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.