Laurette Long

Simone Veil, 13 July 1927-30 June 2017: Portrait of a great lady.

Today’s post is a tribute to one of my heroines, Simone Veil. Since I started blogging in January 2015, it’s been a huge pleasure, an indulgence really, to write mostly in light-hearted vein about the things that interest me with no constraints of time or choice of subject. But occasionally topics would intrude that had to be treated more seriously, and today’s post has given me, to be frank, a major headache. How to reduce to 2000 (and a bit more) words a piece that conveys, in the best possible way, all the million things that needed saying about a woman who has been an inspiration for more than 50 years, not just to me, but to millions?

After 15 highly unsatisfactory drafts, here goes. Today would have been her 90^th birthday. Tomorrow is le quatorze juillet, Bastille Day, the Fête Nationale here in France. As a very minor part of the celebrations, I’m happy to say you can download my book of blogs, A View From The Tarn, free from 14 to 16 July (details at the end of the post).

Bonne fête, bonne lecture and vive la France!

***

‘Nous vous aimons, Madame.’

With the three simple words ‘we love you’, Jean D’Ormesson, welcomed Simone Veil* to the ‘temple of the French language’, the French Academy, in March 2010.

On June 30^th this year as news of her death broke in France, his sentiment was echoed in the tributes of an entire nation. In a world of political tarnish, Simone Veil gleamed gold. She was respected, adored, revered even. In the outpouring of emotion on June 30^th, many said they were ‘in mourning’ for one who will remain ‘immortal’. Today, July 13^th, would have been her 90^th birthday.

Who was this extraordinary woman with an extraordinary destiny, a woman who, for the space of a few days, achieved the miracle of uniting a country renowned, particularly of late, for its bitter quarrels and divisions? The woman whose beauty left admirers lost for words, and who, with one look from her turquoise eyes could make grown men tremble and inspire adoration in those who had lost hope?

We all need role models, examples, people who set a standard, who inspire us to do our best. Heroes and heroines. Open any magazine and you’ll see the latest contenders. Personalities from the world of arts and culture, from popular entertainment. How many come from the world of politics? And how many will stand the test of time?

The Panthéon, in Paris, is the resting place for many who have left their imprint on French history: Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Jean Jaurès, Marie Curie, Jean Moulin…The latest to join them is Simone Veil, who, growing up as Simone Jacob, youngest of four children in a secular Jewish family living in Nice, could hardly have imagined that one day she would be laid to rest in their company, an inspiration for both men and women, a true French heroine.

Paris Match pays tribute to ‘A French Heroine’ the woman with the turquoise eyes

Back to March, 2010. In the solemn ceremony marking the election of a new member to one of France’s most august institutions, Simone Veil, like those before her, wore the traditional costume of the Academy, ‘l’habit vert’, and carried the traditional sword. But her sword was engraved with a number: 78651. It was the same as that on her left arm, the tattoo she received on April 15^th 1944, arriving at the extermination camp of Auschwitz Birkenau. She was 16. Although she would survive and go on to become a great stateswoman in the country from which she was deported, her mother Yvonne, her brother Jean, and father André would never return to their homeland. They were part of the six million murdered simply because they were Jews.

Two striking characteristics of Simone Veil were her humanity and her passion for justice. In her lucid and moving biography, Une Vie**, she says that her experience as a deportee gave her ‘an acute sensitivity to everything that, in our human relations with one another, leads to the humiliation and abasement of others.’ This awareness gave her a special perspective which rejected all extremes and aimed at reconciliation between often contradictory concepts. Nicolas Sarkozy, protégé and close friend, described her as ‘adhering to no ideology, having paid too high a price herself for the madness of ideologues.’ In a television interview she talked about ‘being on the left’ for some issues, ‘on the right’ for others. She was a traditionalist who believed in progress, a woman whose past was overshadowed by tragedy but who looked to the future with hope; in the words of D’Ormesson ‘la tradition même, et la modernité incarnée’ (the embodiment of tradition, and the incarnation of modernity).

Recalling that first terrible day at Auschwitz, she describes how she, her mother, and sister Milou, along with other women, were herded into the showers, then dumped onto benches, naked, while the ‘kapos’ paraded up and down in front of them, laughing, making humiliating comments about their appearance and prodding their bare flesh like housewives choosing meat at the butcher’s. ‘We were comic figures for a jeering audience,’ as another survivor put it. In an image which conveys the nightmare of those hours Simone Veil says it was like ‘the horror of suddenly finding yourself in a medieval painting, one of those where you are in the group of people who have fallen into hell.’

Nice, France
courtesy Justin Knabb, flickr
https://www.flickr.com/photos/justinknabb/5025500727

She never forgot the smell of Auschwitz–‘fetid, made up of rot and mud and the smell of the smoke from the crematorium…We lived enveloped in the permanent stench of burning’. (In a tragic parallel, my last post was about the Cathars who, 800 years previously, also paid the price of being different through relentless persecution and burnings.) What impression must all of this have made on a young girl who grew up ‘in a paradise’, breathing the perfumed air and sea breezes of Nice, that vibrant, beautiful city on the dazzling Riviera? As they were stripped of their possessions by the guards, one of her friends hung on to a small bottle of perfume. ‘They’re going to take it,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to give it to them.’ And the young women splashed themselves from head to toe in Lanvin’s famous perfume, Arpège, a last gesture of defiant femininity before they would have to put on the rags of the dispossessed.

The Seven Year Dress: A Novel by [Mahurin, Paulette] — Paulette Mahurin’s novel also set in Auschwitz

How did she, and others like her, manage not just to survive such a hell, but to find a way to go on afterwards, more victors than victims? This is a major theme of two outstanding novels written in 2016 by authors Paulette Mahurin and Anita Nasr***. It’s echoed in W. E. Henley’s poem of 1875, Invictus**** with its mantra ‘I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul’. Writing about the carefree ‘joie de vivre’ of her childhood, the warmth and unity of family life, her education in civic values, Simone Veil concludes ‘we received the best arms with which to face life.’ Elsewhere she talks about the human capacity to preserve the will to live, the strength to live. Her mother, who died of typhus on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen one month before the liberation of the camps, remained an eternal role model for her daughter. ‘She was,’ she says, ‘good and generous…’ Simone was younger, harder, more of a rebel. She defended her mother from those who tried to steal her food and, on the terrible march through the snow, from those who tried to hang on to her for support. She only remembers crying twice, once when she was reprimanded by Milou, the second time when she found out her other sister, Denise, was still alive*****. What we experienced she says, was ‘beyond tears’.

The flint and the fire. It was this toughness and this baptism of fire that reinforced the ideals that would guide her through life, a respect for others and their differences, and a desire to create a better world where what she and millions had suffered would never be repeated. She would demonstrate time after time in her future career that her aim was not to please, not to follow a party-political line, but to listen to her conscience. And in a life of battles, the year 1974 would stand out, as she prepared one of the most controversial laws in French history.

But that was still in the future. In 1945 Simone Jacob returned to France where she discovered with bewilderment that many simply did not want to talk about what had happened. Even worse was the reaction in some quarters that, because she and other had survived, this was obvious proof that ‘things weren’t as bad as all that.’ For months she experienced a feeling of unreality and disconnection. Fortunately she was soon to meet the man she married, and who would remain her rock and companion for 67 years, Antoine Veil. With him she founded a family, and after the birth of her third son, she made the decision to return to her studies and a future career. (This was against her husband’s wishes, but Simone had a way of persuading people round to her ideas…)

The Simone of legend was on the move. Her initial fight, after becoming a magistrate, was to obtain better conditions for prisoners. But as she rose through the ranks to the post of Minister of Health in the new government of Giscard D’Estaing, she approached the first of the truly important battles that would stand out as landmarks in her personal career and in the history of France.

The country was changing. It had gone through the social upheaval of May 1968; the woman’s movement was gaining momentum. In 1971, a shock manifesto hit the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur magazine. Written by Simone De Beauvoir, it was signed by 343 women who all admitted to having had abortions. Their aim was to pressurise the government into legalising a risky procedure undertaken every year by thousands of women, those who couldn’t afford the price of a legal abortion abroad. In 1972 events took an even more dramatic turn when human rights lawyer Gisèle Halimi defended a 16-year-old girl charged with having an illegal abortion after being raped by one of her schoolmates.

Something had to be done. Giscard, and his Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, knew the topic was highly controversial for the majority of their party members. Who to entrust with the unpopular job of trying to change the law?

‘We can no longer close our eyes to the 300, 000 abortions which, every year, mutilate the women of this country’. These were Simone Veil’s words to a packed National Assembly consisting of 481 male deputies and 9 females on November 26, 1974.

Simone Veil addressing the Assemblée Nationale

There followed a marathon debate of unprecedented violence lasting three days and two nights. Melodramatic speeches and demonstrations took place. A recording of the heartbeats of a foetus was passed round the chamber, with the prophecy that the law, if passed, would produce twice as many victims every year as the bomb on Hiroshima. Simone Veil herself was subjected to abuse and insults with references to embryos ‘thrown into ovens’, abattoirs piled with the corpses of ‘little men’, ‘Nazi barbarity’ and even ‘genocide’. She was insulted in the street, her children were threatened and her home and car daubed with swastikas.

Yet she continued to plead her case with unflagging courage and lucidity. ‘No woman undertakes an abortion lightly,’ she told the Assembly. Refusing to descend to the level of insults of her opponents, she reiterated her faith in the younger generation: ‘they are courageous, capable of enthusiasm and sacrifices like anyone else. Let us put our trust in them…’******

It’s tempting to imagine that, after facing humiliation from the female kapos at Auschwitz, the insults of a bunch of bigoted men didn’t count for much in the grander scheme of things. But the ordeal took its toll. In a 2004 interview she admits she never imagined being the object of such intense hatred, and one famous clip shows her with her head in her hands. For many, however, the enduring image of that time is of an erect, dignified figure in trademark Chanel and pearls, hair swept back in an impeccable chignon, looking for all the world like the person she was, a wife, a mother, a member of the middle classes, ‘la tradition même’ yet, at the same time, ‘la modernité incarnée.’

