Carcassonne

The wind is whistling all around the stone corners tonight, gusting against the windows, crossing the room like a hurricane if I open them both. And yet somewhere, faintly, I hear a cricket. It blows hard often up here on the ridge of medieval Carcassonne. I learned today there are old drawings that show windmills on some of the towers long ago. Today there are electricity-generating windmills on the hills.

Carcassonne has been interesting, past the initial carrying the heavy bag again, groping my way through the narrow, winding streets trying make them align with the map until I found my chambre d’hôte phase. Which is pretty cute on the inside of the room, all in shades of yellow (I look at pieces of furniture, cabinets, and think of what it took to maneuver them up three floors of winding stairs). The landlady is pretty absentee, providing breakfast only in the sense of a fridge with butter and preserves, yogurt, milk and orange juice, and the ability to make a variety of coffees and teas. And some really horrible dessicated, Styrofoam-like “toasts.” That’s fine; I quickly shifted to saving a piece or two of my bread from a café meal, or today, buying a croissant at a boulangerie along with my sandwich, to have for breakfast. She clearly works very hard. She has a shop in a ground-floor room as well as the B&B. The building is medieval, on the Place du Grand Puits, the “great well.” (In another square not far away is another, (slightly) smaller well called, of course, “Le Petit Puits.”)

The wind was howling all the afternoon of yesterday, when I arrived, as well. Though I crossed the Canal du Midi right in front of the train station (I thought I’d taken a photo of a lock filling, but later it was nowhere to be found in my phone. The way the wind was buffeting me, I’m not too surprised), found a bus stop, and waited and waited, no bus #4 ever appeared. There was a posted timetable, but apparently it’s out of date or . . . So I recrossed the canal to the station, spoke with a curt woman at the Information window since there were no cabs waiting, who pointed to a posted sign with one cab company number. Which number resulted in being told there were no cars available. A few minutes later, trying to get guidance from one of the ticket clerks, though, I saw a cab pull up in the parking lot—not where taxis were actually supposed to wait, but whatever. I dashed out, and sure enough, he was looking for me.

Carcassonne, as Lonely Planet warns, is practically in danger of becoming a theme park. Vast hordes of tourists descend, by private car, by tour bus. The streets are almost impassable from late morning through the afternoon, and many of them are lined with junky souvenir crap. Its history in itself is the redeeming feature (and it being now somewhat past peak season). I was a little disappointed to learn how anachronistic Kate Mosse’s depiction of the city in her novel Labyrinth is: the city as we see it today largely came to be after the northern French had annihilated the Cathars, when Louis IX of France added greatly to the fortifications, even adding the second wall. But historically we’re still talking about fourteenth-century construction, and there are still a couple of Roman-era towers, too. It would seem the—I hesitate to call them inhabitants, because I think the actual inhabitants of the medieval city are very few (my landlady being one, obviously), most people living in the much larger lower town—don’t care. One restaurant I passed (more than once, in the circling and circling of streets) is called the “Table d’Alaïs.” 

I’d meant to get an earlier start this morning, before the full visitor onslaught, and while my nemesis the sun was still not high, but sleep broke through and flooded the accumulated deprivation. After concocting a little breakfast (one slice of hoarded bread, a cup of yogurt, orange juice and tea), I set out to accomplish my three morning tasks: walk around La Cité

outside the walls; retrace and memorize the route back to the Porte Narbonnaise; find again the most interesting little shop I’d passed at one point yesterday, that among much else has rings and various small devices that act as sundials. 

It’s impossible at the moment to make a full circuit of the walls, inside or out. Sooner or later, walking the ramparts or beneath the walls, you’re blocked by fenced-off construction and maintenance projects. The route to the gate is—of course—quite simple and quick, once you get your bearings and when you’re not maneuvering a heavy rolling bag. The shop took almost all day to rediscover, no matter how many times I circled. I was even beginning to question my memory: had I seen that place in Sarlat? No! I was sure not. I spotted it only on exiting the castle, late in the afternoon. None of the various types of rings really fit, or the one with a stone was sold out in September’s birthstone (referential only, obviously, these not being anywhere close to the price range of real sapphires), but I did come away with one that hangs on a cord as a necklace. Accuracy remains to be determined.

