June 27, 2013
The Tour de France;
Montpellier, The White City

          If English actor Rowan Atkinson ("Mr. Bean") were French, he would be Clovis Cornillac, star of the new comedy about the Tour de France, La Grande Boucle (The Big Loop).  Clovis Cornillac...not a name that exactly trips off the tongue, even in French.  Where Atkinson is hairy and dark, and odd, Cornillac is fair and blue-eyed and just a bit touched.  Cornillac plays François Nouel, a bicycle salesman who loses his job after he annoys the favorite to win the Tour, having just been left by a wife fed up with his cycling mania.  In response to these setbacks (as well as a boozy evening spent with a former contender for the maillot jaune, the yellow jersey the Tour leader wears), François decides he will win back his self-respect by riding the entire grueling course, but starting a day before the professionals.  François becomes a media sensation, eclipsing the Tour and its leader, an Italian cyclist who embodies every vulgar stereotype about Italians except a Mafia connection.  He also befriends a hip-hop star, Âme Strong (get it?), wins back his son's admiration and his wife's love.  Lastly, he earns the respect of the Tour leader, that Italian, who allows him to come in first on the final turn of the last stage, from Rambouillet to the finish at the Arc de Triomphe.

          The movie includes cameos by former cycling legends, Bernard Hinault (five Tour de France wins) and Laurent Jalabert (ranked #1 in the 1990s).  It also includes a  faux doping scandal, with syringes and prohibited drugs planted on François, until then a populist hero.  It is a terrible movie, unless you are a Clovis Cornillac fan, but it does have some lovely footage of the Pyrenées, some sheep and cows.  It will never come to New York. 

          This year's tour is the 99th, and it will start in Montpellier, the capital of the Languedoc-Rousillon region, on July 5.  Montpellier, a city of a quarter of a million people and growing, is characterized by buildings of ivory-colored building materials.  A relatively young settlement with no Greek or Roman antecedents, its first mention is in a document of 985 A.D..   Its largest public space, the Place de la Comédie, is a pedestrianized Picadilly Circus, complete with a domed Gaumont Cinema at one end and the Montpellier Opera House at the other.  Montpellier's most famous buildings are to be found off the Place de la Comédie and are hôtels particuliers, private houses built from the 15th to the 18th centuries by wealthy bourgeois, many of them Protestant, or Huguenot, in French.

          Montpellier is home to a famous medical school and university (a conference on Shakespeare and Myth is in session for the week), and boasts many French language schools.  It has an art museum, the Musée Fabre, housed in a building whose monumental interior architecture is the perfect setting for the many monumental 19th century academic paintings in its collection.  I have never seen so many beautiful  frames.

          Next door, the Musée Sabatier d'Espeyran pretends to be a museum of decorative arts, but is in fact the former hotel particulier of the Sabatier d'Espeyran family, whose collections of Louis period furniture and that of Napoleon III,  fill the rooms on the second and third floors.  The first floor contains the family's collection of 17th century faience, and 18th and 19th century porcelain.  All I could think of, looking at the pieces --which are beautiful, but not spectacular examples of their type-- was how large the tax deduction the Sabatier d'Espeyran family must have received for the gift of the building  and its contents in 1967.