Secret weapons

 

It's an extraordinary thing, actually to see the tools of the trade of the secret operations that took place in Nazi-occupied France. Impossible to look at them, as here at the Musée de la Résistance at Fontaine de Vaucluse, without imagining the fear and sheer courage that went with their use in the darkest days of World War Two.

 

Here is an SOE wireless set disguised as a small leather suitcase. Operators knew that if they were challenged to open the case during a security check on a train, for example, it was as good as a death warrant for there could be no other explanation for it other than the owner's occupation as a spy or active resistant. And neither spy nor resistant had the protection of a uniform under the Geneva Convention.

 

At the Tangmere Military Aviation Museum (see my previous post here), more mundane but still vital equipment is on display. The disguises were intricate and ingenious: a compartmentalised fountain pen contains a silk map and compass. Compared to the basic magnetised compass in the tip of a match it's a de luxe item - a precursor to James Bond's armoury, perhaps...

 

Special agents were issued with British-made imitations of French cigarettes and matches to make their "French" identities more plausible. Their pockets and bags were carefully checked before they set off across the Channel for any clues that would give away their true nationality. The fabric of their clothes, their buttons and jewellery and shoes: all had to be right. The British even cooked special soap with ashes to mimic the poor tablets that most French had to use during the war. 

 

But among the artefacts from a deadly serious time, there are still moments of humour. This one tells you a lot about how the British saw the ordinary French: a bar of French Menier chocolate "modified to produce a garlic odour on the consumer's breath"! A classic worthy of Fairfax and Carstairs in Allo Allo...

 

Communications...stand by!

 

Racing to update my website before US publication in a matter of weeks, I've spent the afternoon writing a Reading Guide for The Sea Garden (all the while having a head full of ideas I am trying to pin down for the next book.) Then I suddenly realised it was well over a week since I'd managed a blog post. I hadn't a clue what to write until I found this photo of what my brain feels like at the moment, all loose wires and dodgy connections!

 

Actually, it's a Second World War wireless transmitter disguised as a leather suitcase, as used by British agents and their contacts in Occupied France. This one is in the Musée de la Résistance at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. Being a wireless operator was an extremely dangerous job, with a life expectancy down to a few weeks by the closing stage of the war. Extraordinary to think of the bravery of those who used this machine in the field and the lives that depended on the Morse code messages (see the tapper at the front) they managed to send out.

 

Next month, in the countdown to publication on June 24, I'm intending to post all sorts of pictures like this that are relevant to the book and which should add to the experience for any reader who comes to this blog looking for interesting background. The redesigned website is looking pretty good too - thanks to Judith Barrett. Not long now before that's up and running as well.

A walk to La Source

 

It may be June, but the River Sorgue is high at Fontaine de Vaucluse this year, rushing and tumbling over the weirs, still full of mountain melt water that tints it glacier blue. On a summer's day, this would normally be a placid emerald pool where clear water babbles over green fronds.

 

But the cold spring in Provence has meant snow has lingered on the Alps - though we have escaped the terrible rains and floods of central Europe - and the rivers are still lively.

I've written on this blog before about Fontaine de Vaucluse, the village at the end of the "Closed Valley" from where the name of the Vaucluse department is derived. In The Lantern, Dom brings Eve here and they walk to the great wall of rock, at the base of which springs the source of the Sorgue. It's a very pretty walk, not far at all, out of the village past the shops and restaurants and along the river. Even when there are other people doing the same, there are always quiet spots along the way for reflection.

Approaching the source, the sheer force of water being forced up from the ground and pushed over rocks can be seen in churning white falls.

High on a promontory stand the ruins of the Bishop of Cavaillon's palace, giving a sense of power to the isolation...

And at the dead end of the valley is the source, with its fig tree that drinks but once a year, according to local legend. It's said that no one knows the depth of this pool; even today it is impossible to measure. This year, the surface markers on the far wall have been submerged, but the cold blue water that has filtered through hundreds of miles of rock still has an extraordinary quality of stillness as it gathers here.

More detective work leads to Fontaine de Vaucluse...

Yet again, the blogging world brings like minds together. My trail of curiosity and detection that went from finding Elizabeth David’s house in Ménerbes to the tragic suicide of artist Nicolas de Staël in Antibes (The concert and the final painting) piqued the interest of another Francophile, Evelyn Jackson at Melanged Magic.

What was it about the music in last concert de Staël listened to in Paris that had such a galvanising, creative and ultimately tragic effect on him? Intrigued, Evelyn listened to a recording of Schoenberg's Serenade Opus 24, and read in the accompanying commentary that the central portion of the work is a sonnet by Petrarch.

