Travel

Bastille Day

Aug 15, 2023

I spent a further week at the Chateau near Chinon. With the school holidays in full swing, my gardening duties were frequently interrupted by child-minding of the three boys. Mostly they kept themselves amused, but quickly decided that I needed to contribute to the summer fun too. The eldest, ten year old Roman, suggested we play ‘Ogre’. In its original incarnation, this game wasn’t much fun. It involved me, the Ogre, standing still whilst the boys attempted to tackle me to the ground. I tweaked the rules to make it a little more interesting; instead the ogre would have to walk, as slowly and menacingly as possible, between two points on the ground marked out by flip-flops. If the Ogre reached the end, the ogre won. So it was that I spent several afternoons standing in the shadow of the Chateau next to a flip-flop, facing down three schoolboys. Before the game began, the three jostled about excitedly suggesting tactics. They would line up a few steps away then, when the game was set to begin, went quiet looking a little nervous. I would take one big, slow step, stomping my foot as solidly as possible onto the grass. Usually it was the middle child, 8 year old Leighton, who would break the tension and charge forward with a high-pitched battle cry. Roman would follow, then the youngest, 7 year old JJ. Two would grab a leg each and the third looped around trying to push from different angles to find a weak point. This tactic almost always failed, except on one occasion, when Leighton delivered a well timed tackle directly at the knees whilst Roman and JJ were wrapped around my ankles. Slowly but irresistibly, I tipped backwards onto one hand. The boys roared with delight at their tiny victory, and attempted to finish the job - the game wasn’t over until the ogre was flat on the ground.

There was another worker at the Chateau this time, an American woman named Sylvia. Like me, Sylvia was doing oddjobs in return for food and accommodation, and had arrived shortly after I left previously. Sylvia clearly wasn’t fond of the way things were done at the Chateau. Instead of eating lunch with the family, she would often eat a peach and some lettuce in the workers lodge before returning to the guesthouses to spend hours sterilising every accessible inch. Over dinner she would tell us of the horrors she had uncovered. In one room, a bowl of decorative walnuts had attracted a couple of flies and she started referring to the offending guesthouse as the “fly-house”. Having lived in France for many years, Sylvia would sometimes identify as French. At other times she would identify as American or, on the grounds of her New York heritage, Sicilian. At one point she was all three over the course of a single meal. Fortunately, Sylvia could speak French, so I made some attempts to practice with her. However, this too turned out to be an ordeal. When demonstrating how to pronounce something, Sylvia would pout her lips, curl the corners of her mouth upward into a W shape, stick out her chin and stretch her neck forward as far as possible, looking like a leathery blonde turtle chasing a lettuce leaf. She then finished off with a distinctly American sounding pronunciation of a French word. The original plan to speak with Sylvia exclusively in French quickly proved to be unbearable.

Bastille Day (La Fete National) happens every year on the fourteenth of July to celebrate the storming of a prison (Paris de La Bastille) in Paris during the French Revolution and the writing of the French constitution. The prison was stormed in order for the attackers to stock up on the ammunition stored inside. Oddly, two hundred attackers and only one defender died before the Bastille capitulated and the attackers were permitted to enter. A misunderstanding then caused fighting to break out again resulting in some further, much more significant deaths. Only seven, politically insignificant, inmates were present in the Bastille at the time, suggesting that the affair was more symbolic than useful. These days, in exquisitely French fashion, the day before Bastille day is also used for celebration and public transport can be unreliable on both the thirteenth and the fourteenth. Fireworks displays are also common at this time, so the family, Sylvia and I squeezed into the car and drove into town to enjoy a show. Food stalls offered up various different foods, including andouillette, and we selected some tiny pancakes that arrived in an open box with either a sweet or savoury topping. When Sylvia approached the vendor and asked the origin of the pancakes in French, he replied in English. She tried a follow-up question to which the vendor again replied in English. Looking a bit disappointed, Sylvia returned to inform us that the pancakes were a Dutch specialty.

Fireworks shows were done well in France. Even in small villages, the displays were tightly choreographed in time with a soundtrack blasted out from enormous speakers. The music, however, seemed to be a random selection of songs from every possible genre. A dramatic and intense classical section with lots of reds and oranges, gunfire at the Bastille, was followed by eighties techno with blues and greens; presumably the celebrations following a successful storming.

I was fortunate enough to spend Bastille day in Paris. Place de la Bastille was quiet, the former site of the prison, was quiet, but the streets between it and the north of the city were a hive of activity. A Harley Davidson shopfront was peppered with cracked glass from recent riots. In the Jewish quarter, a huge queue buzzed in front of a falafel shop. Notre Dame Cathedral, spire collapsed and roof stained black after a fire in 2019, was dressed in a thick comb of scaffolding and helicopters hovered overhead as part of the parade.