Dogs to be merited

The other day, when Louis Arquer and I were talking with Roland Cottin, the former proprietor of the castle at Rochechinard, I happened to evoke my dogs.

 

[Click to enlarge, then ESCAPE to return to the blog.]

When I said that my second dog, Fitzroy, was a Border Collie, the regard of the former mayor of Rochechinard was suddenly illuminated as if I had informed him that I shared my abode at Gamone with an Arabian princess fit for the imprisoned prince Zizim. "Ah, I've always dreamed about owning a Border Collie!" In an instant, I was reminded that a privileged human like me has to merit, as it were, the presence of a dog such as Fitzroy (and my dear Sophia, too, of course, but in a slightly less technical sense).

The Welsh shepherd William who reared Fitzroy up in the French Alps had warned me that I would be acquiring a demanding dog, in constant need of affection, but I didn't really know, a year ago, what this might mean. Today, I'm happy to understand perfectly that Fitzroy is indeed a most demanding dog, who's happiest of all when he's just a meter or so so from my feet… as at the present moment, for example.

At a certain moment in the evening, Fitzroy seems to find it quite natural that he should exit the warm house in order to spend his night in solitude, out under the stars, in the vague company of the donkeys.

Truly, Fitzroy has become my personal guru. We have a highly physical relationship, based upon an abundance of cuddles, caresses and canine kisses. Silently (well, with a few occasional barks), my mentor Fitzroy has taught me to smile at life, and to seek constantly the energetic side of things. I would be happy to believe that I merit Fitzroy.

Ruins of a medieval castle

The ruins of the medieval castle at Rochechinard (near the villages of St-Jean-en-Royans and St-Nazaire-en-Royans) are mysterious and romantic, the kind of place that is best evoked by a poet.

 

[Click to enlarge, then ESCAPE to return to the blog.]

Viewed from a helicopter, the outlines of the three surviving towers are perfectly visible. But the view from down on the surrounding plain is not nearly as clear, particularly when the sun has gone down below the crest behind the castle.

 

[Click to enlarge, then ESCAPE to return to the blog.]

You sense the presence of a gigantic rocky mound, covered in abundant vegetation, but it's hard to distinguished something that might be described as a castle. On the other hand, for an observer who decides to take advantage of a sunny morning and scramble up the slopes to the west of the castle, the form and layout of the ruins become quite clear.

 

[Click to enlarge, then ESCAPE to return to the blog.]

Besides, in the background on the left, you have a glimpse of the splendid tiny church of Rochechinard. Anecdote: One afternoon, several years ago, on one of my regular visits this lovely little isolated village, I heard a chant coming from inside the church. When I edged the door open, I came upon an unexpected scene. A white-robed monk was chanting a mass in Latin for a congregation composed of a single individual: a woman kneeling on the flagstones in a corner of the chapel. I would imagine that this was a ritual memorial offering for a deceased member of the lady's family.

The ruins of the castle were purchased in 2055 by a Parisian gentleman named Louis Arquer, whose unusual profession consists of designing and drawing new series of postage stamps (for foreign as well as French postal authorities). Last week, Louis phoned me up to let me know that he was spending a week or so in the region, and he invited me to a private visit of the castle.

 

I was obliged to make it clear that I'm incapable of strolling alongside precipices, but Louis told me that I should be able to steer clear of any treacherous zones inside the ruins. On the other hand, there was a very real danger—falling stones from the castle—which meant that I had to wear a protective helmet, and avoid loitering in zones that Louis knew to be risky. Whenever I saw Louis heading off in the direction of an area on the edge of the cliffs, I made a point of staying where I was.

While moving through the central tower—the cylindrical Keep, which is no doubt the best preserved element of the castle—I paused for a few seconds to point my camera up at the ceiling, whose central area remains perfectly intact.

 

The following photo shows a corner of the first building in the castle compound, known—for obvious reasons—as the Cannon Tower.

 

Those artillery slots point down towards anybody approaching the unique entry into the castle domain, shown in the following photo.

