france travelogue IV: rognes (2/2)
Sep. 18th, 2025 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishMonday 8/18: Steph's brother and company headed to Monaco, as part of their "visit every tiny independent nation in Europe" checklist, and the rest of us drove down to Marseille.
We spent the late-morning, once we got there, touring the Chateau d'If. I had no idea this was a real place. I knew it solely as the island fortress where Edmond Dantes was imprisoned for fourteen years in the eponymous Dumas novel. Turns out it not only existed, but was used as a prison off and on until the late nineteenth century (its last imprisoned were a group of Marseille Communards, spurred into action by the Paris Commune in 1871). Also, Dumas's novel was such a massive hit that in the mid-1800s there was something of a flood of tourists visiting the prison and wanting to see "the cells where Dantes and Faria were imprisoned." Eventually the prison staff got so fed up with this that they just said "Fine," designated two adjacent ground-floor cells as 'Dantes' and 'Faria,' and even dug a 'secret tunnel' between them. Nineteenth-century tourist-trappery at its finest.
I did not get a photo of Six Ifs, a set of twenty-four 2'-ish cubes that can be assembled to make one of six maps of the island, but I did get a photo of the artist's statement comparing cartography to Sisyphus. (In French apparently 'Six Ifs' is a pun on Sisyphus.)
We had lunch in the old town and then visited Maison Empereur, 'France's oldest hardware store.' This was less impressive than hoped, but still neat. After we walked around a bit, and then got in the car and attempted to locate the rental car dropoff point, which we'd need in a few days. This was sort of successful: we found the train station, and then decided that we'd done enough driving in Marseille rush hour and should just go home rather than contributing to the traffic problems by being tourists. So we did that.
I think this was the evening when I made pork tenderloin with roast carrots for dinner, and that was pretty good as well.
Tuesday 8/19: Steph's brother had decided he wanted to see a large market in the town of Gordes, so we all bundled into cars and headed off. As usual we got going late; as less usual, there was no parking to be had, so we drove around this tiny mountain town for forty-five minutes before finding a place to part that was about a twenty-minute walk from the market proper.
Gordes is absolutely ridiculous. It is a typical French village, built on the side of a mountain. I deeply regret not getting any pictures, and not getting to spend much actual time there. Because of course we got there right as it was closing up at 1:30. We got in a bit of actual market-wandering and then attempted to find lunch. This took substantially longer than anticipated, due to dietary restrictions (Steph's kid will functionally only eat french fries and plain cheese pizza). By the time we had acquired fries for Gemma and lunch crepes for the rest of us it was three o'clock and I was starving and nonfunctional. I had a small breakdown while walking back to the car so we could eat while driving, and that coloured the rest of the day and to some extent the rest of the trip. Ah well.
From Gordes we went to an old ochre processing factory that had been repurposed as a museum. This was honestly fascinating: the whole process of extracting the yellowish clay, washing it with high-pressure water to remove the sand/silt, baking it so the heat and oxygen combine to turn it to the typical reddish, and then packaging, is just impressive. This was one of the few places where we spent almost enough time; there was a dye garden that we had to skip., but we did get to take in the entire factory tour.
It started bucketing down rain at the end of the tour, signaling the end of the heat wave, for which we were all grateful.
Wednesday 8/20:
The rain continued off and on all morning. Steph and her folks and I got up anyway and went into Rognes to do some shopping at the local market day. That was surprisingly fun. Just having enough time to wander and soak in the ambience (and drizzle) made all the difference. Highlights included muscatel grapes, and trying to figure out where the cheese guy had gone (the woman at the veggie stand across the way rolled her eyes and said "I'll go find him").
Back on Saturday when we'd arrived, the guy at the place we picked up dinner sang the praises of Chateau Lacoste as a place to visit. This sounded reasonable, so the five of us packed into the car and drove the also reasonable half hour to get there. In the event it is not actually a chateau: it's a vineyard-cum-sculpture-garden. It is also very, very large. We took maybe an hour to walk around and saw just over half of the sculptures. Highlights included the chapel from the original chateau, enclosed in glass and steel and making some astounding visuals from inside; a group of foxes by Michael Stipe of R.E.M.; a monumental balance thing of quartz and wire. Also a number of Jenny Holzer benches (in French), a giant water spider, a bunch of coloured sliding panels of vertical and horizontal bars. More than I could comfortably take in, and more than I could easily photograph given that I'd ended up leading.
