VISIT TO GASCONY

The House

When we stepped out on the tarmac at Toulouse, the heat almost knocked us backwards.  I had dressed as for a damp, autumnal weekend in Wales, my bag filled with warm clothing suddenly it seemed ‘de trop.’

A text arrived from my sister: she had, like some Carthaginian general, just ‘entered’ Toulouse and would arrive shortly.  I collected some euros from the dispenser - in my experience, the cheapest way of buying small amounts of currency - and sat down to wait.  The airport is thankfully well-air conditioned.

Soon we were bowling along country roads, west and south towards the afternoon sun and, as the roads became narrower and the turnings off more frequent, finally arrived at our destination, a journey of nearly 1000 miles accomplished between a late breakfast and an early tea.

Compare this with the mid-eighteenth century when Talleyrand was journeying from Perigord to Paris on the Bordeaux stage coach.  In his memoirs he says the journey took 17 days - but as this works out at a travelling speed of only 4 miles an hour - it seems unlikely.  No doubt it seemed like 17 days though; the EasyJet flight seemed like 17 hours at times.

The Upstairs Gallery running from the back of the house to the front

My sister lives in a French country house of infinite charm and beauty. But the house is a work in progress, indeed has been a work in progress for the last four hundred years. It has grown like topsy from a small farmhouse to resemble the enormous pile of the Mas Lunel, depicted in Rose Tremain’s novel ‘Trespass.’  And of course as soon as one bit is done up another bit falls down.

In the days when it was built people hadn’t heard of bathrooms. Even the Palace of Versailles wasn’t built with bathrooms and guests answered calls of nature in any convenient cupboard or landing.  With luck the servants might clean up.  So getting to the state rooms entailed the negotiation of what was in effect an indoor farmyard.

This being the twentieth century, my sister’s house of course does have a bathroom but the previous owner (who only used the house in the summer), built the bathroom in an annex on the far side of the barn through which - in an echo of Versailles - it is now necessary to traipse avoiding the detritus from pigeons above your head and ducks around your feet.

Lucky it wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, when the snow apparently blows in through the roof tiles and lies thick inside.  Still plans are afoot to change all this.  And if not, well, they say suffering is good for the soul.

But sitting outside in the September sunshine, with the poultry happily milling about, with four pigs in the wood (carefully named Ham, Pork, Bacon and Sausages, lest anyone become too fond of them) and a pair of cows in the meadow (named less carefully Daisy and Bubble though they too are destined for the freezer at some point), I feel only the warmth on my face and bucolic bliss hanging like the famous gardens of Babylon about me.

This is Gascony and Gascony is famous for being a place where you eat largely and well. The kitchen is big enough to take a table for twelve and we were nine when we sat down to lunch on Saturday, the guest of honour being a retired Brussels interpreter with a fund of amusing anecdotes about language.

The Kitchen

Later he told me there was a statue in the next village of Tossaint Louverture, the former Domincan slave who first led one of the few successful slave revolts in history and later became a general in Napoleon’s army.  We went to see it.  History oozes from the villages of France as from the pores of a wet sponge.

On our way there or perhaps to somewhere else, we met the old woman to whom my sister takes her excess of ducks, which breed in the Gascon sunshine with astonishing rapidity and nest in the trees.  She charges 2 euros a duck to do all the nasty work of killing, drawing, feathering etc and even has a little stun machine so that the duck doesn’t know what is happening until it finds itself full of sage and onion.

She asked me, in a broad midi-accent, whether ‘I was in France?’  I think she meant did I live in France, but for some reason I could only answer her literally.  So I told her I really didn’t know; it could be Bulgaria. 

It wasn’t very funny then - indeed it was incomprehensible, neither she nor my sister knew what I was talking about - and it seems even less funny still when written down.  Bear with me.

And then, hardly before we had arrived we were off again and whizzing home where, inevitably, it was pouring with rain.