Carcassonne Adventure: Photos of Caunes Minervois

Greenery can hide secret doors and crumbling masonry.

It's dripping rain today. I guess I have learned to use what it does in Brookings as a gauge for how hard it is raining, and this isn't much. Nonetheless, I have decided to stay close to home today. I won't be making the walk over to church. I am listening to a wonderful mass on the radio; that will serve as my meditation for the day. I am going to dash out to the tabac for the Sunday paper and stop at the butcher shop for a chicken leg.

Deserted winding street going up.

Caunes Minervois is an interesting town. It's not far from Carcassonne, about 18 km on the road, and probably less as the crow flies. But what a different feel it has. It felt very small, and somehow passed over by everything. Part of the issue is that we couldn't find anyone or anything open....save for one jeweler who was working on his bench by his open doorway. As it turned out, he was English. But it was late in the afternoon on a Friday of a long holiday weekend....and not tourist season.....

The jeweler is at the left, with the sign on the outer wall.

Many stores and restaurants posted handwritten signs that they'd be back next week. They closed for lunch and that was that.

Delete the cars and it is 1213

I think it is a bit of an artist colony. I saw pottery workshops and several framing shops. I also encountered a great watercolor of some chickens. (Along with some live chickens living along the river.)

Cluck, cluck, cluck

Apparently the town commissioned artists to carve something out of the local red marble. I find it pretty amazing that they also use this marble on the sidewalks and along the channels for street water run-off. They have these massive blocks of marble creations placed along a walking route of the town, which is very hilly. It felt like we would never stop going "up." But eventually, since the town is really small, we found our way to the top of the hill and the statues listed on the tour map.

Maybe it is 1213 and we've entered an earlier time.

I can't emphasize enough how odd the town felt. There were four or five plane trees that had been severely trimmed and I don't think they were alive any more.

Sorry, but I think this tree is a bit creepy.

Plane trees--another subject of which I am ignorant. They remind me of sycamores, but with fatter trunks. We found two that had been planted right after the French Revolution (1789) and are still alive. They had big hollows in their trunks that had been filled in, rather artfully, with concrete.

The 1789 plane tree with concrete in the trunk.

(The plane trees along the Canal du Midi, according to the paper last week, are suffering with a blight, and are having to be cut down and new trees replanted. They're trying to raise the funds to do this over the next 20 year period.) We also had a lively discussion about horse chestnuts. The Brits called them conkers--I thought because schoolboys "conked" one another with them, but it has something to do with a game. I realized that they were the equivalent of buckeyes. I don't remember if horse chestnut trees grew back in Maryland. I just remember something about the European chestnut blight killing off forests of American chestnuts back in what seemed like colonial days and that people were still pissed off about it.

A horse, obviously. Jason is reading the plaque.

I am not as taken with this red marble as some others. Maybe if it were highly polished, I might like it. Actually, I wouldn't even have recognized it in its roughest state; it looks like crumbly old brick. But the people of the region, obviously in Caunes, are very proud of it. Many of the columns at the Abbaye Fontfroide were either entirely or partially made of it.

Most of the carvings, statues--I am not sure what to call them, were not to my taste, either. Some were excessively modern. I think it was the lack of finish to them that puts me off, but I am not sure. They are positioned in a line along the walkway bordering the river and it's pleasing.

The title of this one had something to do with Peregrine.

The one thing I do like is that they invite touching. I am always frustrated when I am in a museum, and there are wonderful statues that beg to be touched and some guard is standing nearby ready to pounce on people (me) for doing what the artwork demands. (I did once touch Michaelangelo's David's toe-and nobody will ever be able to take that experience from me. And yes, I did get yelled at.)

This statue had a title referring to the head of God. It's set so that the head does not face in the same direction as its base, and therefore not in the same direction as the faces of all the other statues. It made us wonder if it were deliberate. To the right in the picture you can see the rough, crumbly brick texture and color.

I think this is one of the things that art should do--invite you to play.

By far the thing about Caunes that I found most disconcerting was the loudspeaker system. Someone from the mayor's office, or at least I am assuming it was from the mayor's office, came on unseen loudspeakers at least twice during our visit to make a few announcements. One was to tell people about a service on Monday for the holiday. Another was to announce that water, somewhere in the town was now drinkable. It felt sooo weird.

Red marble fountain

The water in this fountain, however, is not drinkable.

I told my friends that I expected to be told to get in line to get on a train, perhaps one bound for Poland. Bob and Chris recounted their tales of being awakened at 4 or 5 in the morning (the time depends on whether Bob or Chris is telling the story) in Vietnam by loudspeaker announcements of the day. I guess we are just not used to such direct communication from our government.


Looking west from atop the town. The sculpture park is along the right side of the river.

Looking east, and the sculpture garden is to the left.

I did see two old people with the greatest faces. I got a photo of the guy, but not one of the woman. She threw open the street level shutters, and I yelled, "Bonjour madame," to her from across the street. I think she was unused to tourists even noticing her, much less speaking to her. She broke into a great front-toothless grin and waved. I can't remember the last time I saw such joy in another human being's face. How I wish I could have captured that on film. I try to never take anyone's photo without first asking permission, but I did get a photo of the guy and his dog ( I hope he will forgive me)....As we were passing by, he picked up his cane and began tapping out a daaah dat dat daaah rhythm on the pavement. So, Bob and I started to do a little soft shoe. There are many ways to communicate, and we all had smiles on our faces and in our hearts.