place to hide from the Catholic armies during the wars of religion.  At about 400 meters, it is the longest "grotte traversière", or transversal cave, in Europe.
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We were glad to see the light at the end of the grotto!
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The grotto belongs to this small, very provincial French town, the sort which I prefer to Paris because there are more French people and the restaurants are good and affordable.
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August was in good spirits, in his new red seat.
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We stopped for tea in the lovely town of Mirepoix, which I have shown in several previous articles.
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In the famous Place des Couverts - the square of the arcades.
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After six or seven hours on the road we stopped for the night in Arles, at a small hotel just off the motorway, where we stayed years ago.  Like almost every corner of this incredibly ancient city, there is interest in several things here.

You can see the town's main boulevard on the right, leading onto the motorway.  In the center is a curious water channel called Le Canal de Craponne, which a few steps on, empties into the Rhone River.  This is in fact one of history's earliest hydraulic engineering feats, dug in the 16th century by a brilliant man called Craponne, to bring water from the Durance River in the highlands of Provence to irrigate the plain or "desert" of Crau, around Marseilles.  

At the far end of the street stands the picturesque remains of a monastery.   Arles is famous for its Roman amphitheatre and Van Gogh, but the whole town is stuffed with relics.  Even the bed of the Rhone River that flows next to it is littered with the cargo of galleys that foundered in the port there, with many fine statues shipped from Rome for the palaces of the local nobility.  Divers recently fished up a huge bust of Augustus Caesar, which is now displayed in the local museum.
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Wijjie and August having a rest before going out for supper.
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The ruins of the Carmeliite Monastery seen closer up, with the heavy traffic crossing the Rhone River. The portal is the front of the monastery church, which is all that was left when the other buildings, which once stood on the riverside, were removed to make room for the motorway.
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A better view of the Canal de Craponne, which is still used to irrigate the rice fields around Arles.  With its system of flood gates and locks, it served as a model for the great Canal des Deux Mers that, under Louis XIV, was dug out to connect the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, starting in the Gironde estuary and ending in the lagoon at Sète, with a branch up to the Rhone. This was a great achievement, allowing cargo ships to sail from Bordeaux to Lyon without having to go around the Iberian peninsula - and pay stiff taxes to the Spanish Crown for using the Straits of Gibraltar.  It was safer, too!
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With the proprietor, whom I would like to know better, but for the time being can only describe as a very nice guy - "un type très sympa".  We had some interesting conversations about Arles.
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The room cost us about 65 euros, including an excellent breakfast with fruit jams made by the good man's equally charming wife.  Since we can only afford to stay in Etap Hotels these days, when we roam about France, Hotel Constantin feels positively luxurious.
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We drove on, making a stop in the Provençal town of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, which I have described in a previous article.  A friendly, unpretentious place.  I always longed to visit the basilica, famous for the purity of its Gothic  style, but every time I have tried in the past it was late in the day and closed.
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 The outside of the church is disconcertingly basic and bare, for a tragic reason.  Construction work was paralyzed by the Black Death of 1348, which as in many parts of Europe carried away half of the inhabitants, and only desultorily resumed later on.  That is why there is no façade, just the raw stones awaiting the finishing layer of stone, and no bell tower either.  From the motorway, when you look down towards the Mediterranean, it resembles a huge factory or wheat silo, sticking up among the tiled roofs like a great rectangular block, with no suggestion of what it holds inside.
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The vast interior is astonishingly graceful.  I can think of no  more perfect example of the late medieval style originating in northern France which, since the 16th century, it has been customary to call "Gothic" (by which the Renaissance painters meant "barbaric").  The translucent pink-white limestone from the hills of Provence makes the weightless web of arches and columns seem all the more ethereal.
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The 18th century organ - which you can see part of on the left - is famous, and organists come to play it from around the world.
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The sign tells us that in the crypt below are the relics of Mary Magadalen, although there is no evidence of her ever having been in France. The story is a popular legend which was often told in Provence.
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August led the way down - human bones in dark cellars are the sort of thing he is interested in, these days.
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The cloister is even more beautiful than the church, I think.  What simplicity, and yet grandeur!  
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In Rio, circa 1965, I taught English to a newspaper reporter called Irineu Guimaraes, who in his boyhood wanted to become a priest and was sent from Sao Paulo to this monastery as a young seminarist.  But soon after he got to France, he went to Paris and fell in love, so that was the end of his ecclesiastical future.  But he remained the good friend of the Dominican friars who, after all, gave him his chance in life, since he went on to become the foreign correspondent for Le Monde in Brazil. 
