Secession

I hereby announce that I wish Grillou to secede from its commune, Rimont. Here's why.

Two or three weeks ago, during the heatwave, we began to see a white hound-type dog around a bit. He was timid and wouldn't come near, and we thought he belonged to one of our distant neighbours, a farmer across the valley; just in case he didn't (there are lots of dogs who look a bit like him) we left out food and water, which went.

Last week, the dog came back and started to play with ours. They got on like a house on fire. After a couple of hours, he'd disappear before turning up again the next day. Then on Monday he arrived ... and stayed. Nothing we could do could entice him to leave; he settled down under the big ash tree, where he spent the night. A visit to the farm told us he wasn't their dog, though they had seen him around; talking to other neighbours (I call them that in the loose sense of the word - they're all well over a kilometre away!) told us that he'd been seen around by lots of people.

I started trying to find out who he was. Amazingly, he's tattooed, and the national register told me that his name - and I swear I'm not making this up - was Hobo. This is him:

However, being a mere mortal, I was Not Authorised to find out directly who the owner was, so today we went to visit somebody who was - our local vet. And we found out that the person who registered Hobo 2 years ago lives in ... La Réunion. Near Madagascar. Which is - um - in the Indian Ocean. Undeterred, the receptionist phoned the registered owner, who answered, then put the phone down. And that was that.

What the story is heaven only knows. But although he's actually a lovely dog and is very gentil and sociable, (if a little demanding and noisy!) there's no way we can keep him or even find the time to try and rehome him ... especially at the moment when we're busier than we've been since we opened AND I have a full book of my own clients at the same time. So it was with a heavy heart and feeling rotten that after dropping me back home to finish the changeover for tomorrow's new guests, John went to our Mairie (you might call it the town hall, if we were a town - which we're not, but you get the idea) whose responsibility it was to sign the papers allowing Hobo to be admitted to the refuge.

Not our problem, said the Mairie. Go to the Gendarmerie. It's only over the road, so he did. Not our problem, said the Gendarmerie, it's the Mairie's responsibility. Back to the Mairie, who in spite of being required to get involved under both the rural and the administrative codes, refused point blank, even when J pointed out in no uncertain terms (yes, his French has improved!) that we run a business which brings visitors to the commune and which is going to be increasingly difficult to manage given the presence of a chien errant. So, said J, what are your suggestions?

Put the dog in the car, drive him somewhere else, and dump him there, came the response.

Words fail me. I am so angry.

Tomorrow we have more guests arriving, and I still have no idea what we're going to do. But it won't be what the Mairie say.

Dilemmas

It's a tough time here in Ariège just now. Particularly for an indecisive Libran music lover like me.

Thursday: the first night of the new Ercé in Jazz festival, or Vivaldi meets Guinness meets Brazil with the violin group Cordzam in Salies du Salat?

Friday: Blues in Sem, the second night of Ercé in Jazz, or Lëk Sèn at the first night of Ingénieuse Afrique in Foix?

Saturday: Eastern European music from Zaman Zaman at the café culturel Le Souleilla in our neighbouring village, the third night of Ercé in Jazz, or two gigs (Ahmed Cissé and Les Choeurs de Brazza) at Ingénieuse Afrique?

Sunday: lots of folklore-y stuff in St Girons at Autrefois les Couserans, the son et lumière Le Secret des Cathares in Foix, or Harouna Dembele at Ingénieuse Afrique?

Monday: the night market at Castillon - always good fun - or a several-times-postponed trip to Toulouse to collect an oven?

Tuesday: the Choeur de Crimée performing Rachmaninov's Vespers and other goodies in the church at Le Mas d'Azil .... or an early night? Okay, I admit it; after five consecutive (very) late nights and many hours spent dancing, we chose the early night .... but the week went on, and we'll be catching up with the Choeur de Crimée next week at the Festival de Saint Lizier ......

There's always a big sense of build up in the fortnight approaching 15 August, which is a public holiday here (Assumption), and none the more so than in years like this when it falls on a Monday and thus creates a long holiday weekend. "France at a snail's pace!" cried our regional paper; according to one commentator it's the time when many holiday homes get opened up, and camping cars get dusted off, for the one and only occasion in the year. After Assumption thoughts, and holidaymakers, begin to turn homewards, the village fête reigns supreme, and the prospect of la rentrée begins to loom large. In a couple of weeks we'll have the roads to ourselves again.

