5 Weeks and a Wedding in France, 

with photos.

A record of Mark and Jan O’Connor’s visit to FRANCE, June 4 to 8 July  2025.

 

We went to France on 4 June 2025 because in early July my nephew David Duncan was going to marry his French bride, Sonia Mbekhta, in the Mayor’s palace in Toulouse.

  

 

We decided to devote some weeks to seeing some of France’s beaux villages—yes, “beautiful village” is an official (hard-won) designation in France. There are 176 beaux villages across 21 regions of that big country.  (They compete to have the most crooked medieval streets—and, of course, to keep their wiring underground.) We concentrated on the Atlantic coast (the port cities of Bordeaux and La Rochelle) and then inland: on the valleys of the Loire, the Lot,  the Dordogne and the  Vézère (“the river of prehistory”).

We cunningly decided to do this before the wedding, to avoid the heat of July and August—but we got that wrong. In fact  we met 30+ temperatures almost every day in June. We coped by spending much time in air-conditioned museums, Michelin restaurants, and even in caves like the famous prehistoric caves of Lascaux and Peche-Merle.

 

Below is a summary of some things we saw that might interest you . . . 

(By the way, we give big thank-you’s for pre-advice on France to Pam O’Connor and Campbell Duncan, to Lesley and Dario, to Rob Malcolm and to Suiwah Leong.)

On 4 June 2025 Singapore Air  delivered us to Paris  around 7 a.m.—one of us well-slept and rested, the other not.  We found our BNB was next to  the stunning Jardin des Plantes.

This sprawling complex is a bit like Kew Gardens in England, but more varied, containing everything from a zoo and museums to a geological park and historical rose-garden. It is also a museum to the great French biologists like Buffon and Cuvier whose theories Darwin may have trumped, but without whom his work would have been impossible. Here is an amazingly leafy view of Paris from the Gardens’ “Gloriette de Buffon”:

 And here is one of its many monuments—in this case to the Gardens’ director Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and his famous children-of-nature characters, "Paul et Virginie".

 

The next day, 5 June,  we took a boat cruise on the Seine past Ile de France (and Notre Dame, and assorted monuments of Paris). Then we went to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, which had special shows featuring Matisse’s paintings of his daughter Marguerite, plus a retrospective of Gabriele Münter.

Our next target, which is said to be the most visited location in France, was the tidal island and abbey/fortress of Mont St-Michel,

which I think both William the Conqueror and Henry Vth attacked in vain, and where in Milton’s words

. . .   the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;

(though Milton’s Mont St  Michel was a different iteration of the pan-Christian trope of a national mountain sacred to the martial Archangel Michael, viz. St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, England).

The trains were booked out, so we went the way young people do, on the cheap and cheerful Flix Bus from Paris.

At the entrance to the Mont, the  tourist kitsch was amazing. The photo below shows a shop supposedly dedicated to holy mementos of St Joan of Arc. And Yes, that is a statue of a bare-breasted pirate wench winking at you on the right:

Higher up, things got more interesting and artistic:

 

(The photo in an art-shop shows the Comet Neowise passing Mont St-Michel in 2020 during COVID. The card notes the comet’s period is 6,800 years; and its previous visit was in the Neolithic.)

Higher up, the tourist noise fell away, and the views from the vertiginous Abbey were stunning:

 

8 June We walked on country lanes through the fens around Mont St-Michel to a French town with the amazing name of…Alligator Bay. (I think it grew up around a reptile park).

An app called SEEK identified this ground orchid in the fens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jan became a child of nature

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we bade farewell to the Mont:

and caught the 4.55 pm Flix Bus to Caen  and from there took a train to Bayeux (still on the Normandy coast).

9 June We saw the Bayeux tapestry!!!—recently restored and back on view.  No boat-builder should miss this tapestry. About half its panels seem devoted to how William’s carpenters chopped and adzed tree-trunks into an invasion fleet. It also depicts Harold Godwinson (“the last king of England”) rescuing two Normans from the treacherous sands around Mont St-Michel—back in the days when Harold and William were friends.)  We visited the Cathedral. And the great Normandy War Museum. There, among amazing amounts of military hardware we saw a photo of the Latin inscription (perhaps the last time Latin was used as an international language?) on the nearby Bayeux WWII Cemetery. It reads:  

"We, once conquered by William, have now set free the Conqueror's native land."

