L'On Y Danse

Oct. 12

Another life ambition achieved today: I danced on the bridge, or what’s left of it, at Avignon. To my own extremely poor accompaniment: “Sur le pont d’Avignon” et cetera. OK, so I don’t dance well, but I try to move like a movie gangster when I do it, so nobody will give me a hard time.

From the time more than 40 years ago when I first heard the song and learned what the words meant, I have wanted to come here and see the bridge. Then I learned that most of it had fallen down centuries ago. That’s all right, so did London Bridge, and I crossed the ocean to see that.

If you’re old like me you pay 11 euro for one ticket that gets you onto the bridge and also into the Palace of the Popes. Quelque chose! a bargain.

And it was an all-day trip. We left the hotel around noon and went to the post office because I had a couple of cards to mail to the States.

The post office is right by one of the city gates. The walls run all around Avignon. They are largely intact, but in bad repair. People aren’t allowed to walk on them because some of the stones are loose. You could fall, or knock one down on somebody’s head.

Many of the old stone walls here are made of limestone or sandstone, or maybe chalk and butter. I’m not sure. In the Palace of the Popes, Joanna brushed against a wall when she was trying to take a picture, and there was white dust all over her trenchcoat.

Many walls have deep holes where the stone has dissolved in the wind and the rain. I put my fingers into one stone and some grains came away. It was upsetting. Oh no, I just took six months off the life of somebody’s house.

In fact, the window of my room looks out on some ancient-looking stone walls. You can see where a piece of one of them fell and lodged in the roof of an adjoining building. Now, if that happened in New York, or maybe anywhere in the States, there would be a dozen hungry lawyers trying to find out who owns the roof and how much they can get.

The bridge that stands in the Rhone now consists of four arches. There used to be more than 20. The original bridge was the inspiration of someone named St. Benezet. He raised money in the 12th or 13th century and roused people to build it.

The Rhone at this stage outweighed medieval bridge work by a good measure, so the thing kept falling down. It was abandoned in the 17th century. The last remaining arches were restored in the 19th or 20th century and are now part of the Unesco World Heritage Site at Avignon. The papal palace and a couple of other things are also part of that.

It is made of blocks of stone and is paved with a difficult surface of river stone laid in concrete. Think of round bulbous things poking up to torture you.

Joanna says this kind of surface is recommended for reflexology. If you walk on the surface in your bare feet, it makes you healthy. I walked on that pavement in my long-distance shoes, a pair of rubber-soled Rockports, and those stones took some work.

I have learned on this trip that the Rhone was the border between France and somewhere else. The popes lived on this side and Philip the Fair had the other. the bridge was heavily protected on both sides. There’s something, the tower of Philippe le Bel on the far side of the Rhone. The Avignon side includes a drawbridge.

I suddenly remembered my Monty Python. Imagine a bunch of French guys running across the bridge shaking their swords. The drawbridge goes up. They fall into the river. The pope is on the wall saying, “Aha, you silly French persons, your father is a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries. I fart in your general direction.” Or words to that effect.

I’m sure that Matt, who has the movie memorized, can give me the correct dialogue.

When we came to the end of the current bridgework,  Joanna got a cool shot of our shadows in the water. There we are on the Rhone.

We left the bridge and climbed a tower to see if it led to the palace. It didn't, but that's all right. You can see why.

We backtracked and wandered toward the plaza where they actually let you into the palace. It was 2 o’clock by then and I hadn’t had wine all day. But there is always a cafe when you need one. I was able to order a cheese plate with bread and a glass of white Cotes du Rhone.

There were two soft cheeses and one hard, served with a fig and some tapenade, probably egg plant. This white was very interesting with the cheese. It had several fruity and sometimes even mineral flavors, and they changed depending on the type of cheese I had just eaten. I think Joanna noticed that too.

After lunch, we climbed a steep alley of stairs and came out into the plaza of Le Palais des Papes.

The palace has wings inside wings, and there used to be more. After the Revolution it was adapted to serve as an army barracks and several structures were torn down.

I think the place was planned to be confusing, to control housebreakers and assassins. Unless you were an insider and knew your way around it, you would get lost in there and starve.

We followed the tour circuit because there were signs pointing the way, but I had no idea where we really were at any time inside the palace.

It is fascinating even now with the furnishings gone. Some rooms, like the papal apartment, have period furniture, but the pieces are not original to the house.

