Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

17 September 2001: Normandy

On Monday SPG drove RDC and me to the train station to rent our car. On the way I discovered I had left behind the road atlas Nisou and I had marked our route on. But I did have the book in which our chambre d'hôte was listed. In the rental office--bless SPG, because my French is so not up to car jargon--I realized that I didn't have my license either, having put it in my wheelie in a fit of paranoia about carrying both forms of identification with me at all times. RDC was thus condemned to doing all the driving. I did know what the clerk was saying when she asked, "C'est une bonne addresse?" because I had just read somewhere or other that they say "good" when we would say "right." Except when they say "straight ahead" when they also mean "right." ("To the right" is "à droit" but "straight ahead" is "tout droit," literally "all right," which is ridiculous. It does mean that Beezus's misdirecting Mrs. Quimby by saying "Right" when she meant "correct" could be translated. Was that in Ramona Quimby, Age 8? I confess my Beverly Cleary all runs together). Also when she asked for our phone number at home, I could give it. I said the ten digits in the regular Usan way, 303 pause 555 pause 1212, then stopped. I don't remember how many digits French numbers have, but more than 10. She glanced at me expectantly and I said "Oui, c'est tout."

And we were renting a car to drive it around a country my grasp of whose language was that tenuous. An adventure!

SPG abandoned us for work. We had spotted an ATM before and approached it but it was out of service. I stammered to a store cashier something about "la machine de banque, elle ne marche pas"--is an ATM feminine? is it properly called a bank machine? who knows?--and asked, "Il y a une autre?" because I couldn't remember how to switch IL y a into a question: "A-t-il y une autre?" I positively do not remember the "t" between neighboring vowels from high school French--that's something I picked up from my Free U course. And yes, I use the feminine singular indefinite article almost exclusively because I can pronounce une. I cannot get my mouth around un. So we got money. I returned to the little shop, "Avez-vous une carte de ce région, pour la voiture?" Carte is the most useful word. In Paris I had used it to ask a shop for a business card and later in a restaurant I asked for a carte when we were ready to consider dessert. I figured it might mean map too, or maybe I knew it means map, and if it didn't mean map, maybe "pour la voiture" would have clarified what I wanted. It was a good map.

And so we were off, north toward Alençon where the highway as we would understand it ended and where narrow country roads began. They would pass through wee villages, several stone buildings without even the gas station that defines the smallest of one-horse Usan towns; they were one-lane, which made for interesting passing, and the scenery was exactly what I thought it couldn't really be. A farmhouse on a slope with hayfields and stands of maize and a tumble-down church at the top; huge numbers of raptors everywhere perched on fenceposts waiting for mice to venture from the fields; beautiful vaches blanches and others marked like the best calico cats, white brown and black, so pretty. Unfortunately I never got a picture of them, even when I saw chevres marked the same way. After Alençon when we were at the mercy of roundabouts (actually we were at their mercy throughout), I got us to Sées but then goofed and we had a small--really very short--detour to Nonant-le-Pin instead of straight to Argentan. But this detour first brought us through the puny village named Silly and then led through fantastic horse country with absolutely stunning chevaux left and right. (Did the Godolphin Arabian do a stint in France after being unceremoniously booted from Paris, before being brought to England? I was just looking through King of the Wind in a bookstore the other day and even that volume, a Special DeLuxe Gift edition, didn't have the color illustrations in color but in black and white. Which is just as well: the painting of Sham being beaten in the street still makes me cry.) Even though these were many-horse towns, they were still wee.

Here's something that wants explaining: on the National Geographic map of the world on the wall at work, one little inset map is shaded by population. Afghanistan, inland Australia, and Wyoming are as empty as anywhere but Antarctica. All of Europe from Portugal east to Romania is the densest color, a color found in the U.S. only around cities but not solidly up and down the coasts. Certainly this was all settled land: no untended meadows, no wild forests. Everything was cultivated but little was densely residential. Nothing we saw was anything like as packed as any rural Connecticut town. We were only in a piece of northwest France, hardly representative, but I was glad to see that my first glimpses of countryside really did live up to all the fairytale images I had in my head.