 

In the background of the above photo, you can see that the second building in the compound—the cylindrical keep that I mentioned earlier on—also has cannon openings. The general idea was that, if ever invaders succeeded in avoiding blasts from the Cannon Tower, and breaking through the portal into the castle, then defenders in the cylindrical Keep would start to blaze away with the intent of actually demolishing the Cannon Tower, so that its stones, in falling, would crush the invaders. Apparently, this extreme situation never arose.

The shield of the noble Alleman family was carved on a huge block of stone sealed into the wall above the gate. The revolutionaries of 1789 obliterated expertly, with stone chisels, all allusions to French royalty: the fleurs-de-lys and the crowns worn by the lions.

Here's another view that reveals the mutual proximity of these diabolical twin towers, whose primordial combined role was purely defensive and indeed deadly.

 

The residential zones of the castle were located well beyond the defensive towers. In the following photo, Louis is stepping up into the section of the castle known as the Turk's Room, which is an allusion to an amazing but perfectly authentic story that I related briefly in my blog post of 23 February 2009 entitled Fabulous legends [display].

 

In 1482, in a battle for the throne of Constantinople, the two sons of the Sultan Mehmet II—Bayezid and Djem (called Zizim)—set out upon yet another Cain and Abel act. And Zizim lost. The defeated brother then made the mistake of seeking assistance from the kindly Knights Hospitaler on the island of Rhodes… who promptly saw him as a potentially-valuable hostage, and decided to hang onto him. So, next, they had to decide what to do with their precious hostage. The French knight Charles Alleman suggested that his castle at Rochechinard might be a nice holiday home for Zizim, and that's where he ended up residing during the winter of 1483-1484. I'll let you discover (through my above-mentioned blog post) the romantically tragic rest of the extraordinary story of Zizim…

Today, an observer might ask: What is Louis Arquer hoping to achieve through his acquisition of this fabulous pile of stones? He answers this often-posed question in a realistic and convincing spirit.

[Click to enlarge, then ESCAPE to return to the blog.]

 Louis used to come here to the Royans when he was a child, to spend vacations with his grandparents. He would look up at the medieval castle, and dream of ancient times. And he hoped that the castle would never disappear, for that would be the end of his childhood dreams. So, he started already to imagine ways and means of making sure that the magic castle of Rochechinard would be eternal. Today, through a series of happy circumstances, the dreams of Louis Arquer have been transformed into a down-to-earth challenge of saving everything that can possibly be saved. That's what he's doing at present, with enormous personal energy and the help of a lot of friends, gathered together into an association. It's not a matter of restoring the castle, in the patrimonial sense of this term, but of doing everything that's possible to make sure that the magnificent edifice doesn't disappear completely.

Louis appears to me as an other-worldly dreamer endowed with a solid sense of our earthly realities: the kind of individual whom I admire, who strikes me immediately as a friend who speaks the simple truth. His adventure into the past—into the Arabian nights of Zizim in our Royans—is marvelous and almost impossible. But Louis Arquer will succeed, I'm sure, and fragments of Rochechinard will reappear simply, if not gloriously, one of these days, enrobed in their rich memories.

America's Cup, new style

I think back nostalgically to the homely yachting atmosphere of Fremantle back in 1987, which I knew so well. These days, the America's Cup challenge is being transformed into a marvelous something that's just a step short of science fiction.

We must, of course, accept this fabulous metamorphosis, which is the outcome of an amalgam of wealth, ambition and imagination. In a way, these crazy folk—whose operations could never be justified economically, politically or even morally—are inventing tomorrow.

Donkey's nocturnal excursion

 

Fanette [on the left] has now been living at Gamone for over a year. I'm convinced that she likes the place, and feels comfortable in the company of her old gray mate Moshé. They're constantly together, rarely separated by more than a few meters. Whenever one donkey gets carried away with its quest for tasty weeds, and happens to move away from the other, they join up hastily as soon as soon as the anomaly is detected. If ever research were to identify the companionship gene in donkeys, it might be a good idea to insert it into our human genome...

