Baudelaire Review
I’ve just come across a nice review of my new Baudelaire translation on The Bookbinder’s Daughter.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Friday 17 April
Yesterday evening coming up the short lane to our back gate, it was overhung with lilacs coming into bloom.
Our 90-year-old neighbour, in the house adjoining ours, spent his day ‘curing’ (deep-cleaning) the stone basin in his kitchen garden, which he hadn’t done for 2 years and which brings water from a spring in the hills to his house and vegetable plot. The artichokes are producing small violet fruit that are, of course, delicious, much more so than the store-bought variety. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten artichokes straight from the garden before. And he has managed, through a friend, to obtain lettuce seedlings, enough he hopes to see him through the next few months. Today he will start to prepare the earth in the potager so he can plant the seedlings. In the meantime he has run out of fresh lettuce, but another neighbour brought him an enormous head of escarole from the village shop.
He says that if he sits down during the day he falls asleep.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Wednesday 15 April
Today our masks, ordered from a small seamstress in the next village, are ready to pick up, one female-sized, one male-sized, mine plain black with a red lining—like a cardinal. She’d stitched some cushion covers for me a couple of years ago, and I thought maybe she’d make the masks, but she was way ahead of the game. ‘I can do them for Wednesday week,’ she said. ‘We have a lot of orders; we’re going to be working all Easter weekend.’
We do have a couple of aging surgical masks that we wear to collect our daily baguette and Le Monde from the village shop, but it will be good to have something that’s more-reusable. Not that we use them that much, since we don’t often go to a supermarket, and most of our groceries we are now phone-ordering and picking up from the sidewalk in front of the small produce market (which also delivers): fruit and vegetables, cheese, meat, pasta…
Yesterday we did a superette run to Malaucène, then on the way back stopped at the goat farm, which makes cheese, and was open, and hiked to the top of the ridge above the farm, where there are some Roman ruins. hadn’t been there since mid-February when we had a couple of picnics up there.
Birds chirping in the eaves outside my attic window and in the plane tree across the street, now leafing. Small signs of more work perhaps happening—vans on the road. After Macron’s speech on Monday evening, we are now confined till 11 May. It is going to be interesting to watch ‘deconfinement’ happening in Austria, Italy and Denmark, see whether cases start to rise again.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Saturday 11 April
In the space between first and second sleep, to quiet my anxious mind and the fear that I wouldn’t fall asleep again, I was trying the remember the beginning of Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’. A line was bothering me: ‘The [something] of this cottage, all asleep / have left me to that solitude that suits/ [suits what? I’d tried ‘meditation,’ which was the idea but somehow didn’t work, anyway I knew it was wrong, and that’s when it came to me: ‘suits/abstruser musing.’ It was the 3 ‘oo’ sounds that were needed. That recovery made me very happy, and I went back to sleep.’
Pacques au feu ou au jeux? as the saying goes. Paul, our 90 year old neighbour, is no longer so sure about the weather. It is again like summer, probably 80 degrees F, yesterday and again today. The forecast is for rain on Monday.
Chocolate Easter eggs? We’re too scared to go shopping for other than the basics.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Friday 10 April
Settling into a routine here, as many are, if they are lucky enough not to be in hospital: reading the news, mostly via Le Monde, which we buy every morning, along with a baguette and sundry other groceries, such as rice, at the village grocery store (and, in happier days, café). Maybe once a week we take the car to the next town to go to the pharmacy or the superette. Today we will pick up our own order from the butcher, and the fruit and vegetable shop.
We now have internet in the house, which does make life easier—easier than sitting in the car in the hotspot in the next town to the north. I hope I can keep away from checking the news every couple of hours; in any case, whether you are reading the Guardian, Le Monde, or the NYTimes at the moment, it’s the same news, and clearly most of the main stories have been written and rewritten to the point where checking the headlines is enough.
I have two strangely soothing and enjoyable activities: pulling weeds out of the gravel in the garden. Three weeks in, I have done 2/3 of the job. Most days, I take a flower pot, a couple of cushions and I aim to full the pot with weeds. I sit down in the gravel and pinch them up, mostly managing to get the roots along with the tops.Probably by the time I finish it will be time to start over in the part I started with.
