Military heritage

I came upon the stupid website mentioned in my previous post while I was searching for explanations concerning an exotic word: poliorcetic. No, in spite of the first five letters, it has nothing to do with the disease of poliomyelitis. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology indicates that the adjective poliorcetic, formed from the Greek terms pólis (city) and orkeîn (besiege), concerns the military art of sieges: both how to resist a siege perpetrated by your enemies, and how to besiege them in turn. This etymological explanation also guides you in the pronunciation of the term: poli-orcetic.

Without necessarily recognizing any of the names on this map, you might guess that these sites are significant from a military viewpoint, because they're all located on the hexagonal perimeter of France.

They are the spots where a 17th-century nobleman, military architect and poliorcetic expert, known as Vauban, encircled the land with a system of complex and finely-built defensive fortresses, most of which still exist today.

Prior to my arrival in France in 1962, I had heard of the failed fortifications designed by the politician André Maginot [1877-1932], but I must admit that I knew nothing of Vauban. In France, I've found that most people seem to have heard of Vauban, and many have actually visited one of his fortresses, or at least seen a TV documentary on this subject.

Yesterday, a dozen fortresses built by Vauban were added to the Unesco World Heritage listing.

Some of the great sieges in world history—such as those of the Crusaders, for example—were drawn out over excruciating periods of time. Three centuries will have elapsed before the universal recognition of the legacy of Vauban. As the computerized idiot mentioned in my last blog might say: That's a big seat!

Translations

Back in the days when I was working on the outskirts of Paris for the Ilog software company, my job consisted mainly of writing technical manuals in English. Since most of my colleagues were French, they described their software creations in their mother tongue, and I was often called upon to translate these raw descriptions into basic English, before beefing them up into clear didactic documentation. At that time, I disposed of numerous powerful computing tools, some of which exploited the Unix system [ancestor of Linux]. Today, in fact, my word-processing arsenal is even more powerful, and it has the advantage of sitting on my desktop in my bedroom looking out onto the mountains... so, I can't complain about the speed of technological progress!

During my Ilog years, from 1989 until my departure for the Dauphiné in 1993, I acquired a taste for Unix wizardry. Not only did I use a complicated word-processing tool named LaTeX [designed by Donald Knuth, above all, for professional typesetting of mathematical stuff], but I developed (and documented, of course) my own thing named CatMan, to assist me in translating from French into English.

Exploiting a huge collection of French segments and their English equivalents, and activated by Unix scripts incorporating commands such as sed and awk [which might be familiar to readers who use Linux], my CatMan approach did a lot of the basic translating for me, and provided me with a more-or-less understandable but atrociously disjointed pseudo-English text, which I then had to transform manually into correct English. Observers [including Pierre Haren, the Ilog chief] were never convinced, understandably, that my CatMan gadget was an effective translation tool, because it seemed to produce junk, but I always felt that, in the long run, it saved me time and effort.

This morning, while playing around with the web, I came upon a ridiculous website, allegedly in English, that proposes an explanation of what they call a "seat". Somebody has obviously used a computer to translate French into pseudo-English. To understand this article, you have to undo the translation by replacing "seat" by "siege". It's true that a siège, in French, can be a thing you sit on... but not in a military context. Funnily, the computer was so dumb that it didn't realize that you can obtain a perfectly plausible translation of siège simply by removing the accent. To be more correct, accusations of stupidity should be addressed, not to the computer, but to the people who dared to set up this idiotic website.

According to the Evangelist Matthew [26, 41], "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak". A clueless computer once interpreted this as a comment concerning a Biblical tavern, and came out with the following paraphrase: "They serve powerful liquor, but their meat is insipid."

Back home from Brittany

The return journey in the TGV, with Sophia stretched out on the floor at my feet, was very comfortable. In France, the train is certainly a great way to get around. The only problem, for me, is that the gentle movement tends to put me to sleep, so I don't get through as much reading (of Dawkins, of course) as I would like to. Besides, as soon as the train gets down to the Burgundy region, I can't resist the simple pleasure of watching the glorious rural landscapes glide past the train windows, as if I were scrutinizing a TV travelogue. France is truly a beautiful country, and I remain enthralled by its splendors.

