A View from the Languedoc

By Angus Kennedy

In this second novel of the Out of Solitude trilogy, Australian wine writer, Andrew Johnston, is again staying in Europe, this time with his brother, Adrian, for both work and a holiday. He receives an extensive new project from his publisher that takes him through the premium wine producing regions of France, during which he meets up again with a number of his old acquaintances from both France and Dubrovnik. Among these is Niki Meneti and the chance meeting rekindles his old feelings for her. While their relationship develops, Andrew is again drawn into events and affairs which he finds curious and difficult to fathom, having to rely on his trust in Nikis judgement and his own faith in her to maintain his equanimity. While Andrews travels through Europe are superficially normal, the tendrils of Nikis world reach out to and entangle him at various stages, bringing with them complications that he is confident he can resolve but whether the opportunity to do so arises in time raises considerable uncertainties for his future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Aug 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483671475

Angus Kennedy

Angus Kennedy is the world’s leading expert on chocolate and has been dubbed by the media as the “real life Willy Wonka.” Kennedy is the owner of Kennedy’s Confection, a chocolate review magazine his family has owned for forty years, and the founder of the World Chocolate Forum, the world’s largest chocolate industry conference. He’s been a guest on a variety of TV and radio programs, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Talk to Aljazeera (USA), and Bloomberg TV, and featured in a wealth of print and digital media, such as Huffington Post, the Telegraph, NBC News.com, and the Daily Mail. His most recent video about chocolate, on Business Insider, received 2.4 million views in twenty-four hours, setting a record high. Kennedy’s provocative assertion in 2011 that the world might be running out of chocolate received international media coverage and was a source of much concern by chocolate lovers around the world. He is a father of five and lives with his family in Kent, England. ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ANGUS KENNEDY The Kitchen Baby: Angus Kennedy, 9780957532908, Black Mansion, 01/23/2013.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It had been hot for most of the week that we had been at Saint-Thibéry, over 30o and fairly humid. This did not seem to worry Adrian to any extent, being more used to it, but was uncomfortable for me. Under these conditions, the village drifted along even more lazily than normal. Our mornings were devoted to one or both of us ambling along to the boulangerie four doors up Grand Rue and collecting the daily baguette, and then around past the Mairie to the Presse for a newspaper or two and possibly some other reading material. These walks were punctuated by the occasional ‘Bonjour!’ to any of the locals who passed by. Yet another of the cultural differences between France and Australia was the socially compulsory acknowledgement of other people each day. In Australia, one could walk past a hundred pedestrians on the way through town without acknowledging their existence. In France, however, to say ‘Bonjour!’ is to show respect for the other people around and to display that respect. I was not sure that the French do respect their fellow countrymen any more than Australians do theirs, but the social customs and etiquette require this formal recognition of the other’s existence—once and only once each day. (The ‘once and only once’ was extremely important, as I had discovered at the Domaine de la Baume winery one day. Forgetting that I had already greeted the maître de chai that morning, I had a ‘deux fois!’ levelled at me in outraged tones when I proffered it a second time in the afternoon. I did not forget again.)

As the day wore on, the temperature rose, and the level of activity in the village reduced even further. With the narrow streets and multi-storied buildings hemming in and throwing shade over the various thoroughfares, there was some movement in the mornings, cars, bicycles, scooters, and the occasional pedestrian. During the hotter afternoons, when lunch had been finished and the shutters closed for the compulsory nap, some of the older folk would take their chairs and friends out to the pavement or their garage or some local shelter and sit and observe the comings and goings of the village—just small groups of older folk sitting and chatting and looking. It was not in our nature to spend our time this way, so we did not join them, but it was reassuring that the simple village habits of communing with each other and getting through the day continued.

Our time was spent on our different pursuits. Adrian would be working on his book on Anglo-Saxon law, and I would be researching, writing a little, reading, and maybe just thinking. Not a lot different from the locals really, but we were very much less a part of the community than they, and we tended to be more reclusive. We also tended to drive out and visit the local area most days, with its villages, Cathar castles, Roman remains, and general rural vistas, of which neither of us could get enough but which, to them, were just their everyday surroundings.

