Saturday, June 8, 2013
Carcassonne

          Judith and Louis propose that we go to the open air market in Carcassonne that sets up Saturday mornings, which is all our idea of a good time.  We arrive relatively late, about an hour before the vendors dismantle their stands.  We haven't walked 15 feet into the market before we are assailed by Serge, a tall and sturdy, blue-eyed, bald young man selling his own charcuterie and cheese.

          He pegs the three of us for Americans immediately, and starts talking his own version of English, simultaneously cutting off slices of samples as quickly as a TV chef demonstrates his knife skills.  My fingers are literally full of pieces of pork loin, peppered salami, cheese, and another salami flavored with green peppers.  The seduction complete, I buy two pieces of charcutrie and one of cheese sans regret.

          As with most French markets, the array of beautiful vegetables and fruits is dizzying: small strawberries glistening so red I already imagine having them for breakfast with milk; tender, flower-petaled artichokes with pale purple edges still on their stems; black potatoes, purple  and white garlic.  At the dried fruit stand there are four types of figs: sugared small ones from the region, two types from Turkey, another from Spain.  Another vendor sells herbs and spices from brick orange sacks.

          The day is overcast and a bit damp: a hot coffee seems in order.  We sit down in a cafe near the edge of the market in the square and order three large cafés crèmes, milky and foamy.  Total cost: 9 Euros.  Just before we leave the market, spying a Moroccan vendor --an older man with toffee-colored skin --we decide to buy a bunch of mint.  His grandson fairer and French is helping the old man.  I ask about how to make lemonade with mint.  The young man, about thirteen and very articulate, tells me he doesn't know about how to make lemonade with mint, but he can tell me how to infuse black tea with mint, which he says might show me how to make the lemonade.  His French is so clear and he expresses himself so clearly, I think "Here is one example of a successful adaptation to France."  His grandfather, on the other hand, has a hard time expressing himself in French, but wants to put his two cents in: he says that the leaves ought not to be jammed together but piled loosely among the tea leaves before the hot, not boiling water is poured over them.  Before I leave I tell the old man that his grandson is very smart, which seems to please him.

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          After a three-course lunch in a restaurant whose decor suggests Spain and the bullfights, but serves regional dishes like cassoulet, we move on to La Cité, the ancient walled city.  The difference between the words for city in French -- ville and Citè-- is that the latter is a walled city, the other not.  The Cité of Carcassonne is still a place of residence for many, residents who have adapted to the hordes of tourists that are the Cité's lifeblood.  During the summer season its cobblestoned, hilly streets are jammed with visitors; they rightly see in the massive fortifications the closest suggestion of what life in the medieval town actually was, to the extent it is possible to do so anywhere.  Indeed, the turrets and the high walls suggest Robin Hood to me, which is not far wrong: the movie with Kevin Costner was filmed there.

          Unlike Èze, the village perché --a village perched on a cliff above the Côte d'Azur which is draws tourists in the tens of thousands every year; or Mont Saint Michel, the monastery on a mountain on a tiny outcrop in  Brittany separated from the mainland by a sandbar over which the ocean rises and falls daily-- Carcassonne charges no admission to enter the Citè, and the many shops are by and large, high-toned, both as to the products sold, and the polish of the salespeople.  The fine scents of soaps from Marseille, each having a color coded to the scent are redolent of eglantine, jazmin, honeysuckle, rose, vervain, must, opium, honey, patchouli,  I cannot remember them all-- perfume every street in Carcassonne.  It must be wonderful to work amid such marvelous smells.