history – Taran's Tales

Provence part seven – Another touch of seafaring history and more of the fleshpots.

The French Riviera is, in reality, much more than a hedonists’ paradise, including as it does two of France’s most important centres of maritime and naval industry. We were already favourably impressed by Toulon [see Provence Part Six] when a rendezvous with Celine’s sister Dagmara, gave us a good reason to visit the other great seaport at the extreme western end of that coast.

Marseille and the islands from the Basilique.

Marseilles is a real working city, historically important to France’s foreign trade, and somewhat renowned in the past as a place one needed to be careful where one trod, that is, in the best traditions of the seafarer’s way of life, it used to be a bit rough around the edges. Therefore, in homage to its maritime past, we made la Basilique de Notre Dame de la Garde our first stop.

Impressive architecture of La Basilique de Notre Dame de la Garde

Built on top of an impressive rocky outcrop in the 6^th arrondisement, this stunning piece of religious architecture, visible from all over Marseille, is the place to visit if you want to have the best views of the city, the old port and the islands in the bay beyond. It also houses many fascinating artifacts, paintings and models of ships that set sail from the port over the years, commemorating the seafaring heritage of the city. Afterwards, we three took a short stroll through the old city, where we found artists and some amusing grafiti and back down into the port area; but, alas, the day was fading fast and we realized we had to return another day to do the town justice.

Walking back down to the port from the old town, with the Basilique in the distance.

Musée des Civilisations d’Europe et de Méditerranée

And one week later we did just that, Dagmara needing to meet up again with her ride home to Antugnac. Once we had said our “Adieus”, Celine and I proceeded to discover that this was yet another town where one can get hopelessly mixed up in it’s traffic system, and our assumption that the car park named “Les Terrasses du Port” would be convenient for another visit to the old port, proved to be very wrong. In fact Les Terrasses du Port is a modern shopping centre better situated for ferry passengers visiting the new port area, so we relocated ourselves to the car park nearby the somber-looking Cathédrale La Major and wandered down past Mucem, the ultra-modern Musée des Civilisations d’Europe et de Méditerranée sitting in its moat, and around the rebuilt Fort Saint-Jean, the sea-wall battlements of which provided many quiet corners for courting couples, including ourselves, to enjoy the afternoon sunshine away from the madding crowds.

Once in the old port, we decided to make the most of the autumn sunshine by taking a boat trip out on the bay of Marseille, to visit Château d’If, the island fortress on the tiny Île d’If, the smallest island in the Frioul archipelago about three kilometres off shore. Originally built in the mid-sixteenth century for King Francis I, to defend the port of Marseille, it never had to prove its worth in battle. Instead, the nineteenth century saw it become one of the most notorious jails in France, being escape-proof, even if Dumas’ fictitious hero, Edmond Dantès, proved otherwise in “The Count of Monte Cristo”. This fantasy resulted in one rough-hewn cell being maintained in honour of Dantès as the main tourist attraction! There really isn’t very much else to see in the chateau itself and the best parts of the afternoon were the boat trip itself, and the lovely views back towards Marseille, and of the two larger islands further offshore. I could see a large well-protected marina on Île Ratonneau which got me thinking what a great place it would be to berth my yacht, but then I get that dreamy feeling whenever I see a large fleet of sailboats!

A couple of other attractive small towns to the east of Marseilles are Cassis and La Ciotat, the latter also being the home of a small shipbuilding yard, Chantiers Navals de La Ciotat, where I once spent an interesting couple of weeks in my professional capacity as a marine engineer, and first discovered the French capacity for obstinacy when it comes to using the English language. Both towns were horribly busy on that late Saturday afternoon and as parking seemed to be a near impossibility, we decided to drive strait through; but it was evident that they were both popular places to live and, perhaps, for the wealthy Marseillaises to wine and dine.