Many rooms—and this I found astonishing—are still covered with vivid painting from the 1330s. Chaucer really was a boy then. The pope’s room is decorated with a tracery of vines with birds and small animals hidden in the motif. The recesses for the windows are painted with trellises and trefoil arches so they look like corridors or alleyways.

It’s very amusing stuff, and according to the notes, shows the influence of early Renaissance techniques being developed in Italy at the time.

There is a chapel dedicated to John the Evangelist and John the Baptist that is still very much preserved. In the panel where they bring Salome the head of the Baptist on a charger, there is a puppy standing next to her.

The consistory, where the pope met the cardinals for official business, the chapel, and the dining hall are huge spaces with Gothic vaulted ceilings.

There are displays of fragmentary objects found during excavations on the grounds, often they are bits of stained glass, or small ornaments. There is a pile of round stones in one corner outside. They are bullets thrown by ballistas or trebuchets, or some other kind of early artillery during various times when the palace was under siege.

One display includes fragments of the pope’s artillery. That case also includes a human skull pierced by the quarrel from a crossbow.

The tour lets out on the far side of the palace, and so we wandered for a while through some very narrow, very old streets.

We saw a drawing of the bridge of St. Benezet somewhere in the day’s travels, and it shows the palace, and behind it an open space with what appear to be windmills. They’re not going to fit any windmills in the old city now. There is no room for sidewalks so you have to watch for the cars and get up against the wall when they go by.

We headed back to the hotel for a breather. Joanna took a nap. I opened the other bottle that we bought at Et Si Bacchus Etait une Femme. The label says Les Tetes de Chats, Coteaux du Giennois, 2007. It is bottled by Mathieu Coste, vigneron a Villemoison. I think it’s form the Loire Valley. At least, that’s what the lady at the wine shop told me.

A very interesting drink, it had an almost spicy hot bite. If I remember what Larry told me, the Loire Valley sits on a vast limestone formation that flavors the soil, the grapes, and so the wine. I have sensed a pleasant mineral flavor in other Loire wines, but this was different, and very good in its own way.

Later, for dinner, we retraced our steps from the night before. On the way to New Ground, we had stopped in front of another restaurant to look at the menu. The waiter opened the door for us. We already had a reservation, so we told him “tomorrow.”

This was tomorrow. L’Hermitage is tiny and the menu very short. It bills itself as Provencal.

We started with appetizers. The terrine maison tout cochon was a mixture of onion, other stuff, and maybe pork. It came in two parts, one on a thick slice of lettuce and the other on a cake that may have been foie gras. Les oeufs mollet aux girolle were poached and the yolk still runny, served in a bowl with a creamy sauce.

For dinner we had a filet of beef with real French fries. The meat was not as tender as you’d expect in an American restaurant, probably because the beef was grass fed, but that made it taste even better.

Wine, for my record, was Domaine du Coriancon by Francois Vallot, vigneron a Vinsobres. It was labeled “cru des Cotes du Rhone” and was a blend of Grenache, syrah, and Mourvedre grapes.

Hot damn! Vive la Provence.

Oct. 12 My dear Grasshopper,

"Les oeufs mollet aux girolle were poached and the yolk still runny, served in a bowl with a creamy sauce."

Did you copy the name of that dish correctly? I wasn't sure, so I did a Google translate: "the calf eggs with chanterelles." If I remember my French, folks would use "oeufs l'agneau" — the lamb eggs — as a polite way of saying one of my favorite dishes in Morocco, lamb's testicles. Is it possible your eggs had no yolks at all, but were indeed calf's testicles? Call me curious.

Larry

Oct. 12

Sorry to say, I'm pretty sure these were hen's eggs, Sensei.

Had I the slightest clue that I was eating anything even remotely like prairie oysters, you know I'd be bragging about that.

These were soft white eggs, with a runny yellow yolk. By the shape, I knew they were poached or cooked in a similar way.

Grasshopper

Oct. 12

Hmmm...how did they come up with that name for the dish? I will have to ask my friend Claude the next time I talk to him

Larry

Oct. 13

I have a Collins translating dictionary with me. The assumption that I have miscopied something in French is always a good one.

This time, however, the dictionary says “mollet” as a noun can indeed mean “calf” or “calf leg,” which of course I didn't know until just now when I looked it up. The word's also an adjective that means "softish" and that's where the dish name comes in.

Collins lists a special usage of “oeufs mollets” as “soft-boiled eggs.” So these may have been soft-boiled and taken out of the shell whole. Or maybe poached also counts.

Oct. 13

Mystery solved....nice work.

Larry