Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

16 September 2001: LeMans

SPG and Nisou had got seats on the same train as us, but different cars. We'd arrived in different lobbies, too, and Nisou had sent SPG to look for our lostnesses, but we weren't lost. So by the time she walked by our car, we were seated, and SPG pointed out our window, there we were, we were fine and not lost, and I was a monkey under glass. Perhaps I should have been an amœba.

The very clouds looked different, though that's perhaps because this was the first really sunny we'd had in days. We'd had only a few sprinkles, mind you, but any blue in the sky was in the minority for most of the time.

In LeMans, which started out looking like a regular town, we stopped first at the market, which is under the cathedral in the old town, and in the short time and drive spanning station to market, LeMans stopped looking like any old town. (Here, "any old" in the colloquial Usan sense of "nothing special.") I could have spent hours in the market looking at everything for sale. Carts and tents and stands sold everything you could wish: breads, cheeses, seafood, flowers, meats, vegetables, fabric, and everything. It was wonderful. I bought the bread all by myself. We also bought fish for lunch, fruit, and three dozen oysters for something like seven dollars, a bargain that made RDC swoon. Nisou asked if I liked oysters and I said yes, and though I had only ever had them cooked before, I had been meaning to try them raw, and this would be the day. Also we bought some rillettes de canard, really rich and unspeakably yummy, a specialty of the Sarthe region whose seat LeMans is. (Oysters are a treat in France Nord-Ouest as a whole.)

Then we went home and ate. The seemingly effortless continental hospitality is a combination of culinary skill and appreciation, of graciousness and charm, of ease and welcome, that I aspire to. We ate for something like two hours. Before and during this, Nisou showed us their remarkable garden. Really it's the perfect house for her--it had mature fruit and nut trees and she's planted more. They have their own walnuts, hazelnuts, apples, peaches, pears, and various berries; and Nisou planted a kiwi shrub. Kiwi. If they grow in New Zealand, they can't be tropical, but they seem much too exotic a fruit to grow casually in your own garden. But there it was. So there were compôtes invented with fruit too bruised or unattractive or overripe or whatever to eat out of hand (a kind of frugality I admire but which requires an inventiveness in the kitchen I am far from having) and bread and rillettes and cheeses (Nisou gently corrected me for cutting a wedge of Brie wrong, and damn it, I knew that), salad, and I don't remember what else.

After calling in cranes to lift us from the table, we debated Nap vs. Walk. I am really glad we opted for Walk. Not that it could possibly have made up for dinner--it was such a large meal it must have been dinner, not lunch, besides being in the middle of the afternoon--but it did help.

LeMans has one of Europe's, or at least France's, few surviving ancient towns. Most have burned or been bombed or otherwise demolished. In their old apartment, Nisou and SPG could walk to the old town and the market. Now they have a house and drive to it, also perfect. Nisou gave a great tour, apparently having memorized the tour guide the first time she came and giving the tour to everyone else who visits, and I remember nothing. I can make up stuff though.

Bounding Old Town (Vieille Ville? I don't even remember that) is a Gallo-Roman wall, the crumbledy brick bit here with the tilting donjon. Over it is a house dating from, it looks, the 17th or 18th century. Further along, the wall is a little later than Gallo-Roman and the buildings above younger than Louis XIV. Wonderful.

Perhaps one reason this area never burned is that the townspeople built firewalls between buildings--between one half-timbered structure and the next would be six inches or so of cement, meant at least to slow the spread of fire from one house to the next.

Hand-made bricks, stone, and some wooden buildings, with each higher floor jutting out over the lower ones, just as Twain describes in the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper. Staircases built out of buildings, since space was dear and when you built another storey onto your house, you wouldn't want to waste floor space on a staircase.

Few of the streets had names. Instead, a carved column would jut--like that staircase--from each corner building, and the columns have different symbols on them--keys, monkeys, and other devices. So you would direct someone not to Elm Street but to the street of Clés. Some streets did have names: la Grande Rue wasn't big, but I'd love to know the story that earned one lane the epithet "The Sow that Flees."

Out of order, but in the same vein of small, tall, narrow, space at a premium, use the room available, was one building we all loved. I think Nisou said there buildings to either side of this casa piñata and the walls bounded a lane, but I don't remember. Also I think it might have been accessible only by ladder. There were houses only eight feet wide, crammed in between two bigger ones.

Despite having no space, everything that could be was decorated. I had to lighten this photograph--the roof isn't really made of mirrored tiles--but there along the edge of the roof is a joker, hands folded over his belly, ankles demurely crossed, watching the activity in the street. Up the edge marched a line of snails.

And who couldn't love this owl? It held up a gutter along with a row of several characters. At first glance I thought they were heads representing the seven deadly sins or the however many cardinal virtues, but they were just fun. The wooden lintel over a door had similar detail, figure wrapped around it in a spiral.

I guess LeMans is known mostly for a 24-hour car race and a model of Pontiac (?) car. I am shocked that such a gem of architectural and cultural history shouldn't attract more sightseers. And we hadn't even reached the cathedral yet.

I don't remember the year of this cathedral, but its eastern end flares, like that of Notre Dame, into many flying buttresses that bear the weight of the stone walls and permit stained glass. (The western half is Romanesque: older, plainer, with fewer windows.) You can just see how some of the buttresses split as they come away from the walls into two, thus to bear even more weight and allow the wall to be pierced for yet another window. One of the many stained glass windows is a joke--the bishop didn't like that one guild hadn't bought a window and forced the matter, so they did buy a window but its subject matter is all about them, instead of being appropriately holy. I liked that, it reminded me of the ongoing debate of my medieval studies: the worth of high and low cultures, adjectives now considered too subjective and replaced with "elite" and "popular." There is a cathedral somewhere or other in Europe, I forget where (of course), with oak leaves chiseled out of stone decorating the cornices of columns. The oak leaves, representing the flora of the region, were what the designers wanted; what they got in addition was the stonecutters' folly: occasionally, a pig's snout or head is visible within the foliage, because swine like acorns. (That wasn't here.)

