We headed off early to Agen to visit Helene in prison. We had to be there by 9:30 at the latest, so I didn't see much of the scenery on the way though Matilda, our GPS, took us along many twisting roads, over hills, not along the hemarroidal course of the Lot River. The door to the Maison d'Arret des Femmes has no marking at all, but they had my name on file as a qualified visitor. A small man went on ahead of us with his young child through a series of doors opened with anonymous clicks by an unseen guard. My shoes set off the metal detector so I had to wear an incredibly mangy pair of slippers. The small man and his son visited his obese wife who had murdered her own mother. Helene seemed to be herself, extremely sad of course but seeing things clearly. We sat and talked together, the three of us, holding hands the whole time. While the visiting room / parloir was decrepit, filthy, with dangling wires, doors smashed by having been kicked Helene says their quarters are like a hotel: they cook their own food in kitchenettes, watch cable tv, take courses, tend a small garden. She had a decent tan.
Afterwards, in order re-enter the real world gradually, we walked over to the old city, ducked out of the rain into Agen Musée des Beaux Arts and looked at tiny clay figurines from Lebanon, circa 2000 BC.
We found a space for the car at the edge of park with among the worst war memorials I've ever seen. The vast majority of cities, towns, and villages in France have monuments to the dead from the slaughterhouse of World War I (1914 - 1918). And the vast majority of these simply state: "Pour les enfants de [name of town], mort pour la France" I often wonder what must have come over a town to order one of these bloodthirsty, war-glorifying jobs:
And then what is the meaning of this memorial to the Agen folk who fell during World War II?
The final depressurization took the form of a visit to a gigantic Castorama, a sort of French Home Despot. I got myself a professional cordless drill as an improvement on using the heavy Hilti 3 in 1 for finish carpentry as well as a Bosch router and some cheap bits. Couldn't locate with a speed square, curses for having left such a lightweight necessity of life at home.
We continue to sucked into the vortex of the Clicclack flooring departments of giant stores. Stephanie, like Diogenes of old, holds up pieces of MDF with wood patterns photographed on the fronts to try to understand why a photograph of cherry costs a lot more than a photograph of pine.