From Argentan to Falaise to Caen, where we planned to follow the perimeter road from six to nine o'clock, west toward Bayeux. We didn't see any westward road and turned around as soon as we could, thinking we were now going backward. Apparently we had despite ourselves found the correct road, because all of a sudden there were only 19 kilometers to Bayeux instead of 21. Huh.

Bayeux. I was aquiver with excitement. I have wanted to see the tapestry since...since...well, for a long time. When did the obsession begin? English History to 1603, fall of 1988? Would it have come up in ninth grade? 1066 was one of the few dates we were required to learn. Anyway. Bayeux, and I had come to see the tapestry. (I like tapestry--is this from The Bassumtyte Treasure too?) The museum is set up really well--once you find it. We followed signs for the museum, ended up circling a building to a door only for wheelchairs, backtracked to an entrance we had looked into and passed by, clearly for no good reason, minutes before.

Oh, and before this we had lunch at a place called Reine Mathilde. (Good. I've always perhaps blindly sided with her ahead of Stephen. Except that it's probably named for William the Conqueror's wife, not his granddaughter.) Which reminds me, one of the buildings in the old town of LeMans belonged to Richard Cœur de Lion's wife. I managed to convey that RDC could not eat milk and to understand that the soup he craved did have crème in it. I managed not to understand that cidre brut et cidre doux both have alcohol in them and that the latter merely has less. But cider is the drink of the region: too cold for grapes but just right for apples, so everything has apples in it. Cider was therefore de riguer.

So we found ourselves in the courtyard of the impressive building where the tapestry is housed and I took a picture for my sister of a plaque by the door announcing that in 1987--that's quite late in their marriage, isn't it, for them to travel together?--the tapestry was honored by a visit by the Prince et la Princesse de Galles.

The tapestry display is quite good. First you walk through a mock-up of the tapestry, with a few simple outlines of images but mostly the history of Edward, Harold, and William given in both French and English. I knew most of the main points and quite a few of the details, and I was cracking up realizing that I have, up to now, clearly only read the British point of view. According to the French, Harold vowed on holy relics to support William's bid for the crown. According to the English, he might have said something vaguely promising but only because he was shipwrecked in Normandy needing William's help, and Edward definitely wanted Harold, not William, to succeed. There are some small-scale model villages and life-sized figures in armor playing chess and hefting steins, and there's a 14-minute movie we skipped, and then there's the tapestry.

As with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, I wondered how it can be displayed vertically--20 inches high, 230 feet long--without tearing the fibers. It's backed with linen, though. In narrow margins bounded the top and bottom border, mythical and allegorical critters cavort, up until the Battle of Hastings, after which the margin is filled with the dead and dismembered. Of its 58 scenes, the crucial one is the 23rd, when Harold makes his sacred vow. In 32, a strange sign appears in the sky that put the fear of God into everyone who saw it (it turned out to be Halley's Comet). The crossing from Normandy to Pevensie (is that why Lewis named Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie?) was such a happy time that even the horses laughed. They look like they're in the merry old land of Oz, don't they? The audio accompaniment (available in English, hooray!) keeps you moving. The narrator allowed himself a little sarcasm when he said that even though Odo's vows prevented him from spilling blood, being a bishop didn't mean that William's half-brother couldn't wallop people with a mace.

The tapestry wraps around three sides of a broad U. We were on the last stretch, scene 51 (when the battle begins), when from behind us we heard, in a strong English voice, "Bloody hell! Does this go around a corner?" It does, because if it didn't, Harold couldn't get one in the eye. The site I linked above suggests that this might merely be one of Harold's men and not Harold himself, but everybody knows Harold took an arrow in the eye. Everyone knows it because of the tapestry, I guess. But pop culture is stronger than factual history: it'll be a long time before Richard III is exonerated from killing his nephews, because even though he possibly didn't, Shakespeare implied he did.