During this pleasant trip to Christine's place, it became clearer than ever to me that each of us is living in an ideal location: Christine in Brittany, and me in the Dauphiné. Each of us appreciates the other's home place, and admires its many charms, while realizing that it would surely be an error for either of us to try to live in the other's region. For me, Brittany is quaint, sturdy in a stony style, and ultra-folkloric. The people there appear to live on an island, and take pride in being Breton prior to being French.

The villages are often pretty in a quiet old-fashioned way, but many of them strike me as granite graveyards built around a gray church. Insofar as I have no time for archaic attitudes towards the dead, I find cemeteries both stupid and ugly. Once upon a time, I liked to crawl around in certain graveyards in the hope of discovering genealogical data... but written archives are infinitely more effective in that domain. Above all, I persist in considering that fragments of a decaying corpse, such as we might find them in a cemetery, bear no relationship whatsoever, "spiritual" or otherwise, to the deceased... whose soul resides henceforth in an ethereal territory that we might designate as InformationLand. Cemeteries are vulgar and uninteresting junkyards for mindless and anonymous DNA. Human society would lose almost nothing if all our cemeteries were to be plowed under and sowed with crops. Meanwhile, our dead are elsewhere...

Christine, who owns and lives in an ancient presbytery, possesses detailed documents on Gommenec'h priests, including a martyr who was struck down by silly revolutionaries. But this morning, while leaving the village, I was amused to discover that Christine hadn't yet stumbled upon the tombstone, fixed to the wall of the local church, of a 19th-century Gommenec'h priest who died at the age of 30. Who was this young fellow? As I said, words are lovelier and more effective than stones... even though the latter can be moving.

I agree with Christine that my beloved Dauphiné is a rude country, whose inhabitants often reside in ramshackle abodes. My analysis of the situation is as follows. Dauphiné residents live in the shadow of mountains, which are surely the most permanent entities on the surface of the planet. A Breton might build his home in stone as a reaction against the ephemeral waves and windy mists of the sea, whereas a Dauphiné peasant would look silly if he attempted to construct an artificial fragment of an eternal mountain. So, our Dauphiné artifacts are primarily simple shelters from the elements, bivouacs, not monuments. At an adjacent level, I would be tempted to suggest that Brittany may not even think in the same way as the Dauphiné... but that's an enormous subject, which I cannot approach within such a superficial context as my Antipodes blog.

Global warming

The latest scientific report on climate change in my native land, Australia, sounds grim. Concerning severe droughts and scorching temperatures, the prime minister Kevin Rudd evoked a "historical assumption" that such conditions only prevailed once every twenty years or so. Well, according to the report from Australia's CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation], this situation will arise, from now on, every one to two years. That's a hell of a big difference! The report also indicates that the area affected by such conditions will be doubled. Meanwhile, Australians appear to be concerned primarily by a recent report on climate change written by an economist, Ross Garnaut. This economic report states the price to be paid by Australians in order to combat global warming... and journalists have been getting a kick out of writing in-depth and would-be witty editorials about the Garnaut conclusions. Money seems to be a more meaningful and exciting "language" than science.

In the context of talk about climate change, there's a regrettable metaphor: greenhouse effect. In our everyday world, we imagine a greenhouse as a hot and steamy microcosm in which luxuriant foliage thrives splendidly as if it were growing in an equatorial jungle.

In physical terms, a greenhouse is an extremely simple affair. The sun's rays heat the air trapped inside the structure, and a current of moist air circulates constantly through convection.

On the other hand, the complex chemical mechanisms by which obnoxious gases such as carbon dioxide cause temperatures to rise on the surface of our planet have nothing whatsoever to do with the familiar convection currents in a greenhouse. It would have been preferable if this dangerous outcome due to the presence of excessive carbon dioxide had been labeled, say, the lethal furnace effect.

Readers of my blog have heard me referring to a brilliant fellow named Joseph Fourier [1768-1830]. He was mentioned in the following three articles:

— Prefects, 21 July 2007 [display];

— Becoming French, 19 June 2008 [display];

— and Curious trail, 27 June 2008 [display].