As in the Parthenon, as in many cathedrals, the interior was originally painted. On the columns in the nave of this cathedral, you can see traces of the red, green, and yellow paint. The painting combined with the stained glass must have been spectacular. In almost every church, that painting is gone (we know it was there once because of textual evidence, paint residue, or other evidence).

In this cathedral, it's still there in one chapel. Once upon a time this chapel had been whitewashed, covering and preserving the paint. In the last century or so, the limestone began to chip off and someone noticed what was under it all. The interior of the entire church would have looked like this. The interiors of most Major Cathedrals similarly would have been painted.

Also I have a confession to make. In Sacré Cœur, I lit a candle. I asked Nisou if you had to be Catholic to do it, if it meant anything, and she said no. Tom had said he'd never seen the basilica so lit up, and we all thought it was because of the attacks. I was so relieved to be with other Usans, so glad to be with Nisou, that the no-atheists-in-foxholes mania overtook me and I lit a candle. In this chapel, Nisou always lights a candle for ZBD, who herself, at 2.5 years, felt and expressed the holiness of the chapel, kissing flowers at the altar, and later in the trip was ill. I was wrong to have lit a candle in Sacré Cœur, though I was now painfully aware that Nisou was doing this for ZBD and I was not.

I'm justifying, I know. I can interpret lighting the candle in Paris then abstaining in LeMans as selfish then selfless, respectively, and also vice versa. I fell from my principles in Paris (or adopted expedient extemporaneous shallow ones) and in LeMans my best friend saw me not perform a ritual for our precious Z. No more public discussion of that.

The site had been sacred for longer than Christianity. At the side of the western portal was a rock, worn smooth in layers from running water, that was once the focal point of native pagan worship. When a would-be saint showed up to convert the masses, he struck this rock with his staff and lo, it ran with water. Nisou said she read somewhere that most churches are built over junctures of underground streams and rivers. That I can believe because I suspect most European churches are built on the site of earlier pagan points of power.

A manse across from the church housed the ecclesiastical staff and also served as a hospice. SPG and Nisou said it was called a grabatoire and said you'd basically go there to die. Nice. We continued out of the old town and Florida came up in conversation. Nisou asked RDC what it is like, Florida, as she'd never been and her parents had hated it. We both groaned. "It has good beaches," I contributed, and then fell silent, having come to the end of anything nice I could say about the state, and didn't continue about the sea lice and sharks and man o' war that make the beaches unswimmable so many months of the year. RDC expanded a bit: all the crowds and lack of space of a city with none of the cultural advantages, the endless flatness, the God's Waiting Room aspect.

I will not admit who made the obvious leap and called Florida the Grabatoire of the States.

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When we got back to the house, SPG shucked oysters and Nisou and I did Presents. She gave me a bowl from Tunis--it's official, I now collect plates and bowls, because when we got home, someone else had given RDC a hammered copper bowl with a stylized orca whale in it from the Pacific Northwest. I gave the rata piñata books--Runaway Bunny, Carl's Masquerade, and Jamberry--and a something I hadn't wrapped for fear of suffocation. I told Nisou to close her eyes, and she did, and I put it in her hands. She got a palmful of dangling legs and wondered if it was a spider. She felt further and detected a hump and began to whoop, so the the camel's head only made her happier. "Rakumi" means "camel" in which African language I forget, one of the ones the Francophone Africans at UConn spoke or maybe one from her sister's Peace Corps stint in Niger. Anyway, when I saw a camel in the Tattered Cover, I immediately seized it, casting aside my initial plans to get the Impending One a Rocky Mountain animule. But now I shall have to look for a rata piñata for the rata piñata.

By dinnertime, everyone anticipated the oysters, one of us four with slightly more dread than the other three. Eating sushi was a psychological jump, one I was able to manage with the interim step of lox. Eating meat bleu was a hurdle too, one I overcame inadvertently due to the Chop House kitchen's error and bad lighting. Now I faced a Thing on the half shell. I held it in my palm, pondering. Everyone was watching me. I considered hitching back from the table a bit so if spewing was necessary I could do so without hitting the table (the floor was tiled). It was a brave man who first ate a lobster, I quoted silently. I raised the shell to my lips and slurped, holding the beast on my tongue. Salt. Sea. Tender. Fresh. Sea. Salt.

I love raw oysters. They taste like Old Lyme, I declared. Nisou smiled at me, "Is that why you like them?" Well, no, it can't be, really, because Old Lyme's waters haven't smelled and tasted that fresh and clear in several generations. They definitely taste like the ocean, though. Clean ocean, like the Strait of San Juan or the Atlantic off Race Point. Cold clean ocean, of which Long Island Sound is neither.

Okay, so I'd never had raw oysters before, but I was game to try. RDC has loved them for years. People in the States do in fact eat seafood, which came as a surprise to other folks we would meet. Two comments ahead of themselves: people we would meet the next night asked if there was other food in the U.S. besides fast food. Yes. A man seated at the next table at a restaurant the day after that would ask if I'd ever had lobster before. In Paris Saturday, Édith asked if I had ever had escargots before. My country does have two long coastlines, people. Rivers and lakes too. We eat fish.

We also go to bed early. I think we were all asleep before 9:00.