On November 29^th, 1974, the Loi Veil was adopted by 284 votes to 189. Bloody, but unbowed, Madame la Ministre could breathe for a while before getting caught up in the two other major tasks that awaited her: the vital preservation of the past, a memorial to the Holocaust, the Foundation for the Memory of Shoah, of which she would be president for five years, and the creation of the new: the re-unification of Europe, and Franco-German reconciliation.

In Une Vie she writes that she never really got over her mother’s death. ‘Every day she is with me, and what I have done is thanks to her.’ In 1945, as Yvonne lay dying, she said ‘Ne veuillez jamais de mal aux autres, nous savons trop ce que c’est’ (never wish harm to others, we know what that means only too well). When, in 1979, Simone Veil was elected first President of the brand new European Parliament, it was the memory of her mother that spurred her to battle for the dignity and freedom of future generations, and their right to a world of ‘never again’.

Her disappearance comes at a time when the European dream has dimmed for many initially carried along by the wave of optimism she symbolised in 1979. On the wider political scene, with its posturing narcissists and vulgar brawlers, it’s hard to think of anyone who comes near the standards set for more than half a century by this modest woman, number 78651, who once said ‘I have the feeling that, the day I die, my last thoughts will be of the Holocaust.’ In the moving eulogy given by her son, Pierre-François, he recounts that her last word to those gathered by her bedside was ‘Merci.’

http://www.lemonde.fr/mort-de-simone-veil/video/2017/07/05/l-hommage-de-pierre-francois-veil-a-sa-mere-simone-veil_5156154_5153643.html

Messages on Twitter: ‘Simone Veil sur nous’

On social media following her death a prayer was taken up by hundreds of voices: ‘Simone Veil sur nous’ (Veil being pronounced the same way as the word ‘veille’ = watch over).

‘Simone, watch over us.’

Indeed.

In memory of Simone Veil, and the victims in the attack on her native city of Nice, July 14^th 2016.

*Not to be confused with the philosopher Simone Weil

** Translated into English as ‘A Life’:

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Simone-Veil/dp/1906598231

*** see my blog December 2016

https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Year-Dress-Novel-ebook/dp/B01FEAX7AU

https://www.amazon.com/Miro-E-Nasr/dp/1533465312

****see blog January 2017

***** Denise Jacob joined the French Resistance. She was captured, tortured and sent to Ravensbruck. Simone and Milou, with no news of her, believed she was dead.

******The full text can be found here:

http://www.bfmtv.com/politique/texte-le-discours-de-simone-veil-en-1974-a-l-assemblee-nationale-1198272.html)

A View from the Tarn: Slow Blogging in a Fast World, free download July 14th-16th

A collection of 26 blogs about the joys of reading, writing and life in the French countryside

https://www.amazon.com/View-Tarn-Slow-blogging-world-ebook/dp/B0725734FD

https://www.amazon.co.uk/View-Tarn-Slow-blogging-world-ebook/dp/B0725734FD

The Autoroute des Deux Mers: Part Two: Cathar country

Note: Minutes after posting this I learnt that Simone Veil died today. She’d been on my list of blog subjects for ages, such an amazing and inspirational person that I was lost for words to write about her. Today’s post about religious persecution is perhaps a fitting way to say ‘au revoir’ to this unforgettable lady, who survived Auschwitz and went on to become an icon for women everywhere. Simone Veil, 13 July 1927 – 30 June 2017.

The siege of Carcassonne 1209. The penitents were allowed to leave with what they stood up in.

I might have let slip that I’m a huge fan of Michel de Montaigne. How about this thought for the day from the great Renaissance humanist?

‘Si la vie n’est qu’un passage, sur ce passage au moins semons des fleurs.’ (If life is but a passage, then at least let us sow flowers along our way.)

The history of mankind, however, has shown that not everyone agrees with this way of seeing the world. A more appropriate quotation for this month’s blog comes from another favourite writer, Voltaire, in a letter to his old friend Lecornier de Cideville in 1754.

‘Ce monde-ci est un vaste naufrage; sauve qui peut; mais je suis bien loin du rivage!’ (This world of ours is a vast shipwreck; every man for himself; personally I’m a long way from the shore!’)

The April blog ended with the promise to resume, in May, with Part 2 of ‘L’Autoroute des Deux Mers’ as it entered les Corbières, a part of Cathar country which, eight centuries ago, was the theatre of one of the bloodiest struggles in the history of Occitania. The battles that were fought over two interpretations of one religion ended in a devastating trail of burnings and massacres, a lesson from those who considered themselves to have the right answer to those who disagreed. And the reason Part 2 is late is that during the past weeks I, like others, have been demoralised to the point of silence by acts committed in Manchester, London and elsewhere, as more recent pages of history have been branded with the mark of atrocities committed under the banner of another religious ideology.

In 1975 a relatively unknown French historian called Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, published a book about a small village in the high Pyrenees. Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324’ (Montaillou, an Occitanian village, 1294 to 1324) recounts the daily life of this medieval rural community of 200 people, farmers, shepherds and mountain men.

To everyone’s surprise (including the author and his publisher) the book became an international best seller. Interest in regional history, in particular the Cathars, was undergoing a revival, and Ladurie’s book, with its detailed picture of this peaceful, progressive, egalitarian community, its complex social organisation and fascinating local characters, brought a unique perspective to this mysterious ‘branch’ of Christianity. It was based on the records kept by Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers (later Pope Benoit XII), the zealous Inquisitor tasked by the Catholic church to root out the heretics in this ‘Cathar-infested’ community. But what happened in Montaillou was the end of the story. Fournier, like his fellow Inquisitors in the region, was busy hammering the final nails into the coffin of a ‘heresy’ which, until the end of the 12^th century, had coexisted peacefully alongside traditional Catholicism in the Midi.

So how did it all start? Why did the Cathars suddenly come under the scrutiny of Rome? One reason was the movement`s success. Albi, Agen, Toulouse, Carcassonne Mirepoix, Limoux-large swathes of the Languedoc had been seduced by this interpretation of Christianity. It was a spreading ‘leprosy’ that had to be cut out before it went further. Looking at what happened from a 21^st century perspective (and not a little influenced by George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones), I’m guessing that human nature hasn’t changed all that much, and that some aspects of Catharism more than others must have been particularly alarming to the established church. One was the idea that the relationship between believers and their God was personal, private and direct. It had no need of a hierarchy of self-appointed interpreters, particularly those who surrounded themselves with pomp and riches.

Along with this anti-clericalism was the practice of an ascetic, spiritual way of life as a way of transcending an earthly domain dominated by Satan. The ‘bons hommes’ and ‘bonnes femmes’ were tolerant and non-violent, but they firmly believed that their version of Christianity was the true one. (In one of those fascinating historical and literary loops, over in the east of France another ‘heretical’ movement was also growing. The Waldensians make an appearance in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, along with Inquisitor Bernard Gui, who happened to be the Inquisitor in Toulouse from 1307 to1323 and who, like Fournier, kept detailed records of his interrogations.)*

One can see how, at the time, all of this would have been a serious pain in the Papal derrière. If things carried on unchecked, a lot of people would be moving out of their sumptuous free housing, abandoning their well-stocked wine cellars and making their way to the medieval job centre. What was to be done about those rebellious Occitans, Cathar communities and the uppity, independent southern counts and viscounts who supported them, who didn’t speak ‘proper’ French, and who had somehow resisted all attempts to be brought back on the right path?

And therein lay another problem. Centuries later, Riquet, planning his Canal du Midi through the same territory, was flummoxed by a geographical handicap, the watershed at Naurouze. In medieval times, an equally vexatious watershed divided north from south, this one linguistic. The Northerners spoke the language of ‘oil’, while the southerners spoke the language of ‘oc’ (‘oil’ and ‘oc’ being the words for ‘yes’). The land of ‘oc’ (Languedoc) at that time extended roughly southwards from Bordeaux almost to Nice; and its lilting, musical language was that of the troubadours and their lyric poetry. In the Dictionnaire of 1762, the word ‘patois’, meaning non-standard French, is defined as ‘rustic, vulgar language as spoken by peasants or lower orders’ **.

History is full of examples of what happens when one lot of people start thinking things another lot don’t agree with. A frustrated Pope Innocent III, having in vain tried to get the Occitans to change their ways, decided enough was enough when one of his Papal legates, having failed to get the Count of Toulouse to toe the line, was mysteriously murdered on his way back to Rome. He appealed to the men in the north, the King of France and his vassals. The dogs of war were unleashed and a terrible revenge descended on the rich and fertile lands of the Midi. The days were numbered for this courtly society where religious tolerance was practised and the arts flourished.

In 1209 thousands of northerners donned the Crusader’s cross and marched south down the valley of the Rhone. We all know about the Crusades, right? All those books and films about the heroic time in the Middle Ages when brave and chivalrous knights set out for the Holy Land to fight against Saladin. Richard the Lionheart, Ivanhoe, Robin Hood…

But these French crusaders were not marching to defend the Holy Land. They were marching against their fellow countrymen. The Albigensian crusade was under way, flying the flag of the true faith against the Cathar heretics. Their noble mission was of course spurred on by the usual baser motives. Crusading may have been a way of getting to heaven but it was also a way of getting rich. Those nobles of the Midi, the Counts of Toulouse, the Trencavel family of Carcassonne, long engaged in their own political chess, were masters of rich territories that were not subject to the French crown.