It had been a good investment for us, the house in Saint-Thibéry. Probably a somewhat strange thing to do, buying a house with your brother in southern France while living in Australia, but we both enjoyed the European feel about the place and the restfulness that only a small village in France can bring. It also brought us closer together, with something in joint ownership that we could share and enjoy and talk about. Adrian was still the mildly extreme socialist, and I continued to be moderately conservative, but we got along pretty well really. Adrian had a family back in Australia, but we were the only siblings of our own family, and I guess that we felt bound to get along.

As well as providing a quiet haven in southern France for both of us and a jumping off place for exploration of the surrounding regions of France and Europe generally, the house also provided a base for me for my work. My prime occupation was writing articles on wine and the wine industry, predominantly for my publisher in England. The main wine-growing regions that I covered were those of Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Europe. While I could do a lot of my work from Australia, I found that it was critical for my preparation that I visit the vineyards and wineries and winemakers about which and whom I was writing. It was not so much that I accepted the extreme view held by some that terroir included the personalities of the surrounding human culture but more that by talking with the people involved, I could get a much better feel for what they were trying to do and where they were trying to go with their wines and how they saw the future. This approach of direct contact with the winemakers worked well for me across all the regions that I covered, and it meant that I travelled extensively throughout the world, or certainly throughout the countries about which I wrote. Consequently, it was extremely convenient to have a quiet place of refuge in the middle of the largest wine-producing region of Europe, where I could gather my thoughts and notes and prepare many of my articles.

And this was just what I was doing at the moment—or rather a combination of all these things. I was finishing up some research work for a project planned for the future, but my stay had coincided with that of Adrian, who was spending a week or two in the area before being joined by his wife, Susan, who was coming for a few more weeks before they both headed back to Australia. In the meantime, Adrian and I had decided to make a number of forays into the local countryside to visit, and sometimes revisit, places of interest in the relatively near vicinity. It was a time to see things together and spend probably more time with each other than we had done since we were both children.

§

With there being a bit of cooler weather coming on, we had decided to visit the Cathar castle at Quéribus, just off the D117 and north-west of Perpignan. We had both seen it before a couple of times but felt it was about time that we did so again. It really is a most attractive drive, particularly after leaving the A9 autoroute and heading west and up into the ruggedness of the Midi-Pyrénées. The low bush vines filling the flat gravelly plains along the way reminded us that grape growing had been going on in the region for centuries, with little change or acknowledgement of the need to change. The mountains of the Corbières and the Fenouillèdes, the lower Pyrénées, stood over and looked down on us along the way, and we drove in comfortable silence.

After we had turned off the D117 and headed north towards Quéribus, climbing into the foothills of the mountain range, we got to talking about the Cathars and their relatively short-lived period of heresy, before they were eliminated during the Albigension Crusades. While their final demise was set in train from around 1208 when the papal emissary was assassinated on the banks of the Rhône, theirs was an essentially peaceful, unobtrusive denomination. They tried to live pure and non-materialistic lives, with the extreme devotees adopting the view that all things of the flesh and of this world were evil and so left it by seeking the ultimate purity by starving themselves to death. However, after the assassination of his emissary, Pope Innocent III in Rome took a dislike to them and arranged with the king in Paris for Simon de Montfort of Burgundy to lead the Albigension Crusades against them, which finally wiped them out in the mid-fourteenth century. All this took some time, of course. The massacre at Béziers, when around forty thousand citizens were reportedly killed, whether they be Cathar or not, was followed by sieges at Quéribus, Peyrepertuse, Minervois, and other strongholds, interlaced by negotiations for settlement or surrender, and more killing. The Inquisition also got into the act because of the heretical nature of the Cathar movement, and on a rare positive note, their records of examinations of suspected heretics remain the most detailed description of life around the area at that time, centred on the small mountain village of Montaillou, south-west of Carcassonne. The simplicity of the life in that place and era was highly revealing of the times—in summer the local herdsmen took their flocks of sheep and goats up into the mountains to graze, and in winter, they brought them down again to their barns. There was much travel over the current border into Spain (although at that time the whole area north and west of Perpignan and south of Barcelona was Catalan), and the intermingling of blood was extensive. Nevertheless, all was eventually done and victory went to the Pope’s forces and Catharism was essentially eliminated, leaving its historical memory as the only remnant of its ever having existed.

