HERE
Les Izards is where I live, the name of the land and of a house. In this countryside every place has its own name, an identity often ancient. To help my very few visitors especially those from afar pronounce Les Izards I tell them to say ‘Lazy Czar.’ It’s close enough.
Start coming here from the very center of Lavaur, my nearest town. Once upon a time I took my children to their school in the mornings and to reinforce their English made ditties for them one of which one went “Lavaur has only one whore and she has a sore.”
It’s small, the town, and down a stretch of only a few blocks one sees the open country rising into green hills. In the central Place there’s Café Americain most often full of local idlers, also the Three Graces Fountain, those alluring daughters of Zeus in bronze. Straight ahead is an old brick townhouse, hick Renaissance, with its surprisingly fine proportions transgendered into the town’s BNP bank (where once to my delight when meeting with a pretentious banker a group of militant farmers turned loose a herd of pigs into the lobby).
Here’s where Lavaur’s Grande Rue begins, it’s the Dark Ages revived. To your left and right a wide swath of ordered trees show where the town’s walls once stood.
Follow direction Route De Castres. ‘Castres’ is the time transfigured Roman ‘Castrum’, once a military post. Soon there is a traffic light, the only one in town. Close after that Lavaur ends.
This old national road has been denigrated to a departmental way fare. It’s picturesque, going between the march of Napoleon’s plantains, parallel rows of pale trunks knobbed 200 years after their planting by what look like malignant cysts.
About two miles on turn to the right onto a country road going no where except to the rural community where I abide, to Massac Seran. The sign post is in French and Occitan– Maçac Seranh –known also as Langue d’Oc. Or simply ‘Oc’ in the faded language militancy of a few decades ago, painted in a drunken cultural rage on hundreds of stop signs.
Oc is the old language of here, older than French, passing away in a death rattle 800-years long. It’s been a sentimental funeral.
Oc makes me think of Oz.
We are entering a land of the most recent ice age, formed on limestone shelvings, glacial till scooping it into valleys and ridges, rivers beveling broad avenues into the earth’s face.
Proceed between rich farms on either side. After a couple more miles if the road disappears before you replaced by a statue of the Virgin Mary, and the rich farms become the convent of the Poor Daughters of Jesus, then you need to back up. You’ve missed Les Izards.
Retrace a few yards, turn right after an open field onto a winding country lane barely wide enough for your wheel base. Caution, there are dire ditches on either side and twice as you descend into our valley there’s no visibility of what might be coming round the bend.
This rural route, in phases of ruination by the farmer’s John Deere tractors, is an infinitesimal strand of France’s web of lanes lacing the countryside together. All paved as are all roads here. A dull homogeneity reflected in the formal manners everyone shares and in the fact that all cattle, sheep and goats are taken into the barn at night. Or that all farmhouses are shuttered tight then so that in the dark nothing human shines.
Then it seems no one at all is about, no biped mammals, no cars and nothing stirs except for what rustles in the bushes– hares, foxes, badgers, wild boar and deer. Then there are only the planets for guidance.
In three minutes the route takes one down to the bottom of a winsome little valley. It’s an oblong bowl formed by tall slopes of a uniform height crowned around by a continuous band of green oaks.
To know if you’re here look up. Black kites should soar on thermals rising from the valley floor. They glide on high in marvelous circles up on wing spans of almost six feet.
This is a miniature landscape overwhelming to me in meaning and content. It has incongruously been formed by what is now our tiny creek below, our ruisseau d’en tournie, toward which the lane proceeds.
Turn there again and drive up the slope of a tall ridge covered in broom and old green oaks.
Halfway up is my house, at long last. Two stories and a high roof yet one can’t see it obscured by linden, almond and fig trees, also by towering spruce and cypress, some oaks and the wild uncircumcised boxwood hedge.
Stay alert because the first hidden drive is the one you want.
We, you and I, have arrived, somewhat at least. I think no one ever fully arrives here. Les Izards is where I too am searching for. It’s where I am lost.
Isolated among fields and woods, the little valley to the front like a wide defensive moat, a high ridge directly to my back like a wall against an evil empire. From lowest to highest point it’s a vertical property rising more than 100 feet from road to crest.
My place feels like it’s being swallowed alive by time, deranged by a minor geologic melodrama, slowly transubstantiating in an imperceptible and boring metamorphosis.
All is quiet here. Silence that is more than silent. This is the same as being hidden in silence, another kind of swallowing act. A defining elemental attribute.
Friends from Bologna, vividly and compulsively Italian once visited, briefly, saying they couldn’t live here because it was too silent. Perhaps part of the reason the place is not easily found is that so few beside occasional Amazon parcel delivery contractors want its location.
