Day Thirty-One: Utter Ruin
Am installed at a comfortable table in the Cafe du Place d'Armees, where apparently all women lunching on their own in Orthez resort, awaiting a Green Salad. In this meat-heavy region, I perish for roughage.
Well, I started out the day by moseying up around St. Christau way again, trying to get in closer to where Les Malineux putatively lays, where partially visible from the D936 is a trout farm. I found my way in, between the villages Arros and Agnos, and goggle-eyed took in the firs, the streams, the swaying grasses that logic tells us could only exist in my imagination. The timber plantations of Les Malineux are now a reserve for hikers and wildlife, called by one of those true-but-unusable-for-fiction names, La Foret de Blanguge. After taking a shred of water mint where the asphalt trails off into cow-trodden mud, I turned back west toward Orthez (with a stop at another cemetery down the road from Gurs, for more noms de famille).
Orthez is as pretty a little provincial ville as you are likely to see in a month of Sundays (though overgiven to sports bars). I tramped around a bit through the ghostly, windswept desert of the pedestrian zone (I arrived after noon), then settled down to my salade nicole.
I had already seen the utterly gorgeous Pont Vieux as a surprise while driving in, and decided not to make myself lost and miserable by trying to find it again -- especially as I was concerned about getting to Bidache on time to see the falcons at the Cite des Aigles fly at 3:00.
So instead I tromped up to the Tour Moncade -- Gaston Febus' old stomping ground. I do hope the old boy can't see it wherever he is, because only the fragilest crumbs are left of his great castle. Can you believe a stone tower can look delicate? (We'll hope Gaston is chasing and being chased by fun-loving boars in the celestial equivalent of the Foret de Blanguge.) I scrabbled around, squinting through the archer's slits at the dangerous pullets stalking up on the castle. Then off to Bidache.
Because the normal road from Peyrehorade to Bidache was closed (this is what is known as "foreshadowing"), I followed the deviation signs through the lovely landscape of Guiche. This part of Bearn is more pretty than you can imagine -- rich in wildflowers and mellowly eroding stone walls and weeping willows and chuckling streams and great sweeping vistas of fields framed by forest... If it was not innocent of a particle of pretentiousness or tourism, you'd say it was too pretty for its own good. It's a land more open-handed and relaxed, more simply douce than the southern terre sauvage of the valleys where I lodge.
Well, I reached Bidache, and not a shred of the Chateau de Gramont could I discover (the Cite des Aigles is on its grounds). I went up and down and around -- I even headed a ways toward Guiche, remembering that the title of the chatelaine, La Belle Corisande, was Comtesse de Guiche -- something equivalent to heading in the direction of Swansea to discover the principal residence of the Prince of Wales. Realizing my folly and in a perfect stew about the possibility of missing the falconry, I booked back to Bidache, where a sudden opening in the trees disclosed the breast-renderingly beautiful ruins of the Chateau de Gramont. Journey ended. Almost.
Across the road to the chateau, a very complete, very official barrier. "Closed for repairs." A smaller handwritten sign -- "The aviary is closed as well."
Now, the Chateau de Gramont is a ruin. It looks exactly like what you'd imagine Thornfield looked like after Mrs. Rochester had done her thing in Jane Eyre. What are you going to repair in a ruin?
There are people in the French municipal works department who do not understand the concept of Romanticism.
Sick at heart, I put my elbows on the barrier and yearned a la Manderley for awhile. Then provisions, home, bed.