With the more down-to-earth ports of Toulon and Marseille ticked off on our bucket-list, it was time to return to the fleshpots of the Côte d’Azur, first stop Monaco. Our arrival there was a nightmare. In an effort to reduce the amount of traffic flowing above ground through the tiny municipality, the hillsides are now a warren of underground roadways, and having taken a wrong turn somewhere deep in the rocky depths, we found ourselves in an enormous never-ending tunnel, going goodness knows where. No longer in the most positive of moods, we eventually found our way out into fresh air and what we hoped would be a convenient car-park at the base of Le Rocher, upon which the ruling House of Grimaldi have built their palace, claiming for themselves the best views of this city-state. And then again, Grace Kelly, the subject of my early adolescent love, lived there once upon a time, so I could never hate the place whatever problems it presented.

It was easy to imagine how beautiful Monaco must have been a couple of centuries ago before the Casino opened in 1869. However, it is now the most densely populated state in the world and as one turns to face the city behind Le Rocher, the view is a seething mass of high-rise apartment buildings that severely mar the view of the hillsides on which they are built, and seem to extend in every direction except for seawards.

The spoiled beauty of Monaco greatly enhanced by my travelling companions!

It is by no means a pretty sight. However, the Jardins de Saint-Martin that stretch down from the front of the Palace around the edge of Le Rocher, with views over the Mediterranean and down over the Port de Fontvieille, are a pleasant place for an afternoon stroll among the lawns and interesting sculptures. But once you reach the eastern end of the gardens overlooking the marina crammed full of enormous luxury power yachts, the awfulness of such concentrated development smacks you in the face. One saving feature, the police do seem have a sense of humour; when asked to indicate the quickest way down to the quayside, one fine officer, standing outside the city hall, pointed straight towards the requested destination, that is down a fairly precipitous cliff face, then laughingly turned round and pointed us towards Avenue Saint-Martin, the road that curves down around the end of the rock, slower but decidedly safer! The pompous ceremony of the “changing of the guard” at the palace gates was also a bit of a farce, there being literally only one guard to change!

We eventually made our way down to the quayside and as we wandered along admiring the magnificent super yachts, we were apalled to find a large funfair spread across the end of the marina, making the place seem more like Blackpool on a drizzly Lancashire afternoon than the posh sophisticated ambience of Monte Carlo and its casinos that we had expected. Undeterred we continued our walk round past the Casino de Monte Carlo itself, till we arrived at La Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, thinking we would visit the advertised Musée de la Poupée. That, alas, was another disappointment when we learned that the doll museum had actually been closed for the last five years, and there was no other exhibition installed to replace it!

Whilst I am quite sure Monaco is still “The Place” for some people, I’m afraid it left us feeling very negative about it and so we quickly returned to our car for the less than 20km, but 45 minute drive further east to Nice, which, with it’s more demure fading elegance, was a great improvement. You arrive driving along the now infamous Promenade des Anglais, the scene of such terror just a few months earlier. This long boulevard is lined with lots of elegant houses and hotels facing the sea, and yet in stark contrast, the road just behind these buildings looked really very impoverished. We found a spot to park in Parking du Phare at the entrance to the small port just around the headland at the end of the long curving beach. Retracing our footsteps, we passed the powerful Monument au Morts de Rauba-Capéu, a memorial honoring Nice citizens killed during WW1, and once back round the headland of the same name, arrived in the Vieille Ville, the type of warren of narrow streets among old buildings, with restaurants and cafés at every corner, that are such a joy to wander through. Sadly the day was coming to an end and we had little time to really appreciate the place, let alone get a true impression of what is France’s fifth most populous city with a population of about one million, and the holiday destination of around four million tourists every year.

A couple of days later we headed back in that same general direction, to visit first of all, Grasse considered to be the world’s capital of perfume, up in the hills a few miles inland from Cannes. Following a succession of signposts, we eventually arrived on the edge of town at the Fragonard factory, where we took a guided tour to learn about the history and processes involved in perfume production.

According to my two sophisticated lady companions, our young guide was not very knowledgeable; and the inevitable sales pitch at the end of the tour was all rather nauseating in more ways than one, as we really didn’t like any of their perfumes, let alone their aluminium perfume “bottles”! Nevertheless, I was quite impressed to learn that some three thousand different essences, sourced from all over the world, are used in the manufacture of their range of perfumes and soaps, and a good “nose” can identify and distinguish each and every one.

