The Ninth Reason I Came To France

After a long hiatus due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays, and a visit to my son in Madrid, I am back in the saddle again, to mix an old metaphor, and ready to continue my countdown to the reasons I came to France.

Right, so, reason number 9: The Patrimony.

The French are very proud of what they call “Le Patrimoine” and what we in the New World would call “a mountain of old rocks”.

Now, I don't mean this to sound disparaging. The fact of the matter is that those old stones are piled together in very interesting ways: castles, public buildings, churches, uh, castles, bridges, and, uh, castles.

Here in southern France, you can find more old castles than new buildings, and they are amply supplemented by old mansions, and even old private homes.

It seems that every Thomas, Richard, et Herold (Tom, Dick, and Harry to the rest of us) who had a “titre de noblesse” found it compulsory to build a castle, and everyone who came into wealth, be it by his or her wits or, most commonly, by inheritance, found it necessary to build a HUGE house of 50 rooms of which only 10 were lived in.

All of these wealthy people and nobles rapidly found they could not keep up the maintenance of their follies, so they gave them up to the state. This is how the French came to own so much patrimony.

Of course, the state—notably cities such as Paris—have found that said piles of rocks can be turned into gold by the machinery of tourism. The french quickly discovered that people who have much less patrimony in their own countries, or who have a different kind of patrimony, love to come here and take pictures of french patrimony. Witness the mobs of the latest “nouveaux riches” of the world, the Chinese, who come to take photos of everything that even hints at being old: buildings, paintings, people. It's as if they have forgotten they have their own pile of old stones, the Great Wall. Or maybe they have tired of taking pictures of that.

In our neck of the woods, we have oodles of patrimony, mainly of the graceless castle and huge mansion variety. My wife has dragged me to two notable examples of each: the Chateau d'Uturbie,

and the house (if you can call it that) where Edmond Rostand lived, he of Cyrano de Bergerac fame.

The first is an old castle owned by the same family since the 14th Century, according to the slick website of the place.

http://www.chateaudurtubie.fr/urtubie/

It has had to suffer the indignity of hundreds of tourist tramping through its wooden floors as well as it being decked out with a pool and other “fun facilities” so that people can stay there and say they have stayed in a castle rather than in an old run-down hotel. Most of these old places are turned into reception halls for weddings and for business men to pretend to have meetings but who are really there to get drunk and have a good time.

We visited the castle on a summer day and we tramped through it following the woman who is a descendant of the family but who does not live there. She is smart enough to live in Biarritz in a comfortable apartment with all the modern facilities.

The mansion where Edmond Rostand lived has also followed suit. Although he made a pile of money from the play that depicted the long-nosed cavalier, he did not make enough to allow his heirs to keep up the place.

We dutifully tramped through those wooden staircases and teak-wood floors, my wife wondering what it must have been like to live in such a marvelous house and I wondering how in the hell they had kept the place warm in winter—answer: they didn't. The house was eventually “donated” to the city and is kept up by (you guessed it) paid visits by tourist and renting it out as a hotel and meeting place.

France, like the rest of Europe, has days when it celebrates its Patrimony, but even as the Minister of Culture admits, it is a hard sale: “Patrimoine : le mot renvoie vers l'immobilité apparente, l'hiératisme des vieilles pierres.” (Patrimony: the word refers to the apparent immobility, the hieratic of old stones.) In other words, when they talk about patrimony, what comes to mind is old stones: my feeling exactly.

The problem is, Patrimony is a good thing but when there is too much of it, it can become a problem. The French government has been quietly dumping some of the old castles and buildings mainly by selling them off to hotel chains. There is just so many old buildings you can turn into governmental offices. Just think of the cost of putting in central heating! Not to mention building maintenance.

But, if castles and old mansions are a problem, so is the patrimony on the other end of the scale: private houses. Here in France, few new houses are built. Most people live in homes that are passed on from generation to generation. Refurbished and repurposed but they are still old and frail.

The house we live in, for example, is 150 years old. The wooden timbers that make up the roof structure were being eaten into sawdust by wood worms. The town has a department that helps you economically to care for such buildings. They subsidised the treatment and reflooring of the upper stage of the house. Across the street, the children of an old lady inherited their mother's house. Instead of knocking it down and building something new (which is what would have happened in the US or in Mexico), they have gutted the inside to modernize it, but have kept the shell of the house they remember living in as kids. There is something to be said for keeping the traces of tradition and the memory of what was, but one wonders if everything and everyone should do it.

Anyway, that sense of history and love of the traditional is one reason one comes to France. If you come here, be sure to take plenty of pictures because with this crisis who know how much longer things will be around.

A List of Reasons Why I Dislike Lists

In 18th Century France, a bunch of intellectuals got together and decided to compile an "encyclopedia". They called themselves, of cours, encyclopédistes. The editor in chief was the great Denis Diderot and his second in command was Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

The first order of business for these folks was to compile (what else?) a list of the folks who were contributors to the encyclopedia! Ever since, the French have refined and developed this mania for lists.

Lists are everywhere you turn: you go to a government office and ask a question (Can you please tell me how I can apply for a...) and no matter what you fill in the blank with, the bureaucrat, without uttering a word, opens a drawer, and pulls out a list. "Voila!" she or he says in triumph before looking over your shoulder and yelling out "Next!"; in the supermarket, the doors are covered with lists of approved products for x, y or z, products that will not be sold to minors, the day's specials, things found and that can be claimed at the lost and found, and so on.

