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cinq: Where Eagles Dare
FOR some reason none of us felt terribly well on Tuesday morning. I
ascribed this fully to the unexpectedly rich food, and sagely took a
Beecham's Resolve. Not long after that I felt fine again, thus
vindicating my diagnosis. The fact that Beecham's Resolve is also a
chaplain-strength hangover cure was of course irrelevant.
 We tossed around the idea of
finding somewhere warmer nearby and prolonging our sojourn in the
Massif Central -- but I think we only really did so for form's sake,
and no-one was really in any doubt that we were going to flee that
cold, damp, inhospitable place and head straight for Madame
Moulinier's.
Even more eagles than the
previous day seemed to be about, some even swooping low over the cars
-- no doubt to show off that, with wings outstretched, they were
wider.
We stopped at
Brive-la-Gaillarde to pick up some food at the Continent supermarket
there. Huge, bright, and full of both French food and beautiful
shop-assistants. These, intoxicatingly, got around the vast space on
inline skates, giving it the aura of a futuristic as well as a
culinary utopia.
At the cheese counter
(which, in my memory at least, was about forty yards long) Ian and I
noticed some Mimolette Extra Vieille, the dark orange cheese I'd
noticed in Montoire market. We ordered some, and to our delight the
beautiful shop-assistant had to cut into a fresh cheese: a decidedly
difficult operation on cheese matured for eighteen months, and we
wondered how she would do it. The answer turned out to be a small
guillotine object with a very long metal lever, which she had to hang
herself right over off the ground before the blade would enter the
dense, head-sized ball.
 We drove on and saw,
eventually, a sign declaring
Terrasson
Vézère Valley
Porte au
Périgord |
all of which was so welcome that we felt compelled to stop and have
lunch by the river before moving on.
We were almost there when I
suddenly gasped. "What's wrong?" said Ian, thinking I'd remembered or
noticed something terrible.
I'd noticed something -- and
remembered it -- but it wasn't terrible. It was The
Bridge At Tursac.
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The Bridge At Tursac. Click on it for a bigger
JPEG (47K), and, modem boys, think yourself very lucky
I didn't inline the big one, as I'm sorely tempted so to
do.
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The Bridge was a sight very
familiar to me, though I'd never, before that day, been within
hundreds of miles of it. Stu's favourite watercolour he's ever done is
of The Bridge (badger him to put it on his web site, you won't be
disappointed), and I think several of his favourite photos are too.
There's a Bridge At Tursac in his front room, and another as desktop
wallpaper on his computer at work.
It is, let's face it, quite
a good bridge. It had, before I'd even been there, become iconic to me
of France -- and once I had been there, had seen where it stands
almost right outside Madame Moulinier's farm, it took on the whole
intertextual archetype of the bridge, the causeway one Must Cross in
order to Get Somewhere.
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| Looking along The Bridge towards Madame
Moulinier's (which you can't actually see over on the right, because
of the trees) |
We crossed it. We Got
Somewhere.
We got, to attempt for a
moment to remain prosaic, to Lespinasse, a hamlet of about four or
five farms. We got to a little farm, with a tiny farmyard and old,
old, farmhouse. We got to a stone-walled, rafter-ceilinged room, with
a Stu watercolour on the wall and the sort of furniture which reminded
me that some do not have to strive to achieve the antique farm kitchen
look. Not ten thousand pounds spent in Habitat could have made that
room, though every penny spent there is an attempt to.
We got to meet Madame
Moulinier, an absolutely typical French grandmother. (Not that I've
met any large proportion of the French grandmother population, but
something about her told me so anyway.)
We chatted for a bit, she to
my surprise speaking French that even I could understand, and then she
showed us where we would be camping.
Clearly rather special
guests, we were shown right past the clipped, square,
cupressocyparis-hedged emplacements where the large Dutch families
with camper-vans sprawled, into a place which was, put simply, not a
campsite, it was a field.
And it was spectacular.
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Shaded, though not very
thoroughly, by walnut trees, the field looked down across the next
farm's fields to the tree-delineated path of the river Vézère itself,
and its craggy river-cliffs. The panorama above is the view I had out
of my tent each morning.
 In no
time at all we'd spread ourselves over quite a lot of the field, but
Madame Moulinier had said we had it all to ourselves -- until
Saturday, when Alphonse, who had booked the prime space under the
grand arbre, would arrive.
Exhausted by delight, we ate
omelettes that evening, and sat back with our ten-litre box of
quaffing Coteaux Vendomois and watched the stars come out.
| Q. How much further south is Lespinasse than
Cambridge? |
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| A. About 10°, enough to make Polaris look too low,
and for there
to be new constellations in the southern sky. |
As Lespinasse was
hidden from view by the trees and the lie of the land, and the only
other town nearby was the sprawling metropolis of Tursac (pop. 300) on
the other side of a big hill, the darkness was soon more total than
any ever seen in Cambridge (including from the grounds of the
Institute of Astronomy, but not perhaps from a punt halfway to
Grantchester).
A thousand stars were soon
our companions. We spent a long time identifying Jupiter, Arcturus and
some others, and none doubted that we'd got them all wrong.
"July," said someone.
"Meteors." But although the others saw a few little ones, I, as ever,
missed them all.
 All Rites
Reversed -- Copy What You Like
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