After a bit of impromptu hiking in between Arles and Aix yesterday morning (during which I stumbled upon a pretty sizable apiary, probably there to pollinate either grapes or olives), I spent the day sightseeing in Aix-En-Provence. While Aix is notable for having been host to Cezanne during his most productive years, there’s not actually terribly much to see and do. It’s a pleasant enough city – lots of pedestrian promenades and fountains – and that was really enough for me for the day. I spent the warm part of the afternoon sitting outside at a glacerie eating ice cream, drinking coffee, and reading. In the evening, I shuffled off to the hostel and met Max, an American living and teaching at an American boarding school in the south of France. We finished off the remainder of my Cote du Rhône red while talking about literature and politics, then headed back to town for a picnic dinner – the now-standard fare: bread, cheese, wine, and pastries. It’s getting hard to remember what else there is to eat. Two bottles later, we again shuffled back to the hostel and met our third roommate, a crazy genius Moroccan-Sicilian bibliophile, who had just returned from town with a wine buzz of his own. With a triumphant matador’s flourish, he produced a bra from his coat pocket. “De mon avocat” he proudly exclaimed. (I’m not clear whether he actually slept with his lawyer, or whether there was idiom at work that I don’t know. In retrospect, probably his own personal idiolect.) He talked to us in a torrent of French, and I responded when I could get a word in, during the course of a conversation that veered from Keith Jarrett to Pliny the Elder to Nils Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer through a bewildering set of segues that I think wouldn’t have made much sense even in English. My Sicilian-Moroccan friend was apparently a book dealer, in Aix to pick up a collectible folio of Pompeii. He gifted me with a sample page from the proofs, a color print on lovely cotton paper depicting the town of Pompeii before Vesuvius. An extraordinary souvenir of an extraordinary encounter.
I’m now on the train en route to Paris, the terminus of my trip. I have three days and three goals: 1) Attend one more dance in France, on Thursday night. 2) Visit the Museé de la Musique and its collection of rare and unusual musical instruments. Finally, a project that I decided upon while listening to some of my sound recordings on the train: 3) Find and possibly purchase a decent diatonic accordion. Now that I’ll be doing no more traveling, save for the flight home, I’m willing to collect some baggage. I’ll probably also look for CDs by some of the grand chanteurs whose songs I’ve run across during my travels. I’ve revised my estimate: it will take months to sort through the materials I’ve collected on this trip.