One dilemma we don't have is whether to pass the next four nights with our fellow villagers under the plane trees at Rimont's annual fête locale. Why? Well, if you've ever heard any of the bands that trawl village fêtes here you don't need to ask. If you haven't, think Birdie Song meets 1980s French pop meets Songs From The Shows meets Jonny Hallyday take-offs, all played at ear shattering volume through appalling sound systems (from Grillou we can hear not only our own fête, but that of our two neighbouring villages, though thankfully not all at the same time). Maybe you just have to be there to appreciate it, but I think I'll just leave that one to the imagination ...

PS Monday's band is called Ad'vil, which also happens to be a brand of ibuprofen. I rest my case.

The end of the line

A couple of days ago, at dusk, we were buzzed twice by a helicopter that was flying so low over Grillou that I thought it was going to land in the willow garden. It's not unusual to see helicopters around here: they have myriad uses in the mountains, from delivering telegraph poles and pylons to dropping food supplies for shepherds and refuge huts to attending accidents to taking aeriel pictures. Our neighbour tells me that the gendarmes also use them regularly to check out isolated houses for cannabis farming; this, I assumed, was the explanation, although I didn't really see why they had to get so close I could count the hairs growing out of the pilot's nose.

The next morning, returning from an early morning dash to the brico shop for woodworking supplies, I encountered three soldiers in the village, all dressed in commando-type gear, one crouching behind the kids' swings, the others behind the little hut that passes for the telephone exchange, pointing their weapons at the Mairie. This, I must point out here, is pas normale. However, nobody seemed perturbed, and the aînés who spend all day sitting outside their houses were just ... sitting outside their houses. As we didn't seem to be in the middle of an invasion, I drove on.

The next day, I discovered that the Ariège was hosting a big military exercise involving students of an elite officer training school in Brittany alongside officers from a couple of local regiments and the Foreign Legion: 250 in total. The trainee officers had been divided into two units: one group were the renegades, whose task was to make their way, in small groups and under cover, from Lavelanet in the east of the department right across to St Girons, from where they could cross the Pyrénées into safety. They were encouraged to undertake a sabotage operation or two en route, of course, and to enlist the help of local residents wherever possible. The other unit had the job of apprehending the renegades before they could either reach St Girons or blow up any pylons or bridges.

Bit of a familiar feel to all of this, non? (Well, okay, maybe there isn't unless you live, as I do, in an area that was at the heart of Resistance action during the Second World War). But the irony was clearly not lost on the militaires, who named their exercise Opération O'Leary.

Pat O'Leary was the cover name of the Belgian Major-General Albert Guerisse, who ran one of the biggest and most successful escape lines during the war: the O'Leary line. The O'Leary line started out leading escapees towards Marseilles, but as time went on many of those helped by the O'Leary network were routed down through central France, through Toulouse and into Ariège. Escapees were passed from one member of the Resistance to another, each one of whom formed a link in a vast, secret but highly organised human chain that sheltered, fed and clothed the escapees on their journey towards the Pyrénées and into Spain. St Girons was the gathering point at the end of the O'Leary line: people would be hidden in secret collecting areas and formed into groups ready for a night-time ascent over some of the most difficult terrain in the mountains: La Chemin de la Liberté. The journey could take several days, and escapees were often ill-prepared for the extreme icy temperatures and the sheer difficulty of the trek - hard enough in daylight, but treacherous in complete darkness. Perilous ledges, steep ravines and mountain peaks stood between them and safety in Spain, and the mountain guides who sheltered and led the escapees across the mountains did so at great risk to themselves and their families. According to official statistics, 782 people escaped over the mountain peaks between 1940 and 1944; in reality there were undoubtedly many more than that. Today, St Girons hosts an association and a (fascinating) museum dedicated to the Chemin, there's a commemorative walk every July, and Le Chemin de la Liberté itself is a waymarked path..