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A lateral view of the basilica with its flying buttresses, from the cloister. I asked if they had records showing the names of the seminarists in Irineu's day, but was told that monks moved out long ago and took everything with them to Toulouse.  The monastery is now used for conferences and public functions.
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Heading west through the vineyards of Provence.  One of the reasons I wanted to stop in Saint Maximin was to get a supply of their not-famous red wine, which I discovered in a local restaurant last year. It is only sold (at the cooperative in Saint Maximin) in 5-liter "bags" and has no other denomination than the name of the nearby village where it is made - "Saint Jean le Vieux".   It's best chilled in the fridge, I find - the softest and most delicious liquid I ever poured down my throat.  A snobby French friend of mine was't so impressed, saying that it "lacks complexity".  I told him that I have enough complications of my own without having to look for it in bottles (or bags).
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We left the motorway and stopped in Brignoles for lunch, after refreshing our hands and faces in the village fountain.
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 Wijjie was frazzled and glum  from doing all the driving (of her own free will, mind you).  August took a picture of me trying to cheer her up.  Fortunately, her bad moods never last long.
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Her salad had slices "magret de canard seché".  This is what is popularly called "jambon de canard", duck ham. They make it in Basque Country, and I actually prefer it to normal cured ham - it isn't as salty, for one thing.  Wijjie isn't fond of it so she gave me her slices.
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Gus and I had ratatouille.  It was alright, but Wijjie makes it better.  Restaurants in Provence are like the ones in Paris, expensive and pretentious, because most of the diners are rich Parisians and foreigners.
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In old Provençal homes, there is always an attic where the larder is kept.  The window is left open for ventilation, and surrounded with glazed tiles of different designs, to keep out the rats, who can't climb up them.  I took this picture of one on a small square in Brignoles, where we stopped in the shade to have a nap in the car.
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Back to Seillans, in the heart of Provence.
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In Seillans, August visited his friend Marylou.
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We got there just in time to see the sun setting on the  church towers.
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In the morning, when I opened the bedroom window, a pigeon came to say Bonjour.
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I took Froggy for a last walk on the Place de la Republique and watched the sun rising over the plain.
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Heading back west, we stopped for lunch in the town of Saint Gilles, in the Rhone delta.  The fish looks good here, but was in fact overcooked - a great pity.  My own fish-and-shrimp dish was also grilled to death, which goes to show that French food isn't always as good as you might expect.
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Several hours later we reached Sète, where I had a date with my old friend James Neville Smith, who was coming from Marseilles to meet us there for the day.  I spent some months in Sète in 2004, and always enjoy walking up and down its canals.
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Froggy had his din-din right on the canal, where the hotel was (not an Etap, which was full, but a much pricier one).
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As lovely as ever, Sète - the birthplace of France's greatest minstrel, Georges Brassens, although he spent most of his life in Paris.  The big fishing boats are for catching tuna, called "thonniers", and much criticized for their  rapacity by the environmentalists (such as dear James, a fishery expert).
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At breakfast the next morning, in the hotel courtyard, August showed me his loose tooth which has been upsetting him for some time.  He's a tough kid, though - a born traveller, and linguist too.
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As soon as we picked James up at the train station, we all went to Rue Louis-Blanc, where I was staying when the two of us met up again after many decades of having lost track of one another – James is a footloose romantic sort, like me.  Here we are for the historic photo of "les retrouvailles retrouvées", with the front door of my old "pad" just on the left.  August says that James and I look like twin brothers, but I told him that it's just because James copies "mon look", as the French say - clothes, short beard, etc.  I have a hat like his too, but left it at home.
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James then too this picture of us en famille - August wasn't even dreamt of when we lived in Sète, though.
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I invited my old buddy to a dish of raw oysters, at a shellfish shop down the street from Louis-Blanc, where they put a table out on the sidewalk for you.  The oyster beds of the Bassin de Thau, behind the city, are small and their produce not well known in France, but I think their oysters are outstanding, even better than many of the Arcachon ones we get in Saint Jean de Luz.  They are richly flavoured – lots of “complexity” to please the most discerning palate – and beefy as well, or not “scrawny”, as James puts it.
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Francis, the oyster man, pours a glass of a nice little “vin gris” (white wine) too, which James appreciated.  When we studied at the Sorbonne together, in 1962, whenever we got a few “nouveaux francs” together we would go to Les Halles at midnight and splurge on a few dozen of the lovely little beasts, with a big bowl of “soupe à l’oignon” to fill our tummies (which were smaller then).
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After the Sorbonne, I went on to live in a Brazilian favela and learn to dance the samba, and James went back to England to become an Oxford graduate (Modern Languages), then embarking on an expedition to Saudi Arabia...  For lunch we did the nostalgic thing and went to the venerable “Le Grillon”, a very popular place where you used to eat well and copiously for a “petit prix”, squeezed in with the local tradesmen. 


