Mémoire

In recent years the nature of biography has become more honest and transparent, particularly in respect of accuracy, historicity and subjectivity. Autobiogs are more likely to be called memoirs, acknowledging a more limited scope or viewpoint. The fallibility of memory is more widely taken as part and parcel of the game.

I'm a humble chap, as you know. But in the field of memory I have been particularly reticent to blow any sort of trumpet, knowing that I have no ability to capture people, names, events or details with any degree of accuracy or reliability. I may imagine some insight into the romantic, impressionistic, artistic or literary; but try to pin me down on the who did what, when (I'm not too bad on the where) and the house of cards looks decidedly shaky.

I was reminded of this recently by my reading. Many years ago when I learned French at high school, we had a reader of selected texts - don't ask me what (that'd be detail) but I guess it was Molière and Rousseau or such.

Strangely enough, I did remember through the decades a story in French that described the death of a young prince. Author and title of this piece were, of course, lost in the mists of my impressionistic memory. But I recall a touching description of how the doors and upper windows of the young prince's grand home had been closed up. They had been closed for such a long time, presumably to keep out the cold airs and unclean mists; something was clearly amiss. Within lay the young Dauphin on his death bed, surrounded by weeping family, servants and courtiers.

One particular passage, which stuck verbatim in my otherwise perfidious memory, pictured the failing prince discussing possible alternatives with his distraught mother and sombre priest:

<< ... Est-ce que mon petit ami Beppo ne pourra pas mourir à ma place, en lui donnant beaucoup d'argent? >>

Roughly: "Couldn't my little friend Beppo die instead of me, if we gave him lots of money?"

Let's leave aside for the moment the utility of this fragment. I can't say I have trotted this phrase out regularly, as the travel dictionaries suggest, in the restaurant, at the station or at the post office. But it must have a certain ring about it to hang around.

This year, as we immersed ourselves in the French language for a while and again visited French friends - half a century in my case since the schoolboy memories of Beppo, whoever he was, were laid down - I gradually came to the conclusion that those passages must have been from the classic work by Alphonse Daudet, Lettres de mon Moulin.

This cherished little book is a series of descriptive letters, anecdotes, snapshots, supposedly written from his old grain mill in the village of Fontvieille, between Avignon and Arles in Provence - not far, in fact, from Les Baux-de-Provence whence came the name of bauxite. It is a often regarded as a classic of French literature of the nineteenth century as it is full of wholesome tales of the traditional and captivating lives of peasant and poet, miller and mayor in the south of France.

On return from France I looked up Monsieur Daudet's classic and sure enough, there was the quote, word for word. OK I got one word slightly wrong ('pourra' should have been 'pourrait'), but for accuracy, after fifty years of wear and tear, it was up there amongst the médaille d'or stuff.
Before you accuse me of reaching for my trumpet, I have an admission. I re-read the letters from Alphonse's iconic windmill with considerable pleasure only to find that my rotten memory had in fact conflated elements of two separate stories and rebuilt the imagined scene and events to suit the revised architecture.

Despite the laser-beam accuracy of my selective useless quote, it turned out that the closed doors and windows had nothing to do with the upper room where lay a suffering prince. They were actually an extract from the introductory cadences as Daudet arrives at his mill from Paris. He observes in the opening lines that the old mill had been shut up for so long the the rabbits had concluded that the race of millers was extinct (well, it does concern people dying, so there.) Seeing the grass growing in the doorways, they had made their headquarters, a sort of strategic centre of operations says Daudet, in the shade of the windmill.

Ah well. It was a nice story or two, both remembered and re-read.

PS. Lettres de mon moulin is a delightful book, but best if you ignore (or even forget and reconstruct) reality: the idealised and optimistic picture of the rural lifestyle; the more disreputable ways of the author in real life; and the fact that he left the rabbits quite undisturbed, writing the letters in the evidently seamy suburbs of Paris.