The remainder of the afternoon involved, at last, some downtime.
Next: return to Paris, mostly cathedrals, and home.
We spent the late-morning, once we got there, touring the Chateau d'If. I had no idea this was a real place. I knew it solely as the island fortress where Edmond Dantes was imprisoned for fourteen years in the eponymous Dumas novel. Turns out it not only existed, but was used as a prison off and on until the late nineteenth century (its last imprisoned were a group of Marseille Communards, spurred into action by the Paris Commune in 1871). Also, Dumas's novel was such a massive hit that in the mid-1800s there was something of a flood of tourists visiting the prison and wanting to see "the cells where Dantes and Faria were imprisoned." Eventually the prison staff got so fed up with this that they just said "Fine," designated two adjacent ground-floor cells as 'Dantes' and 'Faria,' and even dug a 'secret tunnel' between them. Nineteenth-century tourist-trappery at its finest.
I did not get a photo of Six Ifs, a set of twenty-four 2'-ish cubes that can be assembled to make one of six maps of the island, but I did get a photo of the artist's statement comparing cartography to Sisyphus. (In French apparently 'Six Ifs' is a pun on Sisyphus.)
We had lunch in the old town and then visited Maison Empereur, 'France's oldest hardware store.' This was less impressive than hoped, but still neat. After we walked around a bit, and then got in the car and attempted to locate the rental car dropoff point, which we'd need in a few days. This was sort of successful: we found the train station, and then decided that we'd done enough driving in Marseille rush hour and should just go home rather than contributing to the traffic problems by being tourists. So we did that.
I think this was the evening when I made pork tenderloin with roast carrots for dinner, and that was pretty good as well.
Tuesday 8/19: Steph's brother had decided he wanted to see a large market in the town of Gordes, so we all bundled into cars and headed off. As usual we got going late; as less usual, there was no parking to be had, so we drove around this tiny mountain town for forty-five minutes before finding a place to part that was about a twenty-minute walk from the market proper.
Gordes is absolutely ridiculous. It is a typical French village, built on the side of a mountain. I deeply regret not getting any pictures, and not getting to spend much actual time there. Because of course we got there right as it was closing up at 1:30. We got in a bit of actual market-wandering and then attempted to find lunch. This took substantially longer than anticipated, due to dietary restrictions (Steph's kid will functionally only eat french fries and plain cheese pizza). By the time we had acquired fries for Gemma and lunch crepes for the rest of us it was three o'clock and I was starving and nonfunctional. I had a small breakdown while walking back to the car so we could eat while driving, and that coloured the rest of the day and to some extent the rest of the trip. Ah well.
From Gordes we went to an old ochre processing factory that had been repurposed as a museum. This was honestly fascinating: the whole process of extracting the yellowish clay, washing it with high-pressure water to remove the sand/silt, baking it so the heat and oxygen combine to turn it to the typical reddish, and then packaging, is just impressive. This was one of the few places where we spent almost enough time; there was a dye garden that we had to skip., but we did get to take in the entire factory tour.
It started bucketing down rain at the end of the tour, signaling the end of the heat wave, for which we were all grateful.
Wednesday 8/20:
The rain continued off and on all morning. Steph and her folks and I got up anyway and went into Rognes to do some shopping at the local market day. That was surprisingly fun. Just having enough time to wander and soak in the ambience (and drizzle) made all the difference. Highlights included muscatel grapes, and trying to figure out where the cheese guy had gone (the woman at the veggie stand across the way rolled her eyes and said "I'll go find him").
Back on Saturday when we'd arrived, the guy at the place we picked up dinner sang the praises of Chateau Lacoste as a place to visit. This sounded reasonable, so the five of us packed into the car and drove the also reasonable half hour to get there. In the event it is not actually a chateau: it's a vineyard-cum-sculpture-garden. It is also very, very large. We took maybe an hour to walk around and saw just over half of the sculptures. Highlights included the chapel from the original chateau, enclosed in glass and steel and making some astounding visuals from inside; a group of foxes by Michael Stipe of R.E.M.; a monumental balance thing of quartz and wire. Also a number of Jenny Holzer benches (in French), a giant water spider, a bunch of coloured sliding panels of vertical and horizontal bars. More than I could comfortably take in, and more than I could easily photograph given that I'd ended up leading.
The remainder of the afternoon involved, at last, some downtime.
Next: return to Paris, mostly cathedrals, and home.