I sometimes wonder if Grillou was used as a safe house; whether escapees were hidden in the greniers before their final push over the border into Spain. I'd like to think it was, but it's hard to find a tactful way of finding out. Rimont is still, after more than 60 years, a village split between collaborating and resisting families. Because of its unique history, the old wounds run deep, even after all this time and through several new generations. Although we've met two daughters of the family that farmed Grillou at the time, I've no idea on which 'side of the fence' the family lay. And just how does someone like me - foreign, incomer, and pacifist - find the words to ask someone whose family has had roots in Rimont for generations whether they collaborated or resisted?

09 in 09

For a small and sparsely populated department with not a lot of money, Ariège is not half bad at making its presence felt. A couple of years ago, for example, when we were still living over the border in Aude, we decided to hit the bright lights of Toulouse one rainy Saturday in March and what did we find? The main square, Place du Capitole, was filled with hundreds of stalls promoting and celebrating our soon-to-be-home department, complete with goats and sheep and prehistoric flint knappers and every sort of food and heaven knows what else. It was heaving with people - and great fun.

Ariège, or to give it its self-proclaimed full title Ariège-Pyrénées (adopted because it was - and officially still is - the only department sharing a border with Spain that didn't have 'Pyrénées' as part of its name), is department number 09. Every French department has a number, running alphabetically from A to Z (with a couple of quirks, naturally), and residents are strongly attached to 'their' numbers. Two years back, it was decided to replace the current system of departmental vehicle registration, under which the last two numbers are always the department of residence. Now this is a great system, not just because you can wear your departmental badge with pride, but because you also get fair warning that the car behind you comes from one of the departments with particularly bad drivers - anywhere in Paris, for example, or maybe my particular bugbears Gironde (33) and Tarn et Garonne (82) .... So when a national registration scheme was mooted, France revolted. And to cut a long story short, in the end the government had to concede that when the new system finally comes in next month,a department number, while not forming an official part of the registration number, would nevertheless be compulsory on all plates - a typical French compromise.

Now being department number 09 in the year 2009 is not a marketing opportunity to be missed. And missed it won't be: our Conseil Général and the Comité Départementale du Tourisme have just launched their 09 - L'année de l'Ariège campaign, with 9 events which they hope will 'typify the Ariège of tomorrow', put the department centre stage, and give people 9 (more) good reasons to come here. Here they are:

1. The opening of the first part of the new voie verte (green road, for walkers and cyclists - no motor vehicles allowed) which will link Foix with St Girons, along the old railway track. Great news for us, as when it's completed in 2010 it will pass right through Rimont.

2. The opening last month of the centre thermoludique at Ax les Thermes - the first in Ariège, and destined to become one of the best in the Pyrénées. I've not managed to get there, yet, but oh, I will, I will ...

3. The enlargement of the Parc de la Préhistoire in Tarascon, at the heart of one of the most extensive networks of prehistoric caves in Europe.

4. The designation of part of the Cathar Pyrénées as 'pays d'art et d'histoire'.

5. The official creation in May, after several years of negotiations, of the Parc Naturel Régional Pyrénées Ariégeoises. Rimont, and Grillou, will be a part of the new Parc.

6. The celebration on 22 August of the 20th anniversary of the Challenge des 3000 Ariégeois, a mountain running 42.5 km marathon that climbs - wait for it - over 2500 metres. I shan't be running.

7. The creation of a major competition for local innovators, to dynamise the local economy.

8. The commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars.

9. And finally ... la surprise. On the 9th September 2009 (09/09/09) at 09.00 (it had to be, didn't it ...), the Conseil Général and the Comité Départementale du Tourisme are preparing 'an event'. That's all I know, because for now their collective lips are firmly sealed on the details. But watch this space. Or even this one.

Good things 1

Any of you who knew me in my previous (restaurant owning and food writing) incarnation may perhaps be a little perplexed to find that plumbing appears to have overtaken produce in my affections. Indeed I'm a little perplexed myself. So, on a chilly and dreary Sunday afternoon, with only the songs of the birds to remind me that it's spring, I think it's time to indulge in a bit of unashamed glorification of our local food.