Birds and bees

We have remarked previously that birds are frequent visitors to our garden, heading for different trees according to the season. Most have their can't-see-me brown feathers on but for some reason many of our regulars, mainly cockatoos and parrots, are so brightly coloured that they would be startling if they were not so common a sight.

Here's a few pics.

The sulphur crest is a very familiar sight in (or above) our garden, and often the cockies are in this pose, tearing branches off trees around the suburbs, in this case our pistachio before the fall of the leaves in autumn. They sometimes appear singly but in more open spaces are usually in flocks of fifty or so.

Conversely, the pink and grey galahs are ground feeders, and turn up in ones and twos. This one is not in our garden but quite friendly and unafraid of my approach as I walked through the local playgrounds to the shops.

Back in the pistachio the parrots (this one is a crimson rosella) find the nuts tasty. They come in red and blue, red and green, green and red.

The eastern rosella and lorikeets have another range of bright colours some of which are recorded in earlier posts.

Winter is pretty quiet for floral colours but of course, as in any part of the world,they are there if you look. Late winter here is blessed with thousands of violets that spread unnoticed during the summer into unusual corners. I found these in the local park while chatting to the galah featured above. They were flowering profusely, perhaps not elegaically 'blushing unseen' as Gray would have it: yet the boys and girls playing football in the nearby fields were paying no heed.

Who knows, though - perhaps a young person wandered over while supposedly listening to the soccer coach's harangue and found pleasant diversion.

The biggest brick outhouse

This photo will not win the best pic of 2010 award (too pretentious or dramatic?) but for us it conjures up some back stories and is of interest on several counts.

Firstly, the lone ranger quite dwarfed by the huge cathedral is Helen, wandering along waiting for me and probably musing over some obscure corner of French vocab or grammar discussed not long previously during our immersion French course at Villefranche-sur-mer.

Second it recalls elements of the rich and sometimes bloody history of this area in the south-west of France. We are in the regional town of Albi in the departement of Tarn which, like many other administrative zones renamed after the Revolution to break down fierce regional loyalties and friction, is named after the main river of the area, in this case half an hour north-east of the major city of Toulouse.

Of particular interest here is the juxtaposition of relics from two different periods and styles, early Roman and Mediaeval romanesque.

• The finely elegant stone arch framing the large cathedral, probably built about 2000 years ago, is Roman. These few remaining spans are all that is left of what is thought to be a temple on the banks of the lovely Tarn flowing quietly in the small green valley behind the camera.

• The cathedral of Albi, then. It's simply yooje, and actually made of brick, the largest such structure in Europe or perhaps the universe or something. That does not make it any more beautiful, unfortunately, as its size and solidity, when it was built in the 13th century, were intended to emphasise the message not to mess with the church after it put down with astonishing cruelty a heresy since known as the Albigensians. In contrast, the interior is more gracious and beautifully decorated. The ceiling was completed by imported Italian painters in 1513 and remains untouched and beautiful to this day.
  

I admit I am more captivated by the cleaner lines of the Église des Jacobins in Toulouse, featured in an earlier post on Trees here and there - now 18 months ago I realise.

And thirdly, there's the bricks themselves, narrow and elongated, in rich ochres and reds and peculiar to the Toulouse region (though the Zürich contingent may well have seen similar in other places like Italy).

These bricks add a certain charm and warmth to the smaller dwellings and other buildings that cluster around Big Brother, for which no such improvement can be detected. This photo is taken from an alley near the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, housed in the Bishop's fortress-like palace which like the cathedral radiates power and almost menace.

The good bish, it seems, was not on the best of terms with the burghers of Albi whose lips were no doubt still slightly pursed after the fatal 'supression' of many Cathars, including women and children. His architect's brief seems to have chosen self-defence over inspirational qualities. The T-L museum contents, however, are wonderful.

Of course the flat bricks are widely evident in Toulouse itself, like these in this seriously old house in the back-streets of the city. We chose not to stand under it for too long.


But after all that, it was delightful to leave the busy bricks behind and retire to a drink and dinner at our friends' chateau in a nearby village of Cestayrols.