The military struggle would last for decades until Toulouse, and the devastated and blackened countryside around, would finally belong to the King of France after the signing of the 1229 Treaty of Paris. After that would come the second, equally terrifying, prong of the attack, the Inquisition. By 1330, with the last turn of the Inquisitorial screw, the Cathars of Languedoc were finished.

Yellow route from Lavaur to Perpignan, using the Autoroute des Deux Mers and La Catalane. Canal du Midi in blue

We started our journey to the A61 north east of Toulouse in Lavaur, the peaceful market town which has been home for the past six years. Spring is a particularly beautiful season with gardens and hedgerows bursting with pink and white blossom. It`s hard to imagine what took place here in May 1211, two years after the Crusaders had first been let loose in the south. Lavaur was an important Cathar stronghold. In a terrible punishment for its intransigence the biggest bonfire of the whole campaign took place, with 400 heretics burned at the stake, 80 knights hanged in violation of the chivalric code, and the town’s Chatelaine, Dame Guiraude, handed over to the soldiers before being thrown down a well and stoned to death. The leader of the troops was a man called Simon De Montfort

But back to July 1209. The first city to feel the weight of the sword was Béziers, near the Mediterranean, where four centuries later Pierre-Paul Riquet would be born, and later build his incredible staircase of locks. The sack of Béziers was particularly horrifying. The town was heavily fortified and the local population had taken refuge inside the walls, refusing to hand over the Cathars. But there was a slip up; the defences were breached and the mob rushed inside the walls, killing and plundering indiscriminately. The leader of the troops, Papal Legate Arnaud Amaury, asked how to distinguish Cathars from Catholics, gave the infamous reply ‘Kill them all, God will know his own.’ In this first shock victory for the Crusaders, an estimated 20,000 people were massacred.

From Béziers the army wheeled into the Corbières, a great machine destroying everything in its path. The rugged, bleakly imposing landscape, parts of it unchanged over the last 800 years, is a fittingly dramatic backdrop to the atrocities carried out here. From the Autoroute des Deux Mers there are glimpses of ruined fortresses on hilltops, forlorn reminders of more doomed sieges. The Cathar way, running from Port-la-Nouvelle on the Mediterranean to Foix in the foothills of the Pyrenees, takes in the dramatic sites of Quéribus, Peyrepertuse and Montségur, medieval ‘villages in the sky’. Montségur, built on a rocky hilltop at 1207 metres, fell after a siege lasting 10 months. 225 ‘bonshommes’ were burned at the stake. Quéribus, defying gravity on a rocky ridge, was the last to secede, in 1255.

Carcassonne rising from the vines, blue hills beyond

But the most coveted and perhaps the most spectacular of all Cathar strongholds in the Corbières was that of Carcassonne, the seat of Viscount Raymond-Roger de Trencavel. It appears on the left as you drive down the A 61, inevitably bringing a gasp of surprise from those who have never seen it before. Fallen into a sad pile of rubble, the fortified city was rebuilt in the 19^th century by Violett-le-Duc in a 60-year long restauration project, and if you pull off the motorway and park at the viewpoint you’d think you were looking at a fairy-tale castle in a Disney film 😉 *** The air is full of the sound of cicadas and the smell of hot pine-needles, and in front of you, set against the shimmering blue of the distant mountains, a dreamlike vision rises from the vines, its slate turrets and stone ramparts transporting you back to the world of childhood, and stories of knights, castles, minstrels and troubadours.

In August 1209, de Trencavel and his knights watched and waited, stunned by the news from Béziers. The city had been expected to hold for forty days, the standard length of service for crusaders. De Trencavel’s hopes, that the army continuing on to Carcassonne would be much reduced in size, had been crushed. Now thousands of people had taken refuge inside the walls as a crushing heatwave descended on the region. On their arrival, the Crusaders occupied the bank of the River Aude, cutting off the water supply. Dysentery and typhoid broke out. With the situation worsening, deTrencavel offered himself as hostage in exchange for the free departure of those under his protection. Amaury allowed them to leave in what they were standing up in, then threw de Trencavel into the dungeons where he died three months later. The city and its fiefdoms were handed to a Catholic knight, Simon de Montfort.

Having completed their 40 days of service, many barons now went home. But De Montfort stayed on. He would become one of the richest of the conquerors, pursuing his campaigns with a zeal and a bitter relentlessness which made him the terror of Occitania. Ambitious, pitiless, he continued to burn and massacre until 1218, when he was killed during the siege of Toulouse, with some versions of the story recounting that the stone which fatally injured him was launched from the barricades by a woman…

With Carcassonne and the Corbières behind us, neat round silhouettes of pins parasols signal the approach to the Mediterranean. The Autoroute des Deux Mers is ending. Just north of Narbonne the road splits as we hit the A9, the motorway which runs along the coast between France’s natural barriers, the Pyrenees and the Alps.

We turn right, heading west, down through the vineyards of Fitou towards the snapping flags and screaming gulls of the Côte Vermeil. Canigou, Mountain of the Gods, dominates the horizon, its snow-capped peak dazzling against a cerulean sky. Signs announce we’re on La Catalane, the motorway through Catalonia, the province at the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenean range, with one foot in France and the other in Spain. It’s a province with its own language, Catalan, and its traditional dance, the sardana.

At the other end of the Pyrenees lies the Atlantic Ocean, where another region straddles the frontier between two countries, one with an even more mysterious culture and language, le pays basque.

On one side, the ghostly whalers of the Atlantic, on the other, the ships of Ulysses drifting across the wine dark sea.

But that’s another story, and another journey through history.

Dancing the sardana in catalan espadrilles

*An excellent, detailed account of Catharism can be found in Sean Martin’s book: The Cathars.

https://www.amazon.com/Cathars-Most-Successful-Heresy-Middle/dp/1843443368

** Graham Robb, in his fascinating book The Discovery of France (thank you Margaret W. for this gift!) explains it all from a historical point of view. For a thrilling fictional account of 12^th century political and religious intrigue, plus a great love story, read Jean’s Gill’s Song at Dawn, Book 1 of The Troubadour Quartet.

https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-France-Picador-Classic-ebook/dp/B014TBUFK0

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1656686389

*** The story goes that the castle of Carcassonne inspired Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

The first books I read about the Crusades, many years ago, were by French historian and novelist Zoe Oldenbourg:

https://www.amazon.com/Massacre-Montsegur-History-Albigensian-Crusade/dp/1842124285

L’Autoroute des deux mers, a voyage through history. Part 1

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour…

The Canterbury Tales: The Prologue, opening lines

Geoffrey Chaucer, genial English troubadour of the 14^th century, tells us that burgeoning April is the time that ‘folk long to go on pilgrimages’. But for us lucky dwellers in the home of French troubadours, Occitania, March is the month to take to the road and head south, eager to enjoy the first greening of the branches and the spectacle of the almond blossom. The amandier is one of the earliest trees to flower, its shimmering bridal bouquets of pink and white heralding the approach of spring along with the sherbet fizz of mimosa in bloom.

Early March found us setting off down the southern section of the Autoroute des Deux Mers, the Motorway of the Two Seas (las doas mars in Occitan), the road link between Atlantic and Mediterranean. The A62 section goes from Bordeaux to Toulouse, the A61 from Toulouse to Narbonne. During my many years as an adoptive Toulousaine, the A61 was the weekend escape route to sea and sun. Throw a toothbrush and swimsuit into a bag, head off straight after work on a Friday evening, and you could be at the coast in time for an aperitif au bord de la mer in less than an hour and a half.

But the A61 is not just a fast way to get to the waters of la Grande Bleue. It is also a reminder of some of the most fascinating pages in the history of this part of Languedoc. Today’s blog covers the first part of our March journey, through the Lauragais, past Castelnaudary, into the Aude and the beginning of the Corbières.

In 1662, Pierre-Paul Riquet, a man with a head full of projects and dreams, wrote a famous letter to Colbert, Finance Minister for Louis XIV, outlining his idea for the construction of a ‘royal canal of Languedoc’, linking France’s two great ‘seas’.

At the time, he was living in a chateau near Toulouse, known today as the Château Bonrepos-Riquet. One hundred years earlier, another chateau dweller, Michel De Montaigne, had left us a vivid record of the kind of man he was through his writings. But Riquet The Man is harder to pin down. Historians have portrayed him variously as over-ambitious, a dreamer claiming to act through divine inspiration, a misunderstood genius, and a wily player who managed to overcome different obstacles thrown in his path, mostly from Colbert himself who initially approved Riquet’s plans, but who then kept sending inspectors from Paris to check up on him, even considering replacing him for the second phase of work. The exchange of letters between the two men show numerous disagreements, as well as Riquet’s temerity in frequently disobeying Colbert’s instructions.

Photo by FRAMYJO: Riquet’s letter to Colbert 15 November 1662
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lettre_Riquet-Colbert_15-11-1662.jpg

My own picture of Riquet, the 17^th century man of my imagination, has taken shape through what is known of his practical achievements, notably his wonderful legacy to inhabitants of successive centuries, the Canal du Midi.

First, there is Riquet the visionary and problem-solver, the man with the ambition, ingenuity and tenacity to bring to fruition a project that had long shimmered like an unattainable mirage in the minds of many before him. The Romans, Charlemagne, various French kings, had all dreamed of a waterway linking France’s west and southeastern coasts. If such a link could be built, as Riquet proposed, in the form of a canal, its economic and political significance would be enormous. Merchandise from the Mediterranean would no longer have to travel by ship on the long, hazardous voyage through the Spanish-controlled Straits of Gibraltar and round the Atlantic coast in order to reach Bordeaux and the west.

