Saturday, March 21, 2009

Gates

When the architectural richness around here begins to bedazzle, it's wise to inventory things. So here are some of the great gates.

This is in Rivière Haute, the upstream neighborhood of Albas.  Scenes of Vietnamese peasant life are silhouetted in metal.   










A valentine gate in Castelfranc created for a man who had had 40 lovers and but one true love.





Legend has it that figure on this gate represents the Frankish god of fear. 






The Prayssac musée




From Prayssac...





Finally, a typical "Get Out and Stay Out" style




Saturday, March 14, 2009

Pont de fer, 2




How did they build the thing?



They must build the towers first, lift them upright and temporarily brace them in place. Towers are obviously there to transfer weight to the ground so the ground must have been carefully prepared to bear down on solid bedrock. The towers look elegant because they don't require any bulky bracing to keep them from tipping over. That's the genius of the suspension bridge, that the hardworking cables not only hold up the deck and its traffic, transfer their weight to the towers, the cables also keep the towers from tipping over. ( In this way cables are a little like mothers.) The cables don't appear to be attached to the tower in any way, just draped over them: thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif angle of the cables and their tension keep the tower in place.



How do they get the cables in place? They are too heavy to bring to the site in coils and sling across. Instead, they bring huge spools of wire and make the thick cable in place. Using an invention of John Roebling (the reknowned builder of the Brooklyn Bridge) they feed the wire back and forth across the bridge, splicing in a new spool when the old one runs out and then clamp the wires together and wrap them with..more wire. So, if I understand this correctly, there are very few splices or breaks of any kind in the cable, unlike with rope, say, which is made of huge numbers of relatively short strands woven together.



Of course there has to be some sort of beginning cable and catwalk for all this weaving. Here in Castelfranc, someone probably rowed across the river with one end of a long rope. In the case of a bridge Roebling was to build over Niagra, he was reduced to offering boys $10 reward for flying a kite with a line attached across the span.

When they build the deck in sections. They must have to start at both ends and work toward the middle in order to keep the towers from falling over. They suspend the deck from the cable with rods and clamps

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I love the mayor of Castelfranc







When I went in to ask the mayor who to call about an overflowing sewer pipe, and he had someone over to fix it by the end of the day, I knew I LIKED the mayor. I profited from that same interview to ask him if some day he would consider having the two plantanes pruned which were growing chaotically across our view of the river. He sounded favorable, there being other trees to deal with upstream that were about to tumble into the river after the recent tempest. He said they would have to rent a boom truck for a whole day and could probably fit it doing our trees. I was sort of hoping for some action maybe by the end of the decade. I was bowled over to hear chainsaws outside the rear windows at midmorning.



The French have an unfathomable relation to pruning. At the Creuniers they would have their plantanes-- huge ones, three or four feet through-- pruned down to hands with amputated fingers. Not one twig or minor branch would remain. Jeanne would say, yes they are now clean. I guess they grow enough foliage for plenty of shade all summer before they get "cleaned" again in late winter. Maybe my two requests to the mayor--to get the sewer fixed and to prune the trees behind my house-- were not so radically different.





Monsieur le maire is André Bessières and we watched him elected by the conseil municipal and sworn in last year. I take it he is of the famed old local Bessières family, as in Jean-Baptiste Bessières, one of Napoleon's most capable marshals. Word had it that he had lived and worked in far-off lands but had recently retired and returned to his native contrée. Nobody ran against him so perhaps his absence all those years had the effect of rendering him non-controversial. A friend from Albas seemed disappointed that he is not "souriant", a big smiler. Her new mayor is souriant. The old mayor of Castelfranc was also souriant. I like souriant as much as anyone, don't get me wrong. But I love this reserved, discreet new mayor who quietly gets it done for you even if you're just another foreigner.



I was thinking about the old mayor who charged us a fortune to move a few dumpsters from behind the house and how he might have handled the more complex matter of pruning two large plantanes. Someone told me a guy up the street had made a deal with the old mayor to cede a patch of his property to be used for a big electrical transformer if the town would in exchange prune a couple large poplars blocking his view of the river. The transformer went in but the trees were never trimmed.

