Day Eight: Getting My Goat
Well, I was defeated by parking in the matter of attending Protestant culte (you'd think they'd try to name their services something a little more respectable sounding, hein?) this morning. Accepting defeat, I meandered over to the boulangerie that produces those excellent tartelettes aux citrons and consumed them by the canal of the Jardin de la Fontaine. Came back and changed out of "Easter Sunday" togs and decided to head up Cevennes-ward a bit early.
You don't know the meaning of the word "despair" until you've been in the mountains, in France, on Sunday, trying to find a decent radio station. Eventually hooked onto something that had the weirdest damn mix of programming you ever heard in your life -- Benny Goodman followed by Bananarama followed by what sounded to these ears an awful lot like a square dance followed by Janet Jackson followed by an anonymous French chanteusie followed by the Beatles followed by the kind of electropap you'd expect to hear in the elevator on the way to the dentist followed by a French cover of the Platters, "C'est Le Meme Vielle Chanson..." This being miles preferable to religious maniacs, call-in shows, something Charles Ives-ishly atonal on the classical station, and a woman reading what should have been a children's story from her tone of voice, but wasn't.
It took quite a drive to get into the Cevennes proper. You don't need the hazard signs to alert you to the dangers of falling rock -- they are quite evident. The Gardon ripples and chuckles at you beside the road for a ways, before taking a short cut and meeting you in St. Jean du Gard.
...Which is a desperately poor little town straggling along its banks. How do I know it's desperately poor? By how prominently LOTO is advertised. By the stink of baby diapers in the streets. By the miserable dandelion-infested hunks of grass outside the tourist office.
Notwithstanding, it will be fun to stay in the Hotel L'Oronge for a couple of days -- it looks very dark and imposing and altogether vieux from the outside. Still having forty-five minutes before museum opening, I turned the Kid's nose northwards to toodle further up the D907 and take in the countryside. It is all hill and gorge and river and forest and rock and little tumbledown stone mas perched in places you can't imagine how anyone climbed to, much less brought over sufficient materials to build a dwelling...
Great highlight of the return journey -- in the distance a figure is seen running full tilt, apparently one snap ahead of the slavering jaws of several dozen murderous brown goats. Thoughts of the opening scenes of Animal Farm dissolve when one gets close enough to discern the look of maniacal glee on the face of an adolescent boy, arms windmilling like mad, then the dogged exultation of devotion apparent in the expression of every single goat as they sweep down the grassy slope in pursuit of their god.
The museum was so great, it was almost too much. I wish to heavens I could go back a second time... They have every conceivable implement, doohickey and geegaw used for daily life in the pre-industrial Cevennes, and they tell you tirelessly how it was employed. Which plow for which type of soil... which type of ax for which tree? Coins from drachmas to derniers... How to make osier baskets from tiny chestnut branches. How to filter honey. How to unravel silkworm cocoons -- oh, ever so plentiful information about the production of silk (understatement of the century: "The Revolution was a blow to silk manufactory..."). Keys and bottles and mole traps and children's readers and cheese agers and trousseau chests and sabots and bullock collars and ludicrous yarn pom-poms tied to sheep's heads to identify them for market and family psalters and reproductions of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and spectacles and dice and shearing shears and apiary smoking outfits and iron shoes with cruel spikes to crunch dried chestnuts into flour and oil jars and salt mortars and bellows and pig basins, and notes from parents to teachers, ("Please excuse Johnny from school Tuesday -- we're doing the pig").