When he finally received official approval for work to begin, in 1666, Riquet had already started a series of experiments near his chateau in Bonrepos. He was in his sixties, rich, married with five children. He was at a time of life when most people, particularly in those days, would be thinking about putting their feet up and enjoying the fruits of a successful life and career. A spot of hunting, a nice glass of claret in the evening, banquets and balls at the weekend, leisurely strolls through the grounds to check on the progress of his park and formal gardens.

Pierre-Paul Riquet, French engineer, responsible for the construction of the Canal du Midi. Source: from http://www.canalmidi.com/anglais/paulrigb.htm

But instead he had been messing about in the 17th century equivalent of green wellies, testing his theories with a 300-metre model of his dream project, a prototype complete with reservoirs and channels. Why? Because the most difficult obstacle he would face, if ever work got started, would concern an unbudgeable geographical feature bang on the route of his projected canal.

In 1857, almost two hundred years after the opening of the Canal du Midi, bargemen were able to see trains speeding past on the new railway line from Toulouse to Sète. Today, tourists on barge holidays can also see cars, whizzing along the nearby motorway.

We join the A61 south of Toulouse, at Villefranche-de-Lauragais, and within minutes a sign announces we are crossing the Seuil de Naurouze. This is the symbolic moment the traveller leaves behind the rolling hills and wheat fields of ‘Atlantic’ France to join the cypresses, vines and olives of the Mediterranean. It is the highest point between Toulouse and the coast, the partage des eaux, where the water naturally divides, flowing on one side towards the western ocean and on the other towards the sea. It was this watershed that, in the 1660s, proved the biggest headache for Riquet. If we look to the left, beyond the canal, we see in the distance the looming mass of the Montagne Noire, the Black Mountains crucial to his success.

We know that Riquet was both a cultivated man and a man of the country. Born to an upper-class family in Béziers in 1609-ish (the date is disputed), he showed a keen interest in scientific studies. Through his career in the Languedoc salt trade, where he was responsible for transporting and storing the salt and collecting taxes due on it, he travelled widely in the area, settling, in 1648, in the town of Revel, in the Montagne Noire. It was here that he explored the countryside, observing the different mountain watercourses, noting their geographical and natural features and the possibilities of harnessing their power. Fortified by his subsequent experiments in Bonrepos, he became convinced that the water of the Montagne Noire could be used to feed into the canal at the Seuil de Naurouze and thus overcome the problem of the divided water flow.

Photo by Peter Guggerell, Vienna, Bridge over Canal du Midi
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridge_over_Canal_du_Midi.jpg

We may also surmise that Riquet was an inspiring leader, one who was able to convince others of the feasibility of his theories, imbue them with enthusiasm for the project, while intelligent enough to realise his technical limitations and enlist the help of experts in the field, notably Pierre Campmas and François Andréossy. Once approval had been granted by a king who shared his ambition to leave a mark on history, Riquet threw himself into the project. From now on he would spend the rest of his days working to construct this marvel of engineering, ruining both his health and his finances along the way. In the Montagne Noire a channel system was devised to bring the water from the slopes and into the Lac de St-Férreol, where a huge dam was built, creating a reservoir whose waters were taken to Naurouze along a long supply channel, la Rigole de la Plaine. The first phase of the canal, from Toulouse to Trèbes, was completed in 1672.

The second phase got under way, with Riquet’s debts mounting. The whole project was gigantic, lasting for 15 years, encountering numerous practical and engineering challenges, and involving 12,000 workers, peasants, stonemasons, blacksmiths, as well as technical experts. As an employer, Riquet was in advance of his times, paying good wages, granting holidays and sick leave. Communication with such a large and diverse workforce was vital; Riquet was able to discuss with them in their own local language, Occitan. It’s interesting to note that among his army of workers were many women, some of whom came from the High Pyrenees and whose experience of managing the rivers and torrents in that area, constructing weirs, sluices and other ways of controlling the waterflow, was particularly valuable.

May 19^th 1681. The great day of the inauguration of the Royal Canal of Languedoc had finally arrived. In Toulouse, a procession of boats set off, following a magnificent barge carrying various dignitaries including the Cardinal de Bonzi, who would perform the blessing, and Riquet’s two sons, Jean-Mathias and Pierre-Paul II. But sadly, Riquet himself was not with them, having died the previous year, on October 1^st 1680, just months before the canal reached its final destination. His sons inherited the difficult task of its completion, along with huge debts.

Photo by Dedounet of the Lock of Fonserannes (Ecluses de Fonseranes à Béziers)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beziers_Fonseranes.jpg

A sad end to the story? The last major enterprise in which Riquet was involved was tunnelling through a mountain. This audacious project resulted in the 170-metre tunnel of Malpas. On the other side was Béziers, city of his birth, only a few kilometres from the coast. Did the visionary canal-builder have an inkling he would one day be revered as the architect of this wonderful 17th century monument, largest of all those commissioned by King Louis, and today, the oldest European canal still in use? The Canal du Midi is a UNESCO world heritage site and the many marvels on its 241-kilometre course from Toulouse to the Etang de Thau include Riquet’s last construction, the Malpas tunnel, and almost 100 locks, in particular the spectacular ‘staircase’ at Fonsérannes.

Illustration from French Country Cooking by Elizabeth David

On the A61, we have passed the Seuil de Naurouze. The next motorway sign is for Castelnaudary, home to the major port on the canal. Most people, though, associate the town with its famous local speciality of beans, sausage and duck, le cassoulet. It’s tempting to think this peasant dish played an important culinary role in helping Riquet’s army of workers to keep digging. Mangez! Mangez! In the hands of a local grandmère it offers a marvellous blend of savours worthy of its standing as a classic of provincial cuisine. The three rivals for its invention are Toulouse, Carcassonne and Castelnaudary. In spite of my Toulouse connexions, I have to go along with Elizabeth David when the Queen of Cuisine plumps for the Castelnaudary version. Along with her delicious recipe, she also recounts an equally delicious anecdote by Anatole France, about the cassoulet served at small tavern in 19^th century Paris, Chez Clémence.

‘We know,’ he writes ‘that in order to bring out all its qualities, cassoulet must be cooked slowly on a low light. Mother Clémence’s cassoulet has been cooking for twenty years. Occasionally she throws in goose or pork fat, sometimes a piece of sausage or a handful of haricot beans, but it’s always the same cassoulet.’

He goes on to explain that only in this way can the dish acquire its unique amber colour, similar to that found in the paintings of the great Venetian masters. One can only imagine what a European Union Health and Safety Inspector would have made of La Mère Clémence and her 20-year-old Venetian-hued cassoulet.

The kilometres pass, the scenery changes. In this increasingly stark landscape, fortified villages huddle on hilltops, church spires echoing the sombre lances of the cypresses below. Stunted bushes and leaning pines are whipped by ferocious, rampaging winds. In the distance, hills stand out in profile, impressive masses of stone and granite contouring the sky, the bleakness of their treeless slopes reminding us of much darker pages in the history of Languedoc, the bitter wars of religion and conquest that lasted for two centuries and would end, in 1229, with a re-drawing of frontiers in which the independent lords of the Midi would be brought to heel, replaced by conquerors from the north. Languedoc would henceforth be ‘royal’, a part of the kingdom of France.

Vous êtes en pays cathare...

To be continued…

On the link below you can find more information about the Canal du Midi plus a list of books written on the subject:

http://www.riquetetsoncanal.fr/pages/biblio.html

Masters of our souls

In Stephen Frears’ award-winning film ‘Philomena’, there’s a beautifully funny scene where ‘Phil’ and cynical journalist Martin are at the airport being taken to their plane on a mobility vehicle thanks to Phil’s titanium hip. A captive listener on the buggy, Martin is forced to endure Phil’s detailed resume of the romantic novel she’s just been reading, ‘The Slipper and the Horseshoe’. Triumphantly recounting the ending, where the hero rejects the duchess and her diamonds for the humble stable girl and true love, she says:

‘Well I didn’t see that coming Martin, not in a million years.’

Since I started this blog in 2015 there have been quite a few Philomena moments. As 2017 gets under way, we find ourselves in the middle of huge societal changes we never saw coming, where the word ‘unpredictable’ has acquired new resonance and the word ‘future’ more often than not preceded by the adjective ‘uncertain’. As the wind of change swirls around the globe and night approaches black as the pit from pole to pole, there’s an urge to roll a big boulder across the entrance to the family cave and pray there are no sabre-tooth tigers sleeping in the shadows at the back. (See Nancy Babcock’s blog on the current ‘hygge’ craze:

https://nancybabcock.com/a-hygge-state-of-mind/ )

I’m reminded of the famous 1995 interview with Woody Allen on French television. Bernard Pivot, King of French Culture, posed the question:

‘If you were reincarnated as a plant, tree or animal, what would you choose?’

Woody fidgeted and wrung his hands.

‘A sponge.’

The bushy eyebrows of Pivot shot up. Woody shrugged.

‘A sponge,’ he said, ‘has no enemies’.

I hear you, Woody. The notion of an inert sponge-like existence in the calm waters of a tropical lagoon is not looking bad at the moment. Alternatively, a bit of cocooning in the family cave sounds appealing. Here we can turn to traditional sources of renewal and inspiration: the clan artist, painting a few Matisse-like deer on the wall, the clan bard, strumming lyrical ballads on his mammoth jawbone, singing about hosts of golden daffodils and answers blowing in the wind, and of course the story-teller, inviting us to sit upon the ground and weep while he tells sad stories of the death of kings. The soothsayer obviously will have got the boot for failing to read the entrails correctly, but we could end the soirée by turning to the bearded philosopher for wise counsel. The drawback is that instead of providing answers he may well fall back on the sneaky philosopher’s trick of asking us questions instead. The sort of stuff that gets the heckler at the back of the cave yelling ‘Give us break, mate, yer doin’ our heads in.’ Stuff like Who are we? How have we become who we are? And trickiest of all, What about the future? Are we mere pawns swept along on the current of an indifferent Destiny? Perhaps it’s time to all join hands and sing ‘Que sera sera’. Wait, it’s that man at the back again, or maybe a woman, they’re getting a bit uppity since they invented that round thing with spokes, what’s she saying? Something about being the master of her fate?

