In Normandy, it's the cheese

Reporting today from the charming town of Neufchâtel-en-Bray, in Upper Normandy. We drove in from Picardy today, on our way to Rouen. Rouen is the unofficial capital of Normandy, and is a big city. Neufchâtel is not a big city.

As we entered Normandy at a point a little north and east of here, at Blangy-sur-Bresle, the bottom fell out. That's typical — it often rains in Normandy. When I lived here for a year 38 years ago (ouch!), that's what I learned. People told me: En Normandie, il ne pleut pas beaucoup... mais il pleut souvent. "It doesn't rain a lot, but it rains all the time." A fine drizzle is what you get on a typical Normandy day. In fact, Rouen is known as "the chamber pot of Normandy" — le pot de chambre de la Normandie. This afternoon, it rained cats and dogs just north of Neufchâtel, but the storm lasted only 30 or 40 minutes.

One reason we came to Neufchâtel is the cheese. And no, it's not the cream cheese product that goes by that name in America. It's more like a Camembert or Brie, but not exactly. It's a little saltier, a little crumblier or chalky inside when it's not very ripe, and it's delicious. It's a heart-shaped cheese that's made from cow's milk and has a crust like a Camembert. I can buy it in Saint-Aignan, either at the market on Saturdays, or in the supermarket. I've blogged about it before, and probably will again. Now I've tasted it on site.

Yesterday afternoon, when we arrived at the hotel where we're staying, right in the middle of town, I asked the man at the front desk if he thought it would be possible to make us a couple of small salads for dinner, with a side of the local cheese. He said the only way they could do that was to serve cheese as a croustillant — wrapped in a brick or phyllo dough and deep fried — on top of some salad greens. Neither CHM nor I wanted melted cheese. Melting takes all its good flavor away.

The brasserie Chez Jean-Pierre in Neufchâtel-en-Bray

Since the hotel restaurant wasn't willing to accommodate us, I went out for a walk to see if another restaurant or café might have what we wanted. I found one pretty quickly. It's called Chez Jean-Pierre and it's definitely a down-home kind of place. Jean-Pierre greeted us. He was sitting at a table facing the front door when we walked in.

He looked at me and said: "Are you hungry?" Yes, I told him, we would like to have something to eat. "I've been sitting here since noon," he said, "and I'm still waiting for my food!" What a card. He laughed and then he got up and showed us to a table. Then I finally knew he really did run the place.

Chez Jean-Pierre is not a chichi place.

When we told him we wanted just cheese, he said he would bring us the platter. On it, there were three Neufchâel cheeses, a Camembert, some Bleu d'Auvergne, and several others. We said we'd just have some Neufchâtel. No, he said. I'll just leave the platter here and you eat what you want. What do you want to drink?

We had a pitcher of red wine and we proceeded to do a serious Neufchâtel dégustation. But the best thing is that he told us where he buys his Neufchâtel cheese. He gets it from a farmer out on the west side of town, across the street from the SuperU supermarket. "Not in the supermarket," he was very careful to explain, "but at the farm across the road. The farmer's name is Philippe Monnier, and he sells retail."

So that's where we are going tomorrow morning before we leave Neufchâtel and the Pays de Bray. And we'll take some good cheese back to Paris and Saint-Aignan.

Churches, museums, names, and cousins

Okay, I got the computer working again, I think. This is a test. It is only a test. And it's a brief report on what we did yesterday.

CHM spent the morning at the Hôtel de Ville, where the town's museum is housed. I took a walk around, looking at what remains of the château and other monuments. Most of the town was destroyed during World War I. It was rebuilt afterward. It's hard to imagine a town that had to be entirely rebuilt — except, remember, Walt and I lived in San Francisco for 17 or 18 years.

This restaurant called Le Provençal
is in the town of Péronne in Picardy.

We had lunch with the museum director in a restaurant called Le Provençal. In Picardy! The food was very good: a gratin of crayfish and leeks, roasted lamb, veal kidneys in a cream sauce, a salad with cheese, and ice cream for dessert.

The museum director is a man of about 40, I would say, and not at all stuffy. He's an archeology and history specialist. From him, I learned why it is the case that so many houses up here in Picardy are built out of brick. More about that later. It has to do with... what happened here between 1914 and 1918.

In the afternoon, we drove north about 10 miles to see things and meet people in two villages where the M family originally came from. We were guided by one of CHM's cousins. We went to the local church, which had to be rebuilt after the 1914-18 war too. For two people who are not at all religious, at least in any "organized" sense, we have spent more time in churches over the past 48 hours than the law allows.

Windows in the post-WWI church in the village
are dedicated to Joan of Arc and Saint Martin.

One of CHM's cousins is the mayor of one of the two villages. CHM had never met him before. He took us to see the local church, and then he invited us into his house for a drink — we had water, because the weather has been so hot and we are always thirsty. We met his wife, daughter, and a couple of grandchildren. It was a lot of fun for me to see their house and hear them talk.

CHM's grandfather was and still is quite a celebrity in these little towns. There's a plaque on the house where he lived. Well, it's not exactly the same house. It too had to be rebuilt after WWI, but the house is on the same plot of land where CHM's grandfather lived. And there's a monument in a little park in the village that features a bust of CHM's grandfather, with information about his birth and death.

A monument to the memory of CHM's grandfather
was erected in this Picardy village in 1909.

CHM also has or had cousins in the village whose last name is Cousin, so we made a lot of jokes about "the Cousin cousins" — les cousins Cousin. As in small towns everywhere, including and maybe especially in the ones in the little North Carolina county where I grew up, most of the population seems to belong to one of three or four local clans. Many of them, then, have the same last name.