To our dismay, the family that had owned it for generations had just sold out to some new people who have tried to make it more “trendy” with artistic décor etc, and fancier dishes that just don’t have the same punch.  There are also padded sofas instead of the straight-backed wicker-seated chairs.
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August gets ready to take some of his inimitable photographs.  Most of the customers there were the old-timers, such as the one on the far right.  He and his companion looked rather out of place in the new setting, to be sure.  Since most of the regulars were widowers, I wonder where else they have to go now.  Le Grillon was almost a public institution.
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Photo: August Hassan Bohme, 2011 (at age five and a half!)
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In some ways, James is more handsome now than 50 years ago, when he had pimples and unwashed ears (he was only 16 at the time, I admit).  Strange how some of these old guys get so sexy-looking, isn't it?  The patina of old age, my dear...
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Rather than take a chance on their dessert, we bought some "tarte tatin" in a bakery famous for it, on the Grand Canal, to eat in a café.
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We found a place to sit down, in a barge on the canal, tied to the wharf.  Wijjie is listening to James holding forth...
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...on a variety of subjects, mainly his youthful adventures as an NGO worker in the Southern Hemisphere.  Interesting, but nothing to compare to my  years in Brazil! Still, he can tell a  story with style - something like Graham Greene blended with Evelyn Waugh. 
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Actually, I always thought James was like Paul Pennyfeather, the hapless hero of a satirical novel about English life by Evelyn Waugh, called “Decline and Fall” (admired once but now shunned by the PC crowd who define current literary standards).  August loves James, as you can see, and not only because he resembles his Dad!
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Just across from us on the barge were some local he-men having their “pastis”.  Half of the people in this seaport are of Italian origin, workers who came after the war to work as dockhands, since Sète was where Algerian citrus fruit was unloaded then.  After Algeria's independence, the port fell into decline.  I thought that this impressive man could have acted in a Hollywood movie about ancient Rome – he would have made a perfect Caligula or Nero.  Can’t you imagine him in a toga and a wreath on his head?
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Finally our coffee came and James got out his trusty Laguiole knife to cut up the cakes. I have one just like it, but a bit smaller. 
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The "tarte tatin" of that pastry shop is still as good as it used to be, but in the meantime we have eaten so many other good ones (Wijjie learned how to make it also) that it isn't quite so impressive as it then seemed.   They say it was invented by a housewife who made a "tarte aux pommes", a French apple pie uncovered on the top, but by mistake put it in the oven upside down, with the pastry on the top and the apples straight on the pan.  When she took it out and dropped it out of the dish she found that the apples had become browned, half-burnt making a toffee-like "caramelized" crust.  When I lived in Paris in the 60's, it was virtually unknown, unless you had an aunt out in the sticks who made it.  Since then it's become one of France's (and my) favourite pies.
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James used to work for a sea-farers' trade union and came often to Sète to defend the rights of foreign sailors (usually Russians and Africans) on rusty freighters that had been abandoned by their unscrupulous owners (usually Greeks) in port, often living aboard in poverty for months awaiting the pay owed them.  He was the main force in a film on the subject recently shown on French TV, called “En Rade”, and got personally involved in the plight of these helpless men, left to their own devices far from home.  Thanks to James' dogged efforts, many of them finally collected their salaries.  