In The Oxford Book of English Verse, wedged between offerings from the Hon. Emily Lawless and Sir Edmund Gosse, are the following lines:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

So begins a poem by William Ernest Henley. His name many not ring many bells but the four stanzas he wrote in 1875 have become a cultural touchstone for those facing personal adversity (‘My head is bloody but unbow’d’), as well as those engaged in a wider struggle for the right to liberty when their freedoms are under attack.

"The Oxford Book of English Verse", prize awarded to the author at school, prize and author now looking a bit battered — “The Oxford Book of English Verse”,
prize awarded to the author at school, prize and author now looking a bit battered

Henley was 25 when he wrote the poem. Since adolescence, he had suffered from a form of tuberculosis which affected the bones in his legs. In 1868 the lower left leg was amputated and over the next few years his health deteriorated to the point where he was told his right foot would have to go as well. Henley took the decision to consult pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister, who, after several interventions, managed to save the foot. It was the end of an eight-year ordeal. While recovering from the final operation, Henley wrote a series of ‘hospital poems’, one of which, quoted above, was included by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his seminal anthology, The Oxford Book of English Verse. Quiller-Couch gave it the title Invictus: Unconquered.

In September 1941, two years after World War Two was declared, Britain was emerging from the nightmare of the Blitz in which 41 000 civilians died and an estimated 139 000 were wounded. Winston Churchill told the House of Commons: ‘…a year ago our position looked forlorn, and well-nigh desperate, to all eyes but our own. Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world, ‘We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls.'”

He was referring to the last stanza of Henley’s poem:

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.

Around the same time as Churchill was delivering his speech, a 23-year-old Nelson Mandela was setting out to study law in Johannesburg. He went on to join the African National Congress, became involved in political activism, was arrested, and began his 27-year-long imprisonment in 1963. The rest, as they say, is history.

The title of Henley’s poem was borrowed by Clint Eastwood for his 2009 film about Mandela and his relationship with François Pienaar, captain of the all-white (with one exception) South African rugby team, the Springboks. In the film we see recently-elected President Mandela trying to convince his countrymen that the only way forward is through reconciliation and forgiveness. Seeing a chance to use a famous sporting event to create a feeling of unity for his new ‘rainbow’ nation, he convinces the Springbok captain to work with him, to redeem his team’s flagging reputation and aim for victory against overwhelming odds in the forthcoming 1995 Rugby World Cup.

He tells him:

‘On Robben Island, when things were very hard, I found inspiration in a poem…A Victorian poem. Just words. But they helped me to stand when all I wanted was to lie down’.

The poem is Invictus and he gives a copy to Pienaar.

‘This helped me, many times,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it will help you, too.’

While much of the film is based on true events, there are claims that Mandela’s gift was not a copy of Henley’s poem, but of a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, ‘Citizenship in a Republic’, part of which became known as ‘The Man in the Arena’:

‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

Henley or Roosevelt, does it matter? The point being made is the importance of inspiration, and how inspiration can feed our beliefs. In this case Mandela was talking about the conviction that we all have some control over our destiny, a conviction which spurs us to get up when all we want to do is lie down. Roosevelt’s speech inspires, Invictus inspires. It is a matter of record that, during his incarceration on Robben Island, Mandela read Henley’s poem to his fellow prisoners and, in ‘the Robben Island Bible’ ( i.e. The Complete Works of Shakespeare which had been smuggled inside by another prisoner), he marked the following lines from Julius Caesar:

‘Cowards die many times before their deaths/The valiant never taste of death but once/Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,/It seems to me most strange that men should fear’.

http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/robben-island-shakespeare

It’s tempting at times to believe our fate is ‘in the lap of the gods’, that we are simply the helpless victims of circumstance. Or we can turn to the visionary world of artists, musicians and writers whose insights often help us to see our condition from a different perspective.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced or cried aloud

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody but unbow’d

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.

Henley, Mandela and Churchill were all pretty thoroughly bludgeoned by chance. Were they the masters of their fate? These three remarkable men were driven by the same conviction: Fate had perhaps dealt the cards, but it was up to them to play the hand. And, more importantly, in the fell clutch of circumstance, their minds were free, free to believe in the invincibility of the human spirit. They were indeed the captains of their souls.

A Time to hope

Last December I wrote about three authors who had created three totally captivating Private Eyes to add an extra sparkle to the festive season. The authors were all Indie (independent) writers, self-published on Amazon, and, like their heroes, were all men.

Of the 120 or so books I’ve read this year, there are three I’d like to get passionate about. The authors this time are women, two of them Indies, one traditionally published. For two of them, it was their first novel.

As 2016 draws to a close one thing is sure. Many books will be written about a year which has been so dark. The great political divides, the crises in Europe, the USA, the Middle East, the terrifying rise of terrorism. But of the novels that will emerge from these events, how many will manage to take a step back from all the upheaval in order to transcend what is local and temporal and show us something more important, something deeper and more universal?

What is striking about the first two books on my list is that they manage to do just that. The first is a historical novel with a specific time and setting, the Second World War. The second is more generic, an imaginary time in a war-torn country without a name. But we know that the author is Lebanese and that the book comes out of her experiences of ‘a country under siege’.

Dear Reader, I can see the frown lines appearing. All you want for Christmas is a book of really bad jokes or yet another James Patterson or a bit of romantic fantasy to waft you to a tropical island with a George Clooney/Dakota Johnson lookalike covered in sun oil. You don’t want to get into something serious, something that’s going to depress you even more than the news. But that’s the thing about these books. If you give them a chance, step out of your comfort zone, you’ll end up with a feeling that’s the opposite of the despair that’s seemed to dominate this year: a feeling of Hope.

The Seven Year Dress by Paulatte Mahurin

In May I saw that Paulette Mahurin had published a book called “The Seven Year Dress”, based on a true story about the Holocaust. Did I really want to plunge once more into the unspeakable events of that time? I did, because I had been knocked for six by her 2015 historical novel about the Dreyfus Affair (another time of bitter divisions) “To live out Loud”. Reading her new book I felt as overwhelmed as with the previous one, a feeling shared by readers everywhere to judge by the reviews, and culminating, in November, in the author winning the McGrath House Independent Book Award for Historical Fiction.

https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Year-Dress-Novel/dp/0988846861

In October I read another book which again, simply because of its subject matter, I wouldn’t normally have chosen. This time it had been assigned to me in a review group. The title was ‘Miro’, a debut novel by A. E. Nasr.

https://www.amazon.com/Miro-E-Nasr-ebook/dp/B01G4U2J30

As already mentioned, both books are set against a background of conflict. But the terrible events that make up the narrative are presented in such a way that even as we are carried along by the drama we are forced to reflect on deeper issues, to think about human nature itself, about ‘the great and universal passions of men’* and what it is in us that leads to situations where the very notion of humanity breaks down.

In particular, the theme of dominance and oppression is powerfully evoked by both authors. Along with their synonyms–subjugation, control, enslavement–dominance and oppression need an object, someone or something to control and subjugate. From whatever source it arises–intolerance, greed, cruelty, a lust for power–and whatever form it takes–religious, political, racial, psychological–there is something peculiarly chilling about man’s** need to oppress. To assert physical or ideological supremacy, to stifle, to crush, to destroy, to create a world of the dominator and the dominated. It may be in the camps of Boko Haram or ISIL, with their Chibok schoolgirl ‘wives’ and 10-year-old Yasidi sex slaves. It may be in a corner of the school playground, in sports locker rooms, or behind the closed doors of a middle-class family home. In Paulette Mahurin’s novel, it is in Auschwitz where Helen Stein is humiliated, degraded, stripped of her identity, ‘dismantled’ as a person. In “Miro” it is an underground hole where four men and a boy have been imprisoned for 9 years, deprived of light and contact with the natural world, subjected to unspeakable torture in an attempt to dehumanise them.

Before you throw up your hands and reach for the joke book it’s important to remember that, as history has shown us time after time, among the dominated and oppressed a spark of resistance somehow manages to survive, a resilience nourished by the belief in the idea that man, if not born free, is at least meant to be free. And writers such as Paulette Mahurin and A.E. Nasr inspire us to hang on to that belief, to encourage us to continue, to resist oppression, to blow the spark into a flame, to fire the heart to aim for the best. Through their wonderful prose they bring a ringing message of hope that, as in all the best literature, will give immense comfort in these worst of times.

Full reviews:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1637997895

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1811597572

(A little commercial aside before I talk about the last book that had me on my feet and cheering this year. Bearing in mind the baser human craving for a little bit of candy floss in the world of seriously good books, I have been working on my final tome in the French Summer Novel Series and am delighted to inform future readers that Chapter 1 opens with Claudie, on her way to Biarritz, jumping out of the Renault and flashing her red satin Agent Provocateur knickers to a tailgating macho driver, along with an invitation for him to embrace her derrière.)