My neighbor Jackie acquired three superb female donkeys. Their former owner is a lady down in Monaco, who happens to be linked at a personal level with our region. The three new donkeys (a mother and her two daughters) reside now in a large paddock just above the territory of Moshé and Fanette. I'll publish photos of these beautiful Riviera animals (a little evasive for the moment) as soon as possible. Naturally, the two donkey families soon investigated their proximity… from a certain distance. That's to say, they're still in the delicate process of deciding whether they should be close friends or distant neighbors.

Even a gentle, homely and faithful male such as Moshé can develop a sudden urge to set out upon a sexual adventure in the middle of the night. I was awoken by the cries of Fanette, anguished by the departure of her companion Moshé… through a gap in the electric closure due to a recent tempest. It's crazy getting woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming female donkey who doesn't like the idea that her old gray mate Moshé has stepped out into the dark with the intention of visiting the recently-arrived females. I walked out into the night with an electric torch, but I couldn't halt Moshé, who was adamant upon visiting the three females. So I went to bed.

The following morning, I had no problem in leading Moshé back home. I phoned Jackie, to apologize for all the nocturnal noise and strife… but he hadn't been disturbed. I told my ex-wife on the phone that everything was back in order. Moshé was no longer intrigued by the three new females. Christine (who's not really a donkey specialist) said I was naive…

Adieu, dear neighbor

For years, the first person I would see at Gamone, early in the morning, was André Repellin, whom we all called "Dédé". He had the regular habit of strolling slowly up the road that runs alongside my house. Up on the slopes above Gamone, he would gaze out upon the magnificent panorama of the valley of the Bourne, and the surrounding mountains. Then he would turn around and walk back down to his home, a few hundred meters below my place. If I happened to meet up with him on the road, Dédé would always greet me with the same exclamation: "Ah, William, you're particularly matinal today." Obviously, in Dédé's eyes, I didn't have the reputation of being an early riser.

Seven months ago, Dédé was totally stunned by the death of his unique daughter Françoise, after a lengthy bout with leukemia [see my blog post]. Except for rare moments of interest in the outside world (which I had the privilege of observing on several occasions), Dédé's enthusiasm for life appeared to have waned. And his spirits were dampened by the boring obligation of being driven to Romans and back, three times a week, for dialysis treatment.

Madeleine phoned me this morning to tell me, calmly, that her husband had passed away peacefully, in the middle of the night, at the hospital in Romans. She will be faced with the challenge of adjusting her existence to the absence of both Dédé and Françoise. Personally, I'm convinced that Madeleine has the required determination and moral stamina to deal successfully with this new situation.

Childhood memories of Waterview

In the dark lounge room of the Walker house at Waterview, there was an upright piano. I had started to take weekly piano lessons from an old lady named Maude McMenemy, whom we referred to as “Mrs Mack”. I recall waiting on her front verandah, listening to the end of an ongoing lesson and saying to myself that, if this were music, then I wanted no part of it. Maude Mack’s basic weakness was her own inability to play the piano skillfully and artistically. She would thump the keyboard angrily as if she were punishing the instrument for not producing beautiful sounds, and there was nothing in her teaching approach that might have inspired me to take an interest in learning music.

Once, in the middle of a lesson, there was an electricity blackout. Mrs Mack went into her kitchen and fetched a wax candle. No sooner had she lit it than the lights came back on, whereupon my teacher lamented: “Ah, I’ve wasted a match.” When my mother heard this anecdote, she was most amused. The exclamation about wasting a match became a permanent element of our Waterview repertory of humor.

At that time, at the South Grafton primary school, my schoolmates commonly assumed that I was enamored of a young lady named Nancy McDiarmid, who happened to be the daughter of the local Presbyterian clergyman. While it may have been the case that we were attracted to one another, I'm obliged to admit that I have no precise recollections of my yearning for her, or going out of my way to meet up with her. Be that as it may, we were suddenly thrown together through the piano, and the desire of Mrs Mack to have her pupils perform in public. It was decided that Nancy and I would combine our pianistic talents as duettists for a performance of a piece called Carnival of Venice at the forthcoming Jacaranda Festival in Grafton. I seem to recall that we practiced together once or twice at Nancy’s house up on the hill at South Grafton. For the actual performance—which went over quite well—Nancy looked cute in a pale mauve cotton frock (to match the color of our festival trees), while I sported a dark mauve necktie.

