But Enough About You: Essays (46 page)

We had hot dogs for lunch that day—slathered with peppers and onions, tomatoes and Gruyère and then broiled. We ate them in the shade of a tall chestnut in the town square and drank cold draft beer and then pedaled on to Souillac and the old abbey there, built by returned Crusaders in the style of Hagia Sophia, which they’d seen in
Constantinople on their way to Jerusalem. Carved in stone at the entrance is a relief of the prophet Isaiah. His carvers caught him at the moment of revelation that a messiah would someday be born, and Isaiah is dancing at the news. During the Revolution, someone smashed off his nose with a hammer, but Isaiah remains joyful, his whole body and beard twisting in ecstasy at the news he has just been given. You could stand there for hours, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, and watch him dance as swallows flit overhead and your nostrils fill with the centuries-old smell of incense.

We spent the last two nights in a riverside hotel called the Château de la Treyne, which in the course of its half millennium’s existence was sacked and resacked by Catholics, Protestants, and Jacobins until history had run its course and it could at last become a hotel. Our room, named Cardinale, was at the very top, and in the early morning you looked out and saw ghostly mists rising up from the Dordogne.

On our last day we pedaled to Rocamadour. For centuries it was a stop on the great pilgrim route from Paris to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. It was also a destination in itself. Here in 1166 a perfectly preserved body was found; it was said to be that of the publican Zaccheus, husband of Veronica, who wiped the face of Christ as he stumbled toward Golgotha. According to legend, Veronica and Zaccheus fled Palestine and ended up here. Veronica died and Zaccheus became a hermit in these cliffs—Roc Amator, the lover of the rock.

You don’t have to believe any of this, but Henry Plantagenet, later Henry II of England, husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the father of Lionheart, did. He came here to pray to the Black Madonna that still looks down from the wall of the little chapel housing the tomb where the hermit’s body was found. Henry was cured of his sickness, or so he said he was, and so began another wave of pilgrims, including St. Dominic, St. Bernard, St. Louis, Blanche of Castile, Philip the Fair, hundreds of thousands of others. The flag of Rocamadour flew over the battle of Navas de Tolosa, when the Moors were routed by the army of Alfonso VIII of Castile.

Today Rocamadour is a crush of tourist buses. But you can steal away from that and refresh yourself in the cool and dark of the chapel
beneath the Black Madonna and the lamps hung there by Crusaders and the bell that was said to ring miraculously every time storm-tossed sailors were saved by the Virgin of Rocamadour. Then you can walk down the steps and have a pleasant lunch and justify the second glass of cold Bergerac wine by virtue of having to pedal all the way back to Treyne in time for champagne cocktails on the patio and one last death-defying inhalation of foie gras.

—
Forbes FYI
, April 2002

We were a gay party that night at dinner at the hotel outside St. Rémy and slept soundly, if erratically, awaking at intervals throughout the night to the sound of—I would guess—ten thousand bullfrogs croaking symphonically. It’s not an unpleasant sound. I suppose it is reassurance of sorts that global warming has not yet asphyxiated critical links in the food chain. But when next I tuck into a plate of
cuisses de grenouille
, there will be a note of revenge.

There’s nothing like a thirty-seven-kilometer bicycle ride, the last six uphill and into a stiff mistral, to whet the appetite. And nothing like the Provençal landscape on a bright spring morning to squeegee eyes grimy from living amid skyscrapers. We pedaled through fields ablaze with red poppies, past lavender, herb, and melon, and orchard trees—apricot, cherry, plum, and olive—branches pendulous with ripeness. The sky seemed blue as never before, the clouds white as snow. The air shimmered. If it rained it would come down Perrier.

“This country,” Van Gogh wrote from here to Emile Bernard, “seems to me as beautiful as Japan as far as the limpidity of the atmosphere and the gay color effects are concerned.”