The colors in the tapestry were mostly reds, greens, and shades of brown from yellow to umber. I didn't think of it then and of course now I'm looking just as these three details, but the colors here are the same colors on the painted ceiling in the LeMans chapel, and I wonder if that's so because the same pigments were available to dye wool as were available to saturate paint. But it's really only the blue range that's missing: a princely color.

I bought a postcard of that last detail, of the scene of Harold's death, for ABW, because, as RDC said, I'm naughty. ABW has never forgiven the French for changing English into a Latinate language. She liked its being Germanic. I also bought a 1:20 reproduction of the tapestry that is still too long to fit under my study ceiling like a freize.

From Bayeux we drove just a few kilometers north to Arromanches, which is on the west end of Juno beach. Here, perhaps because it was in the middle of the five invasion beaches or because the coast had the best shape, the Allies built a Floating Harbor to dock ships after D-Day. The barges, sunk into place as breakwaters, are still visible. In the photograph, the town is on the left, following a cliff west, and then in the low tide of middleground is one of the barges. At the far right in the background is another. In the very foreground are the remains, covered at low tide, of several Higgins boats--the ones that helped to win WWII by allowing the landing of infantry during this invasion. On this beach, the British flag waved next to the French--Juno, Gold, and Sword were all British beaches--and farther west are Omaha and Utah beaches, where U.S. and Canadian troops landed. From west to east, Utah faces east on a north-jutting peninsula with Cherbourg at the tip, then Omaha, facing east and north, then the other three. Our next stop--we drove straight by Golf Omaha, which sounded to me like Surf Bangladesh--would be an Omaha beach.

Specifically, Colleville-sur-Mer, which is now a cemetery, on land France ceded permanently to the U.S. There are 9,387 servicepeople, including 307 unknowns, three Medal of Honor recipients, and four women. I happened upon one of those women, PFC Mary Barlow of Connecticut, killed in July 1945. Unless I have the figures reversed, these graves represent 35% of those who died in Normandy; the remains of the others went home. (This is the cemetery in "Saving Private Ryan," and I wonder that the character's wife didn't bring him home to bury him under her roses.) The stones are precisely aligned, just as in Arlington; there is a memorial to the soldiers--in the background of the left photo--a round shrine--around whose perimeter is carved "These endured all and gave all that justice might prevail and all mankind enjoy freedom and inherit peace." Behind the reflecting pool is an open arc with battle plans carved into either side, as the Gettysburg Address and...that other speech...are carved into the Lincoln memorial. In the middle of the arc is a statue, The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (bronze, watery, reaching for the sky, impressive, despite the hokey name), and around the statue flowers are laid. I'm sure people always leave flowers--many, many of the graves had flowers laid at their stones--but now I think the messages were different than ever before.

6 juin 1944
11 septembre 2001

fraternité

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Hommage a vous qui avez donné votre vie pour nous liberer. Aujourd'hui nous serons à vos côtes pour venger les horribles attentats--4 Havrais Reconnaissants.

(Homage [I guess] to you who gave your life to liberate us. Today, we will be by your side to avenge the horrible attacks. [The last bit sounds like a reconnaissance military division from the war?]).

My eyes leaked throughout. So many graves, so much sacrifice, the life I have, the attacks. Battles and bloodshed--the Battle of Hastings (which if only a day did alter the course of history, just as every battle does), D-day, 11 September. This was also Hundred Years War territory. Throughout London and Paris we had seen more memorials to the world wars than we're used to seeing in the U.S. In two days we would pass through Tours, which is pretty well into France to be where Charles Martel turned back the Moors invading from Spain. If he had not been victorious, Europe today would likely be predominantly Muslim instead of mostly Christian.