“H is for Hawk” was an instant sensation when published in 2014. I missed the rave reviews and literary awards and didn’t read it until this year, knowing nothing at all about the book or its author. Just in case, like me, you were on another planet (aka pruning lavender in the Tarn) when it came out, here’s why you should put it on your list.

https://www.amazon.com/H-Hawk-Helen-Macdonald/dp/0802124739

One of the enduring symbols of freedom must be the soaring hawk. Earthly animals bound off into the forest or swim away into the ocean, but the hawk goes up, into the endless sky. There are countless examples of man’s oppression of animals, wild or domestic, just as there are examples of man’s friendship with animals, a bond which may even surpass the love he has for another human being. There are cases too where the animal feels that bond so deeply it would rather die than remain alive without its human friend. As an anthropomorphist guided by that old master, Montaigne, I am happy to agree that in many cases animals are superior to humans.

But the heroine of Helen Macdonald’s book defies anthropomorphism. Everything about her is ‘tuned and turned to hunt and kill.’ For the author, she was ‘everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.’ Her name is Mabel, and she is a goshawk. In this extraordinary ‘memoir’, Macdonald tells the story of her year with Mabel, whom she acquired to help her cope with the overwhelming grief she felt after her father’s death. She dreams of ‘the hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world’ and later realises that she ‘had wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.’ Her intellectual curiosity, her reflections on her own experiences with her hawk against the context of history and myth, ‘older ways of seeing the world’, her courageous, no-holds-barred descriptions of the emotional roller coaster she managed to survive, are so moving that several times I found myself having to put down the book and march off into the garden. (As indeed I did with the other two books). There’s also a story within Helen’s own story, that of T.H. White’s experience with falconry, a superb bonus for anyone who had been entranced by White’s magical morphings of humans to animals in ‘The Once and Future King,’ but didn’t know anything about his real-life obsession with ‘the birdwatchers’ dark grail.’ Add to all these marvels the exquisite, breath-taking beauty of Macdonald’s prose, and you have a must-read.

‘I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild’…‘but in my misery all I had done was turn the hawk into a mirror of me…’Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks.’

Ah, the wonderful world of books… Six stars out of five for these three great reads! Kurt Vonnegut has the last word:

“I am eternally grateful… for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.” (Timequake)

Happy Reading, Happy Christmas and a very Happy New Year!

Detail from a drawing by Gordon Seward, property of the author, copyright Gordon Seward

*Wordsworth, Preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads’

**’man’, standing for man, woman, he, she etc. (Do I really need to say that??)

And again et encore…Resist!

armistice-paint

Last November I wrote a blog called ‘Resist’. This was in reaction to the Paris attacks of November 13^th 2015, events that left France, and the world, reeling after the single deadliest terrorist attack in French history with 130 dead and 352 wounded. More than 1 700 people have now been officially recognised as victims of what happened on that dreadful day.

One year later, the events of 2016 have shown that resistance is more necessary than ever.

22 March: in neighbouring Belgium, Islamic jihadists attacked the airport and the metro in Brussels. 32 killed, 300 injured.

13 June, Magnanville: a police chief and his wife were butchered by Larossi Abballa. The couple’s 3-year-old son was forced to watch his mother die as the event was recorded on Facebook Live, with the murderer claiming allegiance to ISIL and promising to kill infidels at their homes. ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with the boy yet,’ he said.

July 14th Nice: in the middle of the 14^th July celebrations Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlelan drove a truck into a crowd of revellers. 86 killed, 434 injured. Islamic state claimed responsibility.

26 July St Etienne du Rouvray: two Islamic state ‘soldiers’ entered a church in a small Normandy village, took hostages, forced the priest to his knees and cut his throat.

Timeline on http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33288542

Last week in a survey carried out by the Red Cross, 55% of people in France said that they feared ‘finding themselves in a situation which posed a dangerous risk’ as against 38% in 2010. 70% of those polled cited the events of 2015/2016 as an influential factor.

Tonight, Saturday 12 November, the Bataclan reopens for its first concert since last year’s tragedy. Sting gives a concert to “remember and honour those who lost their lives…” and to “celebrate the life and the music this historic theatre represents.”

I would like to echo his words, remembering and honouring not just those who lost their lives in November 2015 but also the victims of 2016 and adding to the musical tribute the magnificent lines of Resistance poet Paul Valery, quoted in my blog of November 2015, below.

RESIST

In July I wrote a blog about Paris. It began:

“Just back from two weeks in Paris, the most beautiful and evocative city on earth…City of Light, City of Love… the Seine and its bridges.”

I then went on to talk about a poem:

“…the melancholic poem about love and time by Guillaume Apollinaire that every student of the French Baccalauréat knows by heart, ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’.

On November 13 in Paris a gang of murdering cowards hiding behind Kalashnikovs turned their weapons on families and children enjoying an evening at the restaurant, on football fans enjoying a friendly game, on excited music fans enjoying a rock concert. Their aim was to turn the City of Light into the City of Darkness, the City of Love into the City of Hate and Fear.

It’s doubtful that these brutal, ignorant murderers had ever read Apollinaire’s poem, or indeed any other work of literature. They had surely never thrilled to the verses of Shakespeare, wept at the poetry of Homer; never shared the sufferings of Jean Valjean or Edmond Dantès.

And others like them, lashed to the ideology of terrorism and tyranny, will never, ever, understand why Allied planes, flying over occupied France in World War 2, dropped not just weapons to the maquis: fluttering down from the sky came thousands of copies of a poem, which would continue to inspire and uplift those men and women risking their lives in the fight against Nazi tyranny.

Its title was ‘Liberté, j’écris ton nom’ , Freedom, I write your name.

Written by poet and Resistance member Paul Eluard in 1942, its celebratory stanzas end with the following lines:

Et par le pouvoir d’un mot

Je recommence ma vie

Je suis né pour te connaître

Pour te nommer:

Liberté.

And through the power of one word

I begin my life again

I was born to know you

To name you:

Freedom.

This weekend the Eiffel Tower was cloaked in darkness as the world mourned the victims of November 13th. But the darkness was temporary.

Last night the lights came on again as the Lady put on the colours of the tricolor demonstrating once again the regenerative power of one word:

Liberté.

In memory of the victims of the terrorist attack of November 13^th, 2015.

A complete version of Eluard’s poem can be read at:

http://www.poetica.fr/poeme-279/liberte-paul-eluard/

A Wonderful World

This month I’m celebrating birthdays.

First, my own (better another one than the alternative, as the saying goes), plus that of my one-and-a-bit-year-old bionic hip. Twelve months ago I was in rehab, lying on my back with one leg in the air attached to a pulley.

There was a lot of moaning, whining and feeling generally ill-done by, particularly as I didn’t get the morphine pump I’d been expecting and had to make do with paracetamol. Now, October 2016, I’m scrambling up the garden like…um…a mountain goat (?), hanging onto gorse bushes with one hand and yanking out bindweed with the other, or jumping up and down in the aquagym class with-if not grace-a solid two-legged enthusiasm.

What would Hippocrates have made of the marvellous technique whereby the removal of an old body part and insertion of a new one, a bit like taking the car to the garage, has changed the destiny of those who would otherwise be limping around with the help of sticks or confined to wheelchairs? Hip hip hooray!

What a wonderful world.

This month also sees the birth of my third book. After more moans and wails the novella has finally made it into cyber-print, thanks to another astonishing invention, the e-book. This allows aspiring authors to bypass the traditional publishing route and, with the click of a button, see their magnum opus available to all who possess a computer, tablet, smartphone, Kindle and (in my case) £0.91p.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3SVW1P/ref=la_B00JYZ3DMY

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M3SVW1P/

What an amazing world.

On February 10^th, 1898 in Villa Clara, Argentina, Joseph-Elie Ressel was born, the son of Russian Jewish emigré doctors. Except that he wasn’t. He had been born 11 days earlier, but his absent minded-father forgot to register the birth. And his name wasn’t Ressel. The clerk made a mistake. So began the extraordinary life of one of my mega-heroes, Joseph Kessel, actor, journalist, WW1 aviator, WW2 war correspondent, aviator with the Free French squadron of the RAF, co-composer of the ‘Chant des Partisans’, the stirring anthem of the French Resistance, writer of screenplays, and internationally famous author. He was a dreamer, a humanist, a man of integrity, a loyal friend, a patriot, a gambler, a drinker, an opium-smoker, a timid lover of women, an inveterate traveller, an adventurer, a nighthawk, a lion. His life, which spanned most of the 20^th century, took him all over the world and brought him into contact with a staggering range of people–politicians, prostitutes, criminals, Hollywood stars, Bedouin chiefs, gypsy musicians, slave-drivers. You would need a thesaurus to do him justice, a man who was simply larger than life, making Hemingway in comparison look like a neophyte boy scout.

When, in 1962, Kessel’s candidature was put forward to that nec plus ultra of the French linguistic and literary establishment, l’Académie Française, some of the august members had to reach for the smelling salts. One of them, Pierre Gacotte, is reported to have said:

‘Why Kessel? We’ve already got one Russian (Henri) Troyat. And a Jew (André) Maurois. And up until this year we’ve had two drunks, Marcel Pagnol and Pierre Benoit.’

(‘Pourquoi Kessel? Un Russe nous en avons un : Troyat. Un juif aussi : Maurois. Et des ivrognes jusqu’à cette année nous en avions deux: Marcel Pagnol et Pierre Benoit!’)*

In his acceptance speech, Kessel told the Academy: ‘You have shown, by the striking contrast implicit in this nomination, that it is not by a man’s origins that we should judge him.’ **

His astonishing life story is recorded in an equally astonishing 950-page biography, ‘Joseph Kessel ou Sur la Piste du lion’ (On the track of the lion) by Yves Courrière, journalist, author and close friend of Kessel. In one memorable passage he recounts the birth of ‘homo kesselianus’, the archetypal hero-adventurer, brave, noble-browed, athletic, resourceful, who finds himself caught up in incredible adventures. It was an archetype based on Kessel’s own experiences in 1919, in Vladivostok. When, at the end of WW1, the Allied leaders met in Versailles, one of the problems discussed was the anarchy in Russia where Reds and Whites were engaged in bitter conflict. The 20-year-old Kessel had already proved his courage and daring as a member of the 39^th squadron (airborne) for which he received the Croix de Guerre. But he had another talent. He was a fluent Russian speaker. And so he found himself en route to the land of his ancestors, travelling first to the US, then across country to San Francisco and finally, after a 35-day voyage, sailing into the port of Vladivostok.

