house-arrest ou le château d’oléron

The settlement that has grown over the centuries around Le Château d’Oléron is arguably most famous as the place where Henry II held his troublesome but otherwise irreproachable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine captive for sixteen years for conniving to replace him as sovereign of England and outremar with their eldest son.  

Surely not the worst of places to wile away one’s sentence, but it turned out to be all the more endearing to us with the hindsight of nine hundred years that we’d visited this place (at least the Vauban fortifications and harbour) a mere five years hence and had forgotten about it—like the Wizard Gandalf said, “I have no memory of this place,” but being as function follows form for citadels, certain patterns start to emerge that tend to blur together.

Happily we had not remembered as we got to discover more, including the rows of former oyster-mongers bright water-colour shacks that had been conserved and converted to boutiques and studios—which reminded me of the laboratories and dwellings of the court alchemists of Prague whose workshops around the castle were resigned to a similar fate but didn't cost an extra entry fee to see—strongholds of Protestantism where the Huguenots had refuge given the island’s remote location, the Jesuit abbey converted into the Mairie, the city hall and chamber of commerce, and the historic square with a fountain that marked in neo-Renaissance style the inclusion of Île d’Orélon on the circuit of the Tour de France, acknowledged some ninety years after a jibe with competing publishers of a bicycle and a car magazines decided to put rubber to the road.  

Our bike trekking here, though no where near epic, took us through some really amazing landscapes of the island.

caveat lector

Though perhaps an object lesson in the reliability of the tabloid-press and this fast-food franchise does carry the daily issue of this particular publication in its restaurants for its diners’ reading pleasure, it seems very tragic that the German outlets would blindly carry this edition the following day after the murderous rampage in Munich, oblivious to the irony. In the main, German journalism is more reserved and sparing on speculation or salacious details (to protect the parties involved) and may never disclose names until one event is overcome by the next catastrophe. ISIS is the Cosplay Caliphate by its nature attracts losers and cowards to its sick and contorted cause, and operating under the principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity, gladly will accept someone settling personal scores under their ægis and allow the media to will connections that may or may not be there.

hühnergott

We discovered on the Atlantic stretch of beach leading to the lighthouse (Phare) of Chassiron on the northernmost tip of the Île d’Oléron thousands of stone piles (cáirn).  It was a really arresting and surprising composition, like a landscape from the imagination of Anton Gaudí.  The collected and arranged stones were obliviously bleached and hewn by the sea, pock-marked and made me think of the received folk-belief of the Hühnergotten (equivalent to the Celtic idea of the Adders’ Stone) that a rock with a naturally (or preternaturally) bored hole is a lucky charm—presumably because it can be strung through easily and worn as an amulet.  Not all of these stones could have been eroded by time and tide to specifications like this one I spied but left on the beach to achieve a perfect poultry-form (I realise that hühn has nothing to do with chicken but it is an association that gets reinforced like Sparkasse as Cheese Bank) as I think that would have been too magical.  I knew, however, that each stone was tending in that direction at least as we stacked and balanced ours along the beach as well before proceeding to the lighthouse and latter day ensemble at the promontory.

revenons à nos moutons

With it being Bastille Day, one could be forgiven for taking the title to be one of the rousing but lesser known verses from La Marseille, but it is actually a French idiom to the effect “but we digress,” which sometimes makes an appearance in English too as a turn of phrase.
From an anonymous medieval play called La Farce de Maître Pathelin, an anti-hero and petty thief tries to confuse a county magistrate trying him for sheep-wrangling but introducing details from a second crime—to which the judge cries “but let us return to our sheep at hand.”