And it turns out that many of them here in Picardy also have the same first name. There were or are Charles and petit Charles, two sisters-in-law both named Madeleine (who couldn't stand each other), and so on. CHM has exactly the same first and last names as his grandfather. Just as I have the same first and last names as my paternal grandfather (not to mention my father).

Later in the afternoon we drove back to Péronne, the bigger town, to go back to the museum in the Town Hall. Madame le Maire of the town came to greet CHM. He was quite the VIP, and very gracious about it.

From Paris to Picardy in a Kangoo

What a day today! I got up at 4:30 a.m., just because I couldn't sleep any longer. I was at CHM's apartment in Paris. I had breakfast — tea and a couple of biscottes — and checked my e-mail and blog comments. I posted something I had written the previous evening about the "troubles" in Saint-Aignan (more about that later). Then at 6:40 a.m. I left CHM's place and walked 15 minutes to the train station where I had reserved a rental car.

The agency opened at 7:00, and they did exactly that: at 7:00, I was waiting out front and saw the lights come on. The door was unlocked. I walked in, handed over the reservation confirmation, my passport, and my credit card, and 15 minutes later I was out the door. It took me a while to find my way out and down to the parking garage where the Renault Kangoo was parked, but I finally found the vehicle and was on my way out onto the streets of Paris by 7:30. I got lost for a second, but a minute later I had found my way again and was back at CHM's by 7:45. Paris traffic was still pretty light.

The church in Fresnoy-la-Rivière, north of Crépy-en-Valois

I pulled the car into the courtyard of his building and we started loading it up. More about the contents later, but let me say it was a lot of stuff. We were taking it to a town about 100 miles north of Paris — in the area where CHM's family came from and where his father had a house built some 75 years ago. After we were all loaded up, we headed out. I decided to drive up the Champs-Elysées over to the Porte Maillot to get to the Boulevard Périphérique, and that was probably a mistake. There was a lot of traffic, and road work all along the way was slowing things down.

The village church in Rancourt, north of Péronne

Fact is, by 9:30 we were on the A1 autoroute, driving past CDG airport and on our way to Picardy. We stopped first to see a very old church in the village of Morienval (more later), and then went into the small city of Compiègne for lunch. We drove on to see the 11th-century cathedral at Noyon (birthplace of John Calvin) and then on to the town of Saint-Quentin, where I also had never been before.

A German military cemetery in the village of Rancourt

Now we are in Picardy near the town called Péronne, and in the middle of many of the major WWI battlefields. We saw British, French, and German military cemeteries this afternoon. I've never been up here before, and I have to say it is beautiful. The fine hot weather doesn't hurt.

I don't really have time to blog, but I'll tell you I took 350 pictures today. I'm having a lot of trouble trying to process them on the laptop I brought along on the trip. One day soon I'll be able to post some of them. It's just after 10:00 p.m. as I write this and I need to get some sleep.

Gypsies riot in Saint-Aignan

I left Saint-Aignan yesterday in the middle of a riot and didn't even know it. It must have been going on, or just calming down, when Walt and I drove down to the bridge at about 10:00 a.m., on our way to the train station in Onzain. It was from Amerloque's comment on my blog post yesterday that I learned about it.

Here's the story as I've understood it. Friday night or early Saturday morning, the gendarmes based at the autoroute exit across the river from our village were pursuing a vehicle and had set up a roadblock in the nearby village of Thésée (where there are Roman ruins). A car with a driver and a passenger ran through the roadblock, stopped briefly, and then accelerated abruptly just as two gendarmes were walking toward their car from the front. One of the gendarmes pulled out his pistol and shot at the car — but not the people in it, according to police.

An hour or two later, a body was found dumped on a street in the nearby village of Saint-Romain-sur-Cher. It was somehow identified as the body of the young man who had been driving the car that ran the roadblock in Thésée, or his passenger, six or so miles away. I don't know how all that was determined. He was a gypsy, un manouche, the police reported. Apparently, the members of his community were very angry about his death.

I took a picture in the metro at the Gare d'Austerlitz.
This is an above-ground line (Bobigny-Place d'Italie).

Saint-Romain is the town where my favorite wine co-op is located. I go there often. On the TV news last night, they said that there is a big gypsy community there. I've never seen any sign of such a place. There's a gypsy encampment over near Selles-sur-Cher that I've noticed, and there's one I know about on the other side of Montrichard, but I've obviously been oblivious to what goes on in Saint-Romain.

Anyway, a crowd of people identified on the news as gypsies, or gens du voyage, attacked the gendarme station over at the autoroute exit during the night between Saturday and Sunday. And then on Sunday morning at about 9:00 a.m., the group, made up of as many as 50 people, went to Saint-Aignan and launched an attack on the Gendarmerie there. It's over near the hospital, on the other side of town from where we live.

TV reports said that most of the attackers were wearing ski masks, and some carried crowbars or axes. They cut down and burned three big linden trees, turned over and burned three cars, and entered and looted the neighborhood boulangerie/pâtisserie, taking all the baguettes, croissants, mille-feuilles, and babas au rhum that were in the display cases. The boulangère was quite shaken, as you can imagine; she was interviewed for the TV news. I don't mean to be facetious. Nobody was injured, according to reports.

Here's a link to a video of the incident that was published on the local newspaper's site.

I like this poster I saw in the metro car.
It's about learning a new "tongue" — une nouvelle langue.

Three hundred military personnel were sent to Saint-Aignan to protect the citizenry in the afternoon and for the night. I hope Walt spends a quiet night. I'll write more about this incident as the story develops. It is unbelievable that such a thing could happen in a quiet town like Saint-Aignan. Meanwhile, I had a nice afternoon in Paris, where the weather was beautiful and the food at the Japanese restaurant was, as always, delicious.