Like much of France, Ariège is blessed with some wonderful local products. To take a trip to Saint Girons market, 20 minutes down the road, on Saturday morning is to be faced with a near paralysing choice of what to bring home: fruits and vegetables, for sure, but also mountain cheeses (from cows, sheep and goats), an endless variety of duck goodies, ham, charcuterie, conserves of all kinds, beans, wine, nuts and nut oils, honey, breads and croustades, millas, donkeys' milk soap ...



We buy unpasteurised whole milk, yoghurt and crème fraîche from a farm in next-door village Lescure, or sometimes from another farm at Castelnau Durban, next-door in the other direction. Castelnau Durban also has a summer-only echoppe (Gascon for shop, apparently) which sells only Séronais produce and is cooperatively run by the producers. Our third neighbouring village, Clermont, has a bakery which is known far and wide for its croustades. And Rimont itself now has an artisan charcuterie, Le Grenier à Jambons, which raises, butchers and - er - charcutes its own pigs.



Our most local produce, however, is the organic honey from our neighbouring farm, Saurine. My out-and-out favourite is the acacia: it's an extraordinarily pretty light, clear golden colour and has a very delicate flowery, vanilla-y flavour: great with yoghurt, or on sourdough toast. If, like me, you grew up on Gales, you probably take honey for granted. But it really is an amazing thing, worthy of a little wonderment ...

So what is it, exactly? Well, it's the sugary nectar of flowers gathered, modified and stored in a honeycomb by honeybees. As far as the plant is concerned, the function of nectar is to attract insects, which pick up pollen and transfer it from flower to flower. As the bee swallows the nectar, its saliva splits the sucrose into the two simple sugars, dextrose and fructose. It stores the nectar in a special 'stomach' and takes a little for its own nourishment; the rest is given up when the bee returns to the hive, where it regurgitates it into one of the cells of the honeycomb (don't you wish you didn't know that?). Each honeycomb cell is an incubator for young bees, which feed on the honey as they grow.

Nectar turns into honey by evaporation, and the composition of the honey depends on the type of flowers visited by the bees (which is why different honeys taste so - well, different). Now, you'll like this bit. As each bee returns to the hive it performs a kind of wriggling dance at the entrance. The angle at which it moves shows the direction of flight to the flower in relation to the current position of the sun; the enthusiasm with which it wriggles shows how good a source of nectar it is. That, I promise you, is absolutely true. And so are these three amazing pieces of trivia:

1. The bee is so well designed that it can carry its own bodyweight in nectar (whereas a jet plane is limited to 25%).

2. It's been estimated that the bee is efficient enough to fly nearly seven million kilometres at a steady 12 kilometres an hour on a gallon of nectar.

3. Apparently it takes bees 10 million trips (or 300 bees around one month) to collect the nectar for one jar of honey. It's the females that do most of the work. The males just hang around waiting to mate with the queen. Hmm …

It's snowing!

Well, well, well. It's snowing. Now this is a Grillou I haven't seen before.

I love snow. It turns me into a big kid with a new toy. It makes me want go out and kick around in it and make snowwomen and throw snowballs. I wish I were a skier, but if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know all about my legendary skiing prowess (I do want to get some raquettes - snowshoes - this year though). But when we woke up this morning and looked out of the window and saw everything covered in snow - proper snow, I mean, not that horrible wet stuff that disappears as soon as you puff at it - all I really wanted to do was go out and walk in it. I made a valiant attempt to go on working, I really did. But given that today's delectation was the scraping of thirty year old cork tiles from the walls of our downstairs loo, my willpower very soon simply gave up on me. I mean, what can you do when your garden looks like this:

So out we went to walk a bit of the GR78, La Voie du Piémont Pyrénéen, which runs across country just a few minutes walk away from Grillou and is part of the Chemin de St Jacques de Compostelle. While not one of the four major Chemins, it's a superb walk of, in total, around 450 kilometres (140 in Ariège) that runs through the Corbières, the Couserans, the Comminges and the Bigorre regions to join up with the Arles to Oloron-Ste Marie route at St Jean Pied de Port in the Basque country. Phew. (That was for the sentence, not the walk). It's a classic Slow Walk, and definitely destined, I think, to be as much of a guest favourite as it is one of ours. One day, perhaps, we'll do the whole thing instead of piecemeal bits.

