Hot and dry August Sunday afternoon; a few clouds lighten the dark blue of the sky; a few crickets accompany the dancing of the greens. Several different kinds of insects bounce on my window.
Insects; there are so many different ones. It seems that every day I see at least one that I had never seen before. And it seems that you just need to move a hundred meters further to get a fresh supply of novelty.
I have been finding myself now for a week in the Aude department, nearby a village called Arques, at the farm of a lovely British family – Ivan and Claire and their three young sons, Joseph and Rowan and Fabian.
**
Arques! How beautiful you can be! Oh France! The more I visit you, the more I feel like I am here more inside a fractal than within a country. Of course there is the France of baguette, of cheese, of wine. There is also, however, the France of each department – specific foods, specific attitude, specific landscape, specific weather. And then it is as if there were, even within each department, a thousand different countries. For every new hill, every new valley, every new river bed, has its own people, its own weather, its own soil.
Take Arques for example. It is perhaps 30 km far from Limoux, and I know Limoux as an uncle of mine lives not far from it, and I thought that it was not very exciting to come back here. But no! Couiza and Arques have absolutely nothing to do with Limoux! Limoux is flat and dry and it has vines all around it. But here is in the middle of rough, small craggy mountains which like precious stones exhibit grey-white rocky walls in their rivers of green.
And here even, at the house, the Perilhou; within ten hectares can one find oneself in ten different places. There is the hill with the pine trees, there is the valley with the fields and house, and there is the river below with the huge deciduous trees gasping for the light above, the mosses and the box trees. Each part has its own fauna, its own flora, its own feel. Up the hill blows the wind constantly, and all around can one admire the mountains, and feel the strength of the summer sun. But, down at the river, instead one hears the constant murmur of the water, and one is always cool and protected from the sun and the wind.
I have been wondering if it is not its extremely varied geography which contributes not only to France's cultural diversity, but also to its remarkably sparse human population. For France's countryside, I got to learn, is quite devoid of people compared to that of England, Belgium, Holland, Germany. So it is not only because of its more generous sunshine, that rural France is being colonized by the people of these other countries, and that farmhouses all over the countryside are being bought up by them, and transformed into secondary houses, or houses for their retirement, or kept running as farms (in the Ardèche, the deserted primary school next door had been bought by a Dutchman, as a secondary house). It is (of course!) also because here, these foreigners can afford to buy a house or a piece of land or both, which they could in their own country, not even dream about. Money, you speak once again!
And, why is France not only so culturally diverse, but also so sparsely populated?
I do not know it for a fact, but I get the impression that France's landscape is much more rough than it is in these other countries. And, evolutionary biologists tell us that a rough landscape is a very potent diversity generator, because not only does it provide a diversity of climates and soils which drive life forms in different directions (this is hard to imagine for people who are not used to it, like me, but life on the north and south-facing sides of a mountain can be dramatically different, as the temperature can differ by ten degrees!), but also does it prevent cultural diversity from being tempered by inter-mixing – simply because it is harder for people in different parts to reach each other (thus in the mountains one finds villages which are separated by only a few kilometers, but which until a few decades ago barely knew of the existence of each other, until roads and cars came to them!).
But besides bringing diversity, what does roughness of the landscape also bring? Difficulty to farm! And thus, few people!
Take this place. A gorgeous, a wonderful place it is! It is not so high in altitude, 400 meters, and there is plenty of water, with the river. But there is at least 50 meters of difference in altitude between one side of the ten hectares and the other. Thus it is difficult to farm, unless one wants to build terraces, and even then, it is not trivial to bring the water uphill, as there is no source uphill (as there was in the Ardèche). Plus, there are not that many stones here I think. Plus, the house is three kilometers away from the most nearby village, Arques, up a winding dirt road which climbs and climbs. So the place is incredibly, astonishingly wild, even though not far from relatively big cities (perhaps 50 km as the crow flies from Carcassonne, and 60 km from Perpignan) and I have rarely heard so much silence nor felt so immersed in nature, than here.
And, believe it or not, but this topic of wildness brings me to the apparently completely unrelated topic of the French Revolution. Here is how.
**
The other day came a man here, Tim, with his small Russel-Terrier dog. He wore, vaguely tilted on his head, a lovely white and black checked hat of the typical “french artist” shape. He spoke French with an accent which I for an initial moment thought was perfectly French - and that surprised me because Claire had told me that this man was a friend from England. In fact, he was just back from England where he had spent two months. He is otherwise a resident of a hamlet nearby.
And then the other night we went to a party (given by three German people, one of them grows wheat and sells German bread at the market on Sunday. The party was attended by lots of new-age and hippie people, and I had never seen so many since-long-grown-up people smoking such large amounts of weed with such little discretion). Tim was at the party as well. We sat on square straw bales under an enormous centenary tree, and I got to learn his story.
I asked him what had brought him to France. Most of the foreign farmers/countryside people answer to this question either with the weather, and/or the price of land. But Tim's reply was different, and unusual, and startling for me. He said that he had always dreamed of coming to live in France, that he had always felt more at home here than he did in England.
As a child he got to spend some time in France, and each time he would leave and go back to England, he felt as though he was leaving home. Later he was a teacher and in the summer he would come for the holiday, and when he would return to England in the Fall he would feel pain, and the whole school year he would wait for the summer and the time to go back to France to return. And then, fifteen years ago the opportunity to buy a ruin in a hamlet nearby presented himself. He had no money, but there was no question - he bought it. “When you have a good idea, he said, money is no question. First comes the idea. Then you find the money.” And then, three years ago, he made the move, and came to live here permanently. And although he does miss certain things about England, such as the pubs and the green and how so beautiful countryside landscape, he is the happiest person to be here. He feels like he did exactly what he has always dreamed about.
I asked him what he thought was the origin of this apparently intrinsic passion for this country. Here is what he answered.
On the one hand, British people in his eyes are “intolerable”. All they ever think and speak about, is money.
On the other hand, here in France can one still find some wilderness. He just loves to be surrounded by this mixture of forest and pastures and sheep. In England, the wild patches that remain are very few.
And why is that? To Tim, this is so not only because of the rough landscape. He thinks that culturally, the French cherish the wilderness more. Perhaps, he says, because many of them still hunt. And although he does not himself enjoy shooting animals, he thinks that the people who do it develop more of a feeling and respect for wild nature.
And why do the French people hunt more than the British do? Well, the French did the Revolution. And, this is perhaps not often realized, but one of the important claims of the Revolution was the right to hunt for all. In England, to this day still, only the nobles are allowed to hunt.
So in England, said Tim, to this day, there exists a nobility that means a class of people who think that they are intrinsically better than the others. When he drove in the morning for work in England, sometimes the road would be blocked by huge land-rovers. They were cars of nobles, who had parked to go hunting. Tim would complain, tell them that if they blocked the road then he would not be able to go to work. But they would reply that this was not important to them.
Tim said that he cannot feel comfortable in such a society, where some people think that they are intrinsically better. He said that as soon as some people in a society think that they are different, special, then it just, simply, cannot be good.