 

Tuesday 10 June.   From Bayeux, to get to the Loire valley we had to take a swift train all the way back to Paris!!, and then a Paris Metro between two mainline train stations in Paris, to get a train to Amboise in the Loire valley! It took most of the day, and then we found that our digs—the aptly named Studio Cocoon—had a floating bed suspended over the kitchen, accessible by a sort of stick ladder. Don’t know if they have had many 80 year olds staying there. But we managed to tilt the fan upwards, climb up and sleep, despite the heat.

11 June We visited the Chateau du Clos Luce. This was Leonardo da Vinci’s bribe for going French. “Francis I gave this mansion/palace to Leonardo when he invited him to France in 1516. The ageing polymath lived his last years in this house until his death on 2 May 1519.” The intellectual king rode over whenever he could, from his castle next door, to chat with the savant.

The large park is full of modern recreations of machines imagined in Leonardo’s notebooks. Also recalls some good parties

 

 

 

We lunched at the Lion d’Or -- Jan’s first Michelin restaurant and experience of such highly engineered food in small portions.          

Revelation!  My France-loving sister Pam had advised that the best restaurant bargain in France is the fixed-lunch menu (formule) in a Michelin 1-star restaurant.  And so it proved. (We had hoped to taste the giant 2 metre catfish that lives in the depths of the Loire. It was on the Lion d’Or’s meu, but just today catfish was off!)

Then to Castle Gaillard with its Reine Claude orchard and Dom Pacello gardens and orangerie—perhaps a better drawcard than the bedroom where a young Mary Queen of Scots (as yet far more a French than a Scots princess) happily honeymooned in 1558 with her 15 year-old husband Francois II of France, who died in 1560 of an ear infection. Mary loved Castle Gaillard, but she had no luck in husbands.

12 June  We climbed the Royal Castle or   Château d'Amboise   with its views of the town

 

and met the Loire.

 Then we took an Uber to the Loire aquarium with its great catfish “le silure de la Loire” larger than a human, swaying and cuddling each other hypnotically in the murky depths.

13 June Friday We left Amboise and the Loire, and moved back (by train) to the Atlantic coast,  to La Rochelle—the famous port and centre of Protestant resistance, as in The Three Musketeers.

We walked through the crooked Old Town, from the Ibis Hotel to the two arms of the harbour, and ate at the Bistro Gourmande. Moules (Normandy mussels) for me, disappointment for Jan.

14 June The great Aquarium.          

Here we discovered what Jan considers the highlight of our sightseeing in France, the amazing La Rochelle Aquarium, complete with real ocean waves and amazing devices to set the human visitor amid the marine life:

 They even have the knack of keeping jellyfish.

The sniffish Look-Down fish looked down on us:

But words cannot do justice to the La Rochelle Aquarium. Photos can, but use mega-bytes.

We also attended the town’s Saturday markets, where Jan bought a silver bird. Was this the Maltese Falcon of legend? Or just a silver quail?… We had coffee beside the main square at writer  Simenon’s favorite café called “The Peace Café”.

 

On 15 June we moved again, from La Rochelle to Bordeau, from one Protestant stronghold to another.

To escape stifling heat, we took a boat tour of the Bordeaux Bridges and harbour. The harbour is essentially a VERY long inlet. Rather than remove the historic low bridges, modern giant ships don’t go anywhere near as far inland as the old city, but use newer docks that are not so far along the inlet. Hence the old portand walled city has been left fairly intact.

 

Jan walked on the famous mirrored pavement, which was too hot and dry to be very mirrory. Media reports of a “canicule” or heatwave, warned that people were dropping dead of heat-stroke. We plunged on.

 

16 June Cathédrale Saint-André de Bordeaux     

 --where they cruelly celebrate a sad girl who denied herself all pleasures, for Christ:

--and was rewarded, the Vatican claims, with a miraculous fall of roses.

 

 

You call that an apse!!?

--now that’s an apse!

 

and then to the Musee de Beaux Arts in its park behind City Hall (Hotel de Ville). Here Jupiter as an eagle brings Ganymede to Olympus:

And The Holy Family slaughters half of creation

--a case of genre confusion by the artist?