The light was fantastic at times:

After descending from Grillou into the valley, the chemin climbs gradually back up to around 500 metres and the views open out to the south and west, giving some lovely views (well, usually!) over the high peaks and some nearby hamlets:

The strange thing is that having walked 3 kilometres or so along the chemin, Grillou is less than a kilometre away (over to the left on the picture above) ... but you can't see it. We've walked the paths and woods all around the house now, and come to the conclusion that Grillou must be one of the only houses that nobody can see, from anywhere ...

On the way back there's a great view of Rimont, our village, in the distance, with the Pyrénées behind (almost hidden in the snowy mist):

More snow tomorrow. Yippee!

Once upon a time ...

I want to tell you a story, about our village, Rimont. Are you sitting comfortably? I hope so, because you might not be afterwards.

The picture above is of Rimont, taken last year. An attractive and peaceful bastide village built on a mound (le mont riant: laughing hill) in the foothills of the Pyrénées, surrounded by hills and farms. The village dates back to the thirteenth century. So, a mystery. Why do so few medieval houses remain? Here is its story.

Early in 1943, the Vichy government instituted a work scheme. Those born between 1920 and 1922 would henceforth be required to go and work in Germany to replace Germans who’d been drafted into the Wehrmacht. Unsurprisingly, many young people refused; instead they left home and hid deep in the country, in particular in the forests. Ariège (which by this time was, like the rest of the south of France, occupied by the Nazis) became a magnet for these early refugees because of its sheer wildness and isolation. Together with others - political activists, trade unionists, those who’d escaped from internment camps and Jews - they formed the first organised resisters - the maquis.

Over the next year, the three maquis groups in and around Rimont became increasingly active and organised various guerrilla actions: sabotaging factories, ambushing railways and Nazi troops as they moved through the department. Travelling the main road between Foix and St Girons became more and more hazardous for the occupiers. Things really began to hot up after the Normandy landings in June 1944; guerrilla actions were now happening every few days, and in turn both the Germans and the local French milice cracked down even harder: repression and reprisal became the official orders of the day. In Saint Girons, for example, an industrialist and prominent member of the fascist Parti Populaire Français created his own commando group, which according to one source “sows terror, tortures, plunders, burns, assassinates with impunity and often exceeds the Gestapo itself in effectiveness”.

At the little Chateau de Vignasse in the centre of Rimont lived Paul Laffont, a politician and one of Ariège’s great and good: member of parliament, senator, Secretary of State for Post, Telegraph and Telephone, President of the Conseil General (county council) … Like most radical-socialists of his day, Paul Laffont originally gave 100% support to Marshal Pétain and the Vichy government. And like most radical-socialists of his day, he remained pétainist for only a few months: unhappy at the racist and increasingly brutal collaborationist regime of the Vichy government, he decided to withdraw from political life. Refusing all the posts offered to him by Vichy, he was then ‘relieved’ of his position as president of the Conseil General. Many of his friends, such as the mayor of Rimont, suffered the same fate. Gradually, he attempted to engage in the Resistance movement – not entirely successfully as the majority of resisters found it hard to forgive his original support of collaboration. He did, however, succeed in giving a large sum of money to the local maquis. All the while, Laffont was under observation by both the German police and the French milice, some of whom apparently believed that he could be the chief instigator of the resistance that they feared yet knew little about. Early in the morning of the 13 July 1944, a Franco-German commando arrived at Laffont’s home in Rimont, seized him, took him away in a van to an unknown destination, then ransacked and vandalised his house. His close friend, Doctor Charles Labro, heard the commotion and ran towards the chateau; he too was brutally seized and taken away. Their bodies were found, separately, several days later, that of Doctor Labro very close to Grillou (now marked by a memorial). Both men had been tortured before being killed.

Two days later, the local maquis made a list of suspected collaborators, arrested some twenty people then summarily tried and executed 11 of them at nearby col de la Crouzette. It was found afterwards that some of these were malicious denunciations and that some of those executed weren't collaborators at all - a story repeated around France. 

