La France Profonde

July 20, 2013

     With 300,000 people making their departures from the Gare de Lyon station in Paris today, the loneliness of the road from Caunes to Lespinassière, 7 miles away, makes a striking contrast to the clogged arteries of France's highways.  The roads are clogged, the heat is unabated and expected to continue until late in the week, as the flight out of the cities continues.  There is a major effort to keep the French cool, whether through visits to the elderly at home to avoid deaths from heat exhaustion, to the inauguration of city beaches inspired by Paris Plage, the capital's installation of misters and chaises longues on the banks of the Seine.

     In Caunes, the weather is not quite as hot as elsewhere due to the mountains, but it is still advisable to  travel with lots of liquids.  I pull out a large bottle of frozen water in a large container, strap on my fanny pack, grab my walking sticks and set out in the direction of Citou, where my Renault Clio 4 had a close encounter with a wall in the village of Citiou, and I saw my life spread out in front of me.

     I set out at one o'clock.  Five hours and forty minutes later, I return from a fourteen mile hike.  On the way to Citou I discover that my shoulder blades and the back of my long-sleeved shirt make a kind of knapsack for the water bottle.  The ice melts slowly and keeps me cool.  I want to reach  Lespinassiere, a village perched on a mountainside in the Black Mountains, part of the Cevennes chain that runs across southern France.

     At Citou, I need to replace my ice cubes, but the first people I see, the parents of a young family about to get into their car, tell me there is no commercial establishment in Citou in response to my inquiry about where I might buy ice cubes.  They are summer visitors, judging from the neat polo shirts.

     Fortunately, a bit further on a man and a woman are chatting.  I make the same request, but this time I encounter a kind soul.  The woman tells me to follow her, that she has ice cubes in her refrigerator.  I enter her house, and follow her into the kitchen, where I fill the bottle with ice cubes and tap water.

     After Citou, the road becomes still more desolate.  Occasionally a car mounting the hills passes, but few descend.  The road is direction north, towards Paris, over the mountains past Castang.  I learn this when I reach Lespinassière, nestled between several mountains.  The village has some late-model cars, and I pass a fancy private home with built-in swimming pool, as well as a villa.  The rest of Lespinassière boasts pretty flower gardens, almost no people.  A string of black clothes are drying against a wall, the owner or owners out of sight.  I pick up a clothes-drying rack that the wind has knocked over in front of a house, earning thanks from a man walking towards it.  Continuing on, I see that there is a nice café, but it appears to be closed.  Its terrace is visible from the road, so I walk to it, thinking there might be table service.

     I encounter a Spanish woman and a Frenchman of middle age who are tending the place for the owner, who is away.  There is nothing on offer, although tonight there will be a Belgian dinner --mussels-- offered.  As there is nothing to eat or drink, I thank them for their time and walk out, only to be followed by the woman, who offers to give me some ice cubes and water.  Gladly accepting, I get to talk to the two, who are more than happy to put the local geography on the points of a compass, pointing out the direction of Spain, the direction of the Mediterranean, and the Pic du Nord, which is not a mountain but a television tower, and a local landmark.

     Walking back, I hear the Argent Double burbling, and with the heat just beginning to subside, the crickets are a symphony.  My legs are holding up, although the thought of hitch-hiking has crossed my mind.  A vain hope: few cars pass, and those that do are filled.  I motivate myself by thinking that when I get to Citou I will be able to identify where in the village I reached the vertiginous way above the sweet onion fields below.

     Citou is known as "the sweet onion capital of France".  Even in my panic, when I was there last time, I remember noticing the field I was afraid of falling into was planted with onions.  Yet I can't find it.  In fact, Citou is a much bigger place than I remember, with two roads, not a tiny way.  Also, the road up to Citou and to Lespinassière is a two-lane highway, comfortable enough for two cars going in opposite directions.  Where was I?

      After establishing that it wasn't Citou, I continue my walk back to Caunes.  I retrace my steps and keep my eyes open, wondering whether I missed something.  I got into the fix I did because I turned off rue du Minervois in the direction indicated by the road sign indicating Citou and Lespinassière along D620, using the GPS to direct me.  When I found myself perilously close to falling off the road into the onions, I backed the car out inch by inch past the only two houses on the narrow road, finally turning around and returning to Caunes.

     I made it back to Caunes, tested but happy, never having seen a sign of the hamlet I entered a month ago. Having gone almost fourteen miles into the mountains and back, I cannot find the picturesque site of my waking nightmare.  It has vanished into the mist, like Brigadoon. 

     This is la France profonde, deep France.  Bob Thorp once told me that on one of his regular drives through the countryside he met a man who had never left his village.  The village doors are often shut, the windows shuttered and locked: the owners only return in the summers, except for a few permanent residents.  Every village has a church, larger ones, abbeys: in Languedoc-Roussillon alone there are forty-nine. Villages like Caunes have ex-pat communities, including some year-round residents that keep the café and a few other businesses open, but tiny ones like Citou and Lespinassière are just a collection of houses, joined to the outside world by the automobile.  Bicycling to Villegly, on the road to Carcassonne yesterday morning, I tried to get a coffee there, but there was no café in town.  If foreigners do not settle there, the village sleeps. Which is not to say that the people who do live there do not go to the doctor and the dentist or watch television and read the occasional newspaper, or that the few children living in these hamlets do not get educated (in Lespinassière there is a rather large public school, a souvenir of when it was more populated), but the villages truly exist in a world of their own.  Caunes-Minervois is exceptional, because it attracts foreigners, but the isolated villages are more like 19th century villages than 21st century communities, untouched by the world outside, even that of France.