Last week while riding my bicycle in the countryside, I suddenly felt a sensation like a needle piercing the skin below my right knee, a novel feeling. A flying insect had nailed me while I was in motion. I got off the bicycle and looked at the bite and took an insect off the point of impact, got back on the bicycle and kept riding.
After a few minutes the bite began to hurt. It never itched, but felt sore. I have never been stung by a bee or a wasp or a hornet, so I do not know whether I am allergic to their stings, but I knew I ought to see whether the area swelled up and I showed other symptoms of anaphylactic shock, like wheezing and continued swelling.
None of these symptoms materialized, fortunately, and I rode home soon after. The bite continued to hurt a bit, but not terribly. I went about my business for the next week assuming the bite would disappear.
Except that it didn't. The skin around the bite became an angry red and the bite itched a bit. The red area even seemed to grow larger, and I began to think that perhaps I had an infected bite. So I went to the doctor in Caunes.
The doctor in Caunes is Laetitia Salomon, a graduate of the medical school in Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine. She has office hours every day, people walk in and wait until she sees them. By the time I arrived at 10:00 a.m., every seat but one was taken. I waited 90 minutes to see her.
When she called me in, I explained my reason for being there and showed her the bite. She touched it, as well as the same area on the opposite leg. She could not identify what caused the bite.
"You are the second person who came in today with that type of bite. The other patient is a woman, who was working in her garden when she felt the bite."
Dr. Salomon gave me a prescription for a week's worth of generic powdered arithromycin to be taken with a glass of water, and for a cortisone cream to be used if the wound itched.
The she handed me her bill: 23 Euros, about $30, probably reimbursable by my travel insurance. One thing she wanted to know: had I been at the World Trade Center when the Twin Towers were attacked? She had never met anyone who was an eyewitness, so she asked me a variety of questions, including why did Rudolph Giuliani not succeed in his quest for the presidency. More than ten years later, 9/11 still animates fantasies about New York by people who have never been there.
The other thing Dr. Salomon wanted to know whether New York was fun to visit at Christmas. If I could, would I write out a few hotel recommendations and put them in her boîte à lettres --mailbox?
I agreed to happily, and then she asked me whether I liked Caunes. When I mentioned I liked it very much, and was thinking of buying a house in the village, she told me she had the name of a good mason for me, when I needed it. Dr. Salomon's house is famed throughout the village for having been completely furnished in the red marble of Caunes, so she knows what she is talking about.
After that, I walked quickly to the pharmacy a few feet away, to try to get the prescriptions fillled before the pharmacy closed for the long lunch hour. The pharmacy looks, I believe, very much like what it looked like fifty years ago. The couple that run it, I venture to say, look like their grandparents fifty years ago. Both are morbidly shy and seem to exist in their own little world.
When I handed over the prescriptions, the wife walked over to the near-empty shelves and pulled the two medications off plain wooden shelves. There was no electronic conveyor to restock drugs, as I had seen in a fancy pharmacy in Mèze. There were no toiletries on offer, no reading glasses, just a simple counter and two people wearing white smocks over their street clothes, which were plain in the extreme. My paperwork required the pharmacist to write in some specifications, which she did in a cursive, 19th century hand. She stamped the prescriptions and handed all the paperwork back to me, then asked me if I wanted a bag, and handed me a simple white paper bag. She explained which copies of which forms I would have to submit to my insurance company. I paid the bill for the medicines, which came to 21 Euros, about $30, and went home to take my medicine.
***
Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech to assembled big-wigs of the UMP this afternoon, provoking a tidal wave of news coverage about whether the speech --which addressed itself not just to party finances (the UMP is bankrupt)-- but to the question of Europe, the French economy, and Sarkozy's conception of his politics. "I am not a man of the Right, nor of the Left", he is reported to have said, a clear sign that he is trying to lead the UMP away from postures that necessarily lead to comparisons between it and Marine Le Pen's Front National.
Of course, François Hollande has only been President since last May, and it could look unseemly for Sarkozy to campaign for the UMP's nod so early in the poitical season (Hollande has another four years of his Presidency left). Yet Sarkozy resigned his appointment to the Conseil Constitutionnel just before his speech. This is France's highest court, which pre-determines the constitutionality of proposed laws before they are voted (contra the American system, which only does so after). French Presidents are usually appointed to it once they leave office: it is a dignified way of exiting the stage. Sarkozy (who set up a legal practice after losing to Hollande last year) resigned from the court to avoid being charged with a conflict of interest in relation to his moves to direct the UMP, riven by the rivalry between François Fillon, Sarkozy's former Prime Minister; and Jean-François Copé, the party leader.
Outside La Mutualité, the UMP headquarters in Paris, Sarkozy militants gathered to hail their man. Sarkozy duly came out, and then shook hands with people in the crowd, to shouts of "France needs you!"BFMTV, the 24-hour news station, had a reporter waiting for Sarkozy when his car arrived at the home he shares with Carla Bruni and their infant daughter. The anchor at BFMTV asked the reporter --who was able to get up close to Sarkozy and tried to engage him in conversation-- to tell us what Sarkozy said in response to his questions about a return to politics.
A quick camera shot showed a smiling Sarkozy holding the palms of his hands together in a gesture of supplication that meant "No questions, I beg of you!" The next shot showed the camera capturing the macadam on the Sarkozy driveway.
"There we have a shot of the Sarkozy driveway!", said the anchor. "Fascinating!"
For the time being, Sarkozy is playing the Sphinx, while François Fillon and Jean-François Copé are relegated to background roles, neither of them liking it one bit.
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