The ingredients of today’s perfumes are sourced worldwide

The local perfume industry started to prosper at the end of the eighteenth century, and centered around Grasse because the micro-climate is particularly beneficial for the flower farming industry. Ironically, whereas in 1905 nearly six hundred tons of flowers were used in the local perfume production, modern methods and synthetic ingredients

Isnard, a local family-owned parfumerie.

mean that less than 30 tons of flowers were used in early 2000.

Heading back into the town centre we were much more impressed by visits to one or two of the many perfume shops, and especially liked that of Isnard. The proprietor, Mlle. Isnard, comes from a long family line that was able to trace their association with the town of Grasse back to the Middle Ages. And because we liked her products so much we came away with a bag well filled with perfume, soaps and even a liqueur to satisfy the driver!

Realising a need to fortify the body as well as the soul we had a delicious late luncheon at “Lou Pignatoun”, deep in the historic centre of the town, lured by their Friday speciality, “L’Aïoli”, a Provençal speciality of a platter of fish, prawns, hard-boiled eggs and lots of other tasty morsels served with a dip of garlic and olive oil mayonnaise. Sadly, we were just too late for that particular dish, but we still ate well of veal, steak, a mix of potatoes and smoked lentils . . . yummy. A quick visit to the very attractive cathedral completed our visit to Grasse, and a second brief stop in Cannes completed our Cook’s Tour of the fleshpots of the Côte d’Azur and also actually marked the end of our stay in Provence. Time for a change of language, and for a short tryst across the border in Italy, but that’s another story . . .

“Habit de Perfume”
Tomek Pawiak 1997
after a 17th century engraving.

Provence Part Three – Local peregrinations.

After “doing” Saint-Tropez, we felt we should get back to reality and start looking around at the sort of places where we might consider living, which after all was the primary objective of this Grand Tour.

Provence, is quite rightly renowned for it’s wonderful scenery and its profusion of ancient villages perched on hilltops and flowing down hillsides. The department of Var, and particularly the region of Le Dracénois, has more than its fair share of these villages [visit www.tourisme-en-france.com/fr/regions-france/340/le-dracenois for an interactive map of the region].

A local example was Les Arcs-sur-Argens, just a few miles down the road from Lorgues. However, the approach was not very encouraging; the village, actually a town these days, is fairly close to the autoroute and consequently we initially found ourselves in amongst several factories, and some not very attractive, fairly modern, housing developments sprawling down into the valley. We could see the ancient village on the hillside above us and, not really knowing where we were, followed our noses till we found a parking place next to the elegant Eglise du Martyre de Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Looking inside churches is something this irreligious travelling couple does unfailingly in every city, town or village we visit. The art and architecture are what we admire the most, and even this unassuming edifice did not disappoint having some unusual stained-glass windows,

The stained-glass window in Eglise du Martyre de Saint-Jean-Baptiste

and the remnants of quite beautiful wall paintings in the small chapels along each side of the nave. Outside the front door was a fine specimen of France’s ubiquitous plane tree population, spreading its branches across the little car park, as well as a small fountain against the retaining wall with the all-too-common notice “Eau non potable”, a sign of the deteriorating environment in this modern age. The ancient village of Les Arcs, originally named Archos in 1010AD, mainly dates back to the 13^th century and is fortified, so first we needed to find a gateway to get in. A wander along narrow streets in a slightly uphill direction found us at the Clock Tower and our entry into a beautiful medieval environment, meticulously maintained and evidently a chic place to live.

Inside Le Parage, the old centre of Les Arcs-sur-Argens

The old center is oddly called the Parage, a word which in both archaic English and French seems to refer to social rank, family lineage, or feudal land tenure. So it appears it has always been a snobby place to live! All the same it was also a very attractive place to stroll around for those prepared to plod up and down steep, narrow cobbled streets.