[Click to enlarge]

Meanwhile, I persevered with my scales and elementary pieces on the instrument at Grandma’s place. Obviously, for those within earshot—such as my uncles—the sounds I created were dull, if not unpleasant. One day, I discovered by chance that I could reproduce the melodies of songs I heard on the radio, and harmonize the music with my left hand using three chords: tonic, dominant and subdominant. Not surprisingly, the members of the Walker household found my improvisations slightly less monotonous than the scales. When I sensed that I was annoying my listeners less than before, this encouraged me to develop my skills in “playing by ear” (as this ability was described). From that point on, I lost interest in learning to read music and concentrated exclusively upon the art of inventing richer methods of improvisation. But I soon realized that I was clearly not marked out to become a competent pianist.

Nice couples, nice tax

These days, people who hear of the Sarkozy couple would have normally imagined this duo:

There's an offspring. The extreme right-wing politician Marine Le Pen was offended by the fact that the given name of Sarko's child, Giulia, is not pure dyed-in-the-wool French. But this will surely not give rise to a revolution.

Meanwhile, the major couple in the news is the Merkozy duo:

And a little bit of the Obamazy duo:

The couple strolled together in the rain, at Cannes, in front of musicians of the French Foreign Legion.

Then, on the Friday evening TV news, Obama heaped praise upon the French president for his rôle in the current Greek crisis.

I've never been a fan of Nicolas Sarkozy, but I've admired his tenacity in dealing with this affair… even though nobody is convinced yet that all the basic problems have been solved.

Governments of progressive societies need lots of finance to improve the situation of their citizens, and it's obtained through taxation. To my mind, Sarkozy is on the right track when he advocates a Tobin tax on financial transactions. I would imagine that François Hollande, our likely next president, would also strive to install this good tax.

Effaced from Facebook

I've just submitted a request to be effaced permanently from Facebook, and I'm apparently scheduled for deletion within a fortnight. I've always detested the Facebook system... for gut reasons that I would be incapable of analyzing. I only joined Facebook for superficial reasons, because friends invited me to do so.

Today, of course, people who wish to contact me can do so by looking up my name through Google and then visiting my Antipodes blog.

Concerning my dislike of Facebook, the straw that broke the camel's back was the situation surrounding the recent Islamist bombing of the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

[Click to access French-language explanations from Charlie Hebdo]

In the wake of the terrorist attack against this splendid French journalistic institution, Charlie Hebdo has evoked "the feeble moral solidity" of Facebook. The Facebook pages of Charlie Hebdo were indeed submerged in Islamic shit, including death threats. It seems that Facebook authorities reacted by reprimanding Charlie Hebdo in a red-tape fashion. And all that remains is a mess.

Fitzroy has a new ball

Late yesterday afternoon, in the semi-darkness, I came upon an elegant soft black-and-white leather ball in the middle of an almost-empty parking zone at the supermarket in St-Jean-en-Royans. It had no doubt fallen out of a car. So, I brought it back home and gave it to Fitzroy.

It's just the right size for Fitzroy: that's to say, a little too big for him to get his teeth into it firmly, destructively. So, the ball might survive.

Leaf peeping

The American expression "leaf peeping"—which I learned from Google—designates the preoccupations of people who are enraptured by autumn panoramas of colorful foliage. Aficionados would be overjoyed by visions of the Vercors at this time of the year. Here's the view, from my house, of the wooded slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek:

[Click to enlarge slightly, then hit ESCAPE to return to blog.]

Throughout the warm season, these trees are uniformly green. So, it's only when autumn arrives that they start to display their specific visual characteristics. While not vouching for the veracity of my facts (since I'm not an expert on the identification of trees), I would imagine that most of the trees that remain resolutely green are oaks (chêne), whereas those that are starting to turn brown and yellow would be beech (hêtre), ash (frêne) or birch (bouleau). As for the two or three spectacular reddish specimens, they are almost certainly maple (érable) trees.

Down from my house, a huge golden-leaved tree dominates the hairpin bend where the road crosses over Gamone Creek.

The road, at that corner, is a carpet of autumn leaves.