The main roads are lined with plane trees, originally planted by Henry IV. Everywhere you see straight lines of cypress trees, windbreaks against the stern mistral, which can blow so hard as to knock a man down or drive him mad. Perhaps it was a factor when a young ponytailed, spittle-spraying shepherd leapt out at me from the bushes with a knife. But first, lunch.

And what a lunch, at the Mas de la Brune near Eygalières. (
Mas
is Provençal for large farmhouse. In Paris, for some odd reason, the
s
is silent.) To the American eye, this particular
mas
seems more château than a milieu for clucking hens and mooing livestock. It was built in 1572, and into its limestone facade are carved the old French words for:
MORTAL: THINK OF YOUR END IN HELL, OR PARADISE WITHOUT END
. A sobering notice, but certainly on a higher plane than
WELCOME TO BILL AND BETTY’S
! We sat outside in the bright sunshine drinking cold pastis and watching the mistral ripple the château’s ivy.

The nonbicyclists had spent the morning at market in town, buying fresh vittles for our noon feast. They and the
mas
’s resident chef then cooked them in the kitchen. Out came platters of anchovy-tangy tapenades, grilled eggplant, ragouts, sausage, duck, cheeses without end, sun-warm cherries with mascarpone.

If this groaning board sounds familiar, you’re probably one of the seven billion people who read Peter Mayle’s book
A Year in Provence
. He lived not far from here, in the Luberon Valley. His great success was not without cost: If you make a place sound this wonderful, can busloads of tourists be far behind? His neighbors, the ones he wrote about so charmingly, were not thrilled by the resulting barbarian invasion. Mr. Mayle had to sell his house and flee. He entered the Author Protection Program and lives at an undisclosed location somewhere in Nebraska near an ICBM silo.

My encounter with the deranged knife-wielding
berger
took place after lunch, a mile or so northwest of the
mas
. Walking on ahead of the
group, I found the road completely blocked by two hundred or so sheep. I clapped my hands to shoo a path through them. This is apparently a serious faux pas in this part of Provence. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, nothing so concentrates the mind as to have a knife held to one’s throat. But the rest of the walk was delightful, and by six in the evening I had reached St. Rémy and drank a cold
pression
beer on a terrace named for Michel de Nostradame, born here in 1503.

Having spent many a hour over the years being bored comatose by people who maintain—insist—that Nostradamus predicted the Great Fire of London, World War II, the Kennedy assassination, and the 1986
Challenger
shuttle disaster, I was prepared to detest the man. But standing outside his house and reading the plaque I learned that he was a medical doctor, highly educated, greatly respected, and moreover, devoted much of his life to treating the plague with herbal medicines rather than with the ghastly “cures” favored by the more butcherly of his brethren. He so impressed Catherine de Médicis—albeit because of his prophecies—that he was installed as “King’s Doctor.” Too late to help her husband, Henry II, who took the tip of a jousting lance through the eye socket, but no blame can attach to Nostradamus for the king’s demise ten painful days later.

I walked the last kilometer back to the hotel in the gloaming, to the squeak and flutter of bats. Back at the château—words I hope to type many more times before I die—we gathered over cocktails to share the day’s gossip and adventures.

The Maison de Santé de Saint-Paul de Mausole has been a sanitarium on and off for four centuries. It was here that Vincent van Gogh came in May 1889 to find peace after the quarrels with his friend Paul Gauguin in Arles and cutting off part of his left ear and presenting it to a prostitute for safekeeping.

It’s peaceful here on a hot day, in the cool cloister filled with purple pansies and red and yellow roses. Poor Vincent was tormented by epileptic fits and probably by what we now call bipolar disorder: periods of manic intensity and abysmal depression. Upstairs above the
cloister is a replica of his room. You can look out through the iron-barred windows and imagine a swirling starry night looming above the field. He said that when he was painting, he never noticed the bars.