‘Which sonnet was it?’ writes Evelyn. ‘Could there be a clue to why this particular piece of music 'sang' to de Staël? I spent most of the morning doing the Google thing and found that the sonnet of Schoenberg's 'Serenade' is Sonnet 217, part of Petrarch's Cantoniziere to Laura, his life-long love and Muse. It took a bit of digging, but here is the sonnet in English:

Sonnetto 217

Once I hoped, lamenting so justly
making such fervent verses heard,
that pity's warmth might be felt
in that hard heart that freezes in mid-summer:

and that the cruel cloud, that chills
and veils it, might disperse with the breeze
of my ardent voice, or others might hate her
for hiding those eyes that destroy me.

Yet I seek no pity for myself, nor hatred
for her: I do not wish it, nor is it possible
(such are my stars, and my cruel fate):

but I sing her heavenly beauty, so
that, when I'm free of this flesh, the world
will know the sweetness of my death 

‘It's one of Petrarch's later sonnets that speaks more of unrequited love and the reality that hope is gone. Laura barely knows he exists and will never love him. I think the last stanza is very telling. The poet almost looks forward to the “sweetness of my death”. Is this what compelled de Staël to take his own life? Was he following Petrarch's advice? Certainly it was well-known that de Staël suffered from bouts of despair and depression, but could the music with its core of unrequited love and death have tipped him over the edge? We'll never know for sure, of course. All this is pure speculation driven by that endless curiosity to know more of the story. But isn't it intriguing how poetry, music and great paintings melange into a story of love, life and death?’

I don’t think I can add anything to Evelyn’s words, except to say thank you very much for the determined research and pushing the story on.

In yet another illustration of how creativity always seems interconnected, the medieval Italian poet Petrarch is forever associated with Fontaine de Vaucluse – a beautiful and (out of season) a rather eerie spot that ends in a wall of rock and cold green water. It happens to be one of my favourite places in Provence and I blogged about it here, giving some of the background to the story of Petrarch’s infatuation with Laura.

Fontaine de Vaucluse

           

            The River Sorgue flows green and glassy through Fontaine de Vaucluse. The green is extraordinary, a malachite composition of underwater meadows of emerald weeds, reflection of the deep greens on the steep valley above, and the ice-blue purity of the mysterious source that boils up from a pool beneath the cliffs, a pool so deep they say it has never been accurately measured.

                                                                 from The Lantern



The village is a dead end, a beautiful place where the river rises from a wall of rock. Held captive on three sides by fractured precipices that climb steeply into the sky, Fontaine de Vaucluse is the place that gave this part of Provence its name, from the Latin Vallis Clausa, the closed valley.

      

The stones breathe a tangible sense of antiquity. People have been drawn here since Neolithic times; a ruined castle perches high above. The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74) lived here and wrote love sonnets to his Laura. An unrequited love, it was, that brought "a rain of tears”. Though a hundred years later, when the poet was being recognised as the Father of the Renaissance, his worship of Laura from afar was already being romanticised. And I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible that the water coming down from the mountain in this image could well represent the river at Fontaine de Vaucluse.

        Petrarch, Laura, and Cupid c. 1444 (from the Bibliotheca Nazionale Centrale di Roma)

But there are mischievous Provencal fables, tales told for centuries by the shepherds as they walked their flocks between the summer and winter pastures, that take a different view of Petrarch’s doomed love. A rather macabre slant, as it happens, involving the switching of plague-victims’ bodies in Avignon, and much more besides for the storytellers to relish on their interminable journeys. The tale of The Shepherd of Fontaine can be found in the collection The Provencal Tales by Michael de Larrabeiti.

Nowadays the paper mill driven by the Sorgue prints Petrarch’s words on single hand-blocked sheets, embedded with tiny dried petals, among many other tourist offerings. Along the side of the mill, a path leads from shops and restaurants up to the source of the river: the great bowl of spring water that is the only exit for the vast caverns of water in the subterranean basin that stretches from Mont Ventoux to the Lure in the east.

Looking deep into the greens and blues in the pool is like a meditation; you can get lost in the shifting dreamscape of colour, cold-clear and almost iridescent. This photograph was snapped with our basic little camera and simply cropped. I’ve done nothing to the colour.

Trying to describe the river here, as it rushes and then stills close to the weirs, I often feel inadequate to the task of capturing it in words, tasting the bitterness of inarticulacy, perhaps trying too hard. Better perhaps simply to sit and absorb the scene at one of the café terraces, where you can sip a glass of rosé while the timeless flow of extravagant sea-greens gurgles and rushes past your table. Then the pictures form, half-real, half-imaginary, and the words come too.