Reflections IX                                                                         May, 2008

by Sandra Price

 

Yikes, my last Reflection on France was written in October, just before my visit to the States, and it’s now May and we’ve just made another visit to LaGrange and Oregon.  I suspect as we’ve gotten more involved with life in France, there’s less time to think.  But I’ll try to get you up to date. (There was a Reflection on our Christmas trip to India in between.)

 

(Actually, it’s now June 6th and we’re on an island off the southern coast of Brittany on a week-long vacation to Normandy and Brittany – details to follow in the next letter.  Since we’re expecting to be back in the States in September, I had better get these musings completed.)

 

On my October visit home I noticed

that there were only quite obese people at the doctor’s office.  There are overweight people in France.  Not everyone is slender and many slender folks smoke- but we’ve created a lifestyle that’s bad for us.  I wonder if the statisticians take obesity into account as they do actuarial tables.  Maybe Social Security is safe after all. 

 

that I still detest the “Let repeat dialing call you right back for {a mysterious, perhaps exorbitant} charge.”  Did they hire someone with the most grating voice they could find to make that announcement? 

 

that I always seem to be home during WBEZ’s pledge week.

 

that future shock is still operative.  I noted dramatic changes on way to airport.    

 

that service is still a concept in the US.  The woman at Enterprise suggested a way that I could return my car on the way to the airport since her office would be closed.  I smiled.   

 

that totally built-up La Grange is the future of Thoiry, our town in France, which threatens soon to have buildings on practically every lot.  Our neighbors are planning to build two next door to our house.

 

 

Other Aspects of the Fall Visit

On the October visit I did get out to Oregon and spent time with Matt and Sarah and belle soeur Peg and her petit-ami Solala and my beau-pere Ed.  Ed and I had good trips to see the Lussenhops in Sister and the Isaac-Olsons in Philomath.  And Ed and I did what we do best together.  We went shopping. 

 

Back in France

Once I got back, life reverted to twice-a-week French classes, a weekly tandem at lunch (a French-English exchange), some exercise classes, work with the Unitarian Universalist Group here, secretarial duties for a volunteer-organized website for Geneva organizations, and gatherings with my friends punctuated by reading to children at the Library in English for a hour once every two months and entertaining guests. Oh, and departement gathering trips.  Some highlights:

 

My Friday French conversation class is based on individuals giving brief presentations that seem to end up taking an hour.  I’ve learned about flying and scuba diving and Chinese astrology.  But my attempts to explain the American religious scene and Pat Chapman’s and my attempts to explain the primary system in the U.S. made me feel like I come from a really weird country. Did you know that there are an estimated 1500 religious groups in America, 1200 of which are Christian? Separation of church and state seem to have led to a proliferation of “church,” many of whom have learned to compete with each other.  Of course the local French elections which just happened gave me pause.  It seems that there are teams of 19 people for each village election with one person more or less heading the ticket of each team as mayor-to-be.  Voters can select a whole slate or cherry-pick from the slates.  There is a run-off if no one wins the first time.  Then the new council selects someone to be the mayor. That team is in office for six years.  Our mayor, who was seen as pro-development, lost to a former council member but it was a dirty election.  We got an unsigned two page sheet with a lot of misrepresentations and I gather the challengers went to the natives and warned of more and more “foreigners” if she were re-elected.

 

 

Departmental Adventures

 

December

Having worked one whole week-end, Larry was ready for a week-end jaunt so we went “departement hunting.”  (For those new to the list, I've set a goal of visiting every departement of France on the continent in my lifetime and I had 30 out of 93 to go yesterday. If France were a state, they would be counties.)  So we drove to Firminy beyond St. Etienne which is southwest of Lyon to see the Le Corbusier church which was finished just last year, 41 years after his death.  One goes to the Maison de Culture to get tickets for the Maison exhibits, the stadium, and the church, all designed by Le Corbusier.  He, incidentally, was born in Switzerland.  His apartment building in the area also has tours given by residents. The four sites were part of a larger post-war urban scheme called Firminy-Vert, and reminded me of the mostly unrealized planned communities I've visited in New Lanark in Scotland and La Saline Royale in the Jura Mountains not too far from us.

