July 18, 2013
My first day on my own for the next ten days begins with a bicycle ride to Carcassonne, which almost never happens. A little after 8 a.m. I pull out my Xootr Swift and, spying the bicycle pump, decide to replenish the air the tires must have lost over the last few weeks. Unfortunately, I manage to deflate my front tire, instead of inflating it. After several failed tries, I give in. It's too early to bother my cycling next-door-neighbor Bob Thorp, but if I walk down to the café, perhaps someone will know how to properly fix a bicycle pump to a wheel. The cafè is always peopled by men of varying ages and states of sobriety, rough and tumble types. I imagine that at worse, the sunburned drunk who cleans tables between glasses of beer might be my volatile recourse: angry at being thrown out for smoking in the bar one morning, he let fly various curses (Je ... ce putain bar....) before walking outside to have his fag.
However, I get to the outside tables and see in front of the entrance to the café a table of six or seven sturdy-looking men enjoying coffees and cigarettes. They take me in, I greet them, and ask whether one of them might be able to help me fill my bicycle tires with air from the pump I am carrying in the knapsack on my back.
Nothing easier, several say, although there is a bit of a debate as to which one has most experience with bicycle tires. A big guy dressed in beige fatigues gets up and walks over to the bicycle. An older man next to him warns him that 7 kilos of pressure is the maximum the tires can take without exploding, which he fully expects to happen. This bit of good-natured ribbing done with, the two of them get my tires filled with air. I thank the two men and wish all around a good day: How nice to be in a place where being a damsel in distress still means something.
The ride to Carcassonne --about thirty miles back and forth-- is very smooth, as it is early and the sky is overcast, the temperature cool. The Thursday market in Carcassonne has few vendors and everyone seems a bit listless from the last few days of heat. I go to the café I've been taken to before, Café Moka, parking my bicycle next to my designated table. A waiter, very energetic for so early in the morning, comes over and I order a grand crème, a large, strong coffee with steamed milk, which comes out quickly.
As I am enjoying the coffee, a gust of wind sends a card flying off the table and onto the macadam, where the shoe of an older man in shorts stops it. I get up, take it from him and sit down, thanking him. He walks over and starts talking to me, asking me about my bicycle. He too, has a bicycle, a cruiser with high handlebars and no speeds. "It's tough sometimes, but good enough." He asks me where I'm from, probing. When I tell him that my family came from Spain, he tells me his did, too, from Cáceres, a long diagonal west from Carcassonne.
"Where is it? I have no idea", he says. By this point we are speaking Spanish, which he speaks quite well. He is old enough that his parents probably left in consequence of the Spanish Civil War, although Extremadura is a famously poor region --many of the Conquistadores were born there-- so poverty could have pushed them out, too. Amazed I've ridden what, is to him, a very long way, he tells me to be extra careful cycling on the highways. The roads in l'Aude are not difficult to ride, I assure him (he's never ridden in Manhattan traffic), and he is off.
Indeed, riding back is easy: I am back in Caunes by 11:35 a.m., and ride on to the Chapel of Notre Dame du Cros as fast as I can, hoping to make at least part of the Mass that has just begun. I walk in at 11:50 a.m. and find that two little girls I saw there yesterday with their father, mother and two little brothers, are there again, just their father accompanying them today. The girls are close in age, both wearing kerchiefs over their brown hair, in simple dresses. At the end of the Mass they each take a hand of the Passionist priest who has celebrated the eucharist, and walk over to the marble statue of the Virgin and Child, where together they say three Hail Marys.
This is at least the second day in a row that these little girls have gone to Mass before lunch (I have only been to the chapel twice this week). Looking at them, and their young father (who looks educated, rather than a manual laborer, judging from his clothes), I am reminded of the days when Catholic families gave a daughter to a convent, or a son to the priesthood. In the family of Saint Thèrese of Lisieux three sisters all became nuns. What these little girls will grow up to be is a mystery to me, but the memory of standing with the Passionist priest in front of the statue of Notre Dame du Cros, "the Virgin of Tenderness", as she is popularly known, will always form part of their imaginations.