 

--a case of genre confusion by the artist? Holy picture of a meal, or Nature morte?

 

 

 

 

17 June To the Museum of Aquitaine . “The different collections include more than 70,000 pieces. They trace the history of Bordeaux and Aquitaine from Prehistory to today. 5,000 pieces of art from Africa and Oceania also testify to the harbor history of the city.”

And its hospitality. “We’re putting on a small party  for all you oenophiles…”

 The statue of the great Montaigne, who inspired Hamlet by asking “What do I really know?”, and said “There is no idea that justifies killing a man”,  is kept there in high honour.

Then, on18 June, we left the coast for good and moved inland by train  to Toulouse, midpoint on the amazing Canal de Midi that allowed barges to be poled or pulled from the Mediterranean to the  Atlantic (via the Garonne river) way back in the C17th.

 

 

PART 2

We took Uber to a pleasant flatlet in Toulouse, and walked to the Mairie and Opera Hotel where the wedding would be on July 4^th).

June 19  We went to the vast Bemberg Foundation museum of art.

  

Jan liked the jewellery exhibition. Here the head of a faina/marten (a weasel-relative) shines in glass and gold:

And here is a showy piece of C17th wearable gold, a “cure dent et cure oreille”, which means that it helps you (a) pick your teeth and (b) spoon wax out of your ears!:

Mind you, the Asian grocery near ANU still sells tiny ear-wax spoons . . .  If only Francois II had had one…!

 

Then we took a cruise on the Canal de Midi,

--the reason you can hardly see the canal is that the boat utterly fills  the canal, which is scarcely wider than a tram.

Then we walked to the heatstruck riverbank and sat on the trodden grass.

20 June Walked in pursuit of Jan’s gourmet salt flakes (fleur de  sel de la garonde -- a hand-harvested sea salt from the Guerande region of France).  Found the Aire de Famille Michelin 1 star restaurant, where (noting an Australian accent on the table next to us) we met Suzanne and Tom from Monash University, an adventurous  couple who have lived around the world and been adopted into an Arab family.

20 June? By Uber to Toulouse’s Natural History Museum. Great specimens; but labels illegible in low light.

 

I assume the illegible label for this one said, “Horse attacked by sabre-toothed cat;  and horse ridden by jockey”.

Tried to walk in the botanical  park afterwards, but it was just too hot. Home. Just in time to catch the barber and get my beard trimmed for the wedding. I thought I had missed him, but a local explained that “Il est musulman, e doit faire ses prières.” Sure enough, he was back from his prayers in 10 minutes and ran a clipper over my head, giving one side a military crewcut. When I protested, he asked if I wanted the other side left longer!  So a crewcut it was.

 

 

On 21 June we took a Paris train from Toulouse, but got off at Brive la Gaillarde in the Dordogne Valley.

Jan had agreed to drive in France for just 1 week, and her ordeal began here. We collected the hire-car just next to station. Tried to drive to the Labenche Museum to escape the heat, but  Googlemaps kept sending us up closed streets. Jan was getting exhausted. Finally she parked at a Cash Outlet and walked to the tourist bureau, who told us how to park underground near the markets. Very helpful—even helped book us a restaurant, finally finding the En Cuisine in walking distance of our BNB.  So we walked to Labenche Museum in stifling heat. Kind ladies there gave us water, and turned us loose among their art collections, which included works of myth and fantasy about:

“Charmed magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.”

.

Look, Hero, what just swam out of the Hellespont.

 

The Museum’s air-conditioning was only just coping. We didn’t spend long on the hot top floor!

Later Jan retrieved car and got more confident with the roads. Until we had to park in host Corinne’s front yard—a tight squeeze. We met Corinne and her  Maine Coon Cat (7 months) and the old French Bulldog. Our first time actually sharing with a host.

Walked to En Cuisine for excellent meal—choosing the salle climatisée indoors. Had some “Meagre” fish in one dish. Tasty, but only about 20 gm out of a giant 50 kilo fish. Portion-control and food-engineering again!  Walked back through amazing numbers of swallows.

22 June Drove to the beau village of  Turenne –finding it a breeze to get out of Brive, with “The Voice” . Thanks Googlemaps!  Stunning village.

