Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  I had decided that I would catch the dawn caique back to town, where other friends and other projects awaited me—alien from this small and perfectly composed world of the unsophisticated village. It was good, I thought too, to enjoy it so thoroughly without nostalgia, without false regrets. What had been lived had been thoroughly lived and thoroughly digested. Only the crumbs of old loyalties and loves remained, and they gave pleasure now, not pain. So bright was the moonlight that I could see the trees reflected in the water. A small fish broke surface under the house with the noise of a drawn cork. The flawless skin of the night sea settled again into its mirrored calm. I lay awake for a long time that night, thinking over the events of the day and watching the moonlight pouring onto the dark floor of the room. From time to time the sea gave a small sigh, like a child turning over in its sleep. Far up on the hillsides in the direction of Vigla a fox barked once and was silent. I slid slowly downhill into sleep, but so slowly that I could not discern the point at which one state superseded the other. They matched like silks.

  France

  “In Praise of Fanatics”

  Published in Holiday. Philadelphia. August 1961.

  THE JOB OF a provincial editor may not be a particularly enviable one in any country, but my friend Lejoie who guides the destinies of the largest of the country newspapers in Provence manages to make it sound full of variety and interest. He weaves his way with skill and tact among the diplomatic and political quicksands of the post—always gay, always tireless, always good-humoured. Also, being a Frenchman, he has a keen eye for the downright ridiculous, and provincial life is full of it—to the brim.

  Nevertheless it is not easy to mediate effectively between all the different factions which assail the provincial daily and its chief—to poultice (for example) the wounds of a village mayor whose name has been spelt wrong twice running, to represent a strongly felt case for an augmentation of salaries without falling foul of government policy, to criticize an art show as honestly as possible within the limits of fair comment … [“Sir: I feel I must protest strongly on behalf of the village of Plages (200 souls) against the gross calumnies levelled against our artist-mayor in your columns.”]

  Perhaps it is the very intricacy of the job which has made Lejoie into a “spare-time student of fanaticism”—as he says; I did not exactly know how he qualified the word until one day he cited, among the great number of French eccentrics who have left works of art behind them, the name of the Postman Horse—Le Facteur Cheval. He was delighted to find that I had never heard of this estimable man, or of the Ideal Palace which he built in response to a vision. “As a spare-time work it is certainly unique,” said Lejoie wistfully. “The man was a village postman in the Drôme whose duties involved him in a thirty kilometre tramp every day. On his return at night he would surrender himself to the intoxication of his vision and set about building this extraordinary monument which, if it had not been built in such an out-of-the-way place as his native village, Hauterives, might well have earned him a reputation similar to that other naif Douanier Rousseau.”

  “You think so?”

  “I certainly do; and you will agree. I’ll tell you more of him and unearth some pictures which will give you an idea. He’s a sort of Gaudi—only touched with French fanaticism.”

  “You mean a monomaniac?”

  “No. Just a Frenchman. I’ll find the pictures.”

  He was as good as his word and on a subsequent visit he tumbled out onto the table between us a number of postcard views of this strange monument.

  “Why, it’s a sort of private Albert Hall,” I said.

  “Except that it’s got every style mixed into it. It isn’t consistent to a single style or influence. It’s got the whole blasted world of assorted architectures all rolled into one cake mix.”

  The Ideal Palace of the Facteur Cheval was begun in 1879 and only finished in 1912, single-handed. The pictures which Lejoie showed me depicted one of the weirdest monuments which it has ever been my good fortune to gaze upon—a sort of giant wedding-cake of styles and moods all welded together into a building which was twenty-six metres long by fourteen broad; it was about twelve metres high—the height of a modern two-storied villa.