I picked up a few specimens of dead leaves.

Unless I'm mistaken, this giant tree—composed of four or five pale-barked trunks emerging from the embankment—is a maple.

Some of my Gamone trees are less splendid in autumn. For example, the foliage of the walnut withers away rapidly and sadly.

And the fallen walnut leaves are uniformly brown and wrinkled.

Obviously, for my grand old lady dog Sophia, a golden maple carpet is more appropriate.

All Saints roses

Today's date has a quite binary look: 2011-11-01. For an All Saints' Day, the weather at Gamone is wonderfully mild, and even sunny at times. This afternoon, I picked up the last few apples from the ground (for my donkeys), and was thrilled to find a few splendid roses in my unkempt garden (where I didn't do any work whatsoever in summer, following my conflict with a fallen tree and my fractured knee).

[Click to enlarge slightly]

On the other hand, I've done a lot of work inside the house, mainly to get rid of old books, papers and obsolete media stuff. It felt funny throwing out all my audio cassettes. I'm also replacing many of my old cardboard boxes (for papers and photos) by transparent plastic containers, which are a great invention.

Windy wedding in Arizona

This short video shows memorable moments of an Arizona wedding:

As you see in the video, it had been been planned that, during the ceremony, the bride and groom would take up two jars of sand and mix their contents together in a third container, thereby symbolizing the eternal fusion of two souls in the holy union of wedlock.

Jeez, that lovely symbolic message sure came through loud and clear. In any case, I would like to imagine that the newlyweds will live together in calm harmony for ever and ever. But I have my doubts...

Ancestral Gauls

Here's an amusing trivia question, to test your knowledge of history.

This tomb is located in an abbey in Farnborough (famous for its air show) on the southern coast of England, but the man in the tomb was a foreigner. In his native land, in the middle of the 19th century, this man had the exceptional honor of being, not only the first elected president of that nation, but also its last reigning monarch. Who was this illustrious foreigner? And what was the land in which this man had been both a president and a monarch?

The man in question was Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte [1808-1873], the nephew of France's first emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte [1769-1821]. In 1848, Louis-Napoléon took advantage of the family name to get himself elected as president of France's Second Republic. Then, in 1851, he initiated a coup d'état that enabled him to become the emperor of France, referred to as Napoleon III. Finally, in 1870, his armies were defeated by the Prussians, and France's Second Empire ceased to exist. Here's an etching of a dramatic encounter, after their final battle, of the defeated Frenchman and the victorious Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck.

The last emperor of France was forced to flee to England, and he died in Kent. Some 15 years later, the emperor's remains were transferred to the Catholic abbey in Hampshire… and it's not at all certain that the English are prepared to hand them over to France.

I've brought up the subject of this much-disparaged French ruler because I want to evoke the legendary ancestors of the French, referred to collectively as the Gauls. In 52 BCE, their celebrated leader Vercingétorix was forced to surrender to Julius Caesar after the defeat of the Gauls on the battlefield of Alesia, near Dijon in Burgundy.

Much of the enduring folklore concerning the Gauls was created during the reign of Napoleon III. In particular, the emperor arranged for a statue of Vercingétorix to be set up at Alesia.

It's quite funny to compare this statue with the various portraits of Napoleon III. There's little doubt that the facial features of the French emperor, with his imposing mustache, were used as a model for the chieftain of the ancient Gauls.

This image of Vercingétorix gave rise, in turn, to the appearance of our comic-book hero Astérix. At present, there's a major exhibition in Paris concerning the Gauls, and specialists concerning this ancestral people consider that they probably didn't look anything like what France's 19th-century artists have led us to believe.

Paris a century ago

A French photographer, Eugène Atget [1857-1927], produced a large series of fantastic photos of the working people of Paris around 1898. One of the best-known is the organ grinder and a young female singer:

The following fellow is selling stationery (sheets of paper and envelopes) to passers-by who intend to write letters:

The next photo presents an unusual professional activity. The fellow with rolled-up trousers, working alongside the Seine, earned his living by washing the dogs of passers-by.