The excellent short film at the beginning of the castle tour, and the information panels throughout, did a lot to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and correct my misinformation. Ironically, an interesting-looking exhibition on the origins of the Cathars is due to open in Carcassonne the very day after I leave.

P.S. The same young guy arrived in a taxi Friday to return me to the station. The exact time I’d requested a pickup (the evening before!), had passed, and, after waiting a few more minutes, I’d called the company to be told he was on his way. Not that there was anything unpleasant in and of itself, waiting in the cool morning breeze across the street from the Narbonne Gate of Carcassone; just—for recent obvious reasons—taxi/station/train PTSD of a sort. He marveled that, out of fourteen drivers, such a coincidence would occur. He assumed I was German, because I don’t, according to him, pronounce my French “r” like an American or English person. I take that as a compliment. I think. Considering how rusty it all is in the first place. Then we talked a bit about Louisiana history, Chinese history (because he is so taken with the concept of 1,000 years—he’s actually underestimating—of history at Carcassonne. Those other two examples sort of put it in context). He mentioned Katrina. Sadly, he also asked which were the poorest and richest American states, and I had to respond honestly. (He immediately guessed Texas as one of the latter.)

No Time, Toulouse

With the effects of events in Sarlat, I was going to have only part of one afternoon in Toulouse. Fate, however, wasn’t finished with me. A few miles outside the city, our TGV train slowed (I assumed to enter the station, but we were actually still in the countryside) and then stopped. Very puzzled, if not yet perplexed and annoyed, we were soon informed by the driver that we’d stopped for “security reasons.” Over three hours later, we finally resumed our journey (he’d come on intermittently to pretty much repeat the first scant information, as far as I could tell, his delivery being far too fast for me to fully follow, much less its being further garbled by irritated passengers talking throughout (obviously, people missed connections due to whatever it was)). I never learned what had happened.

So, with the cold in full swing, the sleepless preceding night, and the very early departure from Sarlat, I essentially missed Toulouse. There might have been a time I would have dashed out and still tried to cover a little ground, but I was dead. Cabbies outside the large station (not as large as Bordeaux’s) declined to take me to my hotel because it was too close. This was literally true, but dragging a bag at rush hour while deciphering a map took a while and a couple of course corrections. Both a young man in a mob of recently freed lycéestudents (who called my attention to the fact that one of my bag’s side pockets wasn’t fully closed, with a manila folder exposed), and a young couple with a baby in a stroller who actually, unsolicited, offered me help, certainly cheered my corpse up and gave me a good impression. The hotel is functional, the room tiny, but there are tasteful touches like designer black and white tiles of women’s faces among the plain white ones in the shower, the breakfast is good, and—best of all—when I hauled myself up and out and requested a suggestion for a quick, simple supper, one of the young desk guys directed me to a new vegan street food/tapas café right across the street (actually, he was astonished at my eager response to his tentative “would you be interested in vegan?”).

This turned out to be a huge mood booster: packed, live music, delicious food (I had a great bruschetta, really a Caprese salad with vegan mozzarella on crusty bread, and a small basket of mixed white and sweet potato fries, with a garlicky dip), and featuring as well a coaster that said “How to talk to the police: Don’t,” with suitable black and white graphics, and a fridge covered with words and slogans (like “Sex, Drugs & Guacamole”). I took their card—it’s called L’Embargo—and posted photos to Instagram.

And then, after said good breakfast, am on the road, tracks, again. Maybe I’ll make it back to Toulouse someday.

In the Perigord Noir, cont'd.

Except for TGV trains, with their assigned seating, I have never thought anything of simply walking into a train station in France and buying a ticket. Once back at the hotel, though, the fact that there are only two trains daily out of Sarlat with a connection to Toulouse, where I was supposed to be Monday (and the one I needed leaves Sarlat at 7:11 A.M.) began to nag at me. I thought I’d go ahead and book it online. What with the flickering on-again, off-again wifi connection, I left to find something to eat, came back, tried and tried. At long last, connected long enough to complete a search at SNCF, to my horror I discovered both Monday trains were sold out.