As I told him after seeing the film, if you didn’t know it you might think that James is a glamourous  and well-seasoned Hollywood star acting the human rights activist, rather than the man himself!
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Before parting ways at day's end, James fed Froggy back on the wharf.  Human-wise, our day with James was the happiest part of the trip - we hadn't met for almost five years.
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After Sète, we headed north to the Cevennes Mountains, for a monastic retreat.  Wijjie and I made one years ago near Carcassonne (where there were nuns, not monks) and I wanted August to see for himself.  Here we are crossing the much-touted bridge called “le Pont de Millau”, which was built more as a high-tech show-piece than because it was needed, the region being very thinly populated. 
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By evening - and a very beautiful one, summery without being too warm - we reached the historic city of Mende.  Its name comes from the Basque word for “mountain”, since it is surrounded with wooded peaks.  I hadn’t imagined it was such a fine, monumental sort of town, and with a very convivial atmosphere too – especially in the main tavern, where people were watching a game of some sort on TV, half of them tipsy.  The Cathedral is unusual and imposing, as you can see.   The left tower seems to have got more attention than the right one, though.
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It was too late to get to the monastery before the monks turned in for bed, so we slept in a village nearby, frequented by hikers.  Most of the diners there were countrymen of mine, on what is known as “the Robert Louis Stevenson trail”.  This is because they, like me, first heard of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows - "Notre-Dame des Neiges" - in one of Stevenson’s first books, "Travels in the Cevennes with a Donkey”, an account of his journey on foot through these hills in 1879.  It is said to be the first travel book ever written about hiking and sleeping outdoors.  

Stevenson spent one night at the monastery, which he describes in not altogether glowing terms, since they tried to persuade him to convert from his heinous Protestant faith to Catholicism.   When we got to the inn in the photo, we were so hungry and the steak and fried potatoes they served us were so delicious that I forgot to take a picture of our generously and handsomely presented dishes. 

French steaks used to be incredibly chewy and tough compared to American ones, but  they seem to be improving.  The taste of the Charolais beef was always good, but now you can eat it even if you have false teeth, like my poor old Dad who could never get through one, on his visits to me.  Perhaps they are hanging the sides of beef longer now, in spite of the French prejudice against aged meat.
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But we were disappointed by the monastery.  Not only because there is not a single thing in it  suggesting that such a great writer had once spent the night there, since after all it isn't a hotel and Stevenson wasn't there to make a spiritual retreat, but because everything about the place is impersonal and business-like, precisely as if it were a hotel - a budget hotel in the wilderness.  

The setting is superb - we drove for more than an hour through beautiful forests just to get there - but for the rest...  The gate in the picture is only for the 19 monks, as the cute little sign on the right says, ACCÉS RESERVÉ AUX MOINES.  I've seen signs with silhouettes of children, deer and cows, but never monks.
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Wijjie in front of the monastery boutique.  At the "Couvent de la Rieuenette" we stayed in 7 or 8 years ago, down south, the boutique  was a tiny room where the nuns sold the jams they make and a few religious medals and beads.  Here, it is a medium-sized supermarket with an enterprising array of wines, souvenirs, sweets, toys and what-not - everything a well-heeled pilgrim might need, and they get busloads of them every Sunday.  

