Day Forty-One: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
A fun, silly day. I trundled off to Moncrabeau, home of the Academy of Liars (forty of 'em, just like the Academie Francaise) -- a pretty village even without this inducement, built in tiers with scads of red rambler roses and other tumble-y sorts of plants in every garden. For the entertainment of those of us who can't come during the official "King of Liars" festivities in August, a "Circuit of Lies" around the village becomes our pilgrimage -- from the shrine to the Unknown Cuckold, to the "fortified mentherie" -- untranslatable gags about Le Vert Galant's reliance on the mint of Moncrabeau. When the mint was blighted in circumstances I can't quite recall, the good folks of Moncrabeau had to leave off being menthiers and start becoming menteurs (liars). A charmingly eccentric place, droll without being pretentious.
Stopped off in Nerac on my way north towards the Abbaye des Automates. Found the perfect little French lingerie store and bought astronomically expensive wee slutty things... Here's another example of where school-larn'd French will fail you -- previous to this moment, I had no vocabulary for lingerie sizing. For those of you playing along at home, the critical word is profondeur (roll those rrrr's deep!). Mademoiselle the lingereuse as merry and helpful as one could wish. I still have not abandoned the idea of acquiring a pouffy nightgown, but I rest easier, knowing that tarty French underthings are in my possession.
Le derriere de mon amie est plus grand que le mien. Mais sa ceinture est plus etroite...
(luh day-ray-AHR duh muhn ah-mee ay ploo grahnd kuh luh MEEN. may sawsehn-TCHOOR ay plooz eh-TRAWT...)
"My friend's butt is bigger than mine, but her waist is more skinny."
Now I was ready for the gardens. Here I have to take back what I said about Nerac's approach to over-preciousness, for La Garenne is a good, old-fashioned scruffy park with muddy lanes and an honest-to-goodness singalong pit, like the parks we know and love so well. You can rent little punts along the river bank (if you have always harbored a deep desire to go boating in cafe au lait).
The principle feature of the park (other than the singalong pit) is La Fontaine de Fleurette. The story goes, she was the gardener's daughter and caught young Henri's eye when they were both young and innocent. But when he was ready to move on to greener pastures, she wasn't, and drowned herself. (The exposition at the chateau stoutly denies this, and says that Fleurette had a long happy tenure and was pensioned off in the finest of health...) Fleurette's abandoned corse is depicted, in marble of course, in the center of the fountain. If it is an accurate representation, one fails to comprehend how she could have drowned, with those personal flotation devices. Talk of profondeur...
Well. If anyone ever entertains any doubt of my personal courage, I must beg them to consider the experiences of this afternoon at Clairac, in the Abbaye des Automates. It wasn’t so much viewing animatronic monks. It wasn’t so much being alone in rooms full of animatronic monks. It was stumbling alone into TOTALLY DARK rooms full of animatronic monks trying to find the switches that would hurl them into their mechanical sham of life. Edgar Allan Poe would have soiled himself.
All the monks look as if they have had serious Max Factor overdoses -- an inordinate number of them are bald and of preying mantis proportion of figure, which makes them look like characters from "Aeon Flux." The narrator stresses how much fun and coziness was to be had in the monastery, as the hellish simulacrums copy manuscripts, knead bread dough, cobble shoes, crush grapes, or just plain gesture masonically. In the dungeon room, when the drone explained ecclesiastical discipline while unmentionable things were happening to a miscreant below, I actually had to step back from the exhibit, put my back against the wall and take a few deep breaths.
It wasn't all just monks. Plenty of chuckles in the gallery of historical characters -- Charlemagne looking like a Hanna Barbera character ("HR Pufnstuf Furioso"?); Eleanor of Aquitaine dressed in leftover costumes from one of those Russian-Finnish fantasy flicks on MST-3K -- you kept waiting for her to ask for a sampo; many others of the "Montaigne spent a couple of nights here on his way to Italy once" variety. Jeanne d'Albret was wearing a bustle -- I nearly vomited.
Hidden away in the center, an actually fine and historical significant collection of chasubles and other liturgical garments, only slightly marred by the look of batrachian vapidity on the dummies's (thankfully unanimatronic) faces.
Scenes of famous fetes -- including the scandalous wedding of a 16th century Abbot to a notable lovely widow (with an equally glamorous inheritance) -- he had a Protestant chaplain marry them to avoid being excommunicated, supposedly. I'm dubious. If this was a loophole that worked, why wasn't it employed more often?
And how did David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust get mixed up in the refectory scene?