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The night before, as we plotted what we would like to do, we decided to stop Monday night away (I have got to stop reading British English). Nisou brought out her well-thumbed book of chambres d'hôtes, which is what they call bed & breakfasts Over There, and we looked on the map for a village that was nearish Bayeux and the beaches, but on the western side of them, on the way toward our Tuesday destination. On the map we saw Formigny, so in the book we looked up Formigny, and our choice was easy because there was only one listing. Nisou made the call, spoke to the woman, arranged our room and also supper, and laughed with her. That sounded good. Nisou reported that she spoke a little English and that dinner was at 7:30. Sharp. And don't be late.

We left Colleville-sur-Mer at 5:00 and had six kilometers to travel and the place to find. I wasn't encouraged by the directions, which were basically "when you get to town turn left," and besides we were approaching from the north, not the south of the book. But I was forgetting how wee and insubstantial these towns are. The next day on the map I would compare the size of the print of Paris, LeMans, and Formigny to the population scale, and Formigny is the smallest possible size. There was only the one road, and one lane leading west off that with a signpost. It was 5:30. The other thing the book had said was that this is a 16th-century farmhouse with bounding a court. Oh yes. Mme de la Salle was over 60 and must have had superhuman energy. She led us to our room with its private bath (wheee!) and we asked if we could explore the property. First, we explored our view.

From our bedroom window, we looked out over her flower and vegetable gardens, her fruit trees, and a field of corn. It was magically peaceful and silent. I unbuckled my passport belt and dropped it on the bed, saying to RDC that this was about the last place on earth an international incident could ever happen. "You mean like a land invasion?" he asked. Um, yeah. But I left it off.

That these buildings had survived for centuries amazed us. Okay, the oldest was the farmhouse and none of the rest dated from the seizi�me si�cle. So nothing was as old as the Hundred Years War. But they survived the Normandy invasion of just 56 years ago. We would later read that in many towns in this region, the corners of the stone buildings are chipped from gunfire exchanged between Allies and Germans.

This isn't exactly a panoramic compilation, but there's the farmhouse, the oldest building, with the roof of turret poking over the south side; a long barn that opened on what we would discover to be fields, so I figure it was for hay and produce; stables on the north side, with no horses, and a cowbarn on the east side.

At the front of the house, two donkeys cropped the emerald grass. The one behind my head looks like just a piece of neck, but it only turned its head sharply. In Arromanches we had seen two cats looking at each other, one on the sidewalk and the other on a gate. "Le meow," we had said. We had discovered that prefixing anything with "le" made it French. We discovered that French pigeons certainly are les pigeons and that a dog is much more likely to understand you when you say "le woof" instead of just "woof." Or so we thought. Too much Pepe LePew, probably.

SPG lent me this fleece, thank goodness. Man it was cold. And that was outside. Indoors felt much colder, maybe only because we expect a house to be minimally heated. Why I was delighted that the countryside fulfilled my stereotyped imaginings but still wasn't prepared for unheated houses I don't know. The chill damp got us thinking about armor, particularly plate armor, particularly combined with the fleas that apparently everyone had. How do you scratch under armor? Kinda ruins the romantic chivalric ideal. And cold!

In the garden, we found the garden even more wonderful than it had looked from the window (which had no screens, just as Nisou's house had no screens--she says there are no mosquitoes--heaven!). I don't like espaliered trees, but it was all fascinating anyway and these were very fruitful. A pear tree splatched around the corner of the house bore huge fruit from its old gnarled branches, as did other smaller ones against a wall. Apple trees were not espaliered but trained against four levels of strong cable, no taller than I, mostly two-dimensional: the trunk up and four left branches and four right. They were bonsai apple trees, all their growing power directed instead into fruit. From beyond a hedge we heard chickens clucking--their shed is visible on the far right of the garden picture above, left of the turret. The three non-house sides of the garden were bounded by an irrigation ditch, but I couldn't imagine it ever being short of rain. Tomates, haricots, and many other vegetables whose French names I know not. The vines growing over the windows are grapes. Miniature pear trees flank the door on the right, and above it is our bedroom window. I didn't see any berry canes in the garden, but perhaps they don't need to be cultivated. We scampered along the lane and I whooped, spotting blackberries. Black raspberries? I'm not sure but thought blackberries because of their size and the not having a nubbie left over. We ate a lot of those. There were currant shrubs too. I thought we'd stumbled into Eden.