‘Did the Cathars deserve such a fate?’ I wondered. ‘Rome was all-powerful at that time, but there was much concern in the pastoral community and in the areas removed from Rome about the material turn that ecclesiastical life had taken. Those high in the papal hierarchy had surrounded themselves with riches, to the detriment of the peasants and the ordinary folk. There was extensive corruption throughout the Church of Rome, and many made themselves wealthy through their office, through favours granted, and, often, at the expense of others. Perhaps the Pope felt uncomfortable having his mode of living being held up to indirect scrutiny by the simple-living Cathars and felt the public gaze on his worldly warts a little disturbing?

‘I wonder if the world has changed a lot since then and whether the destruction of the Cathars would occur today. Is the church, or mankind generally, any more tolerant now than then; or would modern communication and our more civilised values bring the wrath of the UN, or whomever, down on the Pope’s head?’

‘The threat of such wrath did not stop the Serbs in the Balkans or the genocide in Sudan,’ said Adrian, ‘but in the civilised west and among the enlightened people in Europe, it would be bound to have some effect.’

‘But the UN has proved to be extremely ineffectual in its role as world peacekeeper—not a lot better than the League of Nations that it replaced,’ I countered.

‘But you still have to leave all global policing work to the UN,’ he responded. ‘No individual nation has the right or responsibility for international policing.’

‘What about a little analogy closer to home,’ I said. ‘For example, if someone’s neighbour is attacking his wife, does he have the right or responsibility to do more than just report the matter to the police (and then sit back and watch television)? Surely, as human beings, we should be getting involved and taking some action to help the woman rather than just leaving it to the police, who would probably turn up too late anyway. If not, then why does society hail as a hero someone who takes the matter into his own hands and goes to the aid of someone when they are in distress? It seems inconsistent to me that social behaviour appropriate on a small scale should not translate to similar behaviour on a large scale. Why does the sovereignty of nations act any differently from the sovereignty of a household?’

‘You simply cannot translate local actions to a global stage,’ said Adrian. ‘It just does not work. Households have already signed over their sovereignty to the government of the country of which they are citizens, but nations have their own sovereignty and have to respect the sovereignty of others. No nation has the right to unilaterally interfere in the affairs of another; it can only get involved in another nation’s affairs with the imprimatur of the elected global policemen, the UN. We have to live with this; it is the logical outcome of a democratic world.’

‘So you are saying that nations are guided by different principles than, say, individual households?’ I queried.

‘It would seem so,’ he replied. ‘It is the sacrifice of individual freedoms that individuals make to share in a national society, and of national freedoms that nations make to share in the global society.’

It was a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion, albeit probably only an adjournment, but we had arrived at Quéribus, and we prepared for our visit.

§

The Château de Quéribus is certainly awe-inspiring. The stark remains of the castle stronghold sit high on an outcropping peak of a range, seemingly at the top of the world, with just a short stretch of sharp ridge connecting it on the west to the rest of the range. The construction effort that had been required to hew and gather the building blocks from the local rocks, haul them up to the summit, and construct the fort would have been extraordinary. It was originally one of the Five Sons of Carcassonne, the brother of Aguilar, Peyrepertuse, Termes, and Puilaurens—a chain of castles built by the French along what was then the border with Spain—and was often regarded as the last Cathar stronghold, although there were many confrontations between the Albigensian crusaders and the Cathars after its fall.

After the steep walk up the path leading to the castle, we took a short breather and then entered through the fortified gate and continued up through the various levels to the uppermost storey and the lookout area. The view from the parapets and ramparts was 360o around the plains, valleys, and mountains surrounding the castle and was breathtaking. To the south, beyond the narrow plain through which we had driven, were the beginnings of the Pyrénées; and to the north, the Corbières; and in the distance, Peyrepertuse. The outlook was stunning, and the fortification must have seemed impregnable to the Cathars who took shelter in it. Unfortunately, the inhabitants had to eat and drink, and that meant either leaving their stronghold and descending to the plain for supplies or starving. Like most sieges, the patience and supplies of the besiegers eventually won out, and Quéribus was taken after many months. It was a sad but inevitable end.

