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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
'A glowing memoir of Provence.' -- New York Times'Fisher writes with such intimacy and style about her corner of Provence that it will make you want to travel there immediately.' -- StylistM.F.K. Fisher moved to Aix-en-Provence with her young daughters after the Second World War. In Map of Another Town, she traces the history of this ancient and famous town, known for its tree-lined avenues, pretty fountains and ornate façades. Beyond the tourist sights, Fisher introduces us to its inhabitants: the waiters and landladies, down-and-outs and local characters, all recovering from the effects of the war in a drastically new France.Fisher is known as one of America's most celebrated food writers; here she gives us a fascinating portrait of a place. It is, as she confesses, a self-portrait: 'my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself'. This is an intimate travel memoir written in Fisher's inimitable style – confident, confiding and always compelling.'A splendid and lovable book.' -- The Times'If Fisher's food writing makes you want to eat, preferably with her, Map of Another Town will make you long to book a budget flight, so you too may stroll down the Cours Mirabeau.' -- Lauren Elkin, from the introduction'An elegiac ode to one of the Mediterranean's most colourful cities that will delight all lovers of Provence . . . A tantalising memoir.' -- France Magazine'Many authors whisper, as though to a diary, or chat, as though to a friend, but Fisher communicates with the heady directness of a lover.' -- Bee Wilson, author of The Way We Eat Now'She is not just a great a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.' -- Rachel Cooke, Observer
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‘A glowing memoir of Provence.’ New York Times
‘She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.’ Rachel Cooke, Observer
‘A splendid and lovable book.’ The Times
‘Poet of the appetites.’ John Updike
‘The most re-readable of all prose stylists.’ Bee Wilson
For Nan Newton
Contents
Introduction by Lauren Elkin
W.H. Auden said that he did not know of anyone in the US who wrote better prose. John Updike called her a ‘poet of the appetites’. In a series of now-classic books on food – Serve it Forth (1937), Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), and The Gastronomical Me (1943) – Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) established herself as not only a prominent food writer, but a dazzling stylist. Legend has it she never edited her work; everything we read is meant to be the first and only draft, much like Mozart, taking dictation from God.
In Map of Another Town, her essays on Aix-en-Provence, originally published in 1964, Fisher demonstrates that her powers extend far beyond the realm of the culinary, bringing her gift for evoking taste and texture to the city she loved best in the world, where she lived for several years between 1954 and 1961. There’s no vista, fountain, or curlicue that escapes her enthusiasm; she lovingly documents every caryatid, every statue, every stone turtle in the ‘city of fountains and music’.
She devotes entire chapters to doctors, servants, beggars, the pre-Lent fête of carnaval, the effects of Provençal roads on American feet, theatre (housed, surprisingly, in the old royal tennis hall), a boy who haunted her in Lucerne and Aix, the fascinating couple across the way she watches from her window as they fight, eat, clean, and make love, a law professor who killed his wife by getting her pregnant twelve times, at whom his students hiss Assssasssin, asssasssssin … It even gets slightly racy in places; the word panties appears far more often than you’d think.
If Fisher’s food writing makes you want to eat, preferably with her, Map of Another Town will make you long to book a budget flight, so you too may stroll down the Cours Mirabeau, mingling with law students and booksellers and newspaper vendors and officious older ladies with their dogs. First stop: Fisher’s favorite café, the Deux Garçons, or 2Gs as it’s known locally, for a noontime pastis in the sun. Then over to the Glacier, where Fisher ate lunch every day with her daughters, feasting on ham sandwiches – ‘a slender slit loaf of bread spread with sweet butter and curtained limply with ham’ – although her daughter Anne, ‘petite voluptueuse’, sometimes skipped the sandwich and lunched instead on ‘a silver bowl of crème Chantilly’. To be followed with a romp in a meadow, gathering fresh herbs to fill a sachet, stick in a vase, or liberally strew in one’s bath, as Fisher does on one of her return visits to Aix.