I spent a very bad night of very little sleep, the small family hotel’s desk long since closed, remembering the guidebook’s warning that hotel rooms in Sarlat are hard to get, etc., etc. I would turn the light back on and search for a bus station—no. I remembered our afternoon guide mentioning there was an airport at Bergerac—how many towns toward Bordeaux was that, again? Could I take a taxi there (and at what insane cost)? What to do, what to do? Was I going to wind up sleeping in some doorway?

As soon as the reception area opened Sunday morning I was there. Miraculously, my room was available another night (the waning of peak season saved me). Back up to my garret, where I had an internet connection long enough to come THIS close to buying the ticket I needed, only to have the SNCF website reject not one, not two, but THREE American credit cards (including one I didn’t even have on me, but remembered the number of). I called the hotel in Toulouse and canceled one night.

I had to go rendezvous, still twisting slowly in the wind, with the group for the day tour. 9:00 A.M., same little square, by now familiar. 

We drove first, through gorgeous countryside, to Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil (these places wind up with these long hyphenated names when multiple little villages and communes join to share administration; this one seems to get called simply Les Eyzies for short) and the National Museum of Prehistory. It’s a beautiful, modern museum, very well curated and thought out (past the reception area, you enter via a pathway that’s a replica of a cast of the Paleolithic footprints of an adult and two children)—and the collections are magnificent. We of course couldn’t spend the hours there one definitely could, but our excellent guide took us through high points, talking at length about various finds and artifacts and their significance.

From there we drove to the cave of Rouffignac. Our guide had said she liked for people to visit it before Lascaux, brilliant and perfect replica though it is, to get the feel of “cave art” in situ, and be able to bear that sensory experience in mind when viewing the replica. Rouffignac is the largest cave complex in the Périgord, over eight kilometers. A tiny train takes visitors into the winding passageways of the underground river that formed the tunnels over millions of years. Visits are restricted to a certain small number a day. Unlike even the original of Lascaux, though, that was sealed for many millennia by a rockslide and then clay, a little damp has been able to penetrate Rouffignac, with the result that, very slowly but inexorably, calcite formation is gradually obliterating some of the art.

So we rode, and rode, slowly into the tunnel. It was very dark, with only the flashlight of the complex’s guide, a middle-aged man clearly passionate about his task (and who our tour guide, who stayed outside for the duration, said has been doing the same job for twenty-seven years) for light. When he turned it off for—illumination would be the opposite of the correct word, except in the mental sense, we experienced absolute darkness. Even with the relative comforts and reassurances of modern technology, it is a sobering, profound experience: to be there, to grasp that our ancestors walked in there for unknown reasons, with the most primitive of tools and iffy of lights (small scooped-out stone bowls of fat, with juniper wicks, each of which might burn for a couple of hours at the very most), and produced—well. Nothing for about a kilometer, and then he shone his light on a frieze of beautiful, perfect two-horned, shaggy rhinoceroses in a row. My eyes filled with tears. It is the most moving, overwhelming sensation, the connection over tens of thousands of years, the beauty of what they made there. I have a friend, who drove me to the airport before leaving, who said he’s ruffled other, artist friends’ feathers by saying there has been nothing truly new in art since the cave paintings—and yet I could see the truth of it, here and even more, later, at Lascaux.

Deeper, far deeper in, past other friezes and drawings, we stopped and got out for the only time, in a small round “room.” There are drawings all over the walls and ceiling, that he illuminated one by one for us. Then, having, unnoticed, reversed all the seat backs in the little train (as New Orleans streetcar drivers do), he started us back toward the entrance. We repassed another feature of the cave, a vast number of “nests” of the cave bears who had hibernated there over millennia before humans showed up. These are enormous, hollowed out areas. In places on the walls are the marks of their huge claws.