Visiting churches in France, I am struck by the fact that several generations of Catholics attend Mass together. In Mèze I was startled to see three tall, good-looking brothers in their late teens and early twenties standing in a pew at Sunday Mass in Saint Hilaire. What is so striking about all this to me is that, unlike the United States, where freedom of religion is a core principle, France's revolution of 1789 seized all religious property, defrocked those in holy orders and prohibited religious worship. Although the extremes of the Reign of Terror (which subsided with the guillotining of the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne) are no more, a legacy of the Revolution is laicité, or secularism. In France, no Catholic priest, Jewish rabbi, Protestant clergyman or Muslim imam has the authority to solemnize a marriage, as in the United States. The law prohibits the display of religious symbols in the schools, meaning that no type of religious pendant or other identifying mark of adhesion to a religious faith may be displayed by either students, teachers or school officials.
Which makes the intensity of the devotion of French Catholics provocative. I am always surprised that when I go to a Mass in France, there are people attending in significant numbers. There are not enough priests, but there are plenty of congregants, although the former may explain the latter. In the first decades of the 20th century, the Catholic Church was associated with Charles Maurras and his anti-semitic ideology, but today's French Catholic Church seems more concerned with missions in Africa and the inner lives of the faithful. One evidence of this is that La Croix, the French Catholic daily, takes positions that are neither right nor left, but consistent with Catholic social teaching.
Perhaps there is something about being in the decided minority that makes more tenacious the attachment of French Catholics to their churches. It might be a bit like the situation in the former East Germany, where Protestantism (which had formerly been the state religion) was not outlawed, but Protestant practice came at the price of all preferment professionally. For that reason, the sons of many Protestant families chose to become carpenters, the better to live a life in imitation of that of Jesus. (And some attribute Chancellor Angela Merkel's tenacity in no small part to the example of her father, a Protestant minister in East Germany.)
It is easy to think of France as a liberal country, but there is a deep strain of conservatism, too. Not just the Front National's brand of anti-immigrant rabble-rousing, but a deep attachment to the old ways, based on France's history, and in small towns, the history and customs of the region. The divide between Paris and the rest of the country is nowhere more apparent than in the small villages and towns. Paris and its bureaucrats may decide, but the stubborn people of the countryside will outlast them. Paris outlawed the churches, but the faithful outwitted the Revolutionary Committees: local people bought up privately the lands that had belonged to the churches, then turned them over to the commune (the local government), which re-established them as parishes after the Revolution's frenzy subsided.
***
There is no bookstore in Caunes. Indeed, even magazines of any substance are thin on the ground, with the café's offerings limited to a few newspapers, a few horse journals and a lot of celebrity magazines. Carcassonne has a few good bookstores and one very good outlet for lots of newspapers and magazines. Otherwise, books have to be ordered from the Web.
Unless you know about Patrice Cartier. Patrice Cartier lives across the way from Notre Dame du Cros, in the foothills of the Black Mountains, the only other person inhabiting this remote spot. He runs a used bookshop there, where no one can find him. I only knew about him because I had seen a poster for a new book about Languedoc-Roussillon's historic sites on the door of the shop, although there was no sign identifying it as such. Walking out after Mass, I saw that the door was open and walked in.
Inside there were English books, there were lots of books about Marx, about Mitterand, there were magazines from a hundred years ago and two copies of Paris Match of May 1968 when students rioted and de Gaulle threw in the towel. There was bric-a-brac, there were multiple copies of a book about residential swimming pools, there were post cards. Patrice began his career as a journalist, then worked in radio, then wrote articles for a trade magazine about swimming pool construction, which led to the contract for the book about swimming pools. After the book came out the magazine folded. Not because the book was too costly, he told me, but because the publisher of the magazine ruined himself chasing African girls who took him for every cent he had. End of job writing articles for magazine about residential swimming pools, beginning of life as a bookseller.
Patrice had a geography of France for children published in 1896. Its brightly colored pages highlight France's many rivers, and list the départements as they were then, as well as skewing the attitudes of French children in a decidedly anti-German direction: France includes all these départements, minus those Germany took from us, Alsace and Lorraine. Another book, a child's history of France was published in 1916. It too, has a decided slant on history. Who were the Normans? The Norman pirates came from the sterile shores of Northern Europe. Their joy was to die amidst the clash of armies. Then, they believed, a paradise called Valhalla would open to them where they would drink mead forever in a place of honor.
The bookstore is a fun house mirror onto France's past.
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