Among the Aixois, Fisher reports feeling ‘more alive […] than I was anyplace else in my known world’. But Fisher’s life in Aix was not a dappled succession of gorgeous meals and charming encounters with the locals; there is something darker at work in this book. Although she lived in Dijon as a young bride, from 1928 to 1932, 1954 sees her unmarried in Europe for the first time, a single mother with two girls in her care, no longer young and confident but older, and battle-scarred in a country still reeling from the Second World War. Boarding with a succession of landladies, her daughters living separately at a pensionnat, accentuates this feeling of uncertainty and discomfort. They don’t know what to make of her – she’s too old to be a student, and clearly not a professor; who is this tall American, they wonder? This sense of uncertainty pervades the text, as Fisher describes feeling largely invisible, like a ‘ghost’.
The forced intimacy with the Aixois throws into relief her differences from them. To her, they are members of an old, ‘exhausted’ culture, taking ‘an apparently voluptuous pleasure in exhausting themselves with archaic ceremonies which taxed them almost past remedy’. Their snobbishness appals her, and she can be most cutting in return; at the home of one grande dame, ‘The sunlight poured in through the beautiful windows, and stripped Madame’s face like a scalpel, seeing viciously into the essence of her, the skin within the skin.’
She is keenly aware that the grandes dames consider her an ‘outlander’, an emissary from a graceless, culture-less people. At dinner, Madame Lanes (often clad in ‘a finger-length cape of thick, long monkey-fur which her husband had given her in Monaco in 1913’) would ‘shriek down the table at me with a comradely twinkle’, asking how an American could fancy herself an expert on gastronomy, when in the land of her birth ‘“from everything we hear, gastronomy does not yet exist?”’ Fisher spends much of the book on a charm offensive, wearing away at the old ladies’ prejudices.
In post-war France, money was tight and luxuries were scarce. Behind the multi-course meals, Fisher reminds us of ‘the dismal scullery kitchen with its inadequate dribble of cold water and its diminishing stock of chinaware, and its desperately thin larder. I knew of the frantic scribblings and figurings for each day’s market list, and of the hurried scurryings through the town to find beans or even bread a few cents cheaper. I knew that the wine in the fine glasses was watered to its limit.’ Then, alarmingly: ‘I knew that the current slavey’s eyes were swollen because the cook had hit her for having an epileptic seizure between the third and fourth laborious courses.’
‘Ten years after the Liberation,’ Fisher notes, ‘French people were still steadying themselves.’ There are brand-new plaques on street walls commemorating the sites where people were shot down, and the city is full of refugees whose origins are unknown. Many of the people Fisher encounters in the city have been maimed, deformed, or diseased by the war; a housemaid at Madame Lanes’ is run over by a truck while cycling and this fate is also attributed to the war: ‘Her weak eyes were blamed on the hardships of her refugee childhood, and the motorists were dismissed as men whose driving undoubtedly had been influenced by the liberating Yanks and Tommies in ’45.’ Another maid, Madame says, ‘was badly tampered with when she was a child during the Occupation, and she stopped growing. Now and then she comes alive, and remembers, and it is terrible’. A neighbour’s back had been broken in a labour camp, and her kidneys destroyed. Fisher notes and watches them all, in their daily ‘quiet evasion of disaster’.
In the years leading up to the move to Aix, Fisher herself had been through a difficult time, with the illness and suicide of her second husband, her beloved Tim Parrish (‘Chexbres’ in her writings) in 1941, and, a year later, the suicide of her brother. Both of her parents died in the late 40s and early 50s. She does not refer explicitly to these events, but references them obliquely, to account for her sensitivity to the psychic and physical scars of the Aixois: ‘All this intimacy with the raw wounds of war was doubly intense with me, perhaps, because I was alone, and middle-aged, and scarred from my own battles since I had lived in France.’
Although Fisher is a thoughtful, self-questioning guide, some of her attitudes to race, class and ability are noticeably of their time. For all her open-mindedness (and she recounts regularly giving money to beggars and being markedly kind to housemaids), her outlook is often shaped by the predominant discriminations of her era.