I discreetly tried to take a picture of the little sign on the door warning you that the shop is equipped with closed-circuit television - "VIDEO SURVEILLANCE" - but the "manager" was hovering around and it didn't come out well.  I could scarcely believe, one, that any potential shop-lifters would ever make their way up there and, two, that Trappist monks could have even thought of such a thing, rather than placing their trust in God, or at least taking a more Christ-like attitude.
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We had read about their sauterne-like wine, but Friar Pierre (seated at his computer here racking up the sales) explained that the monks are getting too old to produce it themselves, on their ancient vineyard near Avignon, so they recently sold it all to a company that agreed to go on producing the same wine just for them to retail - commerce being supreme, if not divine…  Wijjie bought a bottle anyway, and it was pleasant, but not really worth all the fuss.  Just having "made by the monks" written on the label, whether they really made it or not, doesn't make it better to drink than another wine, does it? 
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Most of the monks were indeed so old and frail that all the work seemed to be done by Friar Pierre and Friar François, "le moine hotelier" whom I had previously contacted via Internet.  He was only about 50 and very vigorous, almost hopping about with energy.  Here he is vigorously mowing the lawns on his noisy machine, probably the only fun he gets, poor man.  He received us with what  I can best call aloof politeness, and once we were in our room curtly informed us that no talking was allowed at meal times nor in the corridors.  Rather daunting, but when you travel you have to adapt to circumstances, just like RLS!
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At La Rieuenette the five nuns - also Cistercians - lived in silence in their cloister, but once they were out of it they chattered away all the time, with each other and with us too.  They were also  good cooks (and sang wonderfully in Latin too) and we enjoyed excellent vegetable soups and a soufflé, as we chatted with a young seminarist from Paris.  

No such thing here - a few hours before lunch we saw a refrigerated truck pull up with the name of a company that makes pre-cooked meals for hospitals and schools, and that was what we ate - warmed up omelette, flabby chicken, tasteless potage, plastic pie!  I suppose that the monks used to do the cooking, but gave up when they all started getting so old.  It's very sad, and I imagine that soon Friar François will be all alone and the lovely place sold to a hotel chain.
August loved the bit about not speaking during meals though, and when I whispered something to him during the meal  he silenced me immediately.  Now let me assure you, if you've never lived among the French, that telling them not to talk at the table is almost like telling them not to eat. The few middle-aged ladies there (including one nun) would visibly have loved to get hold of us to ask where we came from, how old the boy was etc., but all they could do was stare sadly at their plates, where there wasn't much worth contemplating.  

For supper we had to eat - brace yourself now - PIZZA from the truck, which François heated up in the micro-wave oven and served with a great flourish, causing a very old and spunky lady who was staying there (not for a retreat but because she couldn't afford the hotels in the nearby spa, where she was having her rheumatism treated) grunt audibly in disgust.  What is "la douce France" coming to, when even monks eat frozen pizza?  

Wijjie even joked (back in the room) that they didn't let us talk at the table because they were afraid of what we might say about the food, but I'm sorry to say that I don't think that they, or at least Friar François, would have cared.
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The next day we drove to the nearby village famous for its hot springs, Saint-Laurent-les-Bains, where August got a surprise when he put his fingers in the public fountain...
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C'EST CHAUD!  It wasn't that hot, but he loves making a big fuss about nothing.
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Friar François didn't give us any towels so August went out in the corridor and found a cupboard full of them.
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The room was nice, but too much like a hotel decorated in the 1970's, with wall-to-wall carpetting (moquette, in French).  Nothing to remind you of a monastic cell, to be sure....  I made a donation before we left which was a bit more than the suggested amount, if I understood the information on their webpage correctly.
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On the way back through Mende, the weather had changed and all looked grey and forlorn.
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We passed by the monumental city of Albi but didn't visit the famous cathedral.  I decided to leave it for our next expedition, when the sun is shining again.  Otherwise, how would I get the right photos for French Places?
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This story has a happy ending though - in a nondescript town north of Toulouse where we stopped at what looked like a Tabac-Café-Snack Bar but turrned out to be a spacious restaurant with very good food at the usual lunchtime prices - 10 or 12 euros each for three courses.  I had duck's hearts in "whisky mousse sauce" and some gnocchi-affairs, all perfectly prepared and presented.  I never thought that duck's hearts could be so tender and juicy.
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Wijjie had the steak with potatoes and a sort of ratatouille, also excellent.  This place is called Le Week-End and it's in a town across the river from Rabastens called Coufouleu.  Well off the beaten path of tourists and Parisian chic-dom.  I told them we would be back and I meant it!
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Best of all, it was right there in the Week-End (what a crazy name) that August's loose tooth finally dropped out, while he was munching on his steak.  Here he is showing me the gap.
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