La Tour de Taradel and Chapelle Saint-Martin

Our route home took us through the village of Taradeau, on the hill behind and above which is the 12^th century watch tower, La Tour de Taradel. You can’t normally enter either the tower itself or the small Chapelle Saint-Martin next door; but while we were walking around outside, we met a French lady who was trying out the acoustics of the chapel by singing most melodiously through a small open window in the wall, a truly angelic voice in such a peaceful place. We also discovered that from the adjacent car-park, a rough road that provides firefighters access to the wooded hillsides above, was also a designated footpath leading along the side of the ridge back towards Les Arcs; later during our stay in Lorgues, we returned two or three times to take what proved to be one of the loveliest walks we found in Provence, wending alongside vineyards from which we gleaned the odd bunch of dried-out, but very sweet, raisin-like grapes as we passed. We befriended a couple of local ladies who seemed to take this walk regularly in the afternoon sunshine, and whom we bumped into each time we were there.

And the time we took the upward detour to the very top of the small colline, we discovered the Oppidum, the remains of an ancient pre-Roman fortified settlement, in a commanding position with views across the valleys on both sides of the hill. All that is to be seen today are the old walls, which have been slowly revealed by local volunteers clearing the thick brush which had kept the site well hidden over the centuries. There is a wonderful rocky viewpoint nearby, overlooking the valley below, from where one can see all the distant peaks towards the Mediterranean thirty miles away, and below us, the trains on the railway and traffic on the autoroute looking like toys in the distance. On the track on the way up, we found some very soft, red and orange fruits, a bit like little strawberries, fallen from a nearby tree, one of which my trusty taster boldly bit into and proclaimed to be delicious; so we happily ate several handfuls of them. During our descent we came across a friendly local gentleman scrabbling among the brush for plants and, chatting to him as was our wont, we learnt that these tasty fruits were called arbouses . It seems they are not commonly harvested [www.tous-les-fruits.com] although a few weeks later we were offered them when we went to dine with some friends in Languedoc.

. . . and this was the warning that we missed!

Always eager to walk the local trails and footpaths, one day we had an interesting experience on another trail a couple of miles outside of Lorgues, when we found ourselves walking past a line of chasseurs standing at regular intervals beside the track. It seems we had unwittingly marched into the middle of a hunt for wild boars, and these worthies in their camouflage clothing, though also wearing dayglo orange baseball caps (!!?), and armed with powerful hunting rifles, were waiting for their fellow human predators to flush out the boars in our direction. Not wearing bright orange caps ourselves, we deemed it unwise to hang around to chat for long, and can only assume the hunt was successful as we heard the distant sound of several shots as we headed on up the hill through a lovely green forest. We later learnt that the local winegrowers do not take kindly to having wild boars snuffling the ground around their precious vines and are happy to sponsor these gun-toting hunters to eliminate as many as they can. A not altogether happy compromise between the commercial needs of viniculturists and the ideals of environmentalists, it is quite a common occurrence throughout the wilder areas of southern France, as we were to find out later in our travels.

Enjoying the afternoon sunshine in the quiet calm of an out-of-season visit to L’Abbaye du Thoronet

The simple plain architecture of L’Abbaye du Thoronet

Another find in the immediate area was the Abbaye du Thoronet. Built between 1160 and 1230 this beautiful Cistercian abbey, one of three abbeys known as the “Three Sisters of Provence”, came to be restored as a Monument historique in the mid-eighteen hundreds, after it was brought to the attention of the writer Prosper Merrimée who was also the first official inspector of monuments in France. We thoroughly enjoyed the peacefulness of the location in a river valley surrounded by olive groves, as well as the plain, yet precise simplicity of the architecture, which is said to have been the inspiration of many modern architects.

We met a couple from Switzerland and sat on the grass chatting with them for a half hour or more until the afternoon sun settled behind the surrounding hills and the autumnal cool of the evening made us glad to return to the warmth of our car that had been sitting in the sunshine all afternoon. Definitely a place not to be missed, although I suspect the quiet ambience we found so attractive, would be missing in the busy tourist season.

Of course no visit to this part of France can be complete without a stop at at least one wine store. The next afternoon, having had a lazy start to the day, we drove to nearby Flayosc, another pretty little village with a simple small church. On the way back we pulled in to the Sarl Cellier des 3 Collines, tasted two or three of the local wines, and came away with just one bottle of vin rouge, d’huile d’olive, et des herbes de Provence et Gressini! Those few items, along with the wild thyme that Celine, who always kept a keen eye on the ground for the many wild herbs that grow profusely in the area, had picked on our walks, would provide us with a few of the basics for another healthy Provençal style meal.