We mused for some time over the view at the summit, imagining the border battles and skirmishes that must have occurred all along this old frontier and the misery that the Cathar refugees must have endured during the siege those many centuries ago, and concluded that, in general, we were lucky to live in relatively more peaceful times. We then descended the narrow spiral staircase in the south-east corner to the base of the fortress and strolled back down to our car. We had enjoyed our visit, and leaving Quéribus, we curled our way through the hills to the base of Peyrepertuse for a cup of coffee and a sandwich and then back through the extraordinary Gorges de Galamus to the D117 and then Quillan and the D118 towards Limoux and Carcassonne. On a whim, we took a little side road up to see Rennes-le-Château. This isolated but thriving little village is the destination of many visitors, both to see the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, where the local priest in the nineteenth century, Bérenger Saunière, supposedly discovered parchments relating to a hidden treasure, but also because it is on the same meridian line that runs through Paris. The significance of this fact is not obvious, but people do seem to be interested in the coincidence. Of greater interest is the fact that there was great debate at the time as to whether the prime meridian, 0o longitude, should pass through Paris or through Greenwich. As we know, Greenwich won out, although probably through arrogant insistence rather than through any scientific merit. Whatever, Rennes-le-Château has a lovely little outdoor restaurant opposite the church, which does a thriving trade in drinks and meals. We repaired to it for some refreshment and observed our fellow patrons while we awaited our coffees. A little eavesdropping around the various tables showed that the patrons were from all over Europe, distant and local French, German, British, and Spanish, with a smattering of Japanese and Americans, plus, of course, a couple of Australians.

‘I am always pleasantly surprised to see the number of French people visiting their places of interest,’ I said. ‘It almost seems that they would have become so blasé about it all that, with a yawn, they would go elsewhere.’

‘Australia is such a young country,’ replied Adrian, ‘we forget that it takes somewhat longer to cover two millennia of history and social development than just two centuries. I think also that the French do have the quiet view that things French are significantly superior to those that are not and are therefore all the more worth visiting. This could well be unfair, but the thought does recur the more time that one spends in France, and I am inclined to agree with it.’

‘In many other ways’, I said, ‘France also differs greatly from other cultures, such as Australia. France is a much more socialistic state, with a highly structured social organisation, high dependence on social welfare, highly centralised and interventionist decision mechanisms, wonderful infrastructure, and a massive public-debt problem. Australia is an egalitarian, relatively laissez-faire society, with few social structures, far greater dependence on individual wealth creation, a dispersed (and pretty ineffective) state decision-making framework, and a strong economy. France’s tendency for regulation and state intervention shows through in many facets of life here, from the enormous bureaucracy (which employs around half the workers in the country) to industry (the wine industry, the food industry, the auto and aeroplane industries), all of which are highly regulated and stifling of individual entrepreneurialism and achievement.’

‘However’, commented Adrian, ‘these various policies of the state have, through a complex network of subsidies and grants, kept the rural areas of France populated. In Australia, where no such policies exist, the drift from the country to the city continues apace, with rural towns losing services and facilities and population. France has maintained, possibly artificially, its countryside with industry, farming, and, most importantly, people. France has devised and implemented policies that keep its rural population in the country, doing to a very large extent what they have been doing for centuries. Obviously, there have been changes, but much remains the same. Through their very heavy investment in these policies, they have been able to maintain a demographically more balanced rural population. It is not aging to anywhere near the same extent that it is in Australia (and in many other countries). It is expensive and is heavily draining the country’s capacity for economic development, but it is achieving a major social objective.’

