June 13, 2015
La Douze, France:
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I NEVER DID get the hang of Buffarot le Croquant. Still, it was good to come across him and his stone army, their hands raised in popular revolt. Capdrot, it was, a place you pronounce Cup-droh. Pretty enough but then striking because of the angry 17th-century peasant rebels lined in permanent discontent on the green.
I read the explanatory panel several times without elucidation. It fell into the "everyone knows that so we needn't mention it" category, so I never did find why he did all this angry marching about. He came to a sticky end, though, apparently flogged and then done to death. That was how it was done in those days.
I'm writing this after a day of wooded hills, chestnut trees, deciduous cousins, a few logging sites. There have been quiet lanes barely wide enough for two bikes, stone villages where nobody moved.
I reached Cadouin before the tourists. There used to be a bike museum here and there's still a campground and a big, stone youth hostel set back in a courtyard. It's a living, working village but trade in summer is from tourists and many of the buildings show it. I was one of them, of course, one of the first of the day after escaping the odd Dutch long before they'd stretched and left their caravans.
I stopped again within the hour and boiled my own coffee, sitting on a grass bank and earning a jovial wave from the smiling sort of man who probably waves at everybody. He reminded me of a moment ten years earlier when I sat in a café in America, listening to ol' boys reminisce about a mayor they'd once had, a mayor who waved to everyone he saw.
Come the day of his funeral, the town's police lined the entrance to the church and its graveyard. They stood stiffly to attention, their heads bowed, their caps in their hand. And when the coffin passed, they burst into smiles... and waved.
"You going far?", my man asked. I said I probably was. He didn't ask where to. It was enough to talk to another human, even one making coffee by the road.
I don't know why La Douze is called that. It means "the twelve", but doesn't say of what. I could have found out, I suppose. But I was distracted instead by hundreds of coloured, paper garlands strung across the road. The village was en fête, as French villages are happy to be. I didn't find out why any more than I found out the reason for the name. I was more taken by the way the roads were closed by barricades, specifically the one I needed to reach the campground from the village.
The official way was a detour of maybe 10km. That's how it looked on the sketch map pinned to one of the yellow barriers. Ten kilometres may not be much at the start of the day but they are a descent into the furnace right at the end, when a spot for the night is only a third that distance from where you stand.
I am a cyclist. I ignored the road closure. Nobody cared.
"They didn't tell us," the woman at the campground said, a wiry, smiling and deeply tanned old bird whose appearance defied any guess at her age. "They took the decision at the town hall and told everyone in town but not us. But it affects us more than anyone." She shrugged. The campers were getting there regardless but she was tired of apologising for local officialdom.
We sat and chatted. She came from Rouen, she said, but that was 35 years ago and she no longer considered herself a Norman, except perhaps in moments of civic pride.
"You know Rouen?", she asked.
I said I did. It's where they burned Joan of Arc, and the pillar where the English did it survived the war - unlike most of the city - and still stands.
"I stood my mother-in-law there once in the hope that history would repeat itself," I said.
She looked horrified. She was probably somebody's mother-in-law herself.
"You didn't!"
I said that, well, yes, actually I did.
"But it was a joke."
She looked at me reproachfully. I gathered I was expected not to do it again.
There are more Dutch here this evening. I don't mind. I like Holland and I like the Dutch. And clearly they have forgiven me for my sins of the previous night because everyone has been highly pleasant.
Thunder again now, though.
Today's ride: 100 km (62 miles)
Total: 190 km (118 miles)
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