So I was glad to see that before the end of the day, the truck had moved down to this person's house and restored the honor of Castelfranc.


Saturday, March 7, 2009

Pont de fer, 1



It seems like a French habit to start off in the abstract. A guest on a cooking program might first be asked, What is your idea of cooking? before How do you make REAL couscous? Me, I've got this bridge outside my kitchen window that seems more and more beautiful, more and more laden with meaning.

First there's the physics of it. A couple of towers at either end, a couple of cables hung between them, a plank suspended from the cables. The tower acting in compression, getting squished down, bringing the weight of the bridge itself and the vehicles back from the middle to the two ends. The cable, an upsidedown arch, acting in tension, getting pulled toward each end, a mammoth tug of war trying to win the middle point. At either end, a set of tensioning bolts anchoring the cable and keeping the two cables in balance. Every week a big man comes to adjust the bolts with just a tuning fork and a wrench. (Not true) Finally, the plank is supported by iron rods, also acting in tension.

Legend has it that an older version of this bridge, freshly built, was going to be dedicated. They had set the maximum design weight on the center and the newly-hired bridge guardian strode out to stand there too. Just then, the bridge collapsed and the guardian narrowly escaped being drowned. After the re-building, the guardian was never the same, always paranoid even about little boys playing near the tensioning bolts.

Legend has it that they used to decorate the bridge, covering it with flowers to celebrate some holiday in Spring.

There seem to be no legends about the architect of the bridge having to make a deal with the devil to give him the soul of the first to cross the bridge. The devil would lose when they sent across a cat first instead of a human. This is a legend that sticks to other ancient bridges including the Pont Valentré in Cahors.

There are pictures of an earlier version of this bridge with stone towers instead of the existing metal ones.



Someone told me this bridge was designed by Eiffel. I had done some research and doubt that Eiffel had anything to do with it. It's a shame since it probably means that my other favorite suspension bridge, the graceful one laner in Albas between Rue de la Cale and the D9, was also not built by Eiffel. I've been repeating that myth for seven years.





The genius behind the French suspension bridge craze of 1825 to 1850 was Seguin. Suspension bridges are of course an ancient invention dating from ropes and plank designs. There were also early suspension bridges in Pennsylvania that used chains instead of cables. There must have been some cross-fertilization between France and the US throughout the 19th century.



The present bridge outside my window bears a maker's plaque:



It's likely that by the time of this version of the bridge, the company was under the direction of another engineering genius, Imbault.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Walking around Anglar

Mrs Snoutworthy likes a good walk and that doesn't necessarily mean stopping every five paces to take pictures. So she searched out the equivalent of the Northwest Passage--a footpath to Prayssac that avoids the dreaded D911 highway AND the steep pech while I walked a couple km to Anglar.

Anglar is really (yawn) just another medieval village. It has a black-rimmed Anglar sign going in and out which means the speed limit is 50 km/hr, so it's more than a hamlet where you don't even have to take your foot off the pedal. But it doesn't have it's on mairie: the commune is called Anglar-Juillac and the mairie is down the road a ways along with the grade school and community center.



The first house you come to reminds you that the old masons could do anything. I would find it impossible to imagine or draw the shapes and volumes of this house. They actually built it. In a couple hundred steps, you're at the last house after which it's nothing but vineyards. This place is typical in that the interior space is probably not that big once you subtract a. the entire ground floor which is devoted to dankness and mold, old wine barrels and rusty machinery, since the stone walls wick up moisture from the ground. With any luck the second floor is dry. And b. the thickness of the exterior walls which approaches 24 inches.




The apse in back of the eglise has been built with cut stone, the best method. It goes downhill from cut stone to roughly trimmed stone (appareillé) and finally, tout va, whatever the hell you could lay your hands on and even throw your sandwich wrappers in the middle for filler.




The mur clocher, bell tower is sterner than the one in Castelfranc which looks like an old airedale dog waiting for his biscuit.
mur clocher



There is also the chateau of Anglar but it's surrounded by a wrought iron fence. There used to be a panel on the church giving a little history of the chateau and noting that it was off bounds to the public and not available for visits.