The other project is improving my handwriting, for which, as I think I mentioned, I have a workbook purchased in Paris a couple of months ago, the sort of workbook parents buy for children who require remedial work. I do a couple of pages, diligently, like a child who wants to please the teacher, every now and then straightening my back and loosening my grip on the pencil, the tension of the diligent child. Yesterday I reached the page where you learn to do round letters, how to make a lower-case, cursive, a and a d, when these are joined to other letters in a word. I requires a certain amount of concentration, and there’s no room left for any kind of other thoughts; it’s a good bedtime activity: empty words, no thinking, rote-learning.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Friday 3 April
Settling into a routine, with the idea that this may last longer than we bargained for. We have now been here for two weeks so at least we haven’t imported the virus from Paris, though we might have picked it up opening that package of gnocchi last night.
As my brother-in-law pointed out yesterday when he stopped by to leave us a bottle of olive oil, the media have decided there is no news but Corona news. Is nothing else is happening in the world? Something to think about.
We had a drink in the garden, 3 chairs, 2 metres between them, a bottle, 3 mismatched glasses, a jar of olives from the village shop. The sun wasn’t quite setting, but it was warm.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Saturday 28th March
Sitting in the small, walled garden, sun on my face, listening: birds, tiny ones that make a lot of noise for their size, a pigeon in the neighbour’s almond tree, another neighbour chipping at the dirt in his small patch of earth. My husband’s flute drifting up from downstairs. Few cars.
I’ve hung a duvet to air, put its cover in the wash, pinned damp-from-the-shower towels on the line. A little snow caps the Mont Ventoux, but the sun is warmer today. Our closest and oldest neighbour would relate the weather to the moon—a sliver in the west at bedtime last night—but lately he has confessed some difficulty with the weather and the old dicta, such as ‘Noel aux jeux, Pacques au feu’.
Later. I spoke to Paul, our next door neighbour (our houses share a wall), about the weather, which has been beautiful today, and warmer. He mentioned the cold of two days ago which has been bad for the orchards. A little higher up, towards the Mont Ventoux, farmers have made fires overnight in their fields. It’s because it’s Leap Year (‘une année bissextile’), he says—cherchez la femme?
I’ve been pulling weeds from the small patch of gravel that is our ‘lawn.’ It’s a mindless but soothing activity, like ironing or doing a jigsaw puzzle, or, another current activity, learning to write cursive, again.
My handwriting, never particularly, pretty, what with using a computer most of the time, was becoming sloppier and sloppier, to the point where, signing books, I was embarrassed, and signing checks, upset with myself. One of Paris’s Big Bookstores, had a shelf of handwriting manuals for school children. I purchased one and am working through it. It’s amusing, even interesting, to see how French school children are trained. I’ve finally understood why children in schools use paper that is lined, with grids of lines between the lines: ‘petits carreaux’ and ‘grands carreaux.’ One reason is because all the letters are not the same height. The ‘l’ is 3 small squares high, but the ‘t’ is only 2 small squares high, and the vowels are 1 square high. Accents, points and bars get added after one has finished the whole word.
Monday 29th March
All of a sudden the days are longer…Europe went on summer time yesterday. Was it my imagination that there was more activity, or simply that ours down-below neighbours were playing boules in their yard? In the afternoon we went for ‘our walk,’ permits in pocket, in case we were stopped. Spring is here, and what I noticed most of all on the side of a nearby hill, was the smell of thyme, everywhere underfoot, in flower, in mauve flowers. The smell of walking on a carpet of thyme might be one of my earliest memories, or associations, with Provence, from when I first came here, as a girl from Vancouver; that and the red tile floors and roofs.
VAUCLUSE DIARY
Friday 27th March
Biking is out. Physical exercise outdoors (walking, ‘le footing’) is reduced to a perimeter of one kilometer from one’s house, one hour a day, alone or at least only with the people with whom one cohabits. My children’s doctor friends are writing nightmarish stories about the situation in the hospitals where they work, whether in Paris, New York or California. There is one case in our village, a person who is confined to their home in one of the outlying areas of the commune. A cousin of ours, in a senior residence in Marseille, is affected.
We get our daily baguette and Le Monde at our tiny village shop. In the next, larger village where we do most of our grocery shopping, three shops –fruit and vegetables (and a smattering of things like cheese, butter, yogurt), the butcher (who does pasta), and the bakery—have joined to offer deliveries. Yesterday they brought us a week’s supply of produce, and some treats for us and our neighbour: pains au chocolat, giant meringues, even to round off the bill at 10 euros, a chocolate chip cookie. It’s well-organized: they call in the morning to give us the bill, we prepare our payment (cheque or cash), and they deposit everything on the stone bench at the front door, as the envelope with our payment flutters down, weighted with a clothespin.