Vincent wrote eight hundred letters (in four languages) over his lifetime, mostly to his brother, Theo, the art dealer. During the fifty-three weeks he spent here at the asylum, before going north and shooting himself mortally in a wheat field at the age of thirty-seven, he produced 189 paintings—including the irises that would eventually set the record for the highest price fetched at auction at the time. He also managed to turn out a hundred drawings. It works out to about one work of art per day. He wrote to Theo: “As for me, I’m working like someone possessed . . .”

When he lived in nearby Arles, he fueled himself mostly on coffee and alcohol. To Theo: “I admit all that, but all the same it is true that to attain the high yellow note . . . I really had to be pretty well keyed up.” Coffee and absinthe—just what a doctor would prescribe for epilepsy and bipolar disorder. The calmer routine and the hydrotherapy baths at the asylum, along with Roman ruins, cypress groves, olive fields, and abundant irises, must have been a benison. He lived in terror of his fits and the frightening hallucinations. But without them, we would not have his
Starry Night
. Van Gogh is the artist who most elicits empathy, even as you sense, a bit guiltily, that you would probably have crossed the street to avoid him.

Before he left Arles for St. Rémy, he wrote to his sister: “As for myself, I am going to an asylum . . . not far from here, for three months. . . . Every day I take the remedy which the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide. It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread with cheese, and a pipe of tobacco. This is not complicated, you will tell me, and you will hardly be able to believe that this is the limit to which melancholy will take me; all the same, at some moments—oh dear me . . .”

One day we bicycled up a steep incline to the twelfth-century walled town of Bonnieux, where we ate lunch on a shady veranda and drank rosé and smoked cigars. From there we hiked through a valley of
cherry and olive trees and up another steep hill to the ruins of the castle that was once home to the Marquis de Sade.

The odd part—well, there were many odd parts to the Marquis—is that he emerged after thirteen years in the insane asylum at Charenton adamantly denying that he was the author of
Justine
and
The 120 Days of Sodom
. Those very naughty books—the
50 Shades of Gray
of their day—he published anonymously, whereas according to his biographer Francine du Plessix Gray, he published “more than twenty excruciatingly chaste, excruciatingly boring plays, and a few equally chaste and tedious prose fictions, of which he was immensely fond.”
Figurez-vous
.

He loved his château here at Lacoste, and he had some pretty good times in it, too. There were forty-two rooms, including a private theater—the home entertainment center of its day—that could seat eighty. At a time when hygiene did not rank high on any nobleman’s agenda, there were fifteen portable toilets and six bidets. The Marquise, Mrs. de Sade, even had a bathtub with a copper water heater. But then if you threw the kind of parties he did, innovative plumbing would have been de rigueur.

Between de Sade and Van Gogh, a lot of folks around here seem to have ended up in mental asylums. The shepherd who wanted to cut my throat for disturbing his sheep could use a week or two of anger-management therapy and hydrotherapy; or even a full frontal lobotomy. The afternoon’s de Sadean theme continued back at the château, when one of our party, a jovial but mischievous fellow, produced a bottle of absinthe.

Absinthe, after being mixed with iced, sugary water, tastes like molten Good & Plenty. Delicious. It is also 140-proof and distilled from wormwood, whose molecular structure bears an interesting resemblance to that of tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana. In Belle Epoque Paris, happy hour in the boulevard cafés was known as
l’heure verte
. How pleasantly we all chatted that night as our absinthe dispenser repeatedly refilled our glasses.

The next morning, lying sticky-mouthed in my bed of pain, the frogs beating a vicious tattoo in my eustachian tubes, I prayed for death; and for the death of the purveyor of the absinthe. It was
a pretty grisly twelve-kilometer hike over the Alpilles to Alphonse Daudet’s windmill. Someday I will return to pay proper homage to that writer of gentle, humorous tales. What Van Gogh felt like in the morning after four or five glasses of absinthe, with epilepsy and mania coming on . . . I’m no art historian, but is it possible the poor man intended to cut off not his ear but his entire head?

—
Forbes FYI
, April 2006