Once we emerged, dazed, into the sunlight once again (in my deep preoccupation with other, present-day worries, I hadn’t even thought to bring a jacket. It had been very warm the previous afternoon, hot with all our climbing and descending, and it hadn’t registered how chilly it would be in a cave. Our guide had lent me her long scarf and a woman from California, an extra padded vest she had, and they were barely enough to keep me from chattering teeth—strange, when the cave guide told us the cave maintains a constant temperature of, I think he said, 53 degrees Fahrenheit), we headed off to lunch in Les Eyzies. A very good lunch, in fact, though extremely rushed because we had a scheduled time to be at Lascaux (because there are only so many tours in English).

And then, after more driving (conscious, now, of how alien this very landscape would have been in the last Ice Age: not forests and farms, but short grasses or low, rough tundra, summers of two or three months, maybe an occasional tree where the ice had not extended), there was Lascaux. The actual cave has been closed to the general public since 1963, its location kept as secret as possible. A replica was created early on, a recreation by artists. This was known as Lascaux II. A Lascaux III is a traveling exhibit. Now, in a stunning, state-of-the-art facility—museum, workshops, research facility, and replica—there is Lascaux IV, a digitally perfect recreation: size, shape, colors, configuration. Our guide here was a young man with (I asked our tour guide later) a degree in history that incorporated prehistory. His passion for his subject made even that of the Rouffignac guide’s dim.

You walk through. The space is much, much smaller than Rouffignac; in places it’s a tight squeeze. At the beginning, they’ve even replicated the opening as it was first found in the 1940s, with its rock slide, its 20,000-year clay seal. The paintings—for here they are, not just elegant line drawings, but fully colored in, brilliant paintings—burst into being before you, make your heart stop. These people lived alongside these animals, knew them intimately, in a time when we were just another species trying to survive, not one so dominant it had the ability to destroy the world. There are two bison fighting, likely in rutting season, when they would have half shed their winter coats—and there they are, the browner summer coat showing through the shaggier, darker winter one, the bison thumping up against each other side to side, rump to rump. There are aurochs and mammoths and horses (shaggy little horses, like modern Shetland ponies, as our guide pointed out: not so lost or incomprehensible at all), in closely-observed detail: running, fighting, overlapping naturally, their legs juxtaposed.

And yet: there is more, much more, going on here. Matisse is everywhere, in the brilliant capturing of creatures with a few lines, in the saturated, brilliant colors. There are symbols, literal repeated symbols beyond just the why, the unknown purposes, for which we now have no key to understanding. There are the paintings deep in the cave (or “cave”), half hidden, that must mean something else because of that—were only certain people supposed to view them? There is an area literally covered with etched figures, hundreds of them. It’s speculated that this perhaps was a dedicated place where everyone, not just a select, talented few, was allowed to create. This area leads, though, to an incredible space (that we couldn’t get closer to) where, through an opening, you can see art all over a wall beyond, that is the wall of an abyss, like a deep well. Someone, for surely some deep purpose lost to us, went there and, in such an extremely dangerous position, created art.

And there is, set apart from all the teeming other animals, a creature that is no known, recognizable creature, but a composite of at least three. It is not colored in. The staff at Lascaux refer to it as “the unicorn” (though it in fact has two horns). When you pass through a sort of right angle in the cave, and walk down a bit, if you turn to look back there is an opening behind you. Through it you can see only this creature, in the passage you left behind. Was it to guide you back out? What did it mean?

I am hard-pressed to remember any time when I was so moved, so utterly awed, as on this day, in these caves.



Back in the present-day world, when we arrived back at the little square in Sarlat, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of returning to the hotel, finding a place to sit leisurely with a coffee and perhaps pastry. No, I had resolved that what I had to do was go in person to the train station and buy a ticket for Tuesday morning. The only problem was, WHERE was the station? My arrival and taxi ride were a blur. I knew the general direction, but not precisely how to get there. In our wonderful guide’s perhaps one lapse, she mentioned airily “a footpath” at the railroad viaduct I’d walked almost to when I missed the rendezvous point the morning before. Armed only with that—because it must be easy, or there would be more to it—I set off, sleepless and already tired.