The next photo represents a profession that still existed in Paris when I arrived here in 1962. Parisians of the generation before mine would have immediately recognized this corpulent fellow, through his hat and smock, as a member of the ancient corporation—created under the king of France known as Saint Louis [1214-1270]—called the Forts des Halles: literally, the strongmen of the markets.

Their task consisted of transporting manually all the meat and vegetables sold within the vast Paris markets, the Halles, referred to by Emile Zola as the "stomach of Paris".

In the next photo, the fellow on the left is selling articles that were familiar to my brother and me when we were kids out in rural Australia:

I'm talking of plaited braids of horsehair that were attached to the end of whips, to make them crack with a sharp loud noise. (Making these so-called whip crackers, and then using them effectively, were skills that both Don and I had acquired.) The customer in a top hat was probably a coach driver.

The following photo by Atget, taken in 1898, shows the St-Michel bridge, which links the Latin Quarter to the Ile de la Cité:

Here's a most unromantic modern view of the same site:

Incidentally, Eugène Atget photographed the Paris that is present in the opening pages of the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke [1875-1926]. That's why I borrowed some of Atget's photos to illustrate my movie script based upon Rilke's novel.

Defeating dust

It took me a long time to realize that certain tools and devices can be very good for one kind of task, but totally inappropriate for an apparently similar task. Here's an excellent example:

For somebody like myself who consumes a lot of walnuts (grown here at Gamone), that high-tech hammer is perfect for cracking them open. But the hammer's nylon head is incapable of driving in a nail.

In the domain of vacuum cleaners, I purchased this powerful professional model many years ago, and imagined that it would be ideal for the house at Gamone:

It doesn't use bags, and it's perfect for dog hairs, wood shavings, spider webs, etc. Apparently it can even suck up liquids, but I've never used it for that. When you stick the nozzle in a fireplace, it sucks up the ashes in an instant, and appears to be the perfect solution for this regular winter task. But that's where I made a huge blunder, which I didn't actually detect for years. Let me explain...

Air carrying solid stuff is sucked into the device through the nozzle and tube, then this air passes through a thick cloth filter (which can be washed) and exits from the metal cylinder through a large opening in the rear. This simple operating principle means that the device sucks with great force, and is easy to clean. However I was dismayed to see that furniture in my living room was constantly covered in a film of reddish dust. For a long time, I imagined that this was surely the result of convection currents emerging from my open fireplace. Alas, the true cause of this dust was in fact my vacuum cleaner. I made this discovery on a sunny spring morning when I was using the device to remove ashes from the fireplace. All of a sudden, the rays of sunshine streaming into my living room revealed that a cloud of dust was emerging from the open hole in the back of the vacuum cleaner. This dust was so fine that I wouldn't have normally noticed it on a typically overcast wintry morning. But, on this sunny morning, the cloud of dust was clearly visible, and I suddenly realized that I was using a vacuum cleaner with a peculiar property. Not only did it suck up large volumes of ashes and bits of charcoal, but it deposited in return a fine layer of dust over everything in its vicinity. This was not a fault in the design of the device. It's simply not a vacuum cleaner designed for dusty stuff. So, I promptly banned this device from my living room, and moved it to my workshop in a far wing of the house, where it's great for wood shavings and such things. Then I replaced it by a special-purpose device that's designed precisely for sucking up ashes from a fireplace.

This new device works wonderfully well. I've always had a top-quality Miele vacuum cleaner of the domestic kind for the bedrooms. Realizing that I'm inclined to hesitate before carting the Miele machine up or down the stairs, I decided, a few days ago, to purchase a new Electrolux vacuum cleaner that I'll keep upstairs, above all for my books, papers and electronic devices such as the computers.

Incidentally, the French company that manufactures the device for sucking up ashes proposes an ingenious system for blowing warm air into damp shoes. I've always been fascinated by their publicity pictures.

Installed in a corner of the kitchen or living room, this would be a wonderful conversation piece. It's the first thing a visitor, entering the house, would notice. For young children, you could make up marvelous fairy stories about the way in which, on the stroke of midnight, the system gets up on its legs and actually strolls around the house all night. At dawn, like a well-behaved Cinderella, it returns to its right place.