My hero Fourier started out his adult life by a short and unconvincing trial period as a Benedictine monk. After achieving fame as a mathematical physicist, an Egyptologist [colleague of the Champollion brothers] and a public administrator [at the préfecture in Grenoble where I was recently naturalized], he was made a baron. Well, Joseph Fourier was a specialist in heat flow, and he was in fact the discoverer of the notorious greenhouse effect.

Excursion into a fairytale land

Yesterday, we drove westward to visit Christine's brother Lan Mafart at his seaside tavern named Caplan & Co near Lannion.

[Click the photo to visit their French-language website.]

After lunch, we visited the church of St-Jean-du-Doigt, where the term "doigt" (finger) indicates that their treasure is a silver reliquary containing a knuckle of John the Baptist.

Today, it's hard to imagine that fire could break out in such a damp stone church... but this happened (for the third time in the history of the village) last century, and the stained-glass windows had to be replaced. The new non-figurative windows are extraordinary. One has the impression that we're observing the silhouettes of colorful vines and shrubs growing outside the edifice, with maybe the misty sea on the horizon.

In a nearby village, the church is dedicated to an exotic Breton saint named Melar. As you can guess from his golden crown, scepter and blue cowl with fleur-de-lis motifs, Melar was no run-of-the-mill pious villager. In fact, he was a prince. But a jealous and wicked relative cut off Melar's right hand and his left foot, in the hope that this would prevent the young prince from manipulating an épée and riding a horse, thereby making it impossible to accede to the regional throne. But lo and behold, Melar's artificial hand and foot, made of silver, soon functioned magically, even better than his original limbs... and it was obvious to everybody that they had a saint in their presence. I forget the rest of the story, which Christine read out to me while we were crawling around in the underground crypt where Melar was laid to rest at the end of his fabulous life.

I should point out, for readers who don't know so already, that Brittany is a place where all sorts of strange things happen.

Note for Nancy [private message]

Nancy: I receive all your emails from Australia, but I can't send you emails from France, because your computer won't accept them. I tried to do so a few days ago, but Big Pond wouldn't deliver it... or maybe couldn't, for technical reasons. So, this blog remains [as always] a convenient means of communication between us. You might look into the idea of using the comments facility. Your grandson could show you how this gadget works.

Enchanting vegetation

The day after my arrival in Brittany, Christine took me to a magnificent 42-acre botanic garden near Tréguier named Kerdalo, created during the final decades of the 20th century by a Russian nobleman, Peter Wolkonsy [1907-1997].

Peter became a specialist in dendrology, the science of trees, and his domain can be considered, first and foremost, as a celebration of great trees of many kinds.

A tiny stream enters the upper edge of the property, and its waters have been channeled into a series of pools of differing shapes and sizes.

The largest pool is in fact a small lake surrounded by giant tropical plants, masses of hydrangeas, reeds and rushes.

In the middle of the domain, a square array of splendid flower beds corresponds to what might be described as a "clergyman's garden".

Often, the pools are bordered by fountains and fanciful constructions.

On one edge of this tiny square pool covered in greenery, there's an Italian grotto whose walls are adorned by frescoes.

In certain places, there's an air of giantism, with roses climbing into the branches of huge trees.

When Peter Wolkonsy discovered the property, around 1965, the splendid residence was little more than an old farm house.

The far end of the domain slopes down into a magnificent estuary, with Tréguier across the waters.

Since the death of Peter, the domain has been evolving under the guidance of his daughter Isabelle and her English husband Timothy Vaughan, who's an expert horticulturist.

Extraordinary TV evening

Last night, Christine and I were enchanted by yet another superb documentary in the Ushuaïa Nature series by Nicolas Hulot... whom I first mentioned back on 12 December 2006 in an article entitled Monsieur Hulot [display]. This time, the theme of Hulot's adventures was the Amazon in Brazil.

After a few preliminaries about the suicidal destruction of this Amazonian vegetation that is an essential component of Man's survival, punctuated by delightful shots of contacts with friendly dolphins, Hulot plunged into a fabulous reportage of his encounter with a community of naked Indians called the Zo'é.