I walked and walked. I reached the viaduct. I saw no footpath, or not that appeared to lead to anything. So, I must have misconstrued, and it must be past the viaduct. I walked, and walked. This was turning into my misadventure of the previous year, in Vouvray, that had caused injury. I was out where the street was becoming a highway, and still no sign. This couldn’t be right. I walked. Finally, increasingly limping and disgusted, not to mention frantic, I turned around. There was a little sort of strip mall, where one bar was open, and a young man out front with a couple of children. I crossed over and asked him. He said yes, just past the viaduct, there was a path.

Okay. I hiked back, crossed under the viaduct, and there was—this must be what they were talking about, a sidewalk, some steps that went down, more sidewalk. I followed all this, hoping I didn’t have to climb back UP any stairs at this point. But I did, at the end of this—and (insert many swear words), I was back where I’d started, somehow, right beside the damned viaduct. I was torn between my exhaustion and fear of once again missing having a ticket. I teetered there, starting back on the long walk to the hotel, but veering into the parking lot/terrace of some little café where there were chronically people sitting outside drinking and playing—cards, checkers. HERE, a man pointed, not in the direction of the viaduct, but across the street and up a hill. THERE was the path I needed.

So I crossed over (almost literally, by then). Slowly, because it was a steep hill, past more little strip mallish stores and cafés, stopping a few times to catch my breath, I made my way up the paved walk under overhanging branches. Finally, finally, an hour after I’d set out, there was the small station. Which was—you know this as well as I do—closed.

There, on the side of the station, were posted the numbers of a few taxi—companies. Individuals, whatever. The first one I called didn’t answer. The second did, and within a few minutes a taxi actually arrived (Sarlat has a problem: the taxi people really, obviously do not like to drive anyone just from the train station to the medieval quarter. I lucked out twice). With massive relief, I climbed in and gave him my destination (which, bizarrely—Sarlat is a town of about 10,000, with a huge tourist trade—he professed never to have heard of). Almost immediately, though after we’d started on our way, I realized I didn’t have my prescription sunglasses. I’d kept them on or with me for two intensive days of in and out, off and on, and tightly clenched in my hand when I wasn’t wearing them this past hour. Now, like the camera, they were gone.

In the end, I walked back to the train station the next morning (and back into town. I was very stiff and sore). I bought a ticket. I inquired as to whether anyone had found a pair of glasses (which could be of no use to anyone but me): non, désolé (“et moi aussi,” I responded). I’d gotten up with a sore throat. By that evening it was a full-blown cold, and the night was a sleepless one again. Sitting outside in a chilly wind (Mondays the merchants and restaurateurs, many of them, apparently recuperate from the weekend) to have some lunch probably didn’t help.

The day after, Tuesday, I got up in the dark, ate my croissant, finished packing, and heaved my bag down all the narrow flights of stairs (on one, the minute light went out halfway down. They were motion-sensitive, but I wasn’t close enough to either one to trigger it. I finally just, in the cavelike darkness, let go of my bag and let it tumble to the next landing, then felt my way down, unencumbered). Oh, to be a unicorn.

The hotel owner met me outside the quarter to drive me to the station in the dark, a generous (paid) arrangement after a cab company I’d called abruptly informed me they would have no cars available, once I told them my location). At a little after 7:11, the train left Sarlat.

In the Périgord Noir

Sarlat. What a strange mix of disaster and beauty, exhaustion and breathtaking experiences. The afternoon before leaving Paris, I went over to the Gare Montparnasse to buy my train tickets, only to arrive there to find the entire ticket office evacuated and police blocking off the surrounding area with yellow tape. There was an unattended bag, so the full panoply of pompiersand bomb squad had to come do an inspection. After maybe an hour, it did in fact turn out to be a lost bag, not a bomb, so the office reopened—to, of course, a pent-up horde of travelers.