Washed up in this last outpost of the west, facing the Pacific Ocean, thousands of people were gathered, unable to go any further. The streets echoed with scores of languages; amid the babel roamed bands of soldiers, merchants, beggars, mercenaries, prisoners of war, ragged refugees, coolies staggering under immense loads, Cossacks brandishing terrible whips. It was like a ‘vast, filthy inn’. The orders of one army were immediately countermanded by those of another and the only thing preventing total breakdown was the presence of the Czech forces, holding the station, and the Japanese who held the port.

Joseph Kessel by Pinn Hans www.gpo.gov.il, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3426445 — Joseph Kessel in1948, Photo by Hans Pinn
www.gpo.gov.il, Public Domain

Kessel disembarked from the SS Sherman in February 1919. He was hungover and penniless, having just celebrated his 21st birthday on board and lost all his money in a poker game. Thanks to his fluency in Russian he soon found himself tasked with a strategically important ‘confidential mission’ for the French, involving the railway station. On his first reconnoitre he couldn’t believe his eyes. Thousands of homeless people were huddled outside the building, on the steps, dying of hunger, disease and cold. Inside, in overpowering heat, a scene from hell, a Breughel painting where ragged mothers nursed starving babies amid the vagabonds, drunken soldiers, deserters and madmen who occupied the vast hall, creating mayhem.

And the confidential mission? ‘Find a train. Find drivers and engineers to get it running. Fill it with food and munitions and send it off to Omsk, 4800 km away across Siberia, where the French forces under General Janin await.’

In this dark, freezing nightmare city where no train was to be had and all was chaos, Homo Kesselianus took shape. Armed with a revolver and a bag stuffed with roubles, 21-year-old Kessel completed the very first Mission Impossible, Russian style.

Joseph Kessel died on July 23^rd, 1979 in the village of Avernes, his home for many years. In spite of ill-health he was still as interested in life as ever. He was watching television with two close friends, Georges and Liliane Walter, a reportage about a young speleologist shot in sumptuous colours in a deep grotto.

‘Le monde est extraordinaire,’ Kessel remarked to Liliane ‘Regarde comme c’est beau.’ These were his final words.

‘The world is extraordinary. Look how beautiful it is.’

A wonderful world

A wonderful world. Sunset

*‘Joseph Kessel Sur la Piste du lion’ Yves Courriere, Ed. Plon, 1985

** ‘Vous avez marqué, par le contraste singulier de cette succession, que les origines d’un être humain n’ont rien à faire avec le jugement que l’on doit porter sur lui.’ Joseph Kessel, acceptance speech, Académie Française

There’s always tomorrow…

Writers are notorious for coming up with extremely good reasons to procrastinate*.

“The novella just had to be finished soon, or she would go mad. But events seemed to conspire against her. She had lost an entire day last week when a giant lizard ran amok in the study…”

“Finally she fell into bed exhausted after a long day in front of the computer. The words just didn’t seem to flow. If only she could get a good night’s sleep! Eight hours later she was back at her desk, hollow-eyed, having spent the entire night trying to escape from a dive-bombing bat which had somehow got into the bedroom.”

As a long, hot August draws to an end, another chapter comes to a close in the Tarn version of E. M. Delafield’s ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’.

Guests have come and gone.

Concerts have been attended, classical and jazz.

The lavender has been cut back and peach jam has been made. Life has been good.

The Temple Ensemble Photo Michelle Feraud

And that novella, the one that should have been out in June? Something about desire, and passages? So sweet of you to ask. Currently it is undergoing a full body lift after numerous nips and tucks. Yes, obviously it should now be up on Amazon with its beautiful new cover (more of that later).

But you know how it is, progress has been interrupted by the ‘inequalities of Fate’ as E. M. Delafield calls them in her wonderful book about life in a 1930s Devonshire village.

https://www.amazon.com/Diary-Provincial-Lady/dp/0897330536

This gently satirical, extremely funny, book recounts the everyday tribulations involved in running a middle class household, serving on the Women’s Institute, dealing with snobbish aristocrats, trying to get rid of The Vicar’s Wife, struggling to grow a pot of hyacinths and finding time to get on with her writing.

517iBnXTkPL._SX300_BO1,204,203,200_

Here is E. M. trying to concentrate on her latest literary project:

“June 3^rd.–Astounding and enchanting change in the weather, which becomes warm. I carry chair, writing-materials, rug and cushion into the garden, but am called in to have a look at the Pantry Sink, please, as it seems to have blocked itself up.”

Ah, the famous Pantry Sink syndrome. It manifested itself here last week in different forms on two separate occasions. I had just been re-writing (again) a particularly tricky scene in ‘The Passage of Desire’ when I became conscious of an eerie, scrabbling sound in the region of the bookcase. Suddenly a long scaly creature shot across the study, underneath my desk (narrowly missing bare feet) and vanished behind a cupboard.

‘Help!’ I shrieked.

This was obviously a job for the Maître de Maison (MDM). We operate on a clear division of labour principle. He deals with spiders, crickets and other animal invaders, I make the lavender sachets. This particular animal invader was a lizard. A big, bold Jurassic lizard. Not content with its beautiful home in the patio (why?) it had evidently decided on a move.

The lizards' lovely home — The lizards’ lovely home

One hour later all the furniture had been pulled away from the walls, the rugs had been removed and the bookshelves scoured. No lizard.

“Are you sure you saw one?’

Now, as any relationship counsellor will tell you, that is not a helpful question at times of stress. A terse Franco-Britannique exchange ensued, ending with the unsatisfying (to me) verdict:

“Well it must have got out again.’

The MDM began to put away his lizard-tackling equipment viz: two tea towels (best quality linen), the dustpan, and a high-beam Maglite. Suddenly (again) there was a scuttling noise overhead and we both shrieked as the wily reptile made a flying leap across our heads and out of the window.

Obviously I was too unnerved to do any more work that day, being forced to lie down on a sunbed with my copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ (which actually figures in ‘The Passage of Desire’, so you could say I was doing research). Here’s the scene in which Mr Lockwood, forced to spend a night at the isolated snowbound house high on the moors, is woken by a noise at the window. He concludes it is ‘the branch of a fir-tree that touched my lattice, as the blast wailed by’, but finally, unable to sleep, he opens the window to ‘seize the importune branch’ but finds instead… ‘my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!’

A couple of nights later that riveting scene conjured up by Emily’s wondrous pen was still playing in my mind as I drifted off to sleep.

Tap tap! Tap tap!

Something was trying to get in through the window. As I came out of the dream, I realised that something was trying to get in, through our window.

Horreur des horreurs!!!

Fortunately, the Maitre de Maison was on the case, Maglite in hand, reaching cautiously for the catch.

‘Help!!!’

This time the shriek did not come from me, and it was in French.

‘What is it, what is it, put the light on! Aargh!’

Something whistled past my head, narrowly missing my hair, good job I’d ditched the Kate Bush hairstyle many moons ago.

‘It is a bat!’

‘A bat?

One minute later and we’d have been full swing into the ‘moth/meuth’ routine from ‘A Shot in the Dark’. But we hardly had time to get going before the nocturnal Red Baron launched into the series of ultra-rapid, ultra-acrobatic dive- bombing manoeuvres so beloved of The Red Arrows and the Patrouille de France, resulting in the MDM racing out of the room (the reum) to get the long-handled cobweb brush and me pulling the sheet over my head, each of us wailing in different languages.

As I say, it’s been a long, hot August here in the country, with its fair share of Pantry Sinks.

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Denise Baer, a gracious and talented lady who kindly invited me on to her blog to talk about country matters and the joy of writing. She has just posted a tempting squash recipe for those in search of culinary inspiration:

http://baerbookspress.com/blog

Another thank you, and WOW! to GX and Caroline at Graphicszxdesigns for the cover for ‘The Passage of Desire’.

http://graphiczxdesigns.zenfolio.com/

Now I just have to write those final words. Or stop writing those final words. And avoid the Pantry Sink.

Norah Deay’s blog post for procrastinating writers:

http://norahdeay.com/2016/04/15/information-overload-busy-reading-writing-actually-write/

The end of insouciance

What makes you fall in love with a country?

I had my first crush aged thirteen in a small village in the north of France, not far from Amiens. It was the end of a long journey for a group of excited grammar school girls from a working class town in the north of England. We were going on a ‘French exchange’. We were going ‘abroad’. Oh the resonance of that word. Abroad – different, exotic, possibly dangerous, and undeniably, 100%, ‘foreign’. It was heady. Some of us had never even been outside Yorkshire apart from the odd day trip to Blackpool, which in spite of the Tower and the funny accent, could hardly be called foreign.

I don’t remember much about our arrival. We were all tired and probably fell straight asleep in our foreign beds with their funny sausage-shaped pillows. But I do remember the first morning, awaking to an amazing smell. Downstairs in the kitchen of my penfriend’s house I discovered my first ‘ficelle’, another sausage-shaped object, this one long, thin, crusty, golden and warm to the touch. Anne-Marie split it longways, slathered it with butter and jam from a jar labelled ‘confiture d’abricots’ and handed it over. I would later discover rows of similar jars lining the shelves of the ‘grenier’, the loft, along with boxes of apples in slatted wooden crates, and herbs hanging from the ceiling. The second morning was even more amazing. Anne-Marie and I were ordered by ‘Maman’ to go and buy the ficelles–still in our pyjamas and dressing gowns!