Members of this small and tightly-knit tribe live in a harmonious Jungle of Eden, where the greatest danger consists of getting killed by a serpent or a panther. Their method of resolving certain social conflicts between members of the community involves laughing. The protagonists are made to lie down on the ground, where they are tickled until they burst out into mad laughter.

Enthralled by Hulot's amazing and magnificent documentary, Christine and I could hardly believe our eyes when we discovered a textual message scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen, informing viewers that Ingrid Betancourt had just been liberated. It was one of those exceptional news items, like the death of President Kennedy (except that, this time, it was wonderful news), when you never forget what you were doing when you received the message. Christine and I, like countless French TV viewers yesterday evening, will surely never forget that we were watching Nicolas Hulot in Amazonia. But, up until the end of the Ushuaïa program, there was no detailed news yet, neither on TV nor on the Internet: nothing more than the message that scrolled non-stop across the screen. And then everything started to happen rapidly.

We imagined confusedly that we might soon see terrible video sequences of a fragile Ingrid Betancourt being wheeled out of a military helicopter on a stretcher, under the surveillance of a medical team. Instead of that, we were amazed by the image of a sturdy smiling combatant, in military clothes, striding down from an airliner like an astronaut who has just returned safely, and in perfect health, from a mission to a remote spot in the sky. A few minutes later, Ingrid was addressing spectators on the tarmac in the style of a politician, a statesman, a general. At times, as she shared with us her vision of six years as a hostage in the jungle, Ingrid had the saintly regard of a madonna from a medieval painting. She had the same kind of simple and ethereal splendor as a Zo'é native, on the fringe of our cruel planet.

Evening sky in Brittany

Quite late in the evening, Christine called me outside to observe this fantastic sunset. Back home in Choranche, the hour of the evening at which the sun goes down, and night sets in, is much earlier than here in Brittany. Besides that difference due to longitude, the evening sky above Gamone rarely looks like this pastel poem over Gommenec'h.

Blogging from Brittany

For the first time ever, I took the TGV [high-speed train] from Valence to Guingamp in Brittany, accompanied by Sophia. Christine picked us up at the station, only a dozen or so kilometers from her village of Gommenec'h. It's certainly a rapid and comfortable way to cross France, largely less tiring (and cheaper, too) than driving.

Sophia and her daughter Gamone get along nicely together.

I'm always amused to rediscover the dog-house I once built for my first companion at Choranche, named Bruno.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever created a blog article while away from my house and my usual machine. Today, I'm working on my portable MacBook, and using Christine's Internet connection. The result appears to be satisfactory.

Rocky combat

In my article of 3 January 2008 entitled Fragile existence [display], I described a rock that had rolled down onto the road between Gamone and Pont-en-Royans. Shortly after, as indicated in my article of 12 January 2008 entitled Valley on the move [display], another rock rolled down onto that same stretch of road. And more recently, in my article of 27 March 2008 entitled Law of motion [display], I evoked an awesome stone column up on the slopes of Mount Baret, above that same road.

Over the last week, a small team of woodcutters, attached by ropes, has been cleaning up the area where the last rock fell, which lies directly beneath the above-mentioned stone pillar, and just a few meters above the roadway. By "cleaning up", I mean that they've removed trees and vegetation surrounding a pile of loose rocks.

The purpose of their intervention is to install heavy metal netting over these rocks, to prevent them from moving. I asked one of the workers why it wouldn't be preferable to dislodge the rocks so that they slide down onto the road, where they could be broken into small fragments and carted away. He replied in a sarcastic tone by a single word: "business"... meaning that such-and-such a company stood to make money by installing the metal netting.

Local folk with whom I've spoken, including our mayor, are highly critical of any technique that consists of destroying the vegetation that has been stabilizing the rocky slopes for so long. To fix the netting in place, holes have to be drilled in the rocks [at the places marked with orange paint], then metal rods are hammered into these holes. But everybody knows that these metal rods erode over time, allowing moisture to seep into the rocks. When this moisture freezes abruptly, the subsequent forces can split the rocks and cause them to budge, increasing the probability of the netting giving way. In the perpetual combat of man versus rocky slopes, there's no obvious winner.