  Only an inspired lunatic would have hoped to juxtapose and marry up all these different styles in one work—or at least that is what one feels as one looks at the pictures. To this proposition Lejoie replied: “Yes, but there is something else which these pictures don’t quite capture; they emphasize only its apparent eccentricity. There’s more than that in it. It really deserves to be seen. As a matter of fact the thing is in my own village in the Drôme, and as a child I spent my holidays playing in the Ideal Palace of the old Postman—his private Xanadu, you might say. It left the strangest impression on me. As a matter of fact I am distantly connected to the postman’s family—hence the fine streak of fanaticism in my own make-up. Would you care to come north for a weekend and have a look at it? I could promise you other things of interest. My mother lives there and she is married to Chabert, the great chef. They run a tiny hotel to which they admit only friends who care about …”

  “Don’t tell me; let me guess. Food!”

  “Sometimes for an Anglo-Saxon you are quite discerning. Yes, in a word, food. Such food!”

  “I am your man,” I said solemnly.

  When he left that evening he allowed me to keep the strange pictures, and also a small autobiographical fragment written by the Postman in his old age—a document almost as strange as the pictures.

  It was written in simple schoolboy French which gave it an oracular ring, both touching and authoritative. It was a sort of artistic credo—but it smelt strangely of the direct vision of somebody like Blake. I read it over slowly and with growing admiration.

  The son of peasant folk [it began], and myself therefore a peasant, I would like to live and die in such a manner as to prove that even in my own order of life men of genius and energy can be born, can exist. I’ve been a village postman for twenty-nine years now. Work has been my only glory, honour my only well-being. Up to today, then, here is my strange history. Once in a dream I conceived and built a place, a château in which there were grottoes.… I don’t know how to explain it … but so ravishing, so picturesque, that for ten years the whole thing stayed engraved in my memory. I could not get rid of it. Of course I took myself for a fool, a maniac. I was no mason, to start with; I had never touched a trowel. As for sculpture I’d never touched a chisel. As for architecture—leave it right out of the picture—I know nothing of it. I did not dare to breathe a word about my dream to a soul for fear of being laughed at in the village. To be truthful, I laughed at myself a bit. Fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten this remote dream, a chance slip of the foot jogged my memory. I tripped and fell over an object. It was a stone of a form so bizarre that I slipped it into my pocket, in order to study it at leisure. The next day I went back to the same spot and found others, even more beautiful. The stone was of a softish kind, deeply worked by river-water and finally hardened by time into something as tough as possible; but the shapes—they represented a sort of sculpture so bizarre that I doubted if any man could imitate it. It was full of different species of animal, human caricatures. I said to myself then: ‘Well, if nature can sculp so easily I am sure I can master masonry and architecture.’ Here then was my dream at last. “To work,” I said to myself!

  From that moment the Facteur Cheval was fully awakened to his real mission in life. A dream was trying to get born, to get transformed into a reality. He began to keep a sharp lookout on his thirty kilometre tramp for rare and curious stones—the raw material for the Ideal Palace. His vision was sharpened, his appetite whetted. Soon these lovely objects of virtu began to invade his heavy post-bag as he tramped along. It should be remembered that the Facteur in France does not only deliver letters. He has several other onerous duties as well—to pay pensions, for example, and to collect receipts. It is not an easy job, particularly when
in addition to your mail-bag you load yourself up with stones. He also began to extend his range in his search for new beauties. Dry river-beds yielded him beautifully polished gems, the lush flanks of the rolling Drôme hillsides other treasures. A Japanese artist would have understood immediately what had happened to the Facteur Cheval, but in his own village they began to whisper that he was showing signs of incipient insanity. No matter. He was in the grip of the curious insatiable fever which only the artist knows and recognizes. Sometimes the stones grew so many that he was forced to leave them in piles by the roadside, strategically stacked for loading. At night when he got home he would take his old wheelbarrow and walk back to get them by moonlight, tireless, grim—absorbed in the first aesthetic pleasure he had ever known. Sometimes he was up until two or three in the morning ferrying stones for the Ideal Palace. One begins to see what the good Lejoie means when he uses the word “fanaticism”.…

