quotes

Day Thirteen : Il ne faut pas mourir sans avoir vu Carcassonne II

(EEL nuh fow pah mow-REER sahn AH-vwar voo kar-KAH-sun dew)
"One should not die without having seen Carcassonne twice."

In case you harbor any haziness on the ambiance chez Caille, I will inform you that I could not get into the reception area this morning to leave my key because a stack of monster truck tires were propped against the door. I managed to make my predicament clear to Madame by hopping up and down outside the restaurant kitchen window, and she arrived dewy fresh in quarter-inch thick maquillage and a black leather minidress. I threw the key in her direction and fled.

I hadn’t been sure it was such a good idea to return to Carcassonne. It had been my favorite stop on my obligatory high-school-French-club-trip-to-Europe more than a decade ago. Our French teacher Madame G., that drop-dead-gorgeous Greek maniac of a woman who never sweated the details (when it was discovered that a student with a Chinese passport didn’t have the right visas, she declared we would just “wing it” through our border crossings -- she figured, correctly, that handing the passports over in a group and having fifteen teenagers doing a human three-card-monty game would be more than a match for anyone in customs), had a friend who was the chief of the historical bureau in Carcassonne -- the man who literally possessed all the keys to the city. We got to climb up and down and into every nook and cranny of the most famous medieval cite in the world. They were in the processes of excavating catacombs under the cathedral -- during the lunch break of the archaeologists, he brought us through. He took us down beneath the city where the ancient wells were -- pitch black, the dust of the ages scrunching soundlessly under our shoes. We came up to the rim of the well, lit by one cigarette lighter. The man pitched a stone down the gullet -- we counted ten before the splash.

I couldn’t compare this visit with that. Didn't bother with the official castle tour -- I knew far more of the place than they offer to tourists. Just walked around the cobbled streets placidly, sitting down here and there to enjoy the prospect.

Went into the cathedral and made a slow tour. In addition to plain tapers, now they also sell devotional candles in the shapes of eggs, bells and fish, in all the colors of the rainbow. I lit a blue fish to Ste. Vierge and took away a white fish to light when my prayer has been achieved. I hope Magda will overlook my brazen papistry.

Observation on French Life and Culture #17: I am by way of being a tall woman in France.

After lunch and more loitering through the streets, I headed down to the southwestern ramparts, which were practically deserted, and walked the walls, drinking down that heartbreakingly beautiful landscape of red roofs, light green fields and dark green trees down to the Pyrenees. Everyone says how touristy and Disneyfied Carcassonne is, how the architect didn’t do anyone any favors with his Cinderella-style restorations -- but the bare fact is that the Cite attracts so many people and satisfies them so much because it is simply the most beautiful, most fairy-tale castle that we have available to view.

But whatever possessed them to go placing an enormous baroque merry-go-round outside the city gate? Insert eerie calliope music here.

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