Curious trail

This morning, while waiting for the Préfecture to welcome us for the naturalization ceremony, I took this photo of a wiggly red paint trail on the footpaths of the Place de Verdun. I saw this paint trail for the first time a few days ago, while visiting the Archives départementales to pursue my research about the origins of Gamone. I soon discovered that it leads, over a distance of a hundred meters or so, to the nearby Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l'Isère, which honors local heroes of the combat against the Nazis during World War II.

After finding this blood-red squiggle on the footpaths of Grenoble [which would be trivial, were it not for the Résistance exhibitions to which it leads you], I happened to be reading a brilliant anecdote penned by my favorite author. Richard Dawkins talks of a curious wet wiggly trail he once saw in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. [You can read the story on pages 73-74 of his Unweaving the Rainbow.] Apparently, it was a trail of urine from a randy male elephant. The Oxford zoologist imagined immediately two complementary hypotheses:

(1) There was no doubt some kind of regular swaying rhythm in the pachyderm's prick. Its excretions of urine were governed by physics. First, there was the global gait of the huge animal. Then, there was the pendulum-like movement of the elephant's lengthy penis, wobbling and exuding urine beneath its giant body. Insofar as the urine trail was a kind of wobbly wave, Dawkins imagined that its form might be analyzed by mathematics that were imagined by Joseph Fourier... who once became the prefect of Isère, as I said in my article entitled Becoming French [display].

(2) Dawkins imagined that the elephant's urine trail might become fossilized one of these days, and that future scientific historians, armed with the imagination of our Oxford professor and the mathematics of our French prefect, might be able to digitize the elephant's urine train and apply Fourier analysis in order to determine... the exact length and weight of the elephant's dangling organ! Isn't that nice thinking?

Fifty million Frenchmen... and me

Young readers of my blog won't recognize the allusion to an archaic Cole Porter musical comedy whose hit song declared—for reasons that are neither here nor there—that "fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong". Why not? From now on, with an additional Frenchman in tow (as of this morning at ten o'clock), the situation might change... for the better or for the worse.

By nine o'clock, we were some fifty or sixty future citizens gathered in front of the préfecture in Grenoble, waiting for the great oak doors to open. I had time to analyze visually my companions, who appeared to be largely from Eastern Europe and the Maghreb. There was a single African and a single Asiatic. Not only did I appear to be the only native English-speaking individual, but the fellow at the reception desk said that it was rare to see an Australian at such a ceremony. I told him—as I've informed others on dozens of occasions, whenever the question of dual Franco-Australian citizenship arises—that I would have been naturalized ages ago were it not for a stupid long-standing Aussie stipulation, only recently amended, that an Australian who decided to acquire a foreign nationality would be automatically deprived of his Australian birth rights. Tough typically-Aussie stuff, that caused us expatriates to hesitate.

Everything went over smoothly. A banal film explained the motto of the République: liberty, equality and fraternity. A few extra words concerned the republican theme of the separation between the state and religions. I knew this stuff off by heart, since these fundamental French principles are part of my everyday thinking and outlook on society in my adopted land.

I chuckled inwardly when I thought that foreigners in my native Australia, in a complementary situation to mine, are now liable to be asked, in a ridiculous cultural quiz, to name a famous Aussie cricketer and a billiards champion. The first correct answer was no doubt Donald Bradman. As for the other Aussie hero, I have no idea whatsoever. I didn't even know that Australia was a great billiards nation. In other words, there are few chances today that an ignorant Frenchman like me could ever become an Australian... apart from the fact that I'm already Australian, and have always been so, ever since my courageous pioneering ancestors invested their courage and energy in that great mindless continent, from the earliest days. But so what; I'm French, and tremendously proud to be a citizen of the grand République !

One-track mind and reading

The first time in my life that I tuned in exclusively to a single author, reading nothing else, was back in my adolescent Durrell days. Totally enraptured by this novelist, I've surely read the greater part of everything that Lawrence Durrell [1912-1990] ever wrote, culminating in Caesar's Vast Ghost, mentioned in my article of 27 March 2007 entitled Books about Provence and the French Riviera [display].