The Algerian War, which began in 1954 and ended in 1962, coincided with the entirety of Fisher’s time in Aix. Fisher doesn’t devote much space to the war, referring only, vaguely, to the ‘Insurrection’. On April 22, 1961, as De Gaulle’s peace negotiations with the FLN were failing, four retired generals staged a coup d’état and took control of Algiers, blaming Gaullist politics for the impending loss of France’s colony. The next day, Fisher witnesses from her window a stream of people marching in the street singing and shouting the Marseillaise, and describes being filled with ‘a kind of desperate human pride’. Salan aux poteaux [sic], she hears the crowds cry: Down with Salan, one of the generals responsible for the putsch.1 By this point, 75 per cent of the population had voted in favour of Algerian independence in a referendum. Fisher keeps her sympathies to herself; she doesn’t report any conversations about the war or the coup d’état; she only notes the presence of many more Algerian women in the streets, ‘in their bright flowing dresses’, where usually they restricted themselves to the market and their ‘unofficial ghettoes’.
Perhaps Fisher, like the French, had simply had enough of talk of war. She is certainly much more in her element talking of pleasure. As the collection reaches its conclusion, her final chapters are devoted to the annual music festival, the plays she saw at the theatre, and, of course, her last wonderful meals with friends:
Lunch was long and simple, the way I like it.
We ate Anne-Marie’s salad of endives, the white Belgian ones so good that time of year, cut in pieces with a dressing made of plenty of mustard, no salt, and plenty of olive oil … very little vinegar. It was delicious.
The lamb was the way I like it, very rare. There were brown crisp cubes of potato, and artichoke bottoms cooked with sliced mushrooms and bits of bacon.
Then there was a good mild but ripe Camembert and a good Bleu de Bresse, the way I like them, and then a rather tasteless crème with little sweet brioches … and fruit … and coffee.
We drank a blanc-de-blanc from near Arbois … it was nice. Monsieur was a little annoyed because he had forgotten to warm up a Gigondas to drink with the meat … it had been in the cellar all winter. It did not matter. In the warm sunshine the white wine was the way I like it.
Every so often, as in this passage, the tentative Fisher, the ‘outlander’ who feels so often like a ghost gives way to the accomplished and uncompromising food writer who knows without a doubt what she likes, and how she likes it. By the time she leaves Aix to return home to California, she writes, ‘I knew more how to be a good ghost.’
Lauren Elkin, 2019
1. The correct spelling is ‘Salan au poteau’, meaning down with Salan, not Salan aux poteaux, meaning Salan to the goalposts, as if he were the goalie for Team French Algeria.
Introduction
… it is very probable that if I had
to draw the portrait of Paris, I would,
one more time, draw it of myself.
Jean Giono, 1961
Often in the sketch for a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town.
Not everything can be told, nor need it be, just as the artist himself need not and indeed cannot reveal every outline of his vision.
There before us is what one human being has seen of something many others have viewed differently, and the lines held back are perhaps the ones most vital to the whole.
Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.
Over the years I have taught myself, and have been taught, to be a stranger. A stranger usually has the normal five senses, perhaps especially so, ready to protect and nourish him.
Then there are the extra senses that function only in subconsciousness. These are perhaps a stranger’s best allies, the ones that stay on and grow stronger as time passes and immediacy dwindles.
It is with the invisible ink distilled from all these senses, then, that I have drawn this map of a town, a place real in stone and water, and in the spirit, which may also be realer.
Aix-en-Provence
… 177 metres above sea level; 52,217 inhabitants; former capital of Provence; seat of an archbishopric since the fifth century, and of the departmental law courts and prison, and the schools of Law and Letters of the University of Aix-Marseille; one of the most beautiful art centres of Europe.
The town was founded in 123 bc by the Roman consul Sextius Calvinus, and was made into a prosperous colony by Julius Caesar. Between the fifth and twelfth centuries it lost much of its political importance to the town of Arles, although it was once more made the capital in the twelfth century under the Counts of Provence.
During the fifteenth century, before joining France, it became the hub of European culture under the benevolent administration of King René and his two queens.
Le Guide Bleu: France, 1960
So here is the town, founded more than two thousand years ago by the brash Roman invaders, on much older ruins which still stick up their stones and artefacts. I was as brash a newcomer to it, and yet when I first felt the rhythm of its streets and smelled its ancient smells, and listened at night to the music of its many fountains, I said, ‘Of course’, for I was once more in my own place, an invader of what was already mine.
Depending upon one’s vocabulary, it is facile enough to speak of karma or atavism or even extrasensory memory. For me, there was no need to draw on this well of casual semantics, to recognise Aix from my own invisible map of it. I already knew where I was.