These carvings float above the door to the church.









Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Demerdification



Padma replied the other day in his rich, wonderful French to a message from me in my, well, less wonderful French. He expressed sympathy for Mrs. Snoutsworthy and me on how frustrating we must find it being pretty articulate in English and, well, less so in French. Not but what we don't "muddle through" or "nous demerder", as he put it, literally "unshit ourselves."

I get this reaction a lot from French people here who often generously comment on how well I speak French. To someone who really speaks well they would never make this comment. What they mean is that they are able finding it surprisingly easy to make out what I am trying to say even though they are making a serious effort not to wince at my uglier mistakes. It's the wincing that I dread and find so comical, the tightening at the corners of the eyes. I try to imagine what my level of diction would correspond to in English where one can detect highly subtle data like the region of origin, level of education, social class maybe, and all this to an utter nicety.

Back to shit. You can sometimes hear excremental vocabulary on public radio where it's far less a "gros mot", a "big" word than in English. A minister in the old Chirac government called an opponent's speech "emmerdant" (boring) and it got a smile or two on the evening news. Really polite people find euphemisms for merde! as an outburst word using "mardi" (Tuesday) or "mince" (thin) instead of the m word. It's not all that gross to say "ça me fait chier !" (that makes me shit, it's really irritating or obnoxious) and the participle "chiant" is frequent enough.

We've been having trouble lately getting our toilet to accept, you know, our contributions. Our friend Denis, who visited us and our primitive bathroom, was mortified at having to ask for help plungering down a merde opiniatre (stubborn turd). Mrs Snoutsworthy finally noticed a foul smell in the garden and Mr. Oblivious (me) noticed that the little square lookout, the "regarde" was overflowing with some none-too-lovely stuff that was then finding its way into the nearby storm drain rather than forming a more obvious Lake of Shame beside the house.



So I took myself down to the mairie even though it is to a private company that we pay a monthly fee for water and waste. (A privitization that I find particularly chiant since the company is owned by Martin Bouygue, a super-rich capitalist dude and best friend of the Berlusconi-like French president, Sarkozy). Going in for help was a wise decision since the mayor told me if I had picked up the phone and called the help number I might have connected with an operator in far-off Biarritz and waited months for service. Monsieur le maire was right on the ball and had a huge, high-tech pumper truck outside the kitchen window here within two hours.





The demerdificaiton crew was very active and competent. They found the cause of the blockage, tree roots, probably from our weeping willow. I didn't want to ask how big the holes were in the underground pipe. Not my business. It was a stubborn blockage and this kid with a stylish 12" long blond forelock jumped into the manhole, reeking of you know what, without hesitation. Plus the hole itself was formed around a smallish car tire. It was magic how he slipped in, his broad shoulders offsetting through the tire, and completely disappeared from view. I missed seeing how he extricated himself.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Le repaire de La-bas si j'y suis




I listen to this radio program every day called La-bas si j'y suis with Daniel Mermet. a strange name for a program, one that everyone agrees has little in the way of literal significance. I had already been downloading French radio programs for some time when I heard of this one. A huge controversy had been ignited when the increasingly conservative Radio France tried to take Mermet off the air as it had other popular, leftwing programs. I signed a petitiion supporting the program and then felt obliged to give the program a listen = hooked. Each day at 15h00 (3pm) they begin the program with messages they have received on their answering machine. Very democratic for a national radio program heard in every corner of France. Poets, kooks, professors, truck drivers on cell phones. All of them really hard for me to understand, but full of ideas and passion. A couple of my French friends call the program "miserabilitist" which I suppose means obsessed with poverty and unhappiness. It's true, La bas covers any good labor strike it can find such as Guadeloupe. But with what happy brio. And then there is the easy laugh of Daniel Mermet himself, obviously hugely glad to be alive even if he's uncovering massacre sites in Central America, interviewing Noam Chomsky, ripping into French industrialists and political figures. One of my favorites was a series of shows on the Court of the Pre-condemned where they had mock trials of people like Bernard Henri-Levy, such a pompous intellectual that he is universally known by his initials, BHL. Or the equally hypocritical Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister under Sarkozy. Mermet's the judge, and various great critics from Le monde diplomatique and other places took the parts of avocats and the accused themselves.

