EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALNovember 24, 1998
Ondres
Cote d’Argent
A tree tunnel takes us to Pau. The deciduous arbour lines the highway
from St. Martin de Seignanx to the outskirts of the winter resort. A wall of pale blue
Pyrenees appears behind the city as we enter from the Northwest. It’s
warm—perhaps 15 degrees. Like every French city in the off-season, there’s a
mass of construction and les promeneurs stop along the Boulevard des Pyrenees
to ogle not at the spectacular mountains, but the tiny man in the crane up in the sky.
Pau is a university town, with shady parks and Belle Epoque (1880-1910)
architecture. It is the capitol of the Bearn region and the one largest cities in the
central Pyrenees. In the 19th century it was a favorite resort for the English,
with mild autumns and winters. Here King Henry IV was born after his mother, Jean
d’Albret traveled for 19 days by carriage from Picardy at the northern tip of France.
She was in the eighth month of her pregnancy but she insisted on having her baby in Pau.
She sang throughout the labour, convinced that this would make her child as tough and
resilient as she was, and in keeping with local tradition, as soon as the infant was born
his lips were smeared with garlic and the regional Jurancon wine.
The Chateau de Pau embodies an enthusiastic history of
remodeling and embellishment. It was built in the 14th Century by Gaston Febus,
was given a Renaissance makeover and then completely restored in the 19th C in
the time of Napoleon III. In the 16th century Marguerite d’Angouleme, the
sister of the King, resided in the castle and fostered Pau as an intellectual centre. The
castle’s exterior drips with Gothic ornamentation and perches over the River Gave de
Pau with the snowy Pyrenees in the distance.
Today is a day of errands and we find the Gites De France office
for the department of Les Pyrenees-Atlantiques and buy a catalogue for 55F. Rich tries to
call France Telecom’s Wannadoo registration office and is confronted with yet
another roadblock. The software will not take his foreign credit card number and so we
must mail in a registration form. The form is checked and returned to the client with an
access code. This does not work for us because we do not have a return address (gites
rarely do) and we haven’t booked our gite for next week. The next plan is to go back
to the tres gentil Telecom Man in Bayonne tomorrow and see if he can register for
us over the phone.