  --lower Turenne. Jan bounding uphill:

 

We parked in the square and climbed to the garden at the top, full of placards giving glib quotations in French, like “We don’t stop you believing; don’t you stop us thinking”, and “To a man with a hammer in his hand, everything looks like a nail.” There was a tower in a wall-top garden at the very summit.

 Looking down, we could see our hire-car parked below.

From Turenne, Jan felt emboldened to drive to the red-sandstone village of Collonges-la-rouge.   where Colette (of all people) once lived in the Vicomte’s tower.  

 

 Jan climbs the tower of Vicomte Henri II, a loyal Protestant who was Marshall of France under Louis XIV, and (under great royal pressure) in the end turned Catholic—but only after his wife’s death. 

 

We ate outdoors but at least in shade, next door to the tower. (Tower, by the way,  is one of those many, many “good old English” words that turn out to be derived from French: masonry, pot, potter, poison, pulley, breeze, trout, sole, herring, crab, sardine, pigeon, falcon/faucon, quail/caille, jay/geai, heron, guillemot, cormorant, aigle/eagle, pelican, canari, perroquet/parakeet, branche, tronc, foret, pin/pine,  abricot, cedar, olivier, sequoia, lilac . . .   

 

 

Later that day we drove to the Beau Village of Curemonte, but didn’t stop because we didn’t find the parking spot. We did stop in another, Martel.  Almost everything was closed for Sunday. Covered market, slate roofs, inscriptions in antique French “soubs les Anglais”. But we found a café selling planchettes of Clos Saint Sozy products like rillettes and planchettes of duck, and of course duck foie gras (which we tried to avoid) plus a VERY  runny Rocamadour cheese. Just one shared plate, but a huge variety of tastes

Returned to Corinne in Brive.

23 June  Packed and left Corinne’s BNB en route for Hotel Perigord on the Dordogne, after another lively breakfast. Drove to the village of Donzenac with its church of St Martin and history of the “white penitents”.

We noted the battle against Parisian French  --also suggested by many roadsigns that  had been unscrewed and inverted, leaving only the local (more Italianate) language visible. “Benvenguda” instead of “Bienvenue”, etc.

Then to St Robert where the top-rated restaurant called  “Mr Robert” was alas closed that day—like everything else--  and we walked around the empty town  and its “Chasseurs” Church.

 

Then we drove on, towards the Dordogne—a longish but pleasant route, sticking strictly to the backroads after an unpleasant experience on the A20 freeway. (Its in-feeding lane disappeared too quickly, leaving us at the mercy of speedy vehicles that already occupied the other lanes.)  

We found the luxurious and superbly situated Hotel Perigord, under the cliffs of Domme on the Dordogne River, upstream of La Roque Gageac. Dined in the hotel’s restaurant.

 Hotel Perigord –its red roof seen from the heights of Domme, across the Dordogne.

 

24 June  Drove to La Roque Gageac, an 8 minute trip that took 30 mins after we took a detour between stone walls. Jan discovered that “stone walls do not a prison make” and got through successfully. Parked at La Roque Gageac, a SW-facing heat-trap beside the Dordogne. Jan bought a green dress—and didn’t wear it. Kept on stumbling along in long trousers and sneakers in the heat. We drove to Marqueyssac Gardens, with its 10,000  100-year-old plastic plants (I’m sorry, box trees) –mostly poodle-clipped into odd shapes,and walked to its stunning Belvedere overlooking La Roque (see photos).  La Roque Gageac, far below, appears at upper centre in this photo.

 

La Roque Gageac on the Dordogne.

 

After a long walk at Marqueyssac,

we took the 5.30 cruise on the Dordogne among high limestone cliffs stained with black manganese—the same pigment used by the cave-painters of Lascaux.  

 

 

25 June Another day of 34 degrees. Brekkie at Hotel Perigord. Then to Beynac Castle with its memories of Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

 

 “At the time of the Hundred Years' War, the fortress at Beynac was in French hands. The Dordogne was the border between France and England. Not far away, on the opposite bank of the river, the Château de Castelnaud was held by the English.”

 

 The steep heights of Beynac—soar above modern fields that produce amazing amounts of alfalfa  hay (the round bundles below)—for livestock that are rarely seen in the fields. Where are these animals kept?

Beynac, facing Castelnard,

controlled  and could tax trade on the Dordogne.  

