Day Twenty-Seven: Eugenics
Am sitting here on a shady green bench on the Boulevard des Pyrenees, feasting my eyes on a prospect of burgeoning verdure and distant snow-tipped crags and woolly clouds against an azure firmament -- a picture that could have been sketched by Elizabeth Bennet (on her tour of the Continent with Darcy). Now that I'm not in such a tizz about that blasted bookstore, I'm more prepared to be amused by Pau. It is all very Second Empire and decorous -- has Empress Eugenie written all over it. Lola Montez would buy a motor scooter and be settled in five minutes. Much to be said for Anglophile French cities -- plenty of shady places to sit quietly, a plethora of waste receptacles and chockablock with public toilettes.
And when you possess a large bluff overlooking a rapid river and a big chunk of the countryside, and you build a wide esplanade for people to walk their white woolly dogs (have you ever seen a Yorkie puppy? I did today -- it's about as big as your thumbnail) instead of fortifications and watchtowers -- well, I guess that would be the definition of civilization.
Woke up this morning with that heavy, worn sensation of having wrestled powerful enemies all night, that is the product of sleeping in an overheated room (I hadn't noticed that yes, indeed the radiator does work, after it warms up a bit, and it was pumping heat into my little chamber at a scandalous rate.) Felt better after moodling slowly through my morning toiletries and toddled out to the church across the road.
In addition to its architectural rarities, the cathedralette at L'Hopital St. Blaise has another unusual feature -- a multi-language son-et-lumiere show that gives you your own little tour if you drop in twenty francs and push the button showing your language's flag... Took a rather perverse pleasure in making a French couple exploring the edifice listen to the English version -- God knows I've listened to another of their jabber... It is actually very well-done, with lovely strumming semi-Spanish medieval music in the background while the history and features are being explained.
L'Hopital St. Blaise was established in the 12th century as a hospice for pilgrims on the way to -- where else? -- Compostela. Romanesque had kind of run its course, and Gothic had not yet made its way down into the darkest reaches of Bearn. So they decided to plump for a blend of Byzantine and Moorish, thinking something foreign would be good for St. Blaise, an Armenian early father, patron of sore throats. Spanish workers were probably used, if not actual Moors. Tiny windows far up the walls are filled with either stone latticework or very pretty scrolled blue and white glass. The altar itself is Byzantine to the ninth -- a big, moist-looking celebrity portrait of St. Blaise in sumptuous gilt frame, with twisty gilt columns and holy brick-a-brack. Sheaves of fresh wisteria decorate the altar table itself. A lovely little wood-and-gilt Virgin and Child are slightly to the left of the altar.
On the whole, the statues are surprisingly good for a village church (well, at 20 francs a pop, they're probably making a mint off that son-et-lumiere) -- in the left alcove, a remarkably unsentimental Good Shepherd; in the right, St. Blaise encrusted only so far as you'd expect an Armenian patriarch to be encrusted. With the candles is a laminated prayer that is the product of a mind possessing great gifts of the spirit -- about how small an offering a candle is and how the little light becomes swallowed up in the great Light, as our troubles become swallowed up too.
Got into Pau in time to get my pain au choc fix... The spirit of Le Vert Gallant (Pau's favorite son, Henri the Fourth, who was an avid practitioner of the old "Hokey Pokey") lives, let me tell you -- les hommes bearnais give one the eye on every street. Yesterday I thought it was just a fluke -- kept checking to see if I was unbuttoned anywhere, or if my skirt had ruched up in back. No one does anything or says anything, but the omnipresent stare of naked, fixed lust can be quite disconcerting when one encounters it so suddenly and so often. Took refuge in the Place Royale, under the marble leer of the original, to consume my modest repast, then drifted over here to take in the view.
(Later) Then I hied me to Lescar, a pretty village, once you get away from the new housing tracts on the flats, which are pure Milpitas, and I had a lovely hour traipsing around the cathedral of the d'Albrets. It is a noble building, constructed of an orangey-reddish stone, and whatever Marguerite of Navarre didn't choose of it, she must of still highly approved of.
"They" are doing restorations of some sort, so it was a little daunting to walk in under the immense scaffolding. It was just me and the workmen, humming and dropping things. Lots of beautiful columns, with knotwork and dragons sticking their tongues out and whatnot. Floors tiled with lovely abstracted flowers and semi-Moorish geometrics. And then padding quietly up the left aisle, suddenly one comes on a gorgeous set of choir stalls, carved in dark wood like the one at St. Bertrand du Comminges, but on a smaller scale. Very skilled work -- miscellaneous saints in bulk -- the demon being killed by St. Michel looking very bored by it all -- Mater Dolorosa embracing the seven swords plunging into her thorax in a kind of odd way. You step forward and step back to get proper looks at things, and then you realize you are walking on 17th and 18th century tombstones of exceptionally virtuous people who have been buried in the cathedral floor. You leap around like a cat on hot bricks, because you think it's dreadfully impolite to walk on dead people, but in point of fact you have no choice unless you want to live in that choir stall for the rest of your life.
The tombs of all the kings and queens of Navarre are in the floor behind the altar, commemorated with a large bronze plaque. I rubbed my fingers on the name of Marguerite, my fellow authoress, and prayed for help. Around the tombs are glorious mosaics -- donkeys and boars and lions and goats and a guy with a wooden leg, looking for all the world like a multi-species game of "Duck, Duck, Goose" -- very droll and lively, only discovered in the last century from the days of the original abbey construction.
I walked around the village for a bit, sneezing and wishing there was any sign that the museum or any other habitation in Lescar would be open today. Failing that, I drove back into Pau, found parking at the Place Royale again, and walked to the Castle.
Henri's fine, florid, foxy face looks down on you everywhere in the Castle at Pau -- in marble, wood, oils -- 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century versions. The castle is otherwise liberally smothered in Second Empire -- yes, Empress Eugenie's name does come up more than once in the tour guide's spiel -- all in all, a mid-19th century vision of what a Renaissance castle should look like, with the real antiques looted out by the bargain-hunting Bonaparte family. Oh well. What was first class were the tapestries -- an enormous selection of honking great Gobelins, very fine ones -- scenes of hunting, harvesting, ice-skating, feasting, general folderol And a wonderful room of portraits -- a long, dark, heartbreakingly beautiful picture of La Belle Corisande and one of her daughters. By exercising great care and discretion, I managed to get out of the gift shop for under a hundred dollars. (Although I shall need to return to the chateau for the Musee Bearnais on the upper floor, and that reproduction of Gaston Febus' Livre de la Chasse may prove irresistible...)