I had been conditioned to this acceptance by a stay in another old town on the northward Roman road, when I was younger and perhaps more vulnerable. I lived for some time in Dijon in my twenties, and compulsively I return to it when I can, never with real gratification. And I dream occasionally of it, and while the dream-streets are not quite the same as in waking life (the Rue de la Liberté swings to the right toward the railroad yards instead of going fairly straight to the Place d’Armes and the Ducal Palace, for instance, but I always know exactly where I am going), still I am a remote but easy visitor, happier as such than as a visible one.
I do not, in my imagination, feel as easy there as in Aix. I have long since made my own map of Dijon, and it is intrinsic to my being, but the one of Aix is better, a refuge from any sounds but its own, a harbour from any streets but its own: great upheavals and riots and pillages and invasions and liberations and all the ageless turmoil of an old place.
I feel somewhat like a cobweb there. I do not bother anyone. I do not even wisp myself across a face, or catch in the hair of a passer-by, because I have been there before, and will be again, on my own map.
I can walk the same streets, and make my own history from them, as I once did in a lesser but still structural way in Dijon, my first return to the past, forever present to me.
The town was put on its feet by a Roman whose elegant bathing place still splutters out waters, tepid to hot and slightly stinking, for a ceaseless genteel flow of ancient countesses and their consorts and a quiet dogged procession of arthritic postal clerks and Swiss bankers and English spinsters suffering from indefinable malaises usually attributed to either their native climates or their equally native diets. This spa, more ancient than anyone who could possibly stay in it except perhaps I myself, is at the edge of the Old Town, at the head of the Cours Sextius, and more than one good writer has generated his own acid to etch its strange watery attraction.
Countless poems have been written too, in wine rather than acid, and countless pictures have been painted, about the healing waters and the ever-flowing fountains of the place. They will continue as long as does man, and the delicate iron balconies will cling to the rose-yellow walls, and if anyone else, from 200 BC to now, ever marked the same places on the map, in acid or wine or even tears, his reasons would not be mine. That is why Aix is what it is.
St Sauveur
Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.
Acts of the Apostles, xxvi, 28
I. THE BEGINNING
The structure of the baptistry of the Cathedral of St. Sauveur (end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth centuries) is strongly influenced by the liturgy of primitive baptism: immersion, conferred by a bishop upon adults once yearly during the night before Easter. To this sacramental rite of purification, performed behind curtains to protect the naked participants, two symbolisms are added: the passing from shadow to light (the water flows from east to west; two granite columns serve as entrance to the east, facing six of green marble; steps descend into the pool from the east …), and the resurrection and new life, symbolised by the figure 8, the primitive symbol for Sunday, the eighth day (the original baptistry was eight-sided, as was the marble-lined pool). In the sixteenth century the cupola was heightened …
JEAN-PAUL COSTE,Aix-en-Provence and Its CountrysideMany old towns like Aix in the Western world have grown the way a pearl does, in micromillimetres of skin against the world, around a germ, an alien seed, an itch, which in most of them has been a Christian church, at once fortress and prison and spiritual core.
Aix, however, grew around its baths, which still flow healingly behind the last of the old walls in the spa that is now run by the government. Even the Cathedral that later became the heart of the town was built over a temple bath, which in due time became its baptistry.
In St Sauveur, the Cathedral of the Holy Saviour, the pool is empty now in the octagonal room under the high vaulted ceiling, but beside it a cumbersome font still serves the parish, and from its walls local archaeologists are still, discreetly between Masses, tumbling the bones of believers built into the niches.
Far above the stone ribs of the hushed room a small eye of open sky in the cupola looks down upon the empty basin that the first Christians found so conveniently ready for their baptismal rites, after decades of Roman ladies had bathed hopefully there to give themselves children. Perhaps, it is said, St Maximin himself, one of Christ’s disciples, stood beside that pool …
I remember it as about four feet deep, with crumbling steps down into it, and centuries dry. Once I was standing looking at it in the shadowy room, thinking of how long it and perhaps even I had been there, when I found myself a near-active party to a small christening that had suddenly shaped itself around the modern font.
There I was, and why would I be there for any other reason than to help make a new member of the parish? The parents and sponsors smiled at me with a polite preoccupied twitch, each probably thinking the other side of the family had asked me to come. I must not startle them, caught as they were in the hoarse whispers, the cold air, the irrevocability of the ritual.