After four years working in the Frank Lloyd Wright Unity Temple in Oak Park, I've absorbed a bit of architectural knowledge.  Wright was maybe twenty years older than Le Corbusier and to my eye had some influence on the latter's work.  First, the roof of the Maison leaked, a necessary feature of Wright buildings.  Then the church was built of concrete, a material Wright pioneered as an architectural material in the Temple in 1905 or so, and has the kinds of levels and built-ins and use of light that typify Wright.  So we visited the Maison’s exhibits and then walked around the stadium and up the stairs to the church behind.  Here's what it looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Pierre%2C_Firminy.  Odd, yes?  Inside we wandered through a variety of rooms checking out home movies by Le Corbusier and Moholy-Nagy and other exhibits but I wanted to know where the sanctuary was.  We finally found the door and went up to a magical room with small "skylights" like stars on one wall, skylights on the ceiling in primary colors, a chapel area where those seated there could also be part of the larger congregation, curvy wooden pews, and a reconceived pulpit in concrete. Accessible by a ramp on the outside, the room is used for worship from time to time.  I'm not sure what a service would be like since there was a four-second echo but maybe a crowd would absorb some of that sound.  Anyway, I was delighted.  It was like the first time I went to St. Chapelle in Paris and thought the downstairs was nice but when I went up to the real chapel, I was overwhelmed.  So if you're in the Firminy ‘hood, stop by.

We then drove into 43 - Haute Loire - and over to 07 - Ardeche - through rain and even a snow storm.  It's called haute (high) for a reason.  We noted a fair amount of lumbering in evergreen forests.

 

January

While our husbands were at a meeting in the US, Ellen Taylor and I took off to get to as many departments in the center of France as we could.  On our way to Poitier, we drove into Moulin on the spur of the moment and saw a fantastic triptych done at the end of the 15th century for the Burgundian rulers in the local cathedral.  Opened only for prayer, it has brilliant color and extraordinary texture but until recently no one knew the identity of the Master of Moulin, the artist. The center panel is at http://www.abcgallery.com/H/hay/hay1.html.   An interesting touch is the portrait of the young daughter of the donors who are on either side of the triptych.  She is shown behind her mother and appears to be quite sickly and indeed died young.

 

After a night in  Poitier (big discovery – the Courtpaille chain of restaurants has real Idaho-style baked potatoes)  we drove through the countryside where there were signs along the road  “Hunting going on” which made us a bit nervous, in part because we did not know what we should do.  Then there was the herd of sheep on the road, who despite the exertions of an excellent sheep dog, took its time getting to the meadow of the day.

 

Ellen’s neighbor had suggested we go see Oradour-sur-Glane outside of Limoges.  Destroyed by the SS Troops in the area four days after D-Day, it has been left standing as it was with a new town built next door.  Although the tourist places with maps and explanations were closed for January, the site itself told the tale.  Troops arrived in the afternoon (older signs called them Germans, later ones called them Nazis) and rounded up, purportedly for an identity check, all the inhabitants and some unfortunate souls who arrived on the tram.  The men were divided into groups and taken to places where they were shot, sometimes in the legs to prolong dying, and the buildings were burned down.  The women and children were taken to the church where the incendiary device intended to suffocate them did not work and they were machine-gunned as they tried to escape out the windows and doors.  Six people survived, 642 were killed.  The buildings were destroyed and the troops moved north where within a few days most were dead in fighting in Normandy. Websites have competing explanations and there is a book called Massacre at Oradour that implicates Nazi gold.  There was a trial later but the French people insisted that troops from Alsace (called Malgre-nous – in spite of ourselves) who had been forced to join the Germany army be given a separate trial.  The results were unsatisfactory and the town returned the medals given it by the government. The town remains a reminder of awful choices and ugly situations that are part of any war.  The official website is http://www.oradour.info/.

 

We drove south to Rodez (with a southern French accent the “ez” is pronounced), stopping at Rocamadour, another monastery clinging to a rock face above a valley, this one noted for its Black Madonnas.  We noticed that one area had a terrific idea to reinforce the idea of speed changes as we entered the town.  Along with signs, there were dotted lines on either side of the road which changed color from ochre to green as we went from say 50 to 30.    We wandered around the city of Mende, meandered along the Lot River heading east and got back home via Puy-en-Velay on the edge of the volcanic area of France.  Talk about narrow streets on steep hills.  And I was driving Larry’s largish Citroen.  We spent time in at least nine departments and would have done more if it weren’t cold and rainy.  I still need to visit the three departments in Brittany and two to the west of Paris and ten in the southwest. 

 

A Week-end in Paris

Early February found Larry and me in Paris where we met grad school friends.  Actually I went up on a Friday and met Peggy Mooney and we took a train to Rouen so that I could get to two more departments.  Rouen is a lively town and we especially marveled at a church built next to one bombed in the war that marked the spot where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.  The design, which is hard to describe, evokes a fish diving into the water.  In the evening we met up with Larry and John, Peggy’s husband, for a delicious dinner.  Saturday we took in the Arts et Metiers Museum which is fascinating for lovers of science and history and mechanical devices, sometimes illustrated with silent movies.  Did you know that the first “car” did not have brakes and ended its short life crashing into a wall.  The special exhibit at Arts et Metiers was on Ben Franklin, an anniversary show transplanted from the US and given a French twist.  One feature was the list Ben wrote by hand, all 35 pages of it, detailing what the colonists wanted in the way of military supplies from the French, everything from buttons to cannons.  That evening we saw Moliere’s School for Wives with Daniel Auteuil, a famous French actor.  We’d all mostly read the play in French before but the acting was broad enough that we got the story even if we didn’t get every word.   Sunday we all stopped into the Arsenal Center, devoted to an urban planning look at the history of Paris and an architectural exhibit of buildings done around the world by French architects.  Then it was back to Thoiry. 

