La Maison Familiale - Léran

We Americans are strangers to the pleasures of the maison familiale, the shared rhythms of keeping house (and ours has not been renovated since 1948) among several generations of family. Clusters of extended family come and go. The presiding mother, whoever she may be, shops for the invading armies of cousins, while fathers swat flies from the barbecue, and waves of children set and clear the table (and nowadays the dishwasher) for long meals in the garden, barely shaded from the powerful heat of the Midi.

Chateau de Léran

Our maison familiale is the 18th c. house of Jacques' childhood, in a tiny village, 7 hours away, in the Ariège. Léran's crumbling homes are preserved mostly by Brits, as is the one eating establishment in town. The chateau, where Jacques once played with the Count's son among the sprawling gardens, dark and frightening under enormous unkempt trees of that wild paysage, now houses condominiums. Its romantic turrets and elaborate stonework are recent conceits, disguising its sturdy medieval origins. In a Venetian church we once stumbled on a portrait of Léran's 18th c. Count de Levis-Mirepoix, where he had been buried after fleeing to Venice during the French revolution.

Jacques in his old haunts

But the arresting beauty of Léran is in the pristine air, the herons taking off in long-legged flight over the rushing river, the thick underbrush of birdsong, the immense weeping willows, the sweeping vistas. In early morning the yellow crescent moon gleams through the old magnolia tree, and then with an eruption of birdsong disappears into pastel brightness, as the gold aura creeps subtly toward l'aube.

In the bird soaked dawn I climb down the worn stairs to my morning tai chi on rough ground, mole hills and magnolia cones and long tender grass. It is a world of hollyhocks and roses and tiger lilies, tall and wild, the garden a tangle of green and magenta. Broad leathery magnolia leaves carpet the lawn.

The garden

Jacques has never wanted to come here when the house was empty, but I find my days full and productive, blinded as I am by deep green and azure, by a plunge into a native land, a perfect complement to Paris. I want to receded and glide in the green, and learn about Jacque's boyhood steps--I have never had a home base like this, my life has been so peripatetic. He is happy to be here and calls every room by its family name (the salle du devant, the crumbling petit salon). Life is simple here, while the old house mulls over its own memories, bedraggled as the children like to keep it, unimproved. They don't want a piece of furniture moved.

Montségur

We walk to the lake in the heat of the afternoon where I paddle through cool opaque waters surrounded by the Pyrenees. Walking back, I am still in my swimming suit on a narrow heavily trafficked road. We pet three shy donkeys that await us in their fields, with their enormous, liquid eyes where flies gather. A little gleaming eye flashes at me from the black hot road, engulfed in black down. I had only realized it was a tiny chick and bent towards it when a car swiped violently past, leaving only a smear of blood. I begin to feel the onerous sun. The chimes of the angelus turn round and round their four note melody.

The doves coo, a plaintive flying bird swoops, four or five different birdsongs twitter, and a steady two-note chorus chirps, loudest at the sun's rising and setting.

Artwork at Lac du Montbel

At the lake two girls in bikinis were building clay statues of sunbathers as I swam out in warming currents in the clay-darkened aqua waters to drift among blue Pyrenees, while distant thunder sounded from purple clouds on the far side. Even under the overcast sky, the sun singed my face. Jacques came down from his shady perch with a little blond boy, Victor, at first shy, then later when no one would take him down again to see the clay people he started shouting "pee-pee! ca-ca!" "Je ne comprends rien, je suis Americaine," I responded.

12th c. frescoes of the Vals church

On a drizzly day of cooling air there is no use swimming, so I connect to the wifi at the bistro among playful comments from the old characters drinking there. A gorgeous great dane stares at me and I at her. A gray old man with chic eyeglasses thinks I am admiring him. On leaving, he bows: Madame, mes homages.

And now the storm has passed through, the skies are baby blue underneath slowly sailing puffs, and it will warm again. Light glows on the towering weeping willow.

Burned at the stake

We walk along the Chemin de Vigne, Jacques' mother's old walk above Léran where we can see the bowl of blue lands formed by the Pyrenees. We cut down through bent grasses along the river swept in tresses of weeping willow. There are fresh wood cabins in a kind of camping ground or trailer park that sprawls around the chateau like a feudal village. For all their modesty they are sweeter and greener than the stucco facades of the village, dry as sand in the punishing heat.

