Le Midi
Claude Lanselle
I woke up somewhere in the Rhone Valley. The sky was blue, there were sunny hills in the distance, the fields nearby were green with the hue of crops; lettuce, beans, melons and wonder of wonders, tomato-bearing trees! In December! I had discovered persimmons. I was nine years old. The year was 1934.
The train stopped in Montelimar. The vendors on the quay peddled bars of nougat and calissons, a marvel of diamond-shaped candy made of almond paste created in the 15th Century for the wedding of a local princess. How could I not fall for this land of beauty, of bounty, this, forever; my Midi. How could I not transfer my allegiance, bare myself, cleanse myself of everything Northern and plunge body and soul into this ocean of color. I rolled the name Montelimar on my tongue and, in time, learned to pronounce it with a Southern accent, sounding the “n” and dragging the last syllable, all the way to Marseille where the train stopped at the St Charles station, almost as large as the ones in Paris, and then went east along the coast, following the Mediterranean’s deep blue, its creeks, its red rocky points in the Esterel, stopping at Toulon were I saw sailors in uniform, on to Cannes were my mother commented with approval on the attire of a gentleman in grey pants, blue blazer with brass buttons, scarf in his shirt neck opening and, oh yes, the first pair of two-tone shoes I ever saw, black and white. Finally, we arrived in Nice, sunny and warm, where I was to live for the next fifteen years.
We left Valenciennes in Northern France, near the Belgian border the morning before and took a train to the North Station in Paris, cold and grey on an early December day. We walked, had lunch in a restaurant somewhere, walked some more, seeing the sights. I remember the wide, cracked sidewalks and pairs of policemen wearing short capes, officers nicknamed hirondelles, swallows, by the Parisians. We boarded the night train going South at the Lyon Station, had started dinner in the wagon restaurant while the train was gaining speed in the suburbs. Only the promise of vanilla ice cream with meringues kept me awake till dessert.
Back in our compartment, I fell soundly asleep.
Almost twenty years later I left France to live in southern California, and there I found red bougainvillea, the same one that grew all the way to the top of our four story apartment house in Nice; the same cypresses, the same lemon and orange trees, the same blue sky, the same sun, the same curved roof tiles. There, I would spend the rest of the life I woke up to, as a boy, one December morning, in the midst of Cezanne country.
You can go home again. Peut-etre. Almost.
Claude Lanselle writes about his life in France before and during WW II, and lives in southern California where the sky is always blue and something is always in bloom.