I’m simultaneously in several quite distinct place identities. The Tarn departement, Haut Garonne, Languedoc, Aquitaine, the Cevennes, Occitanie. This is the Midi, France’s version of Italy’s Mezzogiorno. ‘Here’ is the northern edge of the rich Lauregais farming area. Most of all this immediate region is the Pays de Cocagne or to the medieval mind a troubadour’s never-never land of plenty.
When speaking to a French person and explaining I am from Lavaur in the Tarn they look puzzled until I add “due east 32 kilometers from Toulouse.” That’s a whopping distance of about 20 miles (although a meander of 45 minutes by car across a universe of mental distances). Then most often they give a knowing nod, ”Ah oui, la belle France.”
Maps are deceptive in finding me, misleading even to me in my search for where I am. My location is not a simple statement of fact. GPS won’t help much as this place while earthily real is an abstraction of different histories, cultures, people layered in an archeological dig into the foundation of what we came from.
Back many thousands of years it was a site for the pathetic fires of a prehistory people, the remains of their Paleolithic living room are shown on the French government’s ordinance map, platted on a spot only fifty yards from where I do the dishes, making us neighbors.
I’ll try to better explain my location. Here is 450 miles south west of Paris. By car that’s eight hours. Most French people would say that is truly to be lost.
By car Lourdes is two and a half hours distant. Close enough to feel miracles at the back of one’s neck.
I’m 90 miles from the Mediterranean. That cesspool of western civilization, the Phoenician, Greek and Roman pond is where our cultural memory is stuck like Zeus’s cummy feathers on Leda’s bare thigh. It’s sad there, an alzheimeric muddle of sun barbequed ruins.
The Pyrenees mountains for their part rise up like a wall only 80 miles distant, snow capped and effortlessly serene. I call them the shy mountains because they rarely show themselves, even this close up. They hide in a haze of dope smoke. When seen they are suddenly remembered, so surprisingly near and bold, a miracle far better than what Lourdes sells.
Locals say when the Pyrenees appear it portends bad weather. I’ve observed that to be true, Pyrenean wind is on its way blasting in a frenzy of clay roof tiles and severed limbs.
Incredibly, I sleep and dream just an hour separate over more drowsy back roads from the La Madeleine des Albis. That’s a cave near the hamlet of Penne in the north of the Tarn.
There are the wondrous finds of cave sculptures, two nude women each with an arm flung over their head, odalisques that Matisse could not have done better, yet carved 13,000-15,000 years backwards—or forwards? True stuff of which dreams are made.
It’s 40 miles to Albi, capital of the Tarn. Known for lots of postcards.
I’m 33 miles due east from Toulouse. That city, that historical, cultural epicenter of this land, of the human experience on it almost ever since it crawled up out of caves. A city lost too, filled with secrets and splendors. A couple of scholars of the abstruse claim it among the oldest places of all with the same name unchanged (Tolosa-Toulouse) from the start of our kind’s losing struggle with spelling.
Built on the banks of the Garonne, Toulouse is between the Pyrenees and the alluvial plain of the Lauregais. It is positioned roughly midway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. A real estate to die for and many have. The city has held sway over this region in one or another for eons.
Toulouse was the center of the Volcae and Tectosages, the place where those fierce Gallic tribes joined into a powerful confederation.
Toulouse has almost always been a city of riches. As a center of Gallic might its temples held treasures that became legends.
This became a written account when the Volcae Tectosages swept again across southern Europe in 279 BC, the ancient commentators write that they plundered the greatest gold and silver horde of the time, from the temple of Apollo in Delphi. Stole it, hauled it back to Tolosa. The point in recorded history when the place began to glitter in men’s eyes.
Aurum Tolosanum. Two centuries later in turn the Romans seized the loot from Toulouse, a deed recorded in Senate archives, ordering it sent to Rome.
It never arrived. Again It was stolen. Most likely by Consul Quintus Servilius Caepio, Roman commander of Toulouse. The trove was never found but was credited as the source of Caepio’s vast wealth, passed down in turn to his grandson Brutus he who was et tu.
Local legend has it that the gold of Toulouse actually still lies in a lake near the city, having been tossed there, cursed as it was, by the terrified soldiers charged with taking it back to Rome.
In yet another tale it was hidden underground near where the city’s Basilica of St. Sernin now stands. That building, the true treasure, is a sleek solemnity 1,000 years old and the largest remaining Romanesque building in Europe.
During the second world war a plane with a swastika on it was held ready to go on the tarmac of the Toulouse airport. It was there as part of Heinrich Himmler’s looney-tunes scouting for the Holy Grail, for what might lend powerful magic to the lost cause of the Third Reich.
