“So, let’s go to Poitiers on our way back to Paris”, suggests my beautiful wife one day. “And why would we do that?” I ask. “Simply because I went there back in 1982 and remember it being a very nice old city!”
That seemed as good a reason as any. We wanted somewhere within easy striking distance of Paris CDG and Poitiers was a name I remembered well from my schoolboy history classes as being the site of a key victory for my English ancestors during the Hundred Years War. So, having established there were no undesirable motives for visiting the place, such as reminiscing over a long-lost love on the part of either party, we got busy on the AirBnB website once more where we found Phillippe and his “B&B Chambre élégante, spacieuse Poitiers centre” on rue des 4 Roues, overlooking the river Le Clain.
It was a lovely sunny spring day for a drive through the countryside, so we took a detour into the Perigord region to visit Brantôme, a small town on an island in the river La Dronne. Spring flowers were poking up in flowerbeds around the village and the river-bed was alive with bright green grasses. The Dronne river takes an abrupt U-turn around Brantôme, after meeting the limestone cliff that has been the home to many peoples in the past who took to the troglodyte lifestyle in the natural caves worn out by the river over thousands of years. We stretched our legs awhile, taking a few more photos for posterity to add to our already enormous collection from the trip (only to lose them all when we got home as a result of our HDD disaster!). Then we stopped for a coffee at a café beside the river where the poor old waitress seemed to be totally discombobulated, as if the dozen or so customers she had to look after were way beyond anything she had ever experienced before! The Perigord looks very beautiful with it’s rolling hills, woodlands, open farmland and river valleys, and it is easy to understand why so many expats from all over northern Europe have gravitated there over the years.
Phillipe welcomed us warmly on our arrival in Poitiers at the appointed hour and, after giving us a hand with our well stuffed suitcases, showed us around his little ‘jardin biologique’ with its neat raised-beds full of herbs and vegetables and introduced us to his small flock of chickens. The garden backs up to a small limestone cliff into which an old troglodyte dwelling had been carved, similar to those we had seen in Brantôme earlier in the day. Later in the evening we took a short walk to get our first view of the old town centre, and had a tasty supper at La Bonne Quille, the “Veggie Experience” for my health-food loving wife and a tasty piece of monkfish for me.
There is certainly a lot of old architecture to feast one’s eyes on in this very historic city. During our drive there we had read about at least five or six old churches that were worthy of a visit, though having visited, entered and photographed in one way or another, nearly every church, chapel, abbey and cathedral we had passed, or stayed near to, over the previous six months, I felt pretty well ‘churched-out’; so the thought of dragging our irreligious, symbolically near-drowned, brains around yet more such edifices on our last day in Europe did little to excite me. But when we finally returned to our comfortable, warm, five-star digs after nearly five hours plodding around this amazing medieval city on a grey, drizzly day, I can honestly say that if offered to be shown another hundred ‘houses of God’ that were as beautiful as the five or six we saw that day, I could, perhaps, be persuaded to do so, though all in good time of course.
Our first stop was to have been at the fourth century Baptistère Saint-Jean, but due to poor research, we found it was closed until 2PM, and thus it ended up at the end of our list for the day. But our walk there had not been without its pleasures, first along the grassy bank of the Le Clain river, past ducks, drooping willows and weirs, and under the over-pass of the Voie André Maisaux, with its two fine examples of street art on the concrete supporting pillars, across the little footbridge, Passerele de Montbernage, and then weaving up through the narrow streets and into the south-east corner of the city. From the closed Baptistère, we carried on upwards towards the pedestrianised city centre, stopping briefly at Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, Poitier’s twelfth century cathedral, then Église de Sainte-Radegonde dating from the sixth century, and so to Église Notre-Dame la Grande, the oldest Romanesque church in France, on Place Charles de Gaulle, amusingly still better known as ‘Place Notre Dame’ by the locals. (This name change had actually led to one rather embarrassed church warden at the door of the cathedral the previous evening who, when asked where we would find our restaurant on Place Charles de Gaulle, had sent us off in completely the wrong direction; for this he later apologized to us profusely, as we bumped into him again after our dinner, explaining his use of the old name for the square and consequent misdirections!)
