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My appoint­ment at Gar­gas was for ear­ly in the after­noon, so I was able to have a pleas­ant and leisure­ly break­fast. In place of the stan­dard French baguette, there was a much more chewy local loaf known as qua­tre-banes, which I thought superb, per­fect with the fresh coun­try but­ter and jam. The cui­sine of Hautes-Pyrénees, like many oth­er aspects of its cul­ture, is more close­ly in tune with that of the Basque Coun­try and Cat­alo­nia than with north­ern France (and indeed, the slang expres­sion nordiste  is used by the locals with obvi­ous dis­dain). Beans and spicy sausages, coun­try soups, hard rather than soft cheeses, bread that you can get your teeth into. After break­fast, I still had plen­ty of time to reach the caves on foot. From Lom­brès, I walked down the road to the vil­lage of Aventig­nan (about three times larg­er than Lom­brès), then along a minor road to the cave’s recep­tion cen­ter, lit­tle more than 4km.

The road to the caves start­ing at Aventignan.

Only two cars passed me, and there was noth­ing much along the way but emp­ty fields until the hills and for­est start­ed. The weath­er was cool and over­cast. Often, when I’m walk­ing, music pops into my head in sur­pris­ing­ly com­plete form, and this time it was the Shepherd’s Song from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, sung in Old Occ­i­tan, the lan­guage of South­ern France before it was con­quered, re-edu­cat­ed, and reg­i­ment­ed by the nordistes. The dialect of the Auvergne was con­sid­er­ably dif­fer­ent from the Gas­con spo­ken in this region, but it nev­erlthe­less puts across the South­ern mood:

As gaïré dè buon tèms?
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô,
Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.

Pas­tré lou prat faï flour,
Li cal gor­da toun troupel.
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô,
Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.

Pas­tré couci foraï,
En obal io lou bel riou!
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô,
Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.

(“Shep­herd across the riv­er, your work there is hard. Look, the mead­ows here are in bloom. You should watch your flock on this side…. Shep­herd, the water divides us, and I can’t cross it”). Noth­ing at all like French. Incom­pre­hen­si­ble to all but a few sur­viv­ing speak­ers of the Old Tongue, but the melody con­veys such a won­der­ful sad­ness and yearn­ing that it would be under­stood emo­tion­al­ly in Tokyo. In fact, it resem­bles many Japan­ese folk melodies. Read more »