Later, in other domains, I often made a point of reading everything I could lay my hands upon from poets, intellectuals and researchers who impressed me greatly: Rainer Maria Rilke, of course, then my friend and mentor Pierre Schaeffer in France, and great US computer scientists such as Marvin Minsky and Roger Schank. At the same time, I was thrilled in particular by the literary opus of Kurt Vonnegut. Concerning all the above-mentioned authors, I ended up acquiring and reading all their fundamental writings. But, in all these cases, my basic emotion [to use the concept at the heart of Minsky's recent masterly synthesis entitled The Emotion Machine] was admiration, rather than total fascination as in the Durrellian universe. There always seemed to be some little thing that was missing in their works: maybe simply the power and magic of first-person poetic writing.

These days, once again, I've become a one-author reader. His name won't surprise readers of my blog: Richard Dawkins, born in Africa... like all of us, at one time or another. As a reader, I feel that my commitment is for life! Faced with the Dawkins phenomenon, I'm a little like a novice monk about to make his permanent vows. [Dawkins would surely sprout some kind of invisible rash if he learned that a devoted reader dared to liken him to a spiritual abbot.]

Unweaving the Rainbow, as the title implies, is all about rainbows, of all kinds: those that we see in the sky, formed by light passing through droplets of water, and those in our human minds, construed by the foibles of Darwinian evolution. The soul of this book is poetic. Was it not Keats who complained that Newton's analysis of the colors of the rainbows had destroyed forever their charm? Dawkins deals, as it were, with Keats, placing him on the sidelines of fabulous scientific revelations that enable us, now, to know the rainbow.

A Devil's Chaplain is pure Dawkins curled up in a leather lounge in front of a log fire, talking on about anything and everything: that's to say, about life and death, and the quest for profound challenges in our meaningless existence. Dawkins tackles all kinds of topics, including the emptiness of fashionable French philosophy (professed by intellectuals such as Lacan, Guattari and Deleuze), silly religious reactions to the cloned sheep named Dolly, alternative medicine, and the obnoxious expression of religion that disgusted the world at large on 11 September 2001. Dawkins reiterates that the religions of everybody are to be condemned, once and for all: Catholics, Protestants, Jews of all denominations and Moslems.

In the wake of Dawkins, I simply can't imagine what I might ever read from now on. Maybe old Tintin comics. Better still, exciting tales of archaic fiction from the Bible...

Kippa

I'm fond of my Jewish skullcap, which I bought long ago in the extraordinary Holy City of Jerusalem. I used to wear it momentarily when visiting synagogues in Israel. I've always had a profound respect for the Jewish people, the legends and myths of the Torah and the modern state of Israel. There were even times when I dreamed vaguely about the crazy idea of settling down in that amazing and exciting nation, both profoundly archaic and terribly modern, but this kind of project would be senseless, indeed unthinkable, for a goy. In any case, I've always been a supporter of the Jewish state: a friend of Israel.

The recent beating in Paris of a lad wearing a kippa was initially presented as a case of anti-Semitism, but it now appears possible that it was merely an instance of regular fighting between youth gangs in the Buttes-Chaumont park in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.

Phantoms from an ancient world

After arriving in Paris for the first time, in February 1962, and starting to work with IBM Europe in the Madeleine quarter, I developed the pleasant habit of residing in cheap romantic Latin Quarter hotels... often in tiny upper-story rooms called chambres de bonnes, which used to be occupied by maids. Naturally, I ate out all the time. Today, Christine and our children think I'm maybe telling tales when I say that one of my regular eating places was the Procope in the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, where I developed a taste for snails. I assure them that, in 1962, it was a perfectly ordinary Left-Bank restaurant, well within the means of a young Aussie who happened to be earning his living as a computer programmer with IBM.

In those distant days, the Latin Quarter soon became my everyday backyard, and I ventured into every nook and cranny of this exotic territory that had belonged primarily, not so long before then, to the students of the Sorbonne and the existentialists. One of the quaintest places I chanced upon was an archaic art gallery known as the Akademia Raymond Duncan, whose boss was an aging American artist who paraded around in a Greek robe, as if he were a reincarnation of Aristophanes. French friends told me that the claim to fame of this ridiculous fossilized Californian, who had nothing in particular to exhibit in his Latin Quarter Academy, apart from his silly self, was the fact that his long-departed sister, Isadora Duncan, had been an amazing innovator in the world of modern dance.

