Fountain 28 Aix en Provence 10 August

                
                                                  La Fontaine Mousse  Cours Mirabeau
                                                Erected in 1668  designed by Jacques Fosse'

A weathered and diminutive woman in a blue flowery dress and stout, brown lace-up shoes looked up and down the road. She pulled her suitcase trolley away from a shop entrance and stopped when she was in line with the fountain. She bent over at the waist, stiff legged, so one could see the tops of her stockings, and fiddled a bit with the trolley.  Guitar music twanged out of  her portable speaker. Then she straightened and turned to face me gripping a microphone. She pushed her hair off her face with an awkward arthritic movement, grimaced and belted out a wail.

Cars slowed as they curved around the fountain in the centre of the road.
Some paused long enough to throw her coins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCG3gfuUh0M&list=RDcfyqQwoFPLY

I had left Helen only a few days before in the Auvergne, after the weather had changed from hot to wet and windy.

She had seemed so well, so optimistic and we played with ideas of moving to Paris.

She would have loved this chanteuse. 

Fountain 26 was for you, Helen. 

I'm so sad that I never got the chance to tell you.

in was designed in 1668 by Jacques

Fountain 26 and Fountain 27 Sauve 9th August

 

Fountain 26 

The faux source of the River Videron

I had been told by friends that the river suddenly bursts forth from a wall of the town

 and this slightly festering pool becomes a magnificent torrent in the rainy season. 

For centuries this was believed to be a source.

However in the 17th century, or so, an explorer and potamologist

 discovered the truth. That like the river Styx, the Videron is in part subterranean.

 It drops into a sinkhole and some kilometers later emerges again.

Apparently, natural underground rivers are not that unusual-

even the Mojave River, the legendary river of my Californian childhood.

Originating in the San Bernadino Mountains, where I had my first

experience of snow, and much later, a teenage love affair, 

it spends most of its 177km journey underground.

I recommend this eye opening film about water. We are all so naive and trusting.

For Love of Water- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMTXCW8qSCU

environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/global-water-footprint

 

Mademoiselle Lala visits Soave

 

 Fountain 27

Place de Claris de Florian 

 Fabulist 1755-1794

The rather an unfortunate Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian lost his mother as a child,
died quite young after several years imprisonment during the French Revolution,
 and is remembered for writing fables now considered only suitable for children.

Undoubtedly as a subconscious tribute,
a small boy released his brightly coloured sailboat into the fountain.

Fountain 26. Sauve. 9 August

I stopped at a little art gallery with a modest frontage to ask the location of this friend of a friend.

His text to me said "Just ask anyone. Everyone knows me".

And sure enough, she knew him but not his house number. Luckily, just passing, was a woman who did. As they explained how to find to his house- apparently extremely difficult by motorbike with the narrow, steep cobbled roads, steps and the one way system- several other people on the pavement who also knew him well joined in our conversation.

The gallery itself was worth a visit.
A bit of a tardis with a melange of kitch which included those characteristically saccharine yet quirky French paintings, overtly sexual sculptures, dark cellars with landscapes of the local terrain, of both mind and body, and rather a lot of 'Zap' and 'Fritz the Cat' comics harking me back to 1970's California.

And now I know why the comics were there.
According to my in-house wise man, Wikipedia, "in the mid-1990s American underground comic artist Robert Crumb traded six of his sketchbooks for a townhouse in Sauve.
He presently lives there with his family.
The drummer of the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts, also has an apartment in the town."






After a bit of up and down and round about, I found the friend of a friend.

It was excruciatingly bad timing.
He was escorting a gorgeous young woman down the stairs and explained, cold and clear, that they were off for a very long walk.
I could stay one night if I wanted, but all he could offer was a bed his workroom, and he'd be up extremely early to continue with the renovation of his house.

A few minutes after they departed a tail wagging dog sauntered in followed by his bearded barefoot master. The dog had that eager to do a bit of territorial marking look on his face.

" Sorry, X isn't here." I said.

"Oh? Well, I don't know him anyway."

The bearded man didn't make eye contact. He looked the room up and down, taking in the red Chinese lanterns, the long, saffron coloured silk scarves that swagged from the ceiling, the Siamese paper umbrellas either side of my magenta bed.

He  continued,
"there's a sign on the street saying anyone is welcome to come in so long as they don't f*** about with anything".

"Oh. I see."

The bearded man was a compatriot, from Alabama, although I didn't let on to our common land and during his life story he asked me no questions.  For the past ten years he's been a guitarist in a hillbilly band in Belgium. Perhaps thinking I didn't believe him, he flicked out his business card for me with a magician's flourish, whistled to his dog and walked back down the stairs.

I left at first light, careful to not make a noise.
Later that day, I received another text from X, kindly inviting me back again if I were ever passing.

