7 jan

The doorbell rang at 10 o’clock. Which is odd. Trying to find the front door of this house requires investigative skills that are not randomly available, definitely not in this rural, a little backwards, area. Julie opened the door. There was a man standing in the doorway with a plastic bag. I think there is a rabbit in it, Julie told me. He only spoke french.
He was from the local hunting guild, he explained to me. As a gesture of thanks for being able to hunt on the Chassenat estate, he would like to offer us this rabbit. A very generous gesture I said, or better, i intended to say. Do not know what I really said. But we are not the owners of this house, I explained. That didn’t matter to him, he said, while he handed over the rabbit and wished us a nice vacation.
I looked him disappear and thought about all those noblemen and churches in the past that survived on this system of getting a proportion of the harvest, toll, or hunt. It felt strange, but good. Marquis Joseph, sounds rather distinguished, not.
I have never prepared a rabbit in my life. I can not remember it ever being served when I lived with my parents. I am not even sure if I ever ate one. But there is a first for everything. This one who speaks french and has always eaten french food, is going to be delicious. We have to go and chose between Jamie and Hugh for the best recipe.
In the afternoon I went for a walk again. In fact the three of us started of together. After a while our ways divided. We have two detailed maps of the area. Chassenat is right on the border of both of them. I gave Julie the western map, because my walk was mainly going to be in the eastern part.
That was a mistake. After a serious walk, where I lost my GR36 at some point – walking through an ancient village with lovely old buildings that were almost all for sale, dreaming about buying these buildings with some friends (them buying) – I was pretty tired at the time I walked of the map that I had.
Pretty soon I realized I was doing something wrong. It could not have been more than a twenty minute walk, when I left the map, but I managed to spend more than two hours on it. At one point I was approaching a little village with a nice church. I must have passed Chassenat to the east and this must be Monsec, a little north, lI thought.
The village turned out to be Leguillac, which I had visited yesterday. Suddenly I recognized the church, approaching it from a different direction it looked different, and when I saw all the knitted covers for everything I was certain. This meant it was still a journey of an hour to the house and it was pitch dark by now. Luckily I knew the road to take from yesterday’s walk, but walking in the dark over wet footpaths that are also used by tractors is no pleasure. Pretty much exhausted I arrived at Chassenat after 7, after more than five and a half hours of walking. My feet were barking, as Julie would say.
But then, it was another beautiful trip, with lots of small villages that are just too cute for words. And everything seems to be for sale. If a country would like to invade France, start in the Perigord, by just buying up all the houses that are for sale.
Saw another lovely Romanesq church, in Boulouneix. Perfect. Small, simple and with the right amount of sculptured capitals and good stained glass windows. No saints too, which is better I think. The village itself had three houses, two dogs, one tractor and one bonfire in the fields. And a greenhouse on the cemetery, which made me suspect they wanted to grow dead people, or maybe dead people were a good fertiliser for tomatoes, couldn’t figure it out, but thought a greenhouse on a cemetery was a splendid idea. I would like to have one, one day. And then of course one amazing and lovely 12th century church. This is a good place to be, the Perigord.