The fields surrounding the property had just been harvested, or so we thought. The most magical part was just around the corner. I nearly fell over when I saw this path, it was perfectly storybooky. The banks on either side, the branches meeting overhead, the perfect greenness. I checked underfoot for Benjamin Bunny or Squirrel Nutkin, because I thought I was in Bowness-on-Windermere. I looked behind me for a tardy white rabbit. I even wondered if Ratty or Moley, Fiver or Hazel was nearby. Or Mandy. The best thing is that these footpaths lead everywhere from town to town, and you can walk the whole length of the country on them alone. Now I was sure we were in paradise.

The farmhouse dining room was lined with governess-level paintings and copper pots that Mme de la Salle made her jam in. At 7:30, we met Corine et Michel, the other guests, and Mme de la Salle served us Calvados, a liqueur of the area of fermented apple juice that's then distilled, and assis (I think), an aperitif made of black currants. Both of these I did drink. (Luckily I was served only a finger.) There was cider of course and everything else not only a specialty of the region but almost all from her own garden: a quichey dish with jambon, and she didn't grow the ham but did grow the eggs. She said it wasn't a quiche because it was sans pâte, without the pastry. Still delicious. Her own tomatoes stuffed with porque and more jambon. Haricots verts et secs might have been my undoing. I eat green beans readily, but by the time the bean has matured and set its own seed, that seed is a bean bean, like lima or pinto or kidney, which I Don't Eat. But I think these were fava beans--we made the requisite "Silence of the Lambs" jokes quietly to each other--and they were okay. As far as I understood, they were both the same plant, one green and young and the other matured with its seed dried. I guess beans produce for months, so it is possible to have both stages simultaneously. And bread and cheese of course, and an apple tart. RDC and I mostly listened. Though our hostess and Corine had as much English as I had French, and I understood things like sans pâte and jambon and that les ânes earned their living by eating les herbes and could say nous aimons vos framboises en le jardin, that was about it. When we admired the copper pots and the coziness of la salle and praised the food, Corine asked whether it was true that there is only fast food in the U.S. I still think this place and Nisou are exceptions--they've got to be, haven't they?--but if even regular folks like these two from Provence considered this place, this meal ordinary, then I should sue someone or other for Usan cultural vacancy.

Before dinner, I had paused in the passageway looking at a magazin with a cover photograph of a girl laying flowers at Colleville-sur-Mer on Wednesday the 12th. I wish I had asked Madame if I could have had it for the archive I was accumulating. But I didn't. As we looked at it and I haltingly translated the article to RDC, Madame emerged from the kitchen and Corine and Michel came downstairs, and there was an awkward pause. We didn't exchange names until much later during dinner; their first words were concern whether we personally had been affected. Non, non, nos familles et amis sont bien. They smiled and nodded. Also, the day before in the train station, a gentleman--yes, a gentleman, not a man--asked if we could direct him somewhere, and I said non, je regrette, je ne sais pas Paris, je ne parle pas le français. He was African, from Mali I think he said, and he easily heard that we were Usan. He said he was so sorry, it was a terrible thing that happened "to you, to all of us." All of this common decency and concern assured me, gave me hope, reaffirmed my wavering faith in humanity. And this was one of the good things about being away in the immediate aftermath--I'm sure people were decent and kind at home too, but I met people from all over in the days afterward, and everyone expressed their sympathy and many their solidarity.

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When I got home and started looking for links about Formigny, I found that, holy shit, last year there was an historical reënactment commemorating the 550th anniversary of the battle of Formigny (which brought Normandy permanently under French control at the end of the 100 Years War). The reënactment was more like those of the Civil War than like SCA, but I'm emotionally scarred and coming up with mostly snickers about my own failed rôle-playing past. I include the link because there are some pictures of the countryside, even though it seems everything was done in nearby Trévières, not Formigny.