The cornucopia of Romanesque magnificence we had viewed so far in just three churches actually had me almost hankering for more and so we walked yet further along the local streets, all of which are named after persons who are of French historical significance, and have very informative street name-plates with dates etc.; streets with names such as ‘rue Gambetta’, named after Léon Gambetta, a French statesman who came to prominence during the Franco-Prussian war, and ‘rue de Théophraste Renaudot’, a physician, philanthropist and journalist. And so we arrived at the most wonderful church of all, the almost totally Romanesque, Église Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand. The interior of this superb eleventh century example of very early medieval architecture is a glorious feast of stained glass windows, very old murals, beautiful mosaic floors and Romanesque arches, large and small, seen from every angle and from every visual vantage point. It was a wonderful climax to six months of dedicated study of religious architecture by a couple of non-believers!
But we still had one more architectural treasure to visit, the Baptistère dating back to Roman times, although to get there we had to pass through yet another visual surprise, Le Parc de Blossac. Established in 1770 by Paul Esprit Marie de la Bourdonnaye, Count of Blossac, as a private garden on 9 hectares along the ancient city ramparts, it has fine views over the river below and, joy of joys, we saw our first crocuses of spring pushing up through the grass at the foot of the proud beech trees. Even on this dreary grey day the park was a happy place to be, so one can only imagine how pleasant it would be on more clement days.
Finally, we arrived at the last destination of our whistle-stop tour of this fine old city, the Baptistère Saint-Jean, a small, unimposing building at first sight after all the grand churches we had visited throughout the day. The central part of the building which dates from the middle of the fourth century, stands on top of the original Roman foundations from a hundred years earlier. The building has undergone many good and bad phases over the years, from its initial designed use as a centre for full immersion baptisms, to severe neglect during the occupation of the Visigoths in the fifth century, through its religious heyday in the late middle ages, to its sale for use as a warehouse after the French Revolution, and on into the twentieth century when its true historical importance was finally recognized. Although over the years it has undergone partial demolition, several additions, and numerous rebuilding projects, when one enters inside it still retains the feel of its Roman origins. There in the middle of the main chamber is the original baptismal tank, and the remains of many beautiful frescoes adorn the walls and the ceiling of the small chapel at the back of the chamber. It is considered to be the oldest existing Christian building in western Europe and is a fine example of Merovingian architecture, that is the period in France’s history from the fifth to the eighth century.
That evening we again followed our host’s recommendations and ate another good meal, this time at La Gazette. But with flat camera batteries and exhausted bodies too tired to write my daily journal, I have no memory of quite what we ate! Back in our comfortable digs, we fell into the sleep of the gods, though which gods I am not too sure, and awoke late the following morning to find Phillipe had left our breakfast for us, laid out very artistically on the dining table downstairs, plenty of fresh croissants, pastries, home-made jams, small cups of fruit, and a large thermos of piping hot coffee, just what we needed to prepare us for facing the harsh world of modernity that awaited us at Paris CDG that evening. We really were going to be on our way home very soon.
An Epilogue, fit for the end of a six-month travel saga!
Arriving back in Paris after a long and generally uninteresting drive from Poitiers culminating in the usual rush-hour traffic-jam going around the Péripherique, we handed in our very enjoyable Peugeot 308 lease car, and took the courtesy bus to our Hotel Mercure, deep in the heart of the Paris CDG airport complex but also very convenient for our 5.30AM check-in the next morning. The hotel was everything you would expect from a business traveller’s perspective, a clean comfortable room, an overpriced buffet-style dining room (no choice, €33 a head to eat all you like, or nothing), and a large bar area populated noisily by the denizens of whatever conference was being held that day. A not-so-nice welcome back to the grim reality of the modern fly-anywhere world! We spent most of the evening re-packing our suitcases yet again, jettisoning various non-essentials such as half-used bottles of skin care products and a pair of very warm, cosy old slippers, to satisfy the 23kg weight limit. Lights out early, we slept fitfully and woke up at the ghastly hour of 4.30AM, dressed, grabbed our bags and went down to our waiting “coach and four”, the courtesy coach which we had all to ourselves. The very modern new terminal 1 was also similarly bereft of the usual travelling crowds and soon we were close by our departure gate in time to grab coffee/tea/tarte aux pommes/croissant at Brioche Doree for the usual high airport price, none of which bore much resemblance to our recent delightful ‘café culture’ experiences, except for the people-watching component of course. Eleven hours of easy flying later, courtesy of Lufthansa, and we were once more on the last leg home, driving along the 405 towards Long Beach, Belmont Shore and home. It was good to be back to reality and ‘normal’ life once more . . . well for a few months anyway!