Much is unique nearby--the Romanesque church of Vals, built upon a subterranean crypt in the 11th century, with fanciful frescoes from the 12th c. There is the Grotte de Niaux, with its 15,000 year old drawings that rise toward you in the cathdral space as you penetrate into darkness. There are the countless chateaux of the Cathares, in states of varying ruin. The most dramatic, Montségur, is at the top of a steep woody climb reaching to 1214 meters. Montségur was besieged by thousands of Catholic Crusaders for 8 months, before they surmounted the escarpment and burned the unrepentant Cathares the 16th of March, 1244.

Chateau de Roquefixade

But this year we limited our excursions, beginning with Fanjeaux, home of St. Dominic. Its 13th c. streets are bordered by ancient split beam houses. It stands over the meeting of the Atlantic route (the Ariege river) and the Mediterranean (via the Aude), a crossroads of French cultures. St. Dominic's visions of fire miracles occurred here, foreshadowing the terror of the Inquisition and the extinction the local Cathare culture, and with that the eventual domination of this rough country by France.

Carcassonne

And we visited the medieval fortress of Carcassonne, built on a 1st century Roman camp, a Visigoth capital in the 5th century, taken over by Franks in the 8th, and besieged by Crusaders in 1209. Today it feels hectic with tourists, lacking in charm, a full medieval city but with such blatant signature retouching by Viollet le Duc that parts of it resemble a Harry Potter scene set. The fortress told few tales from its medieval towers, round and black-capped like those of the Conciergerie, as the wind blew cold that day. We were warmed by a powerful quartet of Russian men in the Romanesque (1006 AD) church of St. Nazaire, to which the Crusaders added a beautiful gothic choir. There is a charming 14th c. French gothic pieta at the edge of the Romanesque nave that is fashioned of the rough gray stone of the region. Outside, beyond the warmth of the deep Russian voices, an extremely disabled and beautiful young girl in a wheelchair moaned and wailed. Her family surrounded her, dismayed, under an exaggerated set piece of gargoyles that looked like a movie set. Near her a young mastiff sat with its own family, its pink and menacing head saddened by the little girl.

St. Nazaire

The next day I had news of a friend's sudden passing, which made me weep a little in the garden, till a songbird, golden like the fallen magnolia leaves, circled closer and closer to comfort me. Then a ravishing blue butterfly, like those that had two years previous followed me up the climb to the Chateau Roquefixade when I wore the same blue skirt, fluttered around me and landed for long minutes on my computer, allowing me to admire the intricate beads of color that border its wings, dipped in pale blue fuzz that thickens around the regal, delicate head with its glittering black eye and graceful blue antennae. Doves called soothingly behind layers of twitters. But for warbling you must go running over the fields.

Mornings I jog out under the trimmed plain trees along the fancified chateau, up along pastures of red cattle and turned land, along bales of hay drying, perfect quilts of fields in a bowl of land beneath the craggy Pyrenees. I am led by small, regal, black and white butterflies like Japanese monarchs, encircling me and relaying my coming to their industrious clan along the sides of the road. Crimson poppies dot the fields, their damask garb folding back and forth in the wind. Stone ruins of houses tumble into tall lavender and enormous thistles, and the occasional car zips past, for which I have to stand off the narrow little ribbon of asphalt. The women I pass yodel bon JOUR in an unrestrained ascending pitch, while the men say BON jour--all right, I see you.

Protestant cemetery

There are also the tiny allies of nature. A muscular spring drains through the lily pad pond to the little river. Frogs gather near me, as I meditate, some on the lily pads and some bravely jump out of the pond to bask dry in the sun. I've found a more level plot for tai chi, facing a wild abandoned garden, long left to flourish in its own way. Magic is here in the swaying willow and fern trees and tiger lilies hiding secrets in the grasses.

And now more Loups arrive--a family of 4, another cousin and friends. Only French spoken from now on. There is a sudden intimacy. The ados are suitably distant and judgmental, but they all pitch in together for lunch, taking on the barbecue. Some of us amble to the lake in a misty rain. The clay statues sprawl in the sand even after the night's downpour--a lanky man with a branch for a penis, and a round little Negress with flowers for hair. Layers of time rest in the undulating blue horizon.