And so the time arrived to expand our horizons a bit further, a circuitous route to Bargemon and beyond . .

Provence Part Two – Saint-Tropez

Five days into our stay in Lorgues we had explored the village pretty well, and decided to take our first trip to the “seaside”. Saint-Tropez dates back to pre-Roman times, and with its natural harbour and ideal defensive position, has, over the ages, often been fought over, and has been under the control of many different peoples including Greeks from Phocaea, Romans, Saracens and Genoans, Germans during the Great War, and Italians and, again, Germans in the second World War. It is also believed to have been where the first contact occurred between the French and the Japanese, when, in 1615, a Japanese delegation on its way to Rome, was obliged by the weather to take shelter in La Golfe de Saint-Tropez. And interestingly, the name Saint Tropez, comes from “Torpes”, a Roman officer under Nero’s reign who was beheaded after making the mistake of being converted to Christianity by Saint Paul; his body was set adrift in a small boat in Pisa, together with a cat and a dog, and supposedly they drifted ashore in this sheltered cove.

In more recent times, Saint-Tropez attracted famous figures from the world of fashion such as Coco Chanel in the 1920s, it was one of the landing sites for the Allied invasion of Southern France in August 1944, and in the 1950s gained some renown as the location for Roger Vadim’s film “And God Created Woman” that launched Brigitte Bardot into the public spotlight.

And since then it has become very much a destination for the rich and famous, an image which justifies the exotic boutiques we found throughout the town, and the beautiful luxury yachts moored along the quay in the small harbour.

The 52km scenic route across the Massif des Maures gave us a slow, but exciting drive through some lovely countryside, along a road of many twists and turns and lots of steep drops, most of which were on the passenger side, to Celine’s slight concern. Although the town now predominantly conveys the feeling of opulent luxury, the highlight for us was a visit to the fascinating Musée Maritime, which gave us a very different perspective of the history of Saint-Tropez. Climbing the hill upwards from the port, and passing several busy restaurants that teased your scribe’s taste buds, we arrived at the foot of a long set of steps leading up to La Citadelle on top of Colline des Moulins.

The first fort was built there in 1589 but was destroyed just six years later. The imposing hexagonal keep and the bastioned outer wall that we see today, were constructed in the early seventeenth century. The tower encloses a large interior courtyard and houses the maritime museum, a dozen rooms in which one discovers the maritime heritage of Saint Tropez from antiquity to the modern-day. The beautifully presented collection of ship and boat models, engravings, paintings of boats and documents recording the lives of famous local people, sea-captains and adventurers, kept us enthralled for a couple of hours. It was fascinating reading extracts from the letters to his wife, sent by the captain of a coastal sailing ship, as he tried to maintain his schedule in spite of the vagaries of the weather. Lying on our backs in a darkened corner of another room and watching a video of the terrors of life aboard one of the last of the old sailing ships on the passage round Cape Horn with cargoes of nickel from New Caledonia, was a relaxing novelty for two sets of weary legs. And it inspired us to stop in the museum shop on the way out and buy “Carnets du Cap Horn”, the journals of Pierre Stephan, one of the brave young captains who, at the turn of the twentieth century, still preferred the rigours of life aboard a four-masted barque to the comforts of the steamships of the day. The friendly Museum staff themselves made our visit complete when, quite out of the blue, they offered us free cups of coffee as we chatted with them and browsed the bookshelves.

The town’s marine heritage on display in La Musèe Maritime.

Eventually, pangs of hunger obliged us to return down the hill in the late afternoon, passing the now-closed restaurants with the tasty-looking menus, and we stopped at a small crêperie to eat very moreish Grand Marnier crêpes. This kept us going nicely for a while as we ambled through the narrow streets leading down to the sea. Being the good tourists that we were, who had yet to get used to French eating hours and afternoon closures, we eventually feasted cheaply on paella and escargots in one of the few quayside restaurants that stayed open all day.