26 June   A cooler Day. Drove to the walled fortress town of Domme and saw its market.

 

 

Walked the town. Looked down on Hotel Perigord:

 Then hurried onto Castelnaud (less furnished and thus less interesting than Beynac) then on to the cool cave of Lascaux 4 for the 3.30 English-speakers tour.

In the cave, a simulacrum, it was supposed to be always 13 degrees, just like in the original cave, though I think the air conditioning was struggling that day.

 

Excellent commentary. We learned that the old folk, c. 20,000 years ago,  lived on a treeless tundra and (for meat) ate “95% reindeer” – which they never depicted—plus some small game.

 

They used stone lamps with animal fat and juniper wicks to enter the lightless cave and face the cave bears and cave hyenas.

 

There is no evidence they ate the horses, aurochs, deer, cave lions or cave bears they depicted; and of course no one in those days dreamed of taming horses. They did not even have dogs, back then.  They did not depict the mammoths or woolly rhinos. Not their totem?

 

I presume the cave-lion, and perhaps even the cave-bear, was a non-hibernating species. Why hibernate when your cave never drops below +10 degrees? But then what do you eat by day, in winter? Of course,  for a predator that hunts by day, as perhaps the cave lion did, a constant-temperature cave partly solves the problem of how to get through the bitterly cold hours of night. But humans needed caves for the same reason. And their spears and teamwork in the long run triumphed.

 

This cave was sealed at the end of the ice age when permafrost melted and the entrance’s roof slumped. Until one day during WWII a tree fell down, and its lifted roots revealed an opening to a pristine cave.

 

 

 

By contrast, at Peche-Merle

  

 

which we visited a few days later, the human occupants may have been of the mammoth clan. They often depict “Venuses”, obese pregnant women –-no doubt because it is a real achievement for hunter-gatherer women to gain enough  fat (and keep it for long enough) to ovulate, bear a child to term, and then lactate for a year or more.

 

The Venuses are often superimposed on the hulking outlines of mammoths. Did they believe it was the great mammoth spirit that sent them their babies and guaranteed the tribe’s survival?

 

We will never know, since as  the guide at Lascaux put it, all the ones who know are dead.  Spotted horses at Peche-Merle.

 

PART 3

27 June

We left Hotel Perigord and drove across country to the Terminus Hotel in Cahors, where we left the hire car. We were now in in the famous Valley of the Lot. (One river which the French, considerately for foreigners, pronounce as they spell it. But then it is in the South, where the Parisian-French massacre of final consonants is stoutly resisted.)

 Found the station carpark and left the keys, and walked 30 metres to the Terminus Hotel (a wonderful old fashioned railway hotel, where there are no showers, just high-sided bath-tubs that are a challenge to step into safely).  Got a drink in its foyer, and were delighted when my sister Pam and her husband Campbell walked in a few minutes later. Pam and Campbell (at Rocamadour).

We walked the old town together, and lunched at a covered café (just cool enough). Then dined very nicely at the Terminus Hotel.

 The driver then put her feet up.

 

 

 

28^th June 35 degrees. No more driving for Jan, but  Campbell drove us to the village of  Tournons d’Agenais, a former royal bastide fortress, where we climbed up by the Giants’ Gate:  

and saw a remarkable tower, belvedere, church, remembrance park, and Lunar Clock. (Lunar clock? Well yes; in the country any fool can see what time of day it is, but you may want to know if there will be a moon that night):

Lunar-clock tower at Tournons d’Agenais

 

The belvedere and memorial to the fallen.

 

The day was hellishly hot but we finally found the nearby  Auberge du Brelan which proved to be huge and cool, and with wonderful food!  Back at the Perigord we had a refreshing drink downstairs “Perrier petillante et fraises”, but felt no need for dinner!

 

29/6  Everything closed for Sunday.  Min 20, max 35 degrees. Campbell and I walked to the station and round to the bridge before the day heated up.  I think it was that day that we stumbled upon the Henri Martin  Museum in Cahors, and discovered this late-impressionist painter. Then we packed up, and drove to Saint Cirq Lapopie, once 'discovered' by Henri Martin,  for a 1-night stay.

Our room had a vineyard outside its window, at the same level.

  

The driver continued to rest on her laurels.

