Et nous avons pris les temps de vivre! Merci a Dieu, le temps s'est mis au beau! Time and weather --all embodied in the same word... (In our spare time... And we have made time to enjoy life. Thank God, the weather has changed for the better!)
I write this wanting to give a glimpse of some the places we have been that je ne prends pas de temps to write about! But this connection between time and weather deserves some musing... in a country with a rich agricultural tradition and bounty like France, time and weather are the important and integral parts of the growing cycle... and these are true to their Latin roots of tempus temporis for time and tempestas for weather --although more commonly a storm---and the root of temporary which is from the Latin for seasonal --temporalis. By the way, the same root is for tempero --to control yourself! And thus I will stop here as I have studied Latin and French many years ago, but I am not scholar of linguistics (although it is interesting!). The only remaining question is one of relevancy as in these days of green house gases and global warming (yes, I am a believer...) these words will have lost connections as the passing of the seasons is not so rhythmic and predictable... maybe the 40 "Immortals" of the Institut de France will need to add a new word to the French language --or time will become like Le President Bush --stuck in denial.
(I know, enough! --he's almost through-- but he's in office for as long as we are in France so he's fair game! And if Obama continues to sound like Bush-Lite in his campaigning, he's fair game too! McCain flew too many sorties, c'est une perte de temps to write about him.)
You will recall that we went to Toulouse to make the foie gras and duck confit. Well, we also visited Toulouse and some the towns in SW of France, Carcassone, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Albi... so let me continue the story...
This is the Languedoc (Langue d'Oc) the area of the Oc language which is French but with Spanish mixed in!
Toulouse is the large city --remember Airbus?-- along the Garonne river and it is built predominantly out of red brick so that it takes on a rosy hue at sunset.
The basilica of St. Sernin was the most famous of the churches on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (see the March 5th post for refreshing the memory!) It is a Romanesque church dating back to the 12th and 13th century (Architects do not cringe). Basically these are a single nave with heavy exterior walls and barrel vaulting, and as the walls need to hold up this massive structure, there are few and narrow windows. This is rather amazing in these large basilicas; St. Sernin has a nave that is 377 feet long, 210 feet wide, and nearly 70 feet high.
Toulouse along with Albi, Carcassone, and other towns in this area were home to the Cathars, a religious (labeled heretic by the Church) sect that has Eastern roots and believed in a separation between Good --the spiritual world of God-- and Evil --the materialist world of Satan. Man is a spirit caught between the two worlds, constantly seeking "purity". Thus their "Parfaits" (and they also believed in equal rights so there were "Parfaites") lived their in poverty, humility, and patience. The believers, the "Croyants" (and "Croyantes") strove to emulate them. Obviously, this did not sit well with the powerful (and wealthy) clergy and bishops or the Pope. There were several Albigensian crusades against the Cathars, who were the cloth weavers and merchants and supported by the nobility in these towns. The Second Albigensian crusade was lead by the King of France, Louis VIII, who got great support and participation from his associates by promising that the fiefs of the area would be given to them once they were conquered (so... this idea of a war and then no bid contracts for the oil fields has precedence --and undertaken by Le President Bush who confers with our Christian God...) The Dominicans and their Inquisition finished them off... except that they are resurrected as part of the tourist trade in the region.
Next stop, Carcassone, the Cathar fortified town Disneyized by Viollet-le-Duc in 1844. (I will write about Carcassone and Albi in my next "catch-up" piece) Our French friends do not approve of our belittling of Viollet-le-Duc as he probably did save many historical and wonderful places like Carcassone, St. Sernin, Chateau de Vincennes --but did he really have to add that spire to Notre Dame de Paris? In his own words about restoration:
"means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."
Disneyworld.
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