  But you cannot please everybody—not even by trying to build a Xanadu. The Facteur’s wife began to complain bitterly that his clothes were getting worn to rags by his exertions, and by the stones he carried. His pockets were all shot to hell and his trousers covered in mud. Sometimes just the corner of a beautiful stone caught his eye and he simply had to dig it out. Grimly he persevered, turning a deaf ear to family scolding and village gossip alike. But it wasn’t only the stones; his poor wife, who watched the Ideal Palace growing in the rambling garden by the river, began to complain of the expense. Every spare sou was spent on bags of cement and lime. How could all this be done on a postman’s pay? One can understand that from her point of view the whole thing was a grotesque folly, a monomania. In the final analysis the Dream Palace was to cost them 3,500 sacks of cement, and to represent 1,000 cubic metres of masonry; and on the Eastern Façade the old Postman was to engrave the legend:

  1879–1912

  10,000 days

  93,000 hours

  33 years of hardship

  If there is anyone more obstinate than I,

  let him fall to work.

  It was a splendid credo, and in the course of time the Postman’s dream justified all these heroic efforts. But phew! It made my back ache just to think of the plain man-hauling involved for the project, let alone the task of building.

  “It is not really a building,” said Lejoie patiently; “nor is it quite a sculpture. It’s a work which creates its own crazy idiom. Now in our age it is easy to recognize the force and charm of the naive, we are trained to it. But this strange lump, chunk, object was completed in the year of Picasso’s first cubist experiments. That is what is so odd about it. Anyway, wait till you see. By the way, all the arrangements are made. We set off tomorrow.”

  We did. It was a Saturday. He was carefree. The great Chef Chabert had deigned to allow us to stay at his hotel, after many careful questions as to whether I merited the sort of cuisine in which he specialized. We could take an easy trip north, visit the Ideal Palace, and return to Tain which was only half an hour’s drive from Hauterives. The first stop was to be somewhere near Perols where a meal had been planned which would serve, I gathered, as a sort of spiritual launching pad towards our objective.

  So we followed the left bank of the Rhône which was relatively unencumbered by northbound holiday traffic, and once we crossed the border into Ardèche my friend, as if to signify a formal throwing off of responsibility towards his station in life, removed his coat and tie and donned a comfortable wind-breaker and scarf. He was no longer the grave and responsible editor of an important southern daily, but a holidaymaker like everyone else. It was only in his home department of the Gard that he risked being stoned to death by outraged painters, or torn to ribbons by ministers without portfolio, quizzed by communes, or caught with his pants down (metaphorically) by regional officials. That little sign by the roadside “Vous êtes dans l’Ardèche” allowed him to feel, all at once, quite unbuttoned, uncorked, and set by the chimneypiece to breathe, like a good bottle of wine.

  We sang a few songs, but not loudly enough to disturb the nightingales which had responded to a few light showers the day before and decided upon a snap daylight appearance. No, our music, which perhaps was not good of its kind, was at least without prejudice to man or beast. Here and there, too, we made a pretence of needing petrol and turned into inviting routiers’ inns where, in a sunny garden, we took the measure of the country by addressing a local wine with gravity and aplomb.

  If Lejoie had, so to speak, cast off the editor, I for my part was quite ready to cast off the writer and thinker. A touch of the scholar-gipsy was what the situation seemed to warrant, and I felt I had just that. This week-end, I told myself, I should be free to devote myself to higher living and lower thinking. Why not?

  But once or twice I did seem to catch the reproachful voice of the Postman Horse whispering in my ear that laziness was all very well, but that nothing really gets done without brutish labour. I had brought his little autobiography along in my pocket, and we had been discussing it. “I can’t go into all the details,” writes the old Postman, “nor describe the troubles and miseries that I had to endure; it would be wearying. Nor indeed does my limited education permit me to express it all. But quite simply I carried everything on my back, working night and day for twenty-six years, without a halt, without mercy. The visitors who come now from other countries—and in increasing numbers—have difficulty in believing the evidence of their own eyes; they have to be reassured by the testimony of the local inhabitants before believing that a single man, all alone, could possibly muster the courage and will-power to build such a masterpiece. They marvel, and keep saying: ‘No, it’s not possible.’ ‘No, it’s unbelievable.’”