The old town of Saint-Tropez seems small and intimate which added to our enjoyment of this out-of-season visit, without the hoards of tourists that we are told flood the place “in the season”. We wandered through some of the many charming small streets behind the old port, down to the pretty little La Ponche beach where a twenty-first century Dad flew a kite for his toddler, and then onto the concrete remains of a large concrete jetty sticking uglily out into the well protected Golfe de Saint-Tropez, where a young boy was trying his luck with rod and line on the edge of a darkening sea under threatening grey clouds. It was easy to imagine what the town must have been like when it was a small undeveloped village, the home of fishermen, boatbuilders, sailors and captains, many of the latter having learnt their trade at the local School for Captains.

A mega-yacht dwarfs the old quayside buildings

In stark contrast, the tall wooden masts of classic sailing yachts and the gleaming superstructures of megayachts, moored stern-on to the quay around the main port, itself encircled by fading four-storey dwellings, on the cast-iron balustraded balconies of which, sat several comfortable-looking elderly residents, together with the 4km of clean sandy beach just outside of town facing the Mediterranean on the other side of the peninsular, gave credence to understanding why the rich and famous adopted the town for their summer pleasure ground.

It also left us wondering how it would compare with the big casino cities further east on the Côte d’Azur proper, Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo. But they would have to wait for our visit; before that we wanted to get a picture of everyday Provençal life, away from the razzamatazz of commercialized tourism, and for the next few days we concentrated our explorations on the many beautiful old villages to be found in the rolling countryside of Var and up into the hills towards Gorges du Verdon. . .

Provence Part One – The Commune of Lorgues

Part 1 – The commune of Lorgues

Our month in the beautiful city of Lyon completed, the time to start the main business of our trip had arrived. We were both beginning to feel at ease with the language after two weeks of intensive training at Inflexyon, shopping in French had begun to seem quite natural, and chatting with the locals was becoming much easier. Now we were able to start looking around us and begin that search for the all-elusive perfect nesting place.

Our stop in Lyon had been a great success, having found the city even more delightful than we had expected. However, as many of the people we met there quickly confirmed, it was probably not the ideal location for two people who were hoping to live in a warm(-ish) climate. The September weather we had experienced there was lovely, but the general message was that we might not be quite so appreciative of the winters. To make the point, it was raining heavily as we left Lyon behind us that first day in October, driving our brand new short-term lease car, a well-equipped and very comfortable Peugeot 308 diesel. We headed south through quite murky weather, along the A7 autoroute following the Rhône valley, as we anticipated our next destination, the village of Lorgues, located in the midst of wineries and olive trees in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

Provence is one of those places that has been written about so often, and is almost revered by many, and yet neither of us had been there for any length of time. It appeared to have a lot of potential, the climate is temperate, the countryside was said to be beautiful, and culture and history abounds. With so many expats having made their homes there over the years, it surely must be worthy of a visit by a couple of European retirees, disappointed by the Californian Dream, and looking for a place to re-connect to their roots. So we had found a rental apartment in Lorgues, which seemed to be fairly centrally located between sea and mountain, the famous Riviera destinations to the east and Roman antiquities to the west. The sun started to appear among the clouds as we arrived in the late afternoon, and, pleased to be out in the countryside once more after a month of city dwelling, we found our new temporary home easily on the edge of the village, in a small gated community of similar apartments in two three-storey buildings. We had to wait half an hour for the cleaning lady to arrive with the key and let us in; but once the car was unloaded, and we’d had our supper of left-over groceries from Lyon, we settled down to our six-week term of Provençal life.

The first sight of our new Provençal home. Sadly, our view did not include the nice garden and the pool.

There is a lot to see in Provence, chic holiday resorts, tourist trap casino cities, market towns full of history, ancient small villages perched on hilltops high above green valleys, and acres and acres and acres of vineyards interspersed with olive groves. Lorgues fitted somewhere between the market town and ancient village category, far enough north of the A8, the main east-west autoroute, to be relatively unaffected by traffic speeding towards the Italian border, but far enough south to be easily accessible and out of the more extreme hilly regions to the north. It seemed to be, and indeed proved to be, an ideal location to have all of Provence within a comfortable day’s drive. However our first day in the village was all foot-powered, as we took our first stroll around our neighbourhood, including a stop for our daily baguette at what turned out to be the only boulangerie with Sunday opening hours. Then, getting down immediately to the business in hand, we included some window-shopping at the half dozen agents immobiliers in the main street.

