June 25, 2013
Sète/Cette
The Mariner's Cemetery

          Sète was known as Cette in the 19th century and earlier.  The name derives from cetacea, the Latin for "whale", as anyone who recollects the chapter in Moby Dick devoted to the many species of whales will remember.  The town is first mentioned in Ptolemy's Geography in the 2nd century A.D. and is built on Mount Saint Clair, at whose summit there is a small chapel devoted to the Virgin of La Sallette and maintained by a few priests of the eponymous order.  The faithful can make a pilgrimage from the mountain's base to its top, the road marked along the way with the stations, fourteen in all.

           Sète is one of the places along the European Mediterranean where boats to Tangier depart from, indeed, there is something of Algiers in the side streets of the old city rising to Mount Saint Clair.  One of them, rue Rapide, runs straight up at a very steep angle before it runs into rue des 3 Journées, where I make a right turn and stop for a coffee at Le Bar du Plateau, recommended by the tourist office as a local place.

            Rather than sit outside in the strong sun, I walk in and sit at the bar, where there is only one other client, a beer drinker, a slender man with tousled blond hair who looks to be in his 40s.  The woman behind the bar is earthy looking, with her dyed black hair and blue eyes, and she is friendly.  We talk a bit in French, and after a bit, the beer drinker asks me whether I am English.  I say I am American, and before I know it I am in conversation with Erik Gietl, a South African painter who is having having a major exhibition at the Chapelle du Cartier Haut up the street.  Erik left South Africa for Paris, which he left five years ago to settle in Sète with his French wife and children.  I visit the exhibit, which is a few streets away, inside an enormous room in the chapel with a vaulted ceiling made of stone blocks.

           The space is a perfect place for Erik's paintings, which are figurative and realist, featuring seedy encounters between prostitutes and clients, or drug addicts.  The paintings, while graphic, are closely observed and remind me, in their sardonic aspect, of the German expressionist painter Max Beckmann; in their unflinching realism, of Goya.

            I am actually in Sète to visit the Musée Paul Valery, which has some connection to a French man of letters I have read of and heard mentioned many times, but know nothing about . To reach the museum, I walk the length of the rue des 3 Journeés;  the street, high above the Mediterranean, opens out to the sea, providing beautiful views of the blue-green waters.  At its end, I have to turn right and walk up the hill, passing the Cimetière Marin (The Mariner's Cemetery), the subject of a long poem by Valèry.

           The cemetery's white headstones, their simple crosses taller than the cemetery walls , keep vigil over the broad expanse of the Mediterranean and the life it gave those now buried within the cemetery walls.  No wonder Valèry, a son of Sète, wanted to immortalize the place.  The museum, not far away, is not really devoted to him, but to paintings by painters from the region or views of Sète.  A great many of Valèry's writings are on display in a large room on the second floor, but almost as an afterthought.  Nonetheless, Valèry's remarkable gifts are evident: he wrote poetry, essays on music, philosophy, science.  He painted and drew, too, and wrote notebooks containing aphorisms (short, succinct statements meant to convey a unique insight).  Yet he wrote nothing for twenty years, following the death of his mentor, Stephane Mallarmé, in 1896.  Mallarmé was, himself, a disciple of Charles Baudelaire, the Symbolist poet of the mid-19th century who celebrated sensuous experience in his poetry.  Valéry is considered by some to be the last of rhe French Symbolists, a school that used vivid language to convey startling sense experiences.   Valèry's poetry employs formal verse structures  and singing rhythms.

            Yet Valèry was more than a poet, he was a polymath.  He lived through the German occupation of France during the Second World War without compromising his principles, although it cost him.  He is a revered intellectual figure in France, and would have received the Nobel Prize in 1945, but died in July before it could be awarded, two months after the conclusion of hostilities.

              Here is a verse from Le Cimetière Marin:

              Stable trésor, temple simple à Minerve,
              Masse de calme, et visible réserve,
              Eau sourcilleuse, OEil qui gardes en toi
              Tant de sommeil sous un voile de flamme,
              O mon silence!... Èdifice dans l'âme
              Mais comble d'or aux mille tuiles, Toit!  

               Perduring treasure, simple temple to Minerva,
               Mass of calm, and visible reserve,
               Haughty water, Eye that seals within
               So much sleep under a veil of flame,
               O my silence!...Edifice in the soul,
               Golden attic of a thousand tiles, Roof!