Vinyard at our windowThat night we ate at a Michelin star restaurant in the village. Made the mistake of selecting their omelettes which were poor. But the views, when we walked outside, were stunning!    

 

30/6 Moved to Figeac; and then went to Peche-Merle cave, of spotted horses fame. In Figeac, we dined well in partial air-conditioning, opposite the Champollion Museum.

July 1

Campbell very kindly drove us the long way to Rocamadour’s heights

And to Padirac cave, both of which he and Pam had seen before.

At Rocamadour we walked up the slope to the lift, where Mark snapped the town above us:

and then to the Church. Outside was posted (as recently as 1994) one of the silliest of all miraculous stories: “The Virgin of Rocamadour cured our scurvy—once we stopped sailing!”

 

We were due at Le gouffre de Padirac at 2.30, and after queuing for 30 minutes in the heat, were finally admitted to its cool depths, which did not disappoint! A vast underground limestone cave and river system—which prehistoric humans seem not to have known.

  

One of the 3 lifts needed to descend through Padirac’s depths.

 

 

2 July  We drove first to Cardaillac,  an almost empty beau village where we found a ladder leading to a spiral staircase in an empty tower.

Then a long drive via a “Beau Rivage” to another beau village  Conques, where we ate quite well in a well-ventilated back bar overlooking the cliffs. We walked to the tall church with its monitory Last Judgement frieze.   and high

-- high pillars and flat arches!  As I once wrote: “A  church is a psychic pressure-box/To crush imagination into faith”.

Drove back to Figeac, and went to the Champollion Museum where I wished I had more time. (He was the genius who cracked the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphs, winning a great race between British and French experts). There are other rooms on writing systems of the world.  I had not realised that several Mayan languages (or major dialects?) survive, along with more than one writing system for them, including the system that uses woollen threads. That night we found a classy Michelin Restaurant where the hostess in her elegant trailing gown seemed intrigued by my bare knees in shorts. But they had only two tables of guests, so we suspect were glad to have us.

 

3 July   The wedding drew near. We packed and left Figeac. Drove first to Cordes, another beau village, where we stopped and watched great wooded beams being removed from an upper floor by hooks and pulleys in the ancient way—but onto the bed of a modern truck.  

 Campbell dropped Jan and me in Albi, after showing us the station.

 

The great Masonry Appreciation tour of Europe continued; and as usual, all the buildings to be admired were at the top of stairs.

We explored the Bishop’s Keep, which has been secularised into the Toulouse Lautrec Museum—some revenge for all those murdered Albigensians, over whose destruction its massive bulk was meant to triumph. Campbell thought the LaPerouse Museum nearby would interest us more—but you can’t get Jan away from art, and old Toulouse Lautrec did have a certain talent.

--even if he could never understand why this lady artiste (Yvette Guilbert) was not happy with the publicity poster he offered her!  (His is the one on the right.) She, oddly, preferred the one on the left. Elles sont des créatures incompréhensibles, les femmes !

 

But then he, like most modern artists, was two-thirds caricaturist.

 

Toulouse Lautrec makes a monster of the brothel’s laundryman.

 

At the end of that day we caught a train, punctual to the moment, from Albi to Gaillac—where we met Pam’s daughter Lucy and her partner Josh, who told us the trains had been running so late that our on-time train was really their late train from 2 hours earlier.

Campbell kindly met us at the station with his car, saving the walk to our inn, La Courte Verte, with its leafy courtyard --where we met the whole family, including my sister Geraldine and her husband Garry Moore, and their son Richard and his wife Miho and son Kai.

 

WARNING: THIS FINAL SECTION IS MAINLY ABOUT A WEDDING IN MARK’S FAMILY. If you are not family, you may not want all these pictures of people you don’t know. But you can always skip…

 

 

PART 4: Wedding in Toulouse, Gaillac, and Chateau Mauriac.

4 July  Wedding Day! Brekky at La Court Verte with host Bernard and Madame. See its breakfast area below—a “green court” indeed, in a city of stone.

 

At 10 a.m. my nephew Geoffrey Brent and his wife Gillian picked us up  for the long drive to Toulouse. Parked deep undergound, we walked through the heat to Emily’s Restaurant for a  fast Michelin Meal (a slightly rushed cassoulet for me), then we all walked to the splendour and heat of the Mairie, and processed up the stairs:

  with groom and bride David Duncan and Sonia Mbekhta looking superb,    Here’s David with his bride, and with his mother Pam O’Connor.