  It sounds a little immoral I know, but the thought of all that back-breaking labour added a certain vicarious luxury to these moments of sunny ease and relaxation—the two of us sitting before a wineglass in a sunny arbour by the ancient Rhône. “But then,” said Lejoie, spreading his hands in a self-excusing gesture, “any gourmet will tell you that to eat and drink creatively is also a labour.”

  “Yes, but rather a pleasant one.”

  “Besides,” he added, “one carries the raw material for that sort of work inside one, and not on one’s back.”

  “Thank God.”

  But he had something there and I told him so. We faced up to the invisible spectre of the Postman’s reproaches and ordered another glass before rolling on northward in the direction of Tournon, towards that beckoning table which stood under a lime-tree in an orchard, dappled with sunlight. For my part I was somewhat suspicious of the lunch, fearing first of all that if I overdid it my sensibility would be too blunted to take in the Ideal Palace; and secondly that I might find myself unable to do justice to Chabert’s creations that evening. It would be horrible to be expelled from the hotel as a godless and unworthy guest, thus bringing discredit on my friend and sponsor. But Lejoie clicked his tongue reproachfully at me when I voiced these sentiments. “Fear nothing,” he said, “I have ordered a light meal which is calculated to sharpen the sensibility without wearing out your lining or overtaxing the liver. We will proceed according to a carefully graduated scale I have worked out.”

  “In calories?”

  “No. In tastes and smells.”

  He was as good as his word and when finally we settled down at that sunny table, neatly spread with its check cloth, my doubts began to fade; after all it had been a long drive, full of intellectual conversation which takes it out of a man. Moreover the faint whiffs of cooking which curled out of the kitchen on to the tideless air of that vernal afternoon were curiously stimulating. A splendid bosomy matron had been charged to attend to us; rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed, she gave off waves of motherly confidence. A mother-figure, a repository for confidences—that is how one felt as one watched her roll across the lawn with a basket of bread. No. No harm could come to us here; we were among people who could be trusted not to send us reeling out into the main road with purple faces, with gorged, start
ing eyeballs. Well, we lunched according to the severely graduated scale of my friend, on a tarte aux morilles, a splendid sort of mushroom tart, and a truite aux amandes. At least these were the two main features of an excellent lunch. If there was any fear that the trout, dappled in the browned almonds, might prove a somewhat cumbersome dish for aesthetes, it was easily dispelled; we managed a couple each with the greatest ease, the most effortless sang-froid. The wine which my friend unearthed for the occasion was a delightful little Chante-Alouette (a “Sing-Lark”) calculated to put even the tone-deaf into a good mood. So we lingered, gossiping our way through cheese and fruit, and finally sat replete to watch the blue smoke of a good cigar hang above us in the sunlight, mixing its exotic flavour with that of the limes and the wet flowerbeds.

  We had broken the back of our journey; it was only about half an hour’s drive to the Xanadu of the Facteur Cheval. The sun was well past meridian when we crossed the river and rolled eastward, cutting directly across the two great northbound arteries with their rushing traffic, and nosing out towards the greener country in which the village of Hauterives nestled in its green seclusion.

  The landscape changed softly as we headed towards Hauterives, becoming gradually greener and more densely wooded. The clear limestone formations talked of subterranean rivers, of chalk, and of rich soil; the little hills wore dense green topknots out of which peeped the eaves of old châteaux; the roads began to turn and twist, to rise and fall like a conductor’s baton. It was another of those empty corners of France, rich with farms but sparsely populated, where the jerry-builder and the money-mad industrialist have as yet seen nothing they could exploit, nothing they could rape. We ran down an inclined plane into the village and drew up in the market-place, surprised to find that the noise of the engine was replaced only by the cooing of doves and the drone of bees. There was not a soul about. “From here,” said Lejoie, “we walk a few hundred yards to Xanadu.”