The Pissoir Is Not Dead; Ecological Toilets;
Chanticleers and Naked Necks
There is something elemental about life here in l'Aude that, however sophisticated the French image around the world may be, is belied by Audois' fidelity to some of the more basic aspects of life and traditional approaches to them. I speak of toilets, or, to be more specific, pissoirs, those pieces of white enamel with platforms the size of the largest shoes and a hole in the middle of the footrests that are France's answer to sanitation in public places. The term pissoir is also used to describe urinals, but true pissoirs are equal-opportunity comfort stations.
Any American born in the 1950s or earlier taken to France as a child will remember, with a mixture of horror and nostalgia, the first time he was faced with having to use a pissoir. If you were a child and had to use one, the memory is probably comingled with a memory of abject fear only assuaged by the presence of a caring female relative with an ample supply of Kleenex.
The good news is that pissoirs are still around. The bad news is that they still don't have Kleenex.
At the Carcassonne railroad station, I needed to use the WC, as it is called in France, and was directed to a pissoir inside a module of contemporary design at one end of the main platform. Waiting to use it were a group of ten-year old girls on a school trip, with a teacher holding the door open while each of the girls made use of the latrine. The girls were dressed in a preppy style called bon chic bon genre, although the easy slouch of their bodies and the contrasting liveliness of their facial expressions as they talked --their moués-- could never be mistaken for those of junior Ivy Leaguers.
For these young girls, having to use a public toilet at a train station, and having to pay to do so, was a new experience. One young woman --a girl after my own heart-- finding out that there is a 30 centimes charge for the use of the public toilet at the Carcassonne station, said to her teacher,
Et maintenant, il faut payer pour pisser?
("And now, it's necessary to pay to piss?")
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Those living in France who are environmentally-minded don't have to install pissoirs in their homes, they can put in ecological toilets. These flush toilets look and work just like the model pioneered by Englishman Thomas Crapper, which eliminated the "night men" and brought public santiation out of the Dark Ages. However, you don't put the paper in the toilet when you are done, you put it in the plastic bag in the nearby wastebasket --if you remember.
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Another aspect of day-to-day life in Caunes-Minervois which illustrates French attachment to the old ways of doing things, is the existence of at least two coops for chickens kept for the eggs they produce. One coop is kept at the bottom of a declivity between the end of rue de l'Abbaye and the Porte de Narbonne, the other on a rise of unpaved path off the beginning of avenue des Minervois, the principal street in Caunes-Minervois.
The first coop is kept by two tall young men with long hair and identical blue eyes that signal they are brothers. "We're many in the house, so we get our eggs this way", one of them tells me. They have nine hens who lay about an egg a day. They are inseminated by a strutting chanticleer who crows constantly. I have not met the owners of the second coop, but it is worth noting that the hens kept in it look like a cross between a turkey and a chicken. Indeed, they are an old European breed known as naked neck chickens, and come in a variety of colors. Here is a picture of one:
Apparently, anyone in France who wants to raise chickens for his personal use may do so. I meet and greet the young men again later in the evening on a walk through Caunes' narrow streets. With their easy smiles, long hair and plaid shirts, they look more like members of a rock band than farmers.
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