‘I sometimes liken France’s social investment to maintain its rural population to the energy input required to counter-balance the inevitable entropic tendency to random decay and disorder within the universe,’ I mused. ‘While, overall, the universe tends to disorder and decay, it is possible to reverse this entropic decay at a local level through the injection of energy. On the very small scale, heating a pot of water in an electric kettle is an example of this; producing local heat against the background ambient temperature. Business and bureaucratic organisations also practise this in seeking to produce organisational order out of natural chaos. In all cases, such a reversal of the increase of entropy on a local level requires energy input at the local level and actually degrades the total energy available in the universe such that, in toto throughout the universe, entropy still increases. In a similar way, the rural flight to the cities and towns is inevitable within our Western capitalist society, irrespective of the efforts made to counteract it.’

‘This all sounds a little far-fetched,’ commented Adrian. ‘Large organisations fail because they are large and they lose their capacity to deal with the small, local but still essential matters—they lose their culture and their sense of why they are there. They become removed from their core raison d’être.’

‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but I think that the natural order of things is that people seek to improve their lot in the world, and this can best be achieved through following where employment develops. Government employment and business employment both tend to concentrate in the cities and towns (both for reasons of efficiency), so these areas are where employment tends to develop. Consequently, the population naturally tends to move to these cities and towns, following the development of employment. France has been and is continuing to counter this natural tendency through subsidising rural business and industry; it provides handsome social-security funding to the unemployed and older people and maintains regional government offices to a far greater extent than other Western countries. This has been a massively expensive social investment, but it has been largely successful. Their fight against entropic decay has been effective so far but will continue to drain the public purse for as long as France pursues these policies.’

‘I think I can agree with you on both these last two points,’ replied Adrian. ‘But one of the great beauties of France is its countryside, not just for its natural beauty but also for its many wonderful towns and villages scattered throughout its length and breadth. To us Australians (and other New World country folk as well), the towns and villages of France seem ageless and timeless; they began centuries before our country was colonised by Western people and have a charm that we can only marvel at. It is easy to become entranced by the French village scene, forgetting, of course, that maintaining such scenes is part of the very expensive French government policy. Nevertheless, we are all charmed by them and love to visit them. I agree, however, that it remains to be seen whether the enormous expense of maintaining the French rural population is justified and sustainable, but I certainly hope so.’

§

We finished our coffees and made our way back to the D118 and then east on the A61. We were mainly silent during this part of the trip and were content to observe the beautiful and dramatic countryside through which we were passing and then, going north on the A9, the torrent of lorries moving to and from Spain, and arrived back in time to prepare a meal and watch the English news before settling in for the evening. The village was quiet in the evenings, and we both felt that we could be in another world from our own, and enjoyed the fact. The only disturbance to our evening quiet was a phone call I received from my publisher in London, asking whether I could plan to visit him in the near future, as he had not seen me for a while and had a project that he wished to discuss with me. He said that he may even shout me lunch. I half thought that he was sounding me out to borrow the house in France for a while and enjoy a free sojourn in the sun, but the fact that Adrian and his wife would be here made this possibility out of the question, but I undertook to see when I could plan a visit to his part of the world and returned to my peace and quiet. It was always a nuisance to be disturbed by the realities of the outside world when chilling out in the south of France, but I had to acknowledge that the world of my work was essential to me and made a mental note to set a date on which to visit London. I had not been there for a while and would probably even enjoy it.

Chapter 2

It was still early evening a couple of days later, and the sun was beginning to cast its rosy glow on the low clouds. Above us, the martens were wheeling in flocks around the upper stories of the houses and the abbaye steeple and towers, chirping and catching insects to feed their chicks that lived in the small mud nests they had built under the scalloped eaves of the surrounding buildings. At this time of night, the sky was full of their noises and swooping, a change almost as at a signal from the sleepy torpor that had kept them invisible and at peace during the hot daylight hours. It was a good time of night, and Adrian and I sat up on the terrace, observing the coming dusk and digesting our recently completed evening meal. Four floors below in the street, it was mostly quiet, with only the occasional ‘Bonjour!’ or ‘Bonsoir!’ floating up from the villagers returning home for their meals or going out somewhere. There would be the cacophony of small cars and motorbikes disturbing the night peace a little