I stood facing the fat careless priest, a man I saw often in the district of the Cathedral and never grew to accept as anything but obnoxious. His vestments were dirty, and he needed a shave and almost certainly a bath, whether Roman or Christian. He held the new child as if it were a distastefully cold omelette that might stick on his fingers.
The parents and sponsors were mute in their Sunday clothes, the convenient and almost essential uniform of black which will do for the next funeral, a vestment of respectability among poor people, who fortify themselves on what other poor people will think of them.
The new believer would most probably lead a long full life, although like many infants of its environment it looked moribund, a blue wax image faintly breathing, its eyes slits of world-weariness.
I prayed for myself that the lout of a priest would not ask me any direct questions about vouching for the little soul’s well-being, and then, when the insultingly mechanical drone was plainly drawing toward a final benediction, I made myself disappear.
This is something that takes practice, and by the time I was standing there in St Sauveur trying not to accept any responsibility for the sickly newborn baby I had become fairly good at it. It is mainly a question of withdrawing to the vanishing point from the consciousness of the people one is with, before one actually leaves. It is invaluable at parties, testimonial dinners, discussions of evacuation routes in California towns, and coffee-breaks held for electioneering congressmen …
As I flitted, almost invisible by now, across the baptistry, I nearly walked straight into the roughly paved pit where Roman ladies on vacation had splashed hopefully, where the first Christians had doused themselves, pressed down into the flowing water by the hands of disciples who had once heard the voice of Mary Magdalene praying in her cave.
I wondered as I righted my course around the dim room if anyone had ever fallen in. It would be only a bruise or two, perhaps a cracked bone … But why risk it? Why flee? Did I run from looking once more into the cynical eyes of the newest Christian, or did I escape from the more materialistic hazard of having to explain to the dismal young family that I was nobody at all, no cousin’s cousin, an uninvited witness to the rites, not even real?
At the wide door into the comparative security of the nave I felt safe again, and the air had a different weight and coldness. I could hear footsteps up toward the choir stalls: chairs were being straightened between Masses on this Sunday morning. In the organ loft, Monsieur Gay flitted mockingly, tenderly, through two octaves of sound that came down to me as pure silver, like hollow clean beads on a string. I could not even hear the priest behind me. It was as if I had been bathed again …
II. AWAY, AWAY …
We hear the wail of the remorseful wind
In their strange penance.
ALEXANDER SMITH, ‘Unrest and Childhood’
The second time we returned to Aix for more than a few painfully nostalgic days, Anne and Mary and I made a point, with some trouble, of being there during Holy Week so that we could once again see the reposoirs.
They took place on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. It was like a fiesta. People walked gaily from one open church and chapel to another in a kind of jaunty quiet pilgrimage, part relief that Lent was almost over, part plain curiosity to see what the Order of This, the Guild of That would produce.
Chapels that were forever otherwise closed to the lay public were open that day, and in each one an offering of money could be left at the door. In the small convents and monasteries the whole main altar, with, as I remember it, no candle or flame burning, was turned into a wall, a solid wall, of the most beautiful flowers that could be found, which there near the Côte d’Azur meant beautiful indeed. In the larger churches the main altar was dim, and to the left of it, rising from floor to ceiling, sometimes perhaps thirty feet high, was the same solid mass of blossoms, now mixed all in a riotous jumble of spring, now austerely one kind of flower, one colour.
It was a miracle that between the late night of Wednesday and the morning of the next day the old women and men could create such stormy pagan beauty, and then even more astounding that by dawn on Good Friday, or perhaps before, every sign of it would be gone, and the statues would be shrouded in black veils, and everything would be waiting for the recital of the Stations of the Cross.
When we saw the reposoirs in 1955 we decided that the most beautiful was in the Madeleine. It was, as I remember, mostly white tulips, with some scarlet.
Crowds filed into the great simple church with silent excitement, and gasped at its beauty, and as they left put money into the box to help pay for the flowers, and then went on to the next and the next churches, all over the town, which echoed to the sound of thousands of leisurely feet.