Perhaps as an outgrowth of the campaign to save the program, all across France groups were formed known as Repaires de La-Bas si j'y suis. "Repaire" is a funny word that means a den for animals or a den of thieves or other questionable types. I had thought of trying to get my wonderful, world-weary neighbor and friend, Francis to help me start a repaire in Prayssac. So I was tickled pink to hear on the program one day that there was already a repaire in Cahors. I had a bunch of errands to run there, so off I went last Friday to check it out. Francis held back so I decided to record the whole thing so he could give it a test drive for next month's repaire.



I don't really ask look at maps much now that our Garmen GPS with an Australian woman's voice tells me where to go. Matilda knows best. Still I was a little dismayed as she directed me up a steep winding road that ended up high above Cahors. Did I mention that there was one of the most violently colored sunsets going on that I've ever seen?

I finally made it to the restaurant, Le Mont St Cyr, a couple minutes early.



Gradually people trickled in, first of all, LoLo, a Rabelasian guy with long hair, a voice as big as all Cahors, lots of turquoise rings. And a sort of French Padma, erudite, interesting, a real metis, mixed background person, having been raised in France from a Bretton mother and Kabyle (Algerian Berber) father. A few of the woman looked very Vermonty with hiking shoes but most were reassuringly French with really uncomfortable-lookikng high heels. The chitchat was a combination of news about organic farming and passionate discussion about wine. You could probably get a condemned French prisoner into a heated discussion of white wine even on his way to the gallows. So there were about 15 people including the restaurant owner and his wife, also political radicals at the table. Dreamers all! Across the table was a white haired music professor, Arab if I'm not mistaken, telling the story of how he built a 28 ft high tower beside his house because he found the house by itself boring. Little did he know how much work it was going to be. He sang a lot to make the work go faster. When he got up high enough to see how wonderful a view he would be having, he cried out, Allah Akbar! Later, the nosy little local notaire wandered past and accused him of building a mosque. First he is Christian, and towers like this, called pigeonniers, are the hallmark of local Quercy architecture.

After codfish, beef bourginon, salade, and crepes with creme fraiche and melted chocolate, we settled into stuffed chairs and couches and talked for a couple hours about the general strike in Guadeloupe. What a lot of pent up eloquence! Everyone who spoke (except for me) poured out a prose that was emminently publishable. Lucid, accurate, passionate, brief. I was feeling shy and thought the Algerian woman sitting next to me would never be able to break in and have her say, no matter how many tries she made. I was about to gallantly intercede when her time came and she delivered herself of a hydrogen bomb of a "temoinage", a testimony of her experiences during and just after the end of the Algerian War (1954 to 1962) She said the mothers and grandmothers were so deeply angry at the length and ferocity of the war that when two contingents of freedom fighters threatened to fight one another over dominance in the postwar order, some of these women ordered their children to lie down in the roads and dared the armies to roll over them. "Death was by this time nothing at all. Peace was everything. So that these women were willing to put themselves and their children literally on the line for peace."

With all this in my ears, I was grateful to let Matilda direct me home. But she must have been in a funny mood, perhaps rebelling, because the first couple of roads she ordered me to go down looked like 4WD only. Finally we came to one and when she said, "Take a right on the Road to the National 20" I figured I was ok. It started out a narrow paved lane, then the pavement gradually disintegrated, and, like a gag scene in some bad movie, it degenerated into a very steep, completely washed out loose dirt road with ruts deep enough to take out the transmission. A real class 4.



I was just getting over this betrayal when Matilda hit me with the second sucker punch, sending me home from Cahors on the 653 through Sauzet, up and over a twisty road full of possible deer. The oldest trick in the book. Well, the deer around here are the size of huge jackrabbits. And the only thing that ran in front of my car that night in fact was a large jackrabbit.

PS Has everyone figured out that if you click on the pictures, they expand to a more impressive size?