Of Rivers, Baguettes and Billabongs. Reg Egan
commercial life of its own. You know, on reflection, I would almost suggest that you turn left through the entrance gate and that you do a circuit that avoids the main street — the Grand Rue with all its tourist shops. The church, did I mention the church? Never mind.
Domme has a heart-wrenching memorial to the victims of the 1939-1945 war where it lists in one column those who were killed in combat and beside it a further list of the people who were deported from “unoccupied” France. Wars — how is it that we still accept wars as if they are a matter of course and therefore unavoidable?
The author Eugène Le-Roy wrote two of his masterpieces (The Enemy of Death and Frau Mill) whilst living in Domme and, as a consequence, not only has a plaque on the house he then occupied, but has had a street renamed in his honour. The French like to do this renaming thing. What about the previous name and the reason for it? What about all the Rue de Charles de Gaulle — will they be renamed in the twenty-second century?
Eugène-le-Roy was a very interesting bloke but it has not been easy to find out much about him. It is fairly certain, however, that he was born in 1836 and that his parents were domestics or servants at the glorious Château Hautefort. He, no doubt, had the sort of childhood you would have expected, and he struggled somewhat in his youth. He enlisted in the French army and served in Algiers and elsewhere, and he rose rapidly through the ranks. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he and the army parted company after some five years, although he was patriot enough to re-enlist and to fight in the Franco-Prussian War.
His great passion and life-long work was writing and he spent the whole of that life in and around the Dordogne, particularly in his native town of Jumilhac or Jumilhac-le-Grand. But he also lived in Domme and wrote in Domme as we have mentioned. Jumilhac is really just out of the Dordogne proper and is on the D78 in the general direction of Chalus.
And Chalus, well, we all know about Chalus and how it happened that Richard Lionheart was killed there in 1199 by an arrow or quarrel (bolt) from a new long distance cross-bow. Richard, at that time, was king of England, but in his bellicose fashion found an excuse to lay siege to Chalus in La Belle France, and perhaps he met his just deserts when that arrow struck him. The poor defender of the town who fired the shot was flayed to death when the besiegers finally entered Chalus, though Richard, before he died, was supposed to have forgiven him. Jumilhac is worth a visit just to sit and gaze up at its Castle on and in its romantic setting.
Eugène wrote this (my rough translation from the French): “Selfishness makes me indignant, I am exasperated by malice, injustice disgusts me and misery makes my heart bleed.” He died in 1907 but some time before his death he quietly refused to accept the Legion of Honour.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rocamadour and its history and its remarkable buildings squashed against and clinging to the cliff — we saw you from above and photographed you through a telephoto lens but let’s be honest, we squibbed it. We did not drive in or walk through the famous town.
What we did do, however, was to park our car in the spacious area of L’Hospitalet and gaze out over the valley and the Forest of the Monkeys. Rocamadour is fantastic, there can be no doubt of that, but even from our park above we could see the buses and the hordes. We beg your pardon for our cowardice.
When you drive from Lacave to L’Hospitalet, above Rocamadour, you take, or I should say you can take, the little D247, a pipsqueak of a road, narrow and almost without any traffic. It is a lovely road that goes past a goat farm, milking sheds, a little fromagerie and of course, a tasting room and a sales counter. I had an hour or so in the afternoon before dinner and the usual pre-dinner Campari-soda, and so resolved to go back to this charming spot that we had passed in the morning.
From our hotel Le Pont de l’Ouysse right next to the Ouysse River, we looked up at the picturesque Château Belcastel, but when you actually drive through Lacave and on to the D247 you climb suddenly a cliff that is higher than the one on which Belcastel is built and, lo and behold, you are looking down on Belcastel and on the confluence of the Ouysse and the Dordogne. It is such a rapid and dramatic change of scenery. God, or the French, have left plenty of spots where you can pull off the road and park. I did so, and walked back to look at that wonderful view — rivers, villages of stone and slate and tiles, outcrops of rock of the same colour as the houses and châteaux and churches, cliffs of rock but partially clothed in oak trees in their deepest spring green with the sun slipping lower in the west, clouds, but some blue sky…stone, slate, tiles, trees, water, sky and a gentle breeze, and above all — silence.
The soil here is impregnated with natural limestone gravel and supports moderately high grasses of several kinds and wild flowers of many, many different species: orchids, buttercups, geranium, red poppies, white flowers in clumps and singly. All lovely. I wandered on while the breeze whispered to me of ages past, of history and of peace and of the famous and the ordinary people of France over many centuries.
There were clumps of juniper bushes but their fruit was still green, as I soon found, there were other bushes about head height and there were little groves of stunted oaks. There was a farm further ahead on my right and it had one of those ridiculously flimsy post and wire fences that you see all over France — flimsy but successful it seems. It is hard to believe that they keep in the farm animals but apparently they do.
I turned slowly and looked around the full 360º. What I thought, if God had used different colours, the way that painters sometimes do. Couldn’t he have reversed things and made the trees blue and the sky green? Couldn’t the sea have been red? Oh, there were all sorts of possibilities, but as I resumed my walk through the grass and the small and scrubby oaks I had to admit that it had all been rather well done. It was difficult to improve on his work, even if you were a painter.
The late afternoon was perfect and I resolved to drive on. A short way down the road was a paddock of grass that had been cut and baled. The round bales glowed yellow and orange and reminded me of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of haymaking in Provence. I stopped the car and went over to lean on the fence and gaze. Definitely Van Gogh-ish. The evening light was just filtering in and the stubble and the bales stood out the more strongly.
The fromagerie was on towards L’Hospitalet and I went there and parked some distance from the buildings. I had seen their herd of goats in the morning and even from where I had parked, you could hear their baa as they were being milked. I reflected that I should go in and taste their product — the area is famous for its goats’ cheese — but if I did I could only buy enough for lunch tomorrow; any more and it would not keep. So I reluctantly decided not to trouble them.
Across the road, on this rather dry plateau or causse someone had established a small vineyard which they had first surrounded with low stone walls and had then subdivided in the same way. Perhaps it had once been two very small vineyards belonging to different people. It was old — one hundred years perhaps. The vines weren’t neglected — they had been weeded and tilled — but they showed their age in their knobbly black trunks and many had died and there were gaps in the rows. Nonetheless, the spring growth gave them green and erect bushes which contrasted with the white-grey stone fences and the buff stones in the soil. There were two angular and sparse almond trees along the dividing fence and in the distance, but quite distinct, was a small hut or buron with a charcoal coloured roof of flat stones surmounted by a tiny spire in the gold stone.
Romanesque churches, châteaux, hôtels (elegant houses), monasteries, cloisters — we had seen them in their dozens — and we had seen them in all their glory, but was there anything to touch what I had seen that afternoon bordering the narrow D247? I doubt it. Such simplicity. But isn’t that the crux of it all, simplicity? And it is a theme that runs through many aspects of our lives. Even in food and cooking there is nothing to beat simplicity — a piece of good fish beautifully cooked and unadorned except perhaps for a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, and naturally, a few boiled kipfler potatoes beside it on a plain plate.
I drove slowly back to le Pont