Betsy’s Dispatch for Tuesday, June 14, 2011
We missed yesterday as it was Pentecost so the Centre Social was closed.
To expand on the annual Vide Grenier (Empty the Attic) Sunday morning. ( See JP's pictures above-or perhaps below). It was in an open air fairground under some large trees near the Cerou River. To get there you had to cross on a bridge 10’ wide. People were set up all around in no discernible order, with stuff on tables, blankets or hanging in the trees. Five or six guys from the local fire department were there in red Tee Shirts inscribed with their department name, carrying around what looked like an old metal milk can of coffee and a box of fresh croissants to sell. They laughed and joked with everybody. We looked at lots of stuff , figurines, clothes, dishes, cut glass this and that, and lots of rusty old tools, latches, scales, ice saws, lots of old cds and beaucoup de coffee grinders. JP looked at a lot of those. We met Madame from the Chateau Bourguet and her husband there. She was very pleased as we said how much we liked the wine. The people here are so forgiving about our French. It is language stone soup: everyone gestures and smiles and pitches in a word they know and pretty soon we have a conversation. We found one man from Portugal near the Spanish border who has lived in France so long he has forgotten both Spanish and Portuguese. We told him we were from New Bedford with Beaucoup de Portuguese, but I don’t know if he understood us. (By the way, do not look for accuracy in my French here). Anyway, he had a line of old Peugeot coffee grinders and we got a lovely one that marche bien still though it had a broken wooden edge on the top. But the very best was the little unframed painting on canvas, about 12” by 9”, dirty and with loose paint in the upper right corner of the sky, a landscape with a shepherdess watching 4-5 sheep on a bluff, a little river in the foreground, and in the background a little hill with a castle. A peinture du 19th siecle!!! Les Powels!! JP thinks the antique frame, long gone, may have had the greater value and perhaps it was bought for that alone. Pascal was the seller: a tall thin man with crooked uncared for teeth, narrow face, tentative air and a very sweet smile. He gave the price. We looked and walked around, met a man from Valpariso, Chile who left there when he was 22, about 29 years ago. JP had had him pegged as having Andean Indian background. He said not many Americans come to this area. Too bad. But not for us. We had decided since we scream American wherever we go – or maybe British, don’t know, we would embrace that and be the kind of Americans to make you and Obama proud… Anyway, we went back to the painting and ended up buying it for all the Euros in our billfolds. Euros are the prettiest folding money I know of with their pictures of cathedrals and aquaducts and that silver strip. The coins are very pleasing too. Real money is back home in the bank, we devoutly hope. We can ask Charles how we did, but whatever he says, we are confident that we did splendidly given that it is such a truly wonderful, appealing little thing and we were not buying as an investment. We are so pleased!! We went to the car, then came back and got pictures of Pascal and me and the Moline de cafe man and me and the Volunteer Fire Department (Pompiers) and JP. As JP says, more succinctly, they were cut from the same cloth as the Dartmouth volunteers, full of esprit de corps, loud, and proud of their service and rightfully so. Bob Butler would have been right at home.
Sunday afternoon we rushed into Cordes. There was a police trap set up in Vendrac but an oncoming car flashed the universal warning lights and we were very properly slow as we went by the gendarmes. Most people were leaving as we walked up to the St Michel cathedral on the top for a concert by the local community choir, 25 people in red and black lead by a small skinny guy with a long and bushy beard. He introduced the pieces, by Rachmaninoff, Zerlinka, Buxtehude and Bach. The singing was thin, reedy, slightly flat and gawky, but wonderful. Mark Doty has a poem about the transformation of the Provincetown hairdressers, grocery clerks, queens and town officials, into angels when they sing the Messiah. That was true here; amateurs that are brought together in the service of immortal music in a holy and echoing space really do partake of some sort of grace. This may have been a more accurate reflection of how much of this music has been performed; there can’t have been too many Robert Shaw Chorales in the provinces. Coming down we tried to figure out the one way streets leading in and out of Cordes, got home and had the coc au vin. Just yummy and no congealed fat on top of the gelatin. We’ll need more wine very soon.
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