One of the prettiest walls was in the small chapel of a convent of Sisters of Charity behind the façades of the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta, a little below and behind Brondino’s bookshop. It was never open to the public except on that Thursday of Holy Week. No nuns were in sight, of course, but a postulant stood by the coin box, pretending not to listen to the size of the sound of each bit of money hitting the rest. A little sign over another alms box said, For the poor, the sick, and the ashamed.
The most impressive reposoir was in the chapel of the Grey Penitents, or the Bourras, called that in Provençal because they wear sacks over their heads.
They are the last of the three active orders of Penitents in Aix, who devoted themselves, most strongly in the Middle Ages, to the burying of hanged criminals and abandoned victims of the plagues. The brotherhood today is a secret one, made up of businessmen and professionals who celebrate their rites and functions wearing over their regular clothes long tunics made of a grey sacking in much the shape of the Ku Klux Klan costumes, so that on the one time we saw them, silent and nightmarish in their chapel, their secular trousers and shoes showed absurdly beneath their grim disguises. They clanked with brutal-looking rosaries hanging from their waistbelts around their waists.
Their chapel is a plain room, without statues as I remember, but with the whole end an enormous carving, almost life-size, on tortured rocks, of the descent of Christ from the Cross, with the Act of Mercy of the Good Samaritan and perhaps a few others painted behind it. The carving is of gleaming grey-black wood. The altar, which of course was stripped the day we saw it, is in front of the carving and a part of it, so that the figures crouch and swoon and mourn above and behind it.
There were no flowers anywhere. A few of the Bourras stood clattering their rosaries and watching the silent frightened people, who filed in and then quickly went away. My children were scared.
And in a way I was too: it was a stern mercy that led those first hooded men to defy custom and disease, in the far days, and I wondered what bones and ashes they might rescue now, so silent behind their sackcloth maskings.
In the vestibule we bought some postcards of the altar, which I lost, and we left money in the coin box, beside which one last thin Penitent stood, perhaps listening to the size of the sound as if he had a real face with a real ear on either side.
We wanted to see all this with our older eyes when we were in Aix again in Holy Week. My sister and her three sons came too, earlier than they had meant, to see the pagan beauty of the flowers, perhaps the medieval fearsomeness of the Bourras. But the town looked the same on Maundy Thursday as it had on Wednesday or Tuesday, and in St Sauveur there was not a sign of the blossomed wall, and plainly one could not enter the little convents that are still everywhere behind the façades of Aix.
We went into the Madeleine, and there was nothing to show that once at least a mighty wall of white and scarlet blossoms had stood at the end of the south transept for some short hours, long enough for us to see forever.
I was perhaps a little drunk with being in the place again, and while my family stood gaping at a safe distance, I went up to a tall rounded young priest standing near the door and asked him where the reposoirs were.
That was the only time a man of the cloth has ever been discourteous to me, and later I saw this same one be quite rude to elderly women and very irascible with children, in a strangely sneering way. He sniffed, and stared down at me even farther than he needed, and asked in a high petulant voice, ‘Why would anyone ask that?’
‘Father,’ I said with polite boldness bred of my joy at being home again, ‘we came back for the reposoirs, and I wonder where they are.’
He looked me up and down, as the old novels would say, and then remarked in a disdainful way, ‘Anyone who is a believer knows, and therefore it is plain that Madame is not a believer, that the reposoirs have been discontinued in Provence as unfavourable to true Christianity.’
I knew at once what he meant about the pagan element in them, but was sorry to detect his puritanical triumph. I thanked him.
‘Where, if Madame is a believer, has she been? This is not a new edict,’ the priest stated suspiciously.
‘Away, away,’ I answered in a half-deliberately fey manner, and I disappeared from his immediate vision and returned to my family and told them that the reposoirs had been forbidden.
We went away, away … in this case to the Cours Mirabeau, where we consumed sherbets and vermouth-gins according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the plane trees, in the flowing tides of that street.
When the violet-man came along, we bought from him, and held the flowers in lieu of that older vision, ineradicable, of the walls of flowers, and perhaps of the painful sternness of the altar of the Bourras.
III. THE ENDING
Of a good beginning cometh a good end.
JOHN HEYWOOD,Proverbes
The two best things for me, in St Sauveur, were that I was able to know it full and know it empty, not of people but of the spirit.
