Day Thirty-Nine: Winsome Smile, Do Your Stuff
The day did not start out auspiciously -- the drive east through Agen (prune capital of the Western world -- and yes, they brag about it) to Moissac was too uninteresting even to be called ugly. The air rather humid and sticky and dirty. The abbey at Moissac is undoubtedly beautiful -- the polychrome wood mise en tombeau definitely rates a thumbs up -- but frankly, I just can't look at carved Romanesque capitals anymore. Whatever I do this last week, I guarantee that it will not involve carved Romanesque capitals.
Well, I felt sticky and dirty and tired after that, so on a lark I headed for Mont de Marsan. "If there isn't anything interesting there, at least I'll have a drive in the Landes to blow the blues away." (Let me explain that the Landes is a plateau of marshy moors -- yes, I know it sounds unlikely, but it is -- scoured by winds and forested in the last century with pines.)
It was indeed a delightful drive... and then upon reaching Mont de Marsan, discovered via the Cadogans, that the city is home to the everloving mother of all petting zoos, the Parc du Nahques. Please keep this in mind -- the surefire antidote to Carved Romanesque Capital Bloat is a petting zoo.
What did I see? What didn't I see, is more like it... I saw pregnant goats chasing rabbits, I saw a llama mama, I saw a variety of poultry and waterfowl -- one particular species of chicken looks as if it has been dressed in a bathroom-fur poodle suit, with its regular chicken head and chicken feet hanging out. I saw a flock of reposing deer. I saw an honest-to-god ostrich, who gave me a feather. (No really, she did! She rummaged around in her undercoat, plucked a tiny plume and tossed it in my direction.) The wallabies were taking their siesta -- in case you ever need to know, wallabies in repose press their little salamander-like feet together on the underside of their tails in what might be called a half-lotus position... heck, put a lotus in their left hand, and you've got a bigtailed Buddha... The ponies were not receiving, alas, but there were the tiniest burros in existence, and a genuine emu stalking around the compound on sentry duty. The peacocks were carrying on like television actors -- displaying their tails, screaming and mating. A lone egret did the Maasi hopping dance.
Of course I bent all my social skills to befriending the goats -- two charming belles responded handsomely by hopping up on one of the benches to get nearer to the scritcher's scritching apparatus. My goat-coveting could have led me into a ticklish situation here ("What's that lump under your jacket, madame?" "Ummmm, a... goiter?" “It’s squirming, madame...”), since all the animals wander the park at liberty. (Why do they stay? Why do any of us stay -- we get fed.)
Well, then it was time to get lost again, which I did with great facility in the environs of Grenade sur L'Adour (I decided I didn't have enough Our Lady of Rugby prayer cards for the faithful, and cleaned 'em out to the sum of twenty francs). Then it was pretty inevitable that I was going to fall into the hands of the gendarmerie... No, I was NOT speeding, I was not doing anything at all. The provincial police just get bored on holidays -- it's VE Day today -- and hang out on country roads pulling over people and pathetically trying to engage them in human conversation.
I was a big hit with these representatives of the constabulary: an older, silver-templed suavish gentleman, who took one look at his two pink-faced, giggling subordinates gawping at me (I have a hard time believing they were old enough to drive, much less carry guns and arrest people) and decided he had better conduct all the inquiries, or we'd have an international incident on our hands.
He examined my documents in a leisurely, dignified fashion, asked me a couple of minor questions. Only the iron discipline of the Force kept the boys from squealing aloud when I answered Monsieur's inquiry on "lieu de naissance?" with a bold "Santa Clara, California" in what the Silver-Haired Officer dubbed "la vrai accent americaine." The winsome smile doing its work, I was soon free to continue my journey without a stain on my character.