 

Geraldine, Gillian, Miho.

 

Huge Henri Martin paintings covered the walls.      Jan with Geoffrey Brent

Then we moved from the Mairie to the reception in the Palace of Opera Hotel, where we all practiced our French, and I talked with Sonia’s father Mustafa, a maths professor, originally from Rabat.

Jan, Geoffrey Brent, Mark, Mustafa

 

We left. Gillian asked Jan and me to wait on a shady bench till she could bring the car round. Then an absurdly slim young man, in shorts but carrying a large bag, walked by, and we hailed the groom, who was heading off to hand back his wedding clobber. We drove back to Gaillac with Geoffrey and Gillian, and rested all evening.

 

5 July  The morning was free. We talked to the lady in the Gaillac tourist bureau who seemed amazed we had learned French so well. “C’est la practique,”  she decided. We went to the markets, where I bought seaberries or “"argousiers”, which I knew about but had never seen before. We peeped into a newsagent and confirmed that French romanticism still thrives (note the homage to “timeless Diana):

 

and that Charlie Hebo’s satirical magazine still spares no targets—not just Muslims:

Then we walked through the medieval city and down to the riverhead on the Tarn, i.e. the furthest point upstream that a boat can reach on that river, and hence an important port. From here, wines and produce could not get upstream; yet downstream they could reach all Europe or even America.  

We walked on to the Musee des beaux arts, but found it had closed for lunch—a common trick of small museums.

But now, more than 24 hours after yesterday’s wedding, came the real event: the (second) wedding “reception”, at Chateau de Mauriac outside Gaillac, from 5 pm till … dawn?? Reception outdoors at Chateau Mauriac at 5 pm on 5 July.

 

At this (second) reception at Chateau Mauriac there were stand-up drinks and snacks, a tour of the castle (the usual ghastly military history of murdered Templars,  heretics and protestants, and other destroyed causes), and then a formal dinner in the Chateau’s courtyard with many notable speeches. Campbell Duncan told a cautionary story, in both languages, from his son’s childhood; and Pam, as Mother of the Groom, spoke of how she had observed the young couple’s manners on the road, with one driving and the other navigating, and much mutually respected expertise  and co-operation in the cabin. She advised them to “Vivez comme vous conduisez” – Live as you drive.

 

 

Below is Chateau de  Mauriac‘s courtyard, with the “indoor” reception tables set ‘s for this peripatetic wedding.

 

Lucy & Josh

 Campbell’s speech.

After the speeches we old folk mostly took a taxi back to Gaillac, leaving the young to party on, and the newlyweds to bed down in their suite in the chateau.

 

6 July  After an extended family breakfast in the green courtyard, we explored the town a little. At 11.30 G and G kindly collected us yet again for a final wedding lunch (in effect, a third reception)—once  again at the Chateau de Mauriac outside town Jan in rapid motion at the final lunch.

That evening Jan and I and Garry and Geraldine and Richard and Miho had a last meal together at the memorably named Black Soul café, & Garry explained the black art of microwaving chips.

 

7 July  After breakfast we said final goodbyes. Campbell, kindly as ever, drove Jan and me to the station, where, for once, we found a French train running ten minutes late. But soon we were whisked away, via Toulouse, in just 5 hours to Paris Montparnasse, for a final night in Paris..

8 July In the morning we enjoyed one last Parisian patisserie—our  farewell to high eating:

-- then found  our way on foot  to the wonderful Carnavalet Museum, which shows the history of Paris from prehistoric times to Proust.

 

--a final piece of French elegance, the courtyard of the Carnavalet.

 

Then we shouldered our bags, had one final battle with Paris Metro’s unreliable electric ticketing “system”, and reached Charles de Gaulle airport for a late-night flight with flawless Singapore Air to Singapore (where we visited the airport’s butterfly  garden)

 

The butterfly  garden in Singapore

and then on to Sydney, and a very welcome Murray’s bus, back to wintry Canberra. We felt cool—indeed cold—at last! And a world away from the lavishly painted rooms and corridors at La Mairie de Toulouse.

 

= THE  END  =