The TGV left at a comfortable time the next day, and the trip to Bordeaux was uneventful: interesting, as always, just watching the countryside pass and change. But I was sure to be downstairs, bag out, waiting to leap out when we stopped, knowing as I had for a long time that I had eleven minutes to find my connection to Sarlat (thirteen, technically, but the ticket seller in Paris had warned me that the doors close two minutes before departure). Just before stopping, the disembodied voice announced my next train would be at Track 4, so I leaped from the carriage (behind only a young girl of twelve or so on crutches and her friend), dashed up the platform, down the stairs, up stairs—and found a train, mysteriously silent and, when I opened one door, empty. So I found a schedule board up the platform, located my train number, and saw it was actually at Track 8. Down the stairs, running now up the corridor, up more stairs, and—well, in the end, made it. 

The regional train makes twelve stops between Bordeaux and Sarlat. For over half the trip, certainly on a Friday afternoon, it’s somewhat like a school bus, packed, people standing in the aisle, most of them obviously lycée or university students headed home from school in the big city, talking and joking with each other. They gradually get off at one small town or another, until, near Sarlat, the train is almost empty. 

Around St.-Émilion there are vast vineyards, flowing up from rolling fields onto steep hillsides. We crossed several beautiful, sparkling rivers, as the terrain gradually grew more rugged. One of the towns we briefly stopped at was Bergerac (no ghostly Cyrano haunting the station). Most of the official signs are in both French and Occitan; so, for instance, that was Brageirac. A few are not—maybe named later? The same in both languages (Sainte-Foy-la-Grande)? I know no Occitan, so couldn’t be sure.

At Sarlat, tired and relieved, after a day on my rear, to be finally out and upright, I walked out to see a lone taxi outside the station. Not sure of the way to my hotel, despite squinting at the Lonely Planet map and having queried the hotel about whether a taxi was a good idea, I gratefully commandeered it, and the friendly French-only-speaking woman drove me there—or as “there” as possible, since most of the medieval quarter is pedestrian-only. I tried pulling the rolling bag down the steep stony slope just off the modern street, but—remembering what happened to the wheel of my old one on the cobblestones of Prague and Sopron—ended up carrying the poor (heavy!) thing, sparing it instead of myself. 

Sarlat-la-Canédais beautiful. The Dordogne Valley is beautiful. The whole Périgord region, I’d venture to say, is beautiful, its hills and forests, rivers and fields and steep crags. It used to produce tobacco and wine. A fungus pretty much wiped out the vineyards, but fortuitously at about the same time discoveries of prehistoric sites began to be made in the valley. As a tour guide pointed out, tourism turned out to be much more lucrative than wine production, so most of the vineyards were never replanted (those that were necessitated going to California to obtain new grafts from the vines that had originally come from France). The region now produces walnuts, truffles, sunflowers, but—sadly—is known more than anything for its production of foie gras. There are fields and fields of corn, actual American maize—none of it sweet corn, but seed corn, for force-feeding the doomed geese. They have made the region rich, so much so that there are statues of geese in various places: small comfort to the geese.

My room was on the top (third) floor of a very old building. The window looked out over a tiny public square and the steep slope I’d descended, as well as hills in the near distance. The building had a courtyard where I ate breakfast the next morning (dinner, after some preliminary exploration, had consisted of a huge pot of steamed mussels and far more fried potatoes than I could eat, in a café up steep stairs off a steep, narrow street). Then I set forth to check out the famed huge street market of Sarlat, that fills street after street, square after square, through most of the old quarter. It offers absolutely everything, from edible produce to clothing to jewelry to meat stalls to art. The ancient small Sainte Marie church is now a covered market, that appears to specialize in meat stalls and sweets ones—I bought an amazing small, exquisite walnut tart. Foie gras and other goose products are, of course, sold everywhere. 

I wandered up and down (very literally; many passageways are perilous, making me wonder how people navigated them without breaking their necks in the days when they didn’t have the railings many do today, let alone marvel at their stamina), noting a few items of interest I might come back to. I ducked into the cathedral, walked up a steep hill behind it to the oldest structure in Sarlat, a strange sort of rocket-shaped “Lantern of the Dead” dating to the twelfth century, taking photos along the way. Back on more level ground, in one narrow street I found myself stuck in a bottleneck between a sausage seller and a man signing books at a table in front of a shop, of the breathless “secrets of the caves/haunted sites” type, and all the people pausing at one or another. A mass of us came pretty much to a standstill for a few minutes, trying to squeeze past.  