Several times it was almost full when I went to concerts there, with an orchestra in the transept in front of the choir stalls, and then a full choir of men and of boys from the Maîtrise, and everything sacred delicately and firmly shut off. The organ was alive, with Monsieur Gay there at the console in his white cap and his wife beside him in a kind of choir robe to turn the pages, like two gallant old birds high above our heads, so knowing and so skilled in making near-celestial sounds.
Twice the Archbishop sat unobtrusively in one of the stalls to the right, in the big nave, and prelates and priests rustled beneath him and I sat close by, recognising his spirit and looking, invisible and even more so than usual, at the hollows of his eye sockets.
The music sang out from in front of the dim altar, and I knew it was a good thing to play it thus in the house of God.
Once I went into the Cathedral and it was a shell, waiting. It was by accident.
We walked up from the Hôtel de Provence on Easter Eve, I think, for no reason that I can remember, along Gaston-de-Saporta and across the Place de l’Archevêché, and there at the entrance to the cloister some priests and acolytes were bending above a bonfire.
It was startling to see. The flames lighted their intense faces. Around them were a few old women, the kind who are always present at such rituals.
I am sorry and a little ashamed to say that I forget now what they were burning. It had something to do with the purification by fire and then water of the vessels perhaps, and probably it was old candles and suchlike, or the robes of Judas himself, but at the end a large candle was lighted, I think, and then from it each of us lit a long thin taper given to us by an acolyte or perhaps a lay brother.
Then we walked silently through the passage and through the side of the cloister, where I had been used to watching my children playing handball against the Roman tombs, and into the St Maximin aisle of the church. From there we went into the nave, and found seats.
It was in one of the most impressive darknesses of my life. There was no sound except for the muted shuffling of our feet and the mouse-like whisperings of people telling their beads, and the darkness in that great place was as palpable as flesh. It was oppressive. It pressed in upon my skin like the cold body of someone unloved. There was no help for it, no escape, and so it was not frightening.
I looked toward the dead altar, and out and up, and there was nothing anywhere except from the few feeble tapers that seemed to unlight rather than to light the intense worn hands and faces that nursed them.
A long and to me very pagan ceremony unfolded before the altar and then down into the chancel. It had to do with fire and water and rebirth. I wish that I could remember more of it, but all that stays clear is that it was ageless and real. And then gradually light seemed to come.
Of course it was partly mechanical, electrical. But that did not matter. I watched the magnificent conglomeration, perhaps two thousand years old, come alive, softly, subtly, and then like a mighty blare of trumpets, and seldom have I been so startled in my soul. I had for once known true hollow blackness, and then light. And it seems to me now that there was music too, a great triumphant blast of it from the organ, but perhaps it was only the return of light that I heard.
And then the time that I knew the Cathedral full, not empty, was almost as enriching, for I went to a concert there during the Festival, and listened to even that great place hold as much sound as an egg its meat, or the sea its waters.
It was as full as it could ever be with people too, of course, who had come from many lands to listen.
There was a symphony orchestra. The choir and the middle transept were filled with one large chorus of men and women, and one of boys, with the four soloists for the oratorio. Monsieur Gay was at the organ. The walls hummed with the colours of the Canterbury tapestries; the triptych of the Burning Bush was open and glowing; artful lights made the stones vibrate with subtle colours, as I had often watched them do at sunset with a kind of absorption rather than reflection of the colours outside in the town.
But the thing that was real was the sound. It was awesome, whether from a little flute as single as a pearl, or mighty as Judgment Day from the whole orchestra. Everything was a part of it, and the breath that went into and out of the mortals there, and into and out of the great organ, was in a mystical way the breath of the place itself, very old and ageless. I have seldom felt myself more identified with anything. It was perhaps as if I were the right grain of sand for me to be, on the right beach.
Afterwards we were quiet and tired, and that too was in the right way.
Main Street
Aix is nobility itself. It gives to the least plane tree the grandeur of a cedar. On the Cours Mirabeau, where the song of the fountains mingles with Mozart’s music, its good taste comes so naturally that not even the students can disturb it. It was the last city of France to give up its sedan chairs. Since then (the beginning of the nineteenth century) the well-born people of the town have gone on foot, not to economise but instead to show their disdain for money in its weightiest form, that of time.
Marcel Renébon, La Provence
I. THE COURS
Let the street be as wide as the height of the houses.
Leonardo da Vinci