Indeed, I soon discovered that everybody in Paris had heard of Raymond's amazing sister, who liked to dance half-naked to Ancient Greek themes. Even if they knew little about Isadora's celebrated choreography, Parisians remembered the terrible anecdote about her accidental death in 1927, in Nice. Isadora's friend Benoît Falchetto was going to take her for a ride in a fabulous Bugatti automobile named the Amilcar GS 1924. Nonchalantly, the lovely dancer threw a scarf around her neck. This scarf was caught up instantly in the spoked wheels of the automobile, and Isadora Duncan was choked to death.

For me, through the presence of her aging offbeat brother, this anecdote of the American dancer's death—35 years and a world war before my arrival in France—remained terribly present in my mind during my first encounter with the fascinating City of Light.

Gamone plants

In my article of 27 September 2007 entitled Façade at Gamone [display], I spoke about the renovation of the façade of Gamone. Before these operations, I had to sacrifice my rose bushes and the wisteria. And during the work, the earth below the façade was polluted with old mortar dust and sand. Today, I'm happy to find that things are getting back to normal once again.

For the moment, I'm not sure I want the wisteria to invade the entire façade, as it used to do.

Up until now, the flowers were protected from my billy-goat Gavroche by wire netting, which I've just removed. I have no idea how the midget animal will react to the challenge of the flower bed. Stupidly, no doubt, as usual. In case I haven't told you already, my dear billy-goat is, as they say in French, a kind of "casseur" (breaker, vandal), who seems to get high by destroying unexpected vegetation that he doesn't even want to eat. For example, Gavroche hates tomato plants. In fact, I shouldn't use the verb "hate", because I don't believe for an instant that Gavroche behaves with any kind of hatred in his heart. He simply doesn't give a damn.

I think of my billy goat in much the same way that Richard Dawkins talks of Nature in River out of Eden: "Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose." Gavroche is indeed a more-or-less callous nihilist, on a par with the Roman emperor Caligula described by Albert Camus. But there's a bit of Sisyphus in him, too, in the way he trudges constantly up to the top of the slopes above Gamone, only to wander down here again to the house, a day or so later. To be precise, we should no doubt describe Gavroche as an existentialist goat.

Bacterial shit as fuel

The skyrocketing price of petroleum has given rise to a lot of buzz recently about revolutionary high-tech processes capable of producing cheap synthetic fuel. For a long time, hydrogen cars have sounded like the ultimate dream. It's lovely to imagine your exhaust pipe leaving no more than a trail of warm water droplets along the highway.

[Click the image to access an excellent website on this interesting theme.] Today, though, there aren't many hydrogen fuel stations studded around the countryside. So, in spite of new models of this kind that are continually being put on the market, it still remains a largely experimental and expensive approach.

There has been a lot of excitement over the last few days about announcements from a US company named Coskata, which is experimenting with a variation on the relatively classical approach that consists of using the biomass to produce ethanol. [Click the image to visit their website.] The initial step in such a process consists of transforming raw resources (maybe harvested crops or even urban garbage) into a gas mixture referred to as syngas (short for synthesis gas), whose primary contents are carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then, the marvelous aspect of the Coskata system concerns the way in which this syngas is processed to create ethanol. They use exotic bacteria—once discovered on the bed of a lake—which consume the syngas and produce ethanol as excrement! In other words, once this technology is brought to fruition, we'll be able to fuel our automobiles with bug shit! Now, isn't that a lovely idea?

At Gamone, I use donkey and horse shit to fertilize my vegetable garden. In places such as Tibet and Mongolia, I believe they use yak shit as fuel in their cooking stoves. Ecologists inform us that our familiar cattle produce huge quantities of methane, which add to the global warming problem. Maybe the Coskata people could dream up some kind of small bug-filled device that could be attached to the backside of cows so that these dear animals would actually piss out pure gasoline. Ideally, this invention would be followed by a little bit of smart genetic engineering to breed cattle with a second set of udders. The first teats would deliver milk, as usual, whereas the second set would be used to fuel our automobiles.