You see, The Grail came into the hands of the Cathars. And then when the very last of those crazies fled into their one remaining high castle of Montsegur, their final citadel where they were all to die, that’s where Christendom’s Holiest relic disappeared too. Poof.
Was it brought here to Les Izards? Is it out back buried deep beside our septic tank? ‘Here’ has made me as crazy as all the others passing through.
Les Izards is but 85 miles from Montsegur. Many still hallucinate the Grail lying hidden somewhere in the region– anywhere, somewhere nearby, even over the rainbow. Please let there be a Pays de Cocagne.
From Gallic temple riches to Delphic Gold to Legionnaire billionaires, and even Nazi wet dreams, Toulouse and its region has endured in the heart of histories and fables. In the middle ages under the Counts of Toulouse its wealth became its downfall, prey to the avarice of the French in the north.
Later, its Renaissance merchants built palaces on the trade of blue dye, from the pastel plant, the woad grown in the Lauregais.
Les Izards is only 4.5 miles distant from my small cathedral town of Lavaur where your trip began, population 11,000. Its distance by foot is perhaps a mile less: peasants easily managed that. Lavaur is our one and only town. Country folk have journeyed its market for at least a thousand years.
We ourselves do the same. Our weekly trip to the market connects us to the life’s blood of this nook, we who are strangers here always, forever, we and them keeping socially distanced.
Lavaur is of great importance to this place. There again stories abound. During the Albigensian Crusade Lavaur was besieged twice. In 1181 it saved itself by opening its gates without a fight to a force led by Henri de Marcy. But then 30 years later, in March 1211 the might of Simon de Montfort fell full upon Lavaur.
Protected by its walls and staunchly defended the town defied capture for two months. Impatient, at last de Montfort called for backup to come to his aid. A large army, thousands of German crusaders encamped in Carcassonne, moved north.
This army was ambushed in the greatest battle of the campaign against the Cathars, played out 12 miles from Les Izards. Virtually the entire army of up to 6,000 German crusaders was slaughtered. Commentators of the time report that to seal the deal the few survivors had their noses and tongues cut off.
No matter, Simon de Montfort vanquished without the relief. He breached Lavaur’s walls on 3 May, 1211.
Eighty defending knights were hung by de Montfort, something obscene in the Middle ages, and then he had 400 lowly Cathars who’d sheltered in the town burnt at the stake, in one mass firestorm from hell. It’s been described as the greatest single slaughter by public conflagration in the entire middle ages.
The butcher of France’s southwest is this Simon de Montfort of nightmare. The too smart leader of the invading northerners, those French bloodthirsty in rampant piety and rapacity. De Montfort, such a cruel strategist, was felled at last during his final siege of Toulouse by a stone taken from the ramparts of the great St Sernin. Flung at him from on high by women defenders of the city who’d been made widows by his very own stratagems.
Les Izards rides a slope of high ridge, the top of which affords a close view of the Cathedral of Lavaur, that dominates in the Agout river valley below. After the destruction dealt the town when it was taken the current cathedral was started in 1255.
In style it is a fortress cathedral. It stands high on the bank of the Agout river formidable like a warship riding into battle.
The most famous of Lavaur’s bishops was George de Selve. You can see him in ‘The Ambassadors’ painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. George is the sleepy fellow on the right. The painting has been made popular by LSD reveries on the anamorphic skull Holbein added into the work’s center.
So much desiccated mystery in the soil here. When I step on it I hear a moist ‘crunch’ like this area’s jeering peasant laugh.
Here I am a citizen of the rural community, or commune, of Massac Seran. I go in circles as does the place itself. Massac is the name of that convent where you’ve already been, less than a mile away perched on a hill. Seran is the Chateau, a mile off in a different direction, an 18th century hulk deteriorating like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake into what was once its park.
Church and castle, the two end-alls of the dark ages.
Massac derives from the Roman name Maccius, Seran from the Roman name Serranius.
Those two for so long still linked. Maybe they were scarred and roughed up legionnaires retiring here from their northern battles far away on the cold black Rhine. I imagine them warming up here by marrying local women, fathering their own tribes.
Slaves made the vineyards and the wine for them, tilled the valley for wheat, allowed them to grow well off, fat and old.
I like to fantasize that Maccius and Serranius had neighboring farms here, lying side by side as they did on campaigns, casual lovers in the Roman way. Is that why their names remain united after 2,000 years?
The woman of my life lives here with me. Our sons play in memory through the rooms of Les Izards and I can hear them still in a living happiness outside running through tall weeds.
Perhaps it’s not that I’m lost here as it is that I’ve been found by Les Izards.