Fountain 25. St. Martin de Valalgues, Gard. 8 August

 My waterproof boots and waterproof jacket have deceived me. The rain has penetrated five layers and I am wet to the skin. However, my legs and the very top of my head are dry, so it could be worse. I tuck my gloves on top of the cylinder head to warm while I fill up the tank. Then squelch and swish through a fingerprinted door to the cash desk. A puddle collects at my feet as I struggle, numb fingered, with crumpled euros. The extremely disinterested man at the till said that it wasn't raining two hours to the south which, as fortune would have it, was exactly the direction I was headed.

                      

Within an hour the rain had stopped and for the first time I could see the landscape around me.

I was on my way to visit the allegedly very friendly/amazing/interesting person that friends of friends told me I would really enjoy meeting. I presumed at this stage that this enjoyment would be a mutual experience.
 I was torn between rushing to this rendezvous and taking in the sights, so I paused at the medieval village of La Garde Guerin. Built on the Chemin de Regordane, the village was a frontier post to protect travelers and their merchandise as they went from to and from the Mediterranean to the north with wine, salt, tin, spices etc.
For a poetically surreal account of the village visit this website
http://www.regordane.com/en/la-garde-guerin-lozere-48800/

  I climbed the spiral staircase to the top of the tower with French men in sensible shoes and French women in kitten heels and warmed up enough to remove a few layers which were still more than damp.

      A curious variety of styles and motifs on the superimposed engaged columns, 

including the pleasingly casual, off-centered crucifix, in the church of St. Michael.

    Then back on the Chemin de Regordane.

   The sun is out and it's hot: perfect for drying my clothes.

St. Martin de Valalgues

 I watch the men play boules and between turns they watch me eat lunch.

The game worked its way from the far side of the fountain to under my feet.

The little ball they are wanting to hit is a few inches below me, so I pull my legs up onto the bench careful not to upset my spread of cheese, tomatoes and olives.

 I watch the men as they take aim, swing the metal ball behind him and let go,
catapulting it towards me
I wonder if I'm in a dangerous place.

Fountain 24. Chez Caroline et Daniel. 5th August

A few years ago my friends found a delightfully unspoilt stone barn in the Auvergne, 

the departemente to which Caroline is native. 

They have filled it with laughter, good food, interesting conversation and treasure.

It is still rustic and simple. Only a single cold water tap outside for doing the dishes. 

 

The WC, open to the elements, enables one to consider the sky 

and the movement of the sun and stars.

Further down the garden they recently investigated a perennial wet patch 

and found a little spring which they diverted into a stone trough.

After breakfast we laid a blanket down under the young tree.
We dropped a coin into the muddy pool and said prayers for friends who were not well.
Then looking towards the distant hills where he had walked 130 years earlier, we read aloud from Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.

Meanwhile, inside the barn, the girls were writing their own pithy messages with pasta letters.

Fountain 23 Chanteuges 5 August

 

After a swim in the cold brown Allier, where we clung to the rocks in the shallow rapids

  and let the water rush over us like trout, my friends and I donned sunhats and 

flip-flops and strolled up to the 12th century church.

 We were alone and we filled the hard silent cloisters with the chatter

and relaxed busyness that is natural when several families

  who are comfortable in each others' company spend several days together.

  
 The font, of which I know nothing, except that it is very old and made of two unrelated blocks of stone married together in an awkward union at the end of the nave. At the bottom of the bowl was a rather soupy puddle of water sitting slightly below a crusty ring marking its normal level.

An unusual variation of a Green Man capital.

 Rather than the leaves issuing from his mouth, he and his colleague
 link arms as their legs morph into vines.

Knowing I am a churchophile, one of the children asked me why there was a sculpture of an armadillo. " I don't know...show me" I replied and followed them towards the main alter, while furiously racking my brain for other examples of secular armadillos. 
"No no, it's a lamb." 
"But it's got scales!" 
"Well, maybe, but it's the Lamb of God symbolising Christ on the cross" and I proceeded to give a highly inaccurate account of some of the Old Testament offerings- Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Isaac etc etc.

                                                              Armadillo of God

Unfortunately at the time, I could not bore them with my obsession for detail. Such as when a lamb is offered for the repentance of sin, God gets all the fatty bits (fat covering on inner parts, fat on tail, kidneys, lobe of the liver, etc) the priest gets the remainder of the lamb: the chops, rump, saddle, loin, shoulder, rack, scrag end etc and the repenitant goes without. 

God definitely gets the short end of the stick.

I wonder how one can look at that wooly bundle and lick one's lips, 
unless one is a wolf, of course. 

image taken from the vegetarian unfriendly website 

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cuts+of+lamb&client=firefox-a&hs=m7b&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&source=iu&imgil