Regional languages

One often imagines that, in France, everybody speaks French. Well, the situation is far more complex than that. Throughout the République (including overseas territories), there are indeed dozens of so-called regional languages, including Breton, Corsican, Basque, Occitan, Catalan, Alsatian, etc.

A Breton parliamentarian recently presented an amendment to the French constitution that would allow for the reconnaissance (recognition) of regional languages. Insofar as these ancient languages are a significant part of the cultural patrimony of France, it's not surprising that polls indicate that most people approve of such an amendment. In particular, French youth are largely unanimous in applauding such a change of outlook, which respects cultural diversity. After all, the right to speak the language of one's forefathers would appear to be no less sacred than the idea of perpetuating, say, their religion or their life style. Only an insensitive bureaucrat would argue that these precious regional languages should be allowed to die out in the name of progress and unity.

In any case, that's how the situation appears when examined superficially. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the acceptance of regional languages in an operational sense within the République could be quite a complex and hazardous undertaking. What I mean by "operational sense" is that citizens might end up demanding that official documents be drawn up in their local language. Imagine, say, that the authorities in Grenoble were to hand me, at the naturalization ceremony next Friday morning, an identity card written in some Alpine dialect. If I wanted to drive up to Christine's place, I would first have to find an official translator to obtain a Breton version of my driver's license. If ever this linguistic amendment were to be validated, it would only be a short while before an inspired French citizen started to lobby for the reintroduction of Latin, as a daily language, throughout the former territories of Cisalpine Gaul. Then the folk in Marseille would start to scream because they felt that it would be more fitting for them to have the possibility of using Greek. And the République would rapidly become a Tower of Babel, whose major economic activity consisted of language translation. Why reinvent such cacophony within the frontiers of the Hexagon when we already have the European Union? And soon the Mediterranean Union?

Don't take me too seriously. The truth of the matter is that I love the precious phenomenon of exotic languages, old and new... including those we invent these days to run our computers.

Home history

As explained briefly in my recent article entitled Fulfilling day in Grenoble [display], I'm trying to acquire information about the folk who lived here at Gamone in the past, long before I discovered this charming place.

For many years, I've carried out ordinary genealogical research both on paternal Skyvington themes [display] and on maternal Walker ancestors [display], and I've also been concerned by the background of Grafton, in Australia, where I grew up [display]. At times, activities of this genealogical kind can be frustrating, since I have few concrete associations with these research domains, particularly since I live in a land, France, that was never a part of my personal genealogical territory. Maybe my genealogical operations would acquire greater meaning if I were able to spend time in my native Australia, in the UK or in Ireland. Meanwhile, the genealogical challenge is, for me, a largely theoretical affair. Maybe genealogy is a bit like that for most researchers, in that few people remain "in touch" with their ancestral context.

In the case of the history of the place where I'm now living, my contacts with the subject matter of my research are far more concrete, because the house and property are still here to "back up", as it were, my research activities. For example, there was a former owner named Antoine Uzel-Maret. Here's his birth record, stating that he was born in Choranche on 6 September 1815.

He died here at Gamone in 1884. At 8 o'clock on the morning of 26 March of that year, a notary public from Pont-en-Royans came up here to the house and, with the help of Antoine's widow, named Sophie Belle, he drew up a precise list of all the objects and animals in the building. And today, I can read this fascinating list. Here's the start of the list of objects in "the second bedroom, to the west", which is where I'm sitting in front of my computer at the present moment:

I learn, for example, that there was a "bad" wood stove in this room, and a big clock. Curiously, there was equipment here for making bread, whereas the actual bread oven [which is no longer there] used to be located down beneath my big southern window. I haven't had time to analyze all this information yet, but I see that there was a lot of wine-making equipment, described precisely in the list, down in the ancient cellar of the house.

Through this list of the exact contents of my house in 1884, I feel myself associated with this Uzel-Maret couple. It's a little as if I've moved into their house to take care of it while they've left for a long journey.