Le Languedoc

These past few days we've turned the adventure up a notch as we've traveled to a new city, rented a car, and learned to drive in French. We've had our moments, but Monday the payoff was extraordinary.

On Friday we had lunch with our landlord, Guillaume. Guillaume and his wife are in their mid-thirties and have three boys. His wife was in Martinique on business, and his two older boys are staying with Guillaume's mother in Lille, so we only got to meet his one-year-old. We had a lovely meal and a nice conversation.

On Saturday we took time to pack and get things ready for our journey to the south. We also had a lovely walk in the Luxembourg in the morning, and visited the Louvre again in the afternoon.

On Sunday we boarded the bullet train for Montpellier. I have some business with a university there, and so we decided to spend a few days. We took the train down and rented a car. As some of you might remember, the old fool who is married to Evelyn made all the arrangements for this trip except for checking to see when his driver's license expired, so Evelyn is going to have to do all the driving. Meanwhile I operate the navigation system and try to make sure we don't go the wrong way down any one-way streets (not an easy task, I assure you). The learning curve was pretty sharp for the first few hours as we dealt with a new car, a new city, a new set of traffic rules, and a new GPS that only communicates in French. But Evelyn did a smashing job, and after a harrowing search for our hotel, she was willing to get back in and drive us out to on the Mediterranean sea, where we saw live flamingos in the wetlands, dipped our toes in the surf, and watched the sun go down.

But it was on Monday that Evelyn truly earned her French driving merit badge. I have always been an armchair medievalist and fascinated with the Cathar culture of 12th-century France. The Cathars were heretics, deviants from the orthodox Catholic faith who rejected the Catholic sacraments and embraced poverty, vegetarianism, and reincarnation. They flourished as part of the advanced culture of the south of France in the 12th century. Then around 1200 the pope declared crusade against them, and the greedy barons of northern France were only too willing to plunder the wealthy southerners and take control. The Cathar Crusades was a drawn out and bloody affair, with sieges and sacks and burnings at the stake, and in the end the southern French culture was decimated, the northern French took control, and the Cathars disappeared.


So today we toured Cathar country. We headed south toward Barcelona, but turned west just short of the Spanish border and headed up into the Pyrenees. There we wandered through high mountain valleys on tiny winding roads until we came to Queribus, the last Cathar castle to hold out against the Crusaders.







We first made a dizzying climb in our car, then continued on foot to what seemed like the top of the world.

Of course we took the winding staircase to the top.

Man, what a view!

We had lunch at the most charming restaurant in the most charming town in the world, La Table du Curé at Cucucagnan, a tiny village built into a hillside with a working windmill (it actually grinds and sells flour).

We then drove over mountain passes and past rivers and forests and castles to Rennes le Chatêau, the home of Berenger Saunière, a village priest whose massive building projects with unexplained financial sources have created a kind of mystery cult that was popularized in a book called Holy Blood Holy Grail, which was in turn a principle source of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

We were all by ourselves in the Saunière house and garden and church and at the side of his grave, and with the clouds scudding by and the wind whipping through the trees it was all a little creepy.

Wandering into this room with life-size wax figures of the priest and his housekeeper gave me a bit of a start.

He even had his own demon at the door of his church.

By this point it was getting dark, but we pressed on to Carcassonne, which has an entire walled medieval city. It was breathtaking, lit up in the darkness, and we wandered the mostly empty streets and watched a troupe of fire jugglers. Altogether an unbelievable day, and might I say I am so proud of my stalwart wife for getting us all of those wonderful places. I'm glad I brought her.