The battle of Rimont

Resistance was hotting up, and the Allied landings in Provence in August 1944 gave added impetus to the maquis of Ariège, which by now was playing a prominent part in the increasingly organised push towards liberation. On 20 August 1944, a long column of soldiers from the Legion of Turkestan, an adjunct to the German army made up of Central Asian prisoners from the Soviet war, was making its way from Saint Gaudens to Saint Girons; on arrival, there was fierce fighting in which the charismatic leader of one of Rimont’s maquis groups, Réné Plaisant, was killed; the maquis reluctantly decided to withdraw from the town to avoid carnage. That night was a rough one: hostages were taken, fires lit, shops and houses pillaged and women raped.

The next day, 21 August, the column set out towards Rimont – around 15 kilometres. Around 9am that morning, the local garage owner, who was on observation duty, saw it approaching. He counted 44 trucks without seeing the end of the column. Things were serious: there were at least 2000 men. The order to evacuate was given and many of Rimont’s inhabitants hid in the countryside. In the way of such things, however, the gendarmes – who were not on the best of terms with the résistants - had just received a message that a group of 15 Germans were approaching. The gendarmes went around all the houses asking those remaining not to leave but just to lock themselves in their houses. Many of the elderly preferred to sit it out at home, and complied. At the same time, the maquis managed to hold off the column until 11am, long enough for most of the population to flee, at which point they retreated, vastly outnumbered.

The German soldiers surrounded Rimont; the commander gave the order to burn the village to force a passage through it. Soon Rimont was engulfed by flames, the German and Turkestan soldiers screaming in a mad folie of rage, egged on by the French milice. The Rimontais could only flee to the surrounding hills, from where they watched helplessly as the medieval bastide village, along with everything they owned, went up in smoke. Those who lingered were attacked by German police dogs. Women were raped in their houses. All in all eleven Rimontais died in the combat, mainly elderly, one while he peeled potatoes outside his front door. Several groups of hostages were taken; the women were freed at midday, while one group of men were lined up along the wall of the local wine merchant. Realising that they were going to be shot, one of them, François Sentenac, made a break for it and escaped through the open hallway of the house behind him and through into the gardens beyond. The German soldiers gave chase, never returning. Other men were forced to lie face down in the middle of the battle until nightfall. This is how one of them described the experience:
“No idea what time it is. Not for a minute are we hungry or thirsty or cold. We feel nothing. And the battle rages around us while we serve as shields as the maquis kill opposite. And just over there, our village burns …”.

The column eventually moved through Rimont and on towards our neighbouring village of Castelnau Durban, which it occupied that night; the next day it continued its march but by that time large numbers of maquis fighters had arrived from Aude and Haute Garonne. Finally the Germans realised that they’d lost; they capitulated at Ségalas, defeated by 400 maquis.

The battle of Rimont, which took place exactly sixty-four years ago today, put an end to the Occupation in Ariège. Remarkably, the department was liberated entirely through civilian fighting – no regular armed forces were involved. But in France, the Second World War had become not just a fight against the Germans, but also one against the Vichy government. Those who had actively helped Vichy, whether by helping the Milice, denouncing the maquis or organising deportations, were arrested and tried: immediately following the liberation, France was swept by a wave of executions, public humiliations, assaults and detentions of suspected collaborators, known as the épuration sauvage (lit: wild purge); many dozens of people were shot in Ariège alone.

The price of liberation for Rimont was a high one: the village plus several farms and hamlets were burned almost in totality. 236 buildings were destroyed, including 152 houses, the schools, the Mairie, and all the village archives with it. 231 Rimontais were made homeless. Grillou survived, untouched.

As you enter the village today, you’ll see a chilling epitaph: ‘Rimont, village martyr’. The village was rebuilt afer the war, as closely as possible in style and construction to the original, and the 'village ressuscité' was inaugurated by the Minister for Reconstruction in 1950. As you walk the streets of Rimont, Saint Girons and the other local towns and villages, you’ll come time and time again across streets named after the men in these, and other, stories. The battle of Rimont may not have made the heroic war films of my childhood, but it lives on, here.

Note: my thanks to two French sites for the detail in this account: www.histariege.com, and this one. As far as I know, this is the first account in English of the battle of Rimont.