15 nov

My, it was a windy day. During the night, staying in a reasonably protected neighbourhood in Perpignan, Merlin was already shaking terribly. On the road it was a matter of holding the steering wheel very tight. Julie told earlier about Merlin being a cardboard box, this felt worse.
But the good news is we managed to avoid the expected snow of Padres. Merlin doesn’t like snow. Wind is hard enough on it. Ducked tape, the saviour of anyone without a clue, Saint Duck we call the tape, was necessary to prevent a side mirror to blow off. A side indicator light is hanging lopsidedly next to the hood. Julie tried to use some epoxy, but my inexperienced guess is that this also is a matter for Saint Duck. Can’t wait for the statues to show up for this saint. They seem more frequent in bath tubs than churches though, and till recently a giant statue was seen in Eastern Asian harbours, but we keep looking out for them.
Went to see Fontfroide, the Cistercian abbey that has been privatised a century ago. It is a well oiled business, where you are forced to wait for two hours when you’ve missed the guided 12 o’clock tour by two minutes. Which time was happily spent at the exquisite Fontfroide restaurant were we chose the duck heart – if that is what coeur de canard means, it might very well be the heart of the duck breast – a nice fish soup, that according to Julie tasted like fish cream, another fish and some pork cassoulette. The last thing is what I ate.
Since raising a pig I was pretty much convinced that the best thing to do with a pork is to make sausages out of it. With sage, thyme, plain white pepper, an Indian variation, we tried it all and they were just delicious. Seven variations for the seven days and one will never get tired of it. A real treat. But these Cassoulettes are a winner too. I’ve seen the cans in french supermarkets and was often tempted to buy them. But then they rested away in our cellar till our friend Jose would come by and throw them away because their due date had been passed by a year or more. My theory with canned foot is really that: if canned, it will stay good forever, but I do not think that would have mattered anything regarding to the consumption of the cans. They just looked better in a French supermarket than on our basement shelf, I thought. Anyway. That cassoulette was delicious, although the duck was superior.
One of the nice things about the privatised abbey is that they do not really worry anymore about austerity. The wines, for example are called Laudamus (Let us Praise), which makes one less inclined to follow rule 40 of the Rule of St. Benedict, handily provided on the placemat at the table, that one should restrict oneself to 25 a 30 cl of wine a day. We would have managed to do that if we would have been with four of us, but only Julie is allowed to use the plural when she talks about herself (herselves).
The abbey itself, after we were just in time for the two o’clock tour, is restored well, although they had the strange idea to include some very wild new (beginning 20th century) stained glass windows in the church. Saint Bernard would not have approved of them, as much as he definitely had something more to say about which food was acceptable than St. Benedict. Writing St Bernard’s opinions on a placemat might have been detrimental for sales, so was avoided.
The heydays of the abbey were in the 12th and 13th century. After that there was a gradual downfall till the monastery was closed after the French Revolution. In the 19th century there was a little bit of a revival, but beginning 20th century the whole abbey was sold to a Frenchman for €250.000 in today’s money. With 100.000 visitors a year, each one paying €10, sales are at least €1mln. Not counting the revenues from restaurant, gift shop and wine sales. A decent investment I would say, although our guide couldn’t say what the costs of the (continuing) restorations were.
In the abbey we were protected from the wind, but it still was bloody cold. Which doesn’t make the french language easier to follow, the more because the guide speeded up his tempo just to keep himself warm.
Two days ago it still was 20 degrees, now they say it’s five, but that doesn’t include the wind chill factor, I am sure. Yesterday the summer ended, today winter started, the owner of the campground in Cazilhac, south of Carcassone, claimed. She might be right, although we’ve seen these circumstances before. The good news is that the heater in Merlin is doing its job.