When I got free, I headed back to a seller of the beautiful pop-up greeting cards with three-dimensional papercut scenes inside, at a third the price I’ve seen, for instance, online, perhaps because they were machine-cut. And there, when I went to pay him for a couple for my grandsons, I discovered my camera was missing. My dear little Canon, that had made hundreds of beautiful photos for me for over eleven years—nowhere to be found. I was incensed, but immensely relieved I still had my wallet. On the vanishingly slim chance I’d somehow dropped it, I retraced my steps: cathedral, Lantern of the Dead, street with sausage seller and book signer (suspicious now that they were in on it, getting a kickback for providing the set-up. I don’t really think so; I think it was extremely bad timing and luck, plus, unlike in Athens, not any organized gang of professional pickpockets, but some random opportunist. I’m so much more on my guard since that earlier episode, had been carefully putting away the camera and zipping it into my bag after each use. Still, it was gone). I retook as many photos as I could remember with my phone, paranoidly protective of it, now.

At 2:00 we rendezvoused at a little square outside the medieval quarter, those of us scheduled to go on the afternoon tour (of course, I missed the square, which actually appears more a parking lot, walking far, far beyond it before finally doubling back and finding it). Our guide, who I’ll go ahead and (spoiler alert) mention was also my guide the following day, is a friendly, knowledgeable young woman my daughter’s age, very competent. I can’t praise her too highly. She kept up nonstop commentary as we headed out into the countryside, pointing out, for instance, long wooden buildings here and there I’d wondered about, which—if you know anything about, for instance, Virginia, suspect are exactly what they are: tobacco barns from the valley’s earlier crops, blackened with age, a few still in use as tractor barns and such. 

We began climbing on winding roads, heading for our first bastide, Domme. We had a little time to wander around it on our own, medieval streets and buildings largely now restored to a later period, but interesting for the overall concept of a defensible, garrisoned living space. What was most striking, to me, were the stunning views of the entire valley, from such an elevated vantage point. The Dordogne River meanders through it, wide fields and forests to either side, hills rising to other promontories, other bastides peeking from among trees (though our guide also pointed out that many, built largely with the local stone, were deliberately created to blend in with the rocks and cliffs, hiding in plain sight).

At our next stop, La Roque-Gageac, we didn’t actually tour the form the bastide took there, which was extensive “troglodyte” dwellings and shelters inside the high cliffs overlooking the town. In times of peril the populace fled to those (those who didn’t already live there). What we did, after contemplating the windows in the rock (and a huge sort of hall partially exposed by a collapse in 1957), was take a ride down the Dordogne in a replica of a bagarre, a flat-bottomed boat used to transport goods in a long period of heavy commerce up and down the river (and at least in one case, in battle). The commentary was interesting, the scenery—of course—beautiful, but the gliding along in the river, mesmerizing.

The final bastide of the day was Beynac. It, Domme, and La Roque-Gageac are all listed among France’s “most beautiful villages,” deservedly so. It overlooks the river, of course, as well as a bristly (or no doubt were, in the past) collection of other fortified peaks, held at one time or another by the French or English. Except for Beynac, its chateau literally impregnable in its time, that was never taken, not in the Hundred Years’ War, not in the religious wars. As with so many high places, its history goes far back. There’s a remnant of a Roman street leading up into the steep stone village, that you see in the beginning of the film Chocolat. After taking us to the top and talking about the fortress-chateau, our guide left us to meander back down on our own and rendezvous with her at the river. We all missed the turning point she’d taken pains to describe to us, I think because we were desperately watching our feet, trying not to fall on the extremely steep, rough stone paths. We made it to the bottom via the Roman path, but far upriver of the rendezvous point. I asked her, once we’d trekked back, what percentage of her groups manage to follow the directions. She laughed and said 90% don’t.