We stepped out into a hot summer’s morning, the dust rising from the village street beneath our slippers, and pushed open the door of the boulangerie. Inside were several ladies, also in nightwear, exchanging the latest news, speaking in high rapid voices with a lot of hand-waving and ‘dis-donc’s. Their hair was a gleaming confection of undulating waves and complicated curls, their eyebrows perfect, glistening arcs, and waves of eau-de Cologne from their morning ‘toilette’ mingled with the smell of baking bread. It was dizzying and dazzling. Strangely, they were all wearing the same silky dressing gown, a navy blue model with white spots, belted neatly at the waist. (Several years later, watching a rerun of the classic horror film ‘Les Diaboliques’ I discovered Vera Clouzot wearing an identical version as she helped Simone Signoret drown her husband in the bath tub.)

Boat on the Somme, Aires Almeida http://www.flickr.com/photos/31212180@N08/6114055035, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24564968 — Boat on the Somme, Aires Almeida
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31212180@N08/6114055035, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24564968

La joie de vivre. The joy of biting into that perfect ficelle, of lingering in the potager in the falling dusk, bats flitting and ‘Papa‘ watering the tomatoes, of being welcomed into the perfumed embrace of the glamourous ladies in the boulangerie every morning, of comparing bra sizes with Anne-Marie in the bathroom mirror (2 white egg cups, 2 pink egg cups), of hanging out of the bedroom window hoping to catch a glimpse of the tobacconist’s son (he of the convict-cropped hair and bold black eyes), of lying in a boat in the middle of a lake, catching the flash of a swooping kingfisher or the menacing shadow of a drifting pike. Taking the time to enjoy life’s pleasures, le temps de vivre. Freedom was a relatively new concept in a country which still remembered the wounds of a six-year Occupation.

The seed of love had been planted that year and it continued to grow, nurtured through successive holidays. A summer in Brittany as a camp counsellor, herding singing crocodiles of little French girls in plimsolls and cotton hats through the country lanes leading to the beach. The beach itself, all fine white sand, swimming lessons where you hung on to the fillettes by the straps of their woollen swimsuits hoping they didn’t stretch far enough for them to plunge to the seabed and drown. Rockpools, starfish, picnic lunches of cold omelettes and Breton pancakes. At nightfall, a return trip for the older girls to lie on the sand and contemplate a million stars or gaze out at an ocean shimmering with phosphorescence.

Later, other beaches, further south approached through pine forests echoing with the strident vibrato of cicadas. The crash of the surf, rows of burnished women in bikinis and ankle chains stretched out like cats on sunbeds, the tap of balls hitting wooden rackets. The palm-fringed beach, a salty breeze coming in across the blue yacht-studded water, wafts of Ambre Solaire and the smell of beignets and chouchous. And it would be on these summer holidays, spreading the towels and putting up the beach umbrella for the first time, that I would listen out for that most beautiful and evocative of sounds, the laughter of children. Racing in terror from the waves, splashing each other in mock fights, digging holes in the sand, wriggling out of the grasp of suncream-bearing parents, launching themselves onto rubber rings. The embodiment of what it is to be joyful and carefree, to be insouciant. La joie de vivre. Le temps de vivre.

On July 14^th this year, day of the Fête Nationale, an Islamic terrorist killed 85 people who were out enjoying the firework display in Nice. 307 others were injured. The following week, in a small church in Normandy, an 85-year-old priest was forced to his knees to have his throat cut. It was the 11th attack in 18 months by Islamic terrorists, starting with the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. Bombings, stabbings, shootings, beheadings and vehicle rammings. This year, in the second half of July, children playing on the beaches of France saw a new and terrible sight, soldiers and police patrolling with machine guns.

‘…le passé, peut-il renaître?’ ‘Can the past live again?’ asks Yvonne de Galais, heroine of ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’, that most devastating of novels about adolescent friendship and the quest for ideal happiness. And Meaulnes himself tells his friend François Seurel that, when he found the mysterious Domain where Yvonne lived, ‘I had reached a height, a degree of perfection and purity that I will never reach again’, adding ‘Dans la mort seulement…je retrouverai peut-être la beauté de ces jours-là…’ ‘Only in death, perhaps, will I find the beauty of those days once again.’

Packing up our suitcases I realise that this is the end of a French idyll. Those summer holidays with their carefree children are gone. For many of us, who knew what it was like before, we shall look back on how it was and mourn the end of insouciance.

POSTSCRIPT

It was good to rediscover Kamel Daoud’s voice once more in a recent article in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/opinion/paradise-the-new-muslim-utopia.html?_r=0

In the spring of 2016 the talented Algerian author of prize-winning novel ‘The Meursault Investigation’* had announced he was giving up journalism after his article about the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne had provoked a torrent of violent recriminations from a group of 19 French academics in Le Monde.

http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2016/02/11/les-fantasmes-de-kamel-daoud_4863096_3232

Accused of ‘pathetic clichés’, ‘colonialist paternalism,’ ‘anti-humanism’, racism and Islamophobia, Daoud replied that he found their reaction ‘immoral’: ‘They don’t live in my flesh nor in my land and I find it illegitimate, scandalous even, that I am accused of Islamophobia by certain people sitting in the safety and comfort of their western cafés. All dished up like a Stalinist trial…’

For 20 years Daoud, writing in the newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran, had adressed such controversial issues as religious freedom and women’s rights. ‘Women’s freedom is my freedom,’ he said at a literary festival in Germany. A fatwah calling for his execution was announced in 2014 by a salafist imam.

Kamel Daouad's prize-winning novel — Kamel Daouad’s prize-winning novel

Ironically, (and happily), two months after the media controversy, Daoud was awarded the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardère for Journalist of the Year. Denis Olivenne, presenting the prize, spoke of ‘his courage as a journalist…in the tradition of great writer/journalists such as Camus and Mauriac.’ French Prime Minister Manuel Valls congratulated ‘a brave journalist who refused to be cowed’, adding ‘Freedom to inform is also the right to blaspheme and be irreverent, a fundamental principle that France will defend to the last.’

*‘Meursault, contre-enquête’ by Kamel Daoud, Goncourt du 1er roman 2015

https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B00JQ7JJ8C.

Winners or Losers, a lesson from art.

In a couple of hours I shall turn on the TV and see the result of the UK referendum on Europe.

Many years ago I had the privilege of being invited to join the French team of delegates sent to Montreal for an ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) conference. My mission was ‘linguistic’, the aim being to develop a bank of language used in international meetings, and I was given permission to interview delegates from different member states. It was, to put it mildly, an eye-opener. The ICAO, like the UNO, operates on the basis of consensus but as the subject of the conference that year was particularly controversial, it appeared as though a vote (the last resort) loomed.

‘Why not a vote? Why is consensus important?’ I asked one member (from a Middle Eastern state, educated at Oxbridge).

‘Because,’ he said, ‘a vote turns people into winners and losers.’

Last Friday I mentioned on Facebook that I visited the exhibition of artist Gordon Seward in Toulouse. Always a visual treat of enormous magnitude, this year there was an extra. Gordon has written a book called ‘Why I paint’.

Here’s a story from it (with the author’s permission). It’s called: ‘Portrait of a woman singing’.

“A gallery in Toulouse. A young woman enters and looks at my paintings for a long time. I am in the back room. My wife asks her if she would like any information. The young woman beams out a smile when she realises who my wife is and that her artist husband is there too. I come out to say hello.

‘Can I sing for your paintings?’

Apprehensive but amused I told her that she could go ahead while wondering to myself whether this was really a good idea.

‘So I am going to sing a piece by Puccini that states that “the worth is meaningless if not appreciated”.

She told me that she was in Toulouse to perform a lead role in the Mozart opera ‘The Magic Flute’, and by chance she had found herself in front of the gallery. She admitted that for a long time she had been looking for the sensation that opera gave her in contemporary painting and that “at last I have found it.’

So she sang for the paintings. The small room seemed to swell as the voice left her lungs. The paintings blazed. We stood as if tied to a mast in a storm, the sound waves rose impossibly then fell melodiously. A crowd assembled outside the door and windows. We cried. When it was over she held my hands and said:

‘I just wanted you to know how your paintings made me feel.’

‘Listening to paintings, looking at music’ is the title of this chapter.

Gordon Seward: La répetition, Brigitte Hool in rehearsal Le Capitole

After two weeks during which the daily news has showed nothing but bitter division and strife in the three countries in which I have lived, the UK, the US and France, and for which I have immense fondness, I’d like to say the following:

Let’s hear it for consensus.

Let’s find a way together. Let’s remember the words of Jo Cox, in her maiden speech in Parliament:

‘We have far more in common than (that) which divides us.”

I believe, from everything that my parents taught me, that, for the majority of us, it is possible to open our minds, to listen to a painting, to look at music.

For each of us human beings with a clamouring voice in our heads, is it too much to listen to those other voices? Have we closed off our ears to ‘the other side’, insisting on what is different rather than what is in common?

Do we really want to live in a world of winners and losers?

Gordon Seward’s book ‘Why i paint’ , Collected Thoughts on Art, is dedicated ‘To Cécile’, his wife, his Muse, poet and lyricist, brilliant translator into French of ‘Pourquoi je peins’: Cécile Toulouse.

http://cecile-toulouse-poesie.over-blog.com/

http://www.gordonseward.fr/

Laurette Long

Simone Veil, 13 July 1927-30 June 2017: Portrait of a great lady.

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