The next day Jacques and I explored some unmarked roads, driving on the narrow hot winding asphalt through villages half or fully abandoned, the wooden barn doors in splinters, cabins patched together with concrete and plastic covering, magnificent white horned cattle and shorn sheep, of whom the largest drop onto the ground in the heat. We drove through the valleys of the deep green mountains, trying to locate the white escarpment of Montségur, always hidden behind other peaks. We drove through dappled forests under ropes of green, asking direction of tough southern men, one of whom wished us "soyez beni", but most offer unwavering gazes. The heat became unbearable in the little metallic prison of a car, and a growing headache became a searing migraine. So we raced to the aqua lake with its soft clay, where only the female idol remained intact, wide-eyed and brash. The male's branch of a penis had been removed, his clay body crumbled. I plunged into the lake, the layers of warm and cold, and paddled alone far from the shore. Then my body lay completely limp, on the beach, till Jacques came down and we entered the water at a glacial pace together.

Southern Léran has larger houses and lush jardins a l'anglais. Shorn sheep galloped from us as we walked to the pond for cleansing water, a passive filtration system that waits for sediment to drop to the bottom. The Protestant cemetery has lost the charm I remembered, its starkly simple graves marked only by rose bushes. Half of it is hideous, with plastic flowers and garish stones jumbled together, but in the other half, where Jacques' family lies, there is austere and sober memory. Then we circled back, past our lonely donkey friend with his beautiful eyes where flies swarm. We stopped in to see a cousin--one of many in the village. Georgie told us about his travels to Vietnam, the country where he had grown up and whose language he spoke, and where his mother had been a prisoner of the Vietminh for a year. George and Monique are in their 80's, and very present, observant, and voluble. Jacques grew talkative and jovial with his tall aperitif, uncharacteristically hilarious, but we had to get home, it was 8 pm.

Sant Joan de Caselles

The last day we drove to the Independent Municipality of Andorra, a feudal state till 1993, now a duty-free shopping center. We departed on roads that wound around Léran, through villages of a few houses or farms, through forests, past large white horned cattle communing together, wisely ignoring their future. Then we took the torturous sinuous mountain roads of the Pyrenees, past what remain of the chateaux of the Cathares. I was carsick so we stopped in lovely Ax-les-Thermes, a neat village of healing waters where I immediately found the toilet. I sat with my feet in the basin of healing waters in the town square, where St. Louis on his systematic massacre of the Cathares had established a refuge for leprous Crusaders. Then we drove through the Pyrenees, through rocky visages green and bright with mountain flowers, cattle feeding, we plunged into folded green valleys as clouds moved through them. By the time we crossed out of France at the formidable customs station, the sky was pure deep azure, the mountains great ridges of green. But descending into Andorra, heat and construction and commercialization spoiled the wild mountains, everywhere cigarettes at a discount. In Andorra we were assailed by a blast of international brands, with only traces of the local architecture of granite, and an old town council from the 16th c. We wandered en masse--the boys slack, the girls bristling with impatience at all the shopping to be done--to a very charming Catalan/Andorran/French restaurant--named los Menairos, after trolls who are kept in match boxes and do much mischief, like the trolls of Sardinia. We emerged after a long and heavy lunch under an oppressive sun, despite the wind. We crawled along the canal across a hideous white spider of a bridge, the Pont de Paris, found the obligatory duty-free whiskey and chocolate at Leclerc and walked in suffocating streets untempted by shopping.

St, Sernin, 11th c., Toulouse

On the drive back we stopped at St. Joan de Caselles, a 12th c Romanesque church of rough midi stone and timber, with a wide-eyed terra cotta Christ in Majesty of the 12th c. against a charming medieval fresco of the 14th c. A gothic 16th c. retable portrayed the strong characters often created by rural artists. We drove home through the magnificent Pyrenees, through portals and folding rocks to the deep green of the valley.

Our vacances familiales came to an end. We left Léran via Toulouse, with her easy grandeur and limpid edginess. There the magnificent Romanesque church St. Sernin, a major way station on the pilgrimage road, is a Romanesque masterpiece of enormous proportions. Her portal is perfect Byzantine bas-relief, while the vast indoor vault soothes with the warmth of the soft rose colored stone and the cool loftiness of the architecture, massive finely worked arches, and rhythmic receding layers of arches. Byzantine-like figures guard the crypt, whose interior like a stone flower, unfolding in perfect and mysteriously wrought symmetry.

St, Sernin, 11th c., Toulouse

We took the fast smooth train along the Canal du Midi and the flat and silky Garonne River, along the path of the doomed plane trees. Staunch and magnificent, these trees had been brought by Americans after World War II, and are now falling to an American disease, and will all, eventually, be chopped down.

For more on the Ariége, follow the link to an older piece I wrote last trip--