 

Another Departement Hunting Trip

On our way home from the States in May, Larry indulged my notion that I was close to Brittany with three departments and we took a quick trip.  Actually he said that we could write an article for the New York Times’ travel section called 3.6 hours in Brest as a result of our visit.  (The Times has a regular feature called “36 Hours in __.”)  The most important thing we learned is that you can’t do a spur-of –the-moment trip in France on a week-end  with a holiday attached.  We got into Paris from the States around 9 and learned at the train station at Charles de Gaulle airport that there were no seats on trains to Rennes from Montparnasse Station, so we snagged seats on a train leaving from the airport.  But what to do about luggage?  We each had a carry-on and then two giant suitcases holding essentials like cereal and shoes and books as well as one other smallish case.  There are left luggage lockers at the Gares de Lyon and Montparnasse but we weren’t going there.  We tracked down rumors of a place at CDG  (in F2) but it turns out that they don’t keep the luggage at the airport and you need to give 6 hours notice to get your bags back. Not very flexible.  In terms of left-luggage, the bully bombers have won.   So we hauled it with us, changing trains at Rennes and pulling it up the hill to our hotel in Brest around 7:30 PM.  Larry had found on the web a fine local haunt that featured seafood for our dinner.  On the way to the restaurant we passed an American Memorial, first built after WWI to honor the work of the American and French navies.  It was obviously rebuilt after the bombings of WWII.  The Germans has a submarine shelter near Brest which was an elusive target.  A panel in the rebuilt cathedral said that of 4000 buildings in Brest in 1940, 200 were intact after the war.  Now it is a modern city with wide roads and lots of parks and a movement to preserve the architecture of the buildings constructed after the war.   

 

As for our few hours, we walked down the main shopping street, the rue de Siam so named because a delegation from Siam (Thailand) to the French king landed in Brest in 1686.   On the waterfront we found dry docks and two floating bridges that could be opened to let traffic up the Penfeld River.  The Chateau in the harbor still stands with some 3rd century Roman walls, medieval towers, Vauban (important 17th century military architect) improvements, and modern changes.  Since part of the marine museum at the Chateau is being repaired, we saw enough to leave time for the Musee de Beaux Arts.  One aspect of the Marine museum was a section on the prisoners who were used in galleys until 1752 and then as slave labor around the harbor and town until sent off to Guyana and other colonies by Napoleon III.  They had totally dismal lives but it did pay to have a skill because those men got light as opposed to heavy labor. Brest was also part of the African slave trade although Nantes seems to have been far more important. (An article in today’s Figaro features an article about Michaille Jean, the appointed current governor-general of Canada who was a Haitian refugee to Quebec when she was 11. She has urged Sarkozy to remember the horrors of slavery as part of the integrating of France’s social groups.)

 

The Beaux Art features painters from the Port Aven school, who were strongly indebted to Gauguin and whose work is labeled Symbolist and cloisonnee.  We also made an unwitting pilgrimage to the Leclerc department store.  Leclerc started his France-wide chain in nearby Landerneau . 

 

I hope all is well with you.

 

Sandy

 

  

Factoids

France still has a de-mining team that takes care of unexploded ordinance from World War I.  That’s almost a hundred years ago.  And armies keep planting the grenades and shooting off ordinance. 

 

Owner-occupied housing in Switzerland is just 36% of the housing stock.  In the US it’s estimated by the Census bureau to be 67%.  The number for Switzerland is a new high based on low interest rates and lots of new housing, mostly condos.  The article I read was from 2005 so I don’t know how the sub-prime fiasco is affecting the numbers.  The mortgages seem not to be fixed-rate. 

 

Herons often hang around cow herds.  We wondered what kind of fish they were finding in the meadow but Fred Borcherding, our experts on cows, says that the animals stir up the bugs and also leave undigested bits in their cowpies. 

 

The Suisse French speakers call dandelions “dents-de-lion” or lion’s teeth.  The French have moved on to a new word “pissenlit” which celebrates the diuretic properties of the plant.  “Lit” means “bed.” 

 

Protestant Geneva recognized the reestablishment of Catholicism in 1794 by the Treaty of Reunion when it became part of France after the Revolution.  The church called St. Germain was reserved for Catholics.  We passed the building recently and noticed it was called Catholic-Christian.  Turns out that it and some other churches in the Protestant areas of  Switzerland and Holland broke from the Roman Catholic Church over papal infallibility in 1870.  Who knew?