So what did we achieve during this epic ‘holiday’??!!
We had an absolutely wonderful six months, we saw so many places, big cities, towns, and villages large and small, countryside wild and rugged and farmland that is in places manicured to perfection, vineyards with rows of pruned vines stretching into the distance reminding me of the lines of gravestones in one of those many sad Great War cemeteries around Ypres, forests where wild boars roam and where we heard the depressing sounds of gunfire from the ‘chasseurs’ in action. We witnessed simplicity in small French country villages where only hippy foreigners choose to live the alternative life-style among the few ancient locals who hang on to their agrarian way of life. We experienced in a small way, the sophisticated lifestyles of the rich and famous in posh Riviera resorts and Victorian seaside spas. In several cities we walked through beautiful old town centres, full of renaissance, neo-classical and medieval architecture. We drove through, but rarely stopped, in small industrial towns squeezed into narrow valleys, packed with high-density housing. We saw sheep on hillsides, cows chewing the cud on mist-covered, rich green meadows, we have befriended and been warmly greeted by donkeys, been followed down country tracks by goats, barked at by village dogs and have stroked cats everywhere. We have met with friendly locals in town and in country, we have learnt how to greet and say our farewells in four different languages. We watched families meeting and gossiping in squares and market places while their children played on their way home from school. We have drooled at views of high snow-capped mountains on the far side of green valleys and been awed by standing on high cliffs, rocky outcrops and even balconies high above sea and ocean, as waves crashed against rocks and beaches far below.
The lives of both town dwellers and village folk have been ours to experience, and we have purchased our necessary groceries at street markets, smart ‘Halles’, hypermarkets, supermarkets, local grocers and specialty ‘Bio’ stores. We drove 11,000 kilometres on autoroutes, cursing the tolls, on beautifully maintained national roads with very little traffic, on nausea-inducing winding roads through the hills, and squeezed through narrow village streets, laid down in the days of carriages, carts and wagons, when ‘high horse-power’ meant at least ‘four-in-hand’. We have seen many places that we would never consider living in permanently, and a few, very few, that have enticed us to get into serious conversations with local ‘immobiliers’. However, we have not yet found anywhere that was simply the ‘most perfect’ location to plant new roots, as to defy due care and diligence, though we did get dangerously close a couple of times! Our shoes have tramped through city streets, along cobbled lanes, up and down ancient stairways and through marketplaces thronging with shoppers hunting out both quality and bargains. We traversed pedestrian crossings on busy main roads, dodging speeding scooters and the occasional mindless driver, but more often than not we have appreciated courteousness behind the wheel. We stopped in cafés to watch, enjoy and participate in the café culture, and also enjoyed too many sweet patisseries as a result. We have people-watched, contemplated our surroundings and happily absorbed the culture we found everywhere.
In so many ways we have tasted, experienced and enjoyed the European way of life, a style of living we both grew up in, in one way or another, and find we have missed in recent years. Whether or not that life proves to be the answer to our dreams, should have become clear once we returned to terra firma across the pond, and to our American life. But, alas, we remain undecided. Of one thing we can be absolutely sure, we will return ‘ere long and once again go free-wheeling along those roads, discovering yet more “views to die for”, visit some more places that I will declare to be “perfect”, and continue the “thrill of the hunt”. And one day, one fine day, we’ll know we have found the right place, where we will both be equally happy to spend the rest of our lives, and we’ll be able to hang up our spurs and riding crop, once and for all. Till then . . . a little side trip to Australia to visit my sister and her family. . . !!
PS I am thankful to Celine’s love of Facebook, something I never thought I’d be saying! The pictures in these last two posts would have been completely lost as a result of our disc-drive debacle but for her diligence in keeping a Facebook journal of our travels.