The smallest kitchen area I have ever used apart from one in a motor-home!

Our open plan living/dining room. Actually there isn’t a dining table at all!

The apartment that we had booked through the FlipKey website was adequate but much smaller than we had expected, which just demonstrated how deceptive descriptions and photographs can be. The view from our balcony at the back of the building was a distinct disappointment, in the shade all day long and looking straight at the back of a very run-down building that housed the local grape and olive crushing plant, which became noisily active several times during our stay. We were also disappointed to discover that our mobile phone signal was too weak to be of any use when downloading e-mails from the internet or making the comforting Skype phone calls to family and friends at home; and the “café with internet facilities just around the corner” had very erratic opening hours, and wasn’t exactly the kind of place we would have wanted to spend a lot of time chatting to the grandkids. This was our own fault, because we were fully aware of the lack of internet in the apartment when we made the booking, but your scribe had rather foolishly chosen to ignore this lack of what has become such a necessary adjunct to the comfort of our modern travelling lives. Still, by late afternoon the next day, a 40 kilometre round trip to the local Orange outlet in Draguignan, our nearest town of any size, had us returning happily connected to the world again with a new mini-SIM in our IPad and a contract that seemed to give us plenty of gigabytes to play with for the next three months, though we were soon to learn how many of the bytes one Skype call consumes!

The Var department – Lorgues is just slightly north-east of the exact centre.

The local tourist office, very conveniently situated just round the corner from our gateway, was staffed by a couple of very friendly local ladies who gave us lots of good information about the places we should visit in the Draguignan arrondissement of the Var department, and we came away well armed with maps and guides.

To find your way around in France, and to understand a bit about the local politics, it is helpful to have an understanding of how the administration of the country is divided up. There are twelve mainland régions, each region levying its own taxes, and having direct responsibilities for high school education and discretionary powers over infrastructural spending such as public transport, universities and assistance to local businesses. Regions are then subdivided into the ninety-seven main administrative divisions of France, the départements. The departmental seats of government for each department, the préfectures, are usually in a town reasonably centrally placed, historically nominally accessible to all corners of the department within twenty-four hours on horseback. However, slightly surprisingly, the coastal port city of Toulon is the prefecture for the Var department. Further subdivisions of the departments are the arondissements, such as Draguignan, the town of that name also being the seat of the sous-préfecture of the arondissement. Each arondissement is then further subdivided into cantons, the chief purpose of which are to serve as constituencies for the election of members of the General Councils of each department. Within cantons there may be several communes, France’s fourth administrative level. Lorgues is one of fifty-eight communes in the arondissement of Draguignan, and one of five communes in the canton of Vidauban. Communes are roughly the equivalent of civil townships and incorporated municipalities in the United States, and resemble urban districts and rural parishes in the United Kingdom. Each commune has a maire (mayor), a conseil municipal (town council), and a mairie or town hall. Amazingly, a legacy from the French Revolution means that all 36,552 communes, with the exception of the commune of Paris, have more or less the same legislative powers over such things as the local police force and emergency services, even though the population of communes can vary from two million – Paris – to towns of ten thousand, to a hamlet of just10 persons. However, as one might expect, the maximum allowable pay for mayors and deputy mayors, and other financial items such as municipal campaign limits, do vary according to the population echelon into which each commune falls! Lorgues, though, was a larger than average commune of nearly nine thousand people.

Entering Vieux Lorgues through the narrow passage above Place du Revelin.

The original small fortified town around which this community has grown, dates back to the 11^th and 12^th centuries, and is still entered through one of the several old “portes”, or gates. The old town is a small maze of medieval streets uphill from the present day main street, Boulevard Georges Clemenceau, and Cours de la Republique. As one approaches the village the most prominent feature is the 18^th century collegial St-Martin church. Locals told us it had a very impressive interior, but this we never saw as the building was closed to the public during our stay, due to construction work. Every Tuesday there is a large market all along the main street and extending into Rue de l’Église and down Avenue de Toulon. Selling pretty well every type of household accessory, a wide selection of clothing and lots of meat, cheese and fruit and vegetables, one might never need to shop anywhere else if one was not too choosy! A Casino Supermarché, an Intermarché Super and a small Bio store completed the basic grocery shopping options; for the more selective gourmand there was a half dozen boulangeries and pâtisseries. The main street was mostly cafés and restaurants and the aforementioned agents immobiliers, all very much oriented towards the expat and tourist community, of which we were part of course. The local expats came out in force on market days and Saturdays, when one heard as much English as French being spoken.