But the most annoying place I encounter lists (or at least annoying to me) is in speech. The French have a penchant for listing things in support of an argument, as way of explaining or exemplifying something. And, most maddening, as a way of going into rapture about a thing or event.

"Ah, c'est un jour merveilleux, aujourd'hui. Le soleil, les nuages, l'air, l'arôme des fleurs ..." and the person will go on and on for about a half hour listing all the things that make the day a marvelous day.

The gentleman pictured above wrote 17,288 entries into the encyclopedia. This guy did nothing but whip out articles and list of articles and list of list of articles. I can just imagine what it must have been like to talk to this guy:

Uh, Count Louie, I hear you write for the encyclopedia.

Oui, I write articles on physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, political history...

Yeah, yeah, your countship, but it's probably a lot of work. I hear your up to 15,000 articles already. How do you do it?

I hired secretaries, accountants, transcribers, copyists, researchers, invest...

Right, right, you must have spent a fortune 'cause I hear you do this out of your own pocket.

Yes, but I have investments, businesses, inherited money, my medical practice...

I bet no one could get a simple sentence out of the guy.

At a dinner party at home, one of our guests was a very contentious person. As is the case in most dinner parties, the guests were seated, man, woman, man, woman, and so on. He was seated next to a no less contentious woman. Somehow the conversation got on to a documentary that had been recently shown on French television about how France had difficulty facing its past, and particularly its past as a colonial power and the injustices committed in those times. The woman was all for France facing up to its past, and the man argued France had nothing to apologize for. I will spare you the French and transcribe in English the gist of the conversation:

The woman: But, look at the crimes and atrocities committed in Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia...

The man: Mais oui, but we gave them education, the French language, culture, a country, a name...

The woman: But, they paid for it with exploitation, submission, loss of identity...

The man: Not at all, they kept their language, customs, ideas, religion...

These two persons fired lists at one another for a good 45 minutes. It was very amusing to one and all sitting around the dinner table, except to me because I found it as amusing as reading a dictionary for fun, enjoyment, pleasure...(Ah, damn it! Now they got me doing it!)

We at home are no strangers to this sort of thing, especially as it concerns the French side of the equation. In fact, this blog was prompted when I remembered a conversation we had last summer. We were sitting outside (The French rush to their garden to eat outside if the weather is anywhere reasonably good. It's funny to see a family of 10 sitting around a small table in their two square meters of garden when the sun is out. But that is a theme for another blog.) Anyway, we were sitting outside, enjoying the sun, the warmth, the cloudless sky, the...you get the picture.

The first course of our meal was a soup. If you are one of the four persons who has read most of my blogs you will recall that my wife gets her dander up when I don't go into raptures about her soups. This occasion was no exception: I was happily munching away at my bread and slurping up my bowl of soup when a harrumph interceded between my bliss and my serene state of mind.

My wife: Harrumph, harrumph...

Me: (thinking) Oh,oh...what have I done now?

My wife: You have not said anything about my soup.

Me: (Quickly going over my options of answers and calculating the consequences of each. I decided to go with a pleasant but uncommitted answer.) Oh, its very nice.

My wife: Very nice? You don't say anything about the flavor, the consistency, the way the duck fat enhances the spices...

Me: (Trying to figure out where all of this is going and how I will come to grief over a still unnamed fault I have committed.) Well, all of the above are very good, I...

My wife: You say nothing, not a word, not a compliment, not an opinion, not a...

Me: (Setting up a barricade of annoyance to see if that will stop the onrushing hordes of lists coming at me.) Look, stop throwing lists at me. Ask me one thing at a time!

My wife: Augh! Really! I expect rapture, delight, compliments, from you, and all I get is OK, it's fine, real good.

Me: Well, if you don't stop, desist, arrest your nagging, discontinue your badgering, I will leave, go elsewhere to have my soup, decamp the table, slurp soup somewhere else, break bread with a stranger in another place, take my watery item and ingest it in another planet!

Needless to say that my barrage did not help and the meal went south from there. In spite of the lovely weather, we created our own little storm in a glass of water.

What annoys me is that people here use these lists like a battering ram, trying to daze you into submission by the shear amount of words thrown at you. I am not a multitasking sort of guy. I like to do things one at a time, each until completion. If something has not been finished, I do not start something else. So, when someone says to me: "This is not right, not complete, not finished." I take umbrage because each one of these things means something different and should be considered separately.

But, people are careless and want to throw everything at you all at once, without thinking that these lists may contain contradictory elements. Take that fellow at our dinner party. When he said that France had given its colonies "education, culture, a language". Firstly, all of the people in the colonies already had a language, a culture, and educating someone does not necessarily mean you improve them. I can educate someone on how to use a gun to kill; that's hardly and improvement of the person.

By lumping all of those terms, there is no opportunity for discussing each. Perhaps that is the intention of these list makers.

Whatever the cultural, educational, personal reasons, the French have this annoying habit, I will have to abide by it, tolerate it, listen to it stoically, and accept it, although I am learning to ignore it, shut my ears to it, think of something else, and just plain tune it out when it happens.