In line with our intent to live like locals as much as possible, we rarely dined out in the village. Our first experience was a wonderful meal with friends on a damp wet Friday evening, at Chez Vincent (sadly, I see, now under new owners and renamed Chez Flo.) Superbly cooked confit de canard together with delicious starters, yummy desserts and a very nice Chateau les Crostes rouge earned it a well deserved five-star review on Trip Advisor. Then on our last evening in the village we treated ourselves to another very tasty meal in the quaint ambience of the interior of an old olive mill. La Table du Moulin had received mixed reviews, but the unique venue and the warmth of the Maître D and the Chef when, out of hours, we popped our heads inside as we passed by one afternoon, tempted us to find out for ourselves, and we were far from disappointed; it turned out to be an enjoyable parting song to our stay in Lorgues. Of course, we did enjoy the café culture more often, finding the temptations of mille feuilles and tartes aux pommes irresistible more times than we would like to admit, stopping by to rest your scribe’s weary knees on our regular walks to the Bio store and our favourite boulangeries.

Five days after our arrival and we realized we had explored our commune pretty thoroughly and the time had come to start discovering what our département, Var, had to offer. . . .

Lyon – part five – City of Silk

During the Renaissance, Lyon became very active in the silk trade and this resulted in the city becoming an important industrial town during the 19^th century. The main silk district is on the steep slopes of Croix Rousse, uphill from our house of learning at L’Inflexyon. We walked up the many steps one evening and at the top found a neighbourhood very different from where we were staying at Les Toits de Lyon; it appeared to be quite working-class and not ‘posh’ at all, as we had thought it might have been, being in such a wonderful location with such great views over the city. We were too late in the day to visit the two or three old silk factories that remain open to the public, so, after a brief wander around, we trotted back down the long wide ‘staircase’ of Montée de la Grande-Côte, and into more familiar territory.

However, we did come across other reminders of the silk-trading past of the city during our wanderings at other times. Several small boutiques in an area close to the Opera, such as La Boutique Ineska, were displaying some simply beautiful diaphanous silk dresses which looked wonderful when modeled by my long-limbed bride; in another gallery we visited, we were able to see the process of silk screen printing that produced the wonderful patterns of those garments; and in a small shop on rue de Boeuf, Brochier Soieries 1890, La Boutique, we received, from the very accommodating proprietor, a fascinating demonstration of a small version of the Jacquard machine, invented in 1801, that automated the weaving of the gorgeous patterns in silk that we associate with furnishing fabrics and the richer materials used in the aristocratic gowns and cloaks of old.

The silk industry is also associated with some of the more unusual features of Lyonnaise architecture. With the older parts of the city being built on and around fairly steep hills, most of the main streets of old Lyon run across the slopes, rather than up and down them. To give people living and working on the upper slopes easier direct access to the river, the famous traboules, a series of arched walkways, underground passages and staircases leading down the slopes, were incorporated into the buildings. Whilst there were lots of these traboules, not that many are nowadays easily accessible to the public, especially the underground tunnels which are now mostly closed off and used for storage.

All the same, we were lucky enough in our choice of learning establishment, to find ourselves directly next-door to a fine example of this style of construction;

Passage Thiaffait starts with stairs down from rue Burdeau and ends up opening onto rue René Leynaud. Several of the really rather elegant staircase traboules can also be seen on and around rue du Boeuf (such as La Tour Rose) and rue Saint-Jean in Vieux Lyon. Although we didn’t pursue our research into traboules any further, we came across several guidebooks and many websites dedicated to the subject [www.lyontraboules.net].

And the connection of traboules with the silk trade was . . . ? They provided safe and efficient passage for silk workers to get their wares to and from market unmarred [www.atlasobscura.com/places/traboules-secret-passages].