“Soldats nous voilà sauvés, nous sommes à Paris!” Napoléon proclaimed to the soldiers who accompanied him when they arrived in Sisteron on March 5th. Now, that would never be the first thought to enter my mind when I get off the bus in the parking lot overlooking centre-Sisteron, where there is always a cluster of teenagers slouching around a scooter or a dumpster, smoking and groping each other, but I suppose my road has usually been easier than old Boney’s (I’m usually asleep for most of it). And I can see why he’d feel like relaxing and rejoicing a bit within this intensely fortified carapace of a town, which sits sentinel astride a point where two great mille-feuille fins of limestone form a narrows on the Durance, controlling the only passage north-south for quite some distance.
I always have a few hours to kill in Sisteron, so I climb as high as I can up into the Citadelle above the town, whose medieval fortifications grew out of a Roman camp, which itself was built on the site of a celto-ligurian oppidum. In other words, it’s been a strategic place for an awfully long time. These days the upper reaches of the Citadelle are closed until tourist season begins to rear its head in April, but one can still look out over the town from a few levels in.
And if it’s too gray and gusty a winter’s day to sit long up in the ramparts, Sisteron’s a good town for wandering leewards in the narrow streets.
And when one has tired of the streets and the squares and of trying to figure out why the museum devoted to clocks and the measurement of time that one would actually really like to visit always thanks one for being understanding of its fermeture exceptionelle; there's a good bookstore (better than the books section of the Castellane tobac, anyway) and enough bars in Sisteron that one can install oneself in a corner and drink coffees for a couple of hours without risking becoming a regular in any of them. These bars do a good trade through the middle of the day, mostly in pastis and lotto tickets, and often I have to work at not drawing attention to myself by laughing at some of the (unprintable) conversations I overhear. I know I’m drawing attention to myself just by being there, but in French bars, and especially in these mountains of the southeast where outsiders are milked for their money in summertime and regarded with unabashed suspicion in winter, a female can sit alone in a bar without the book in her hand functioning as a neon pester-lure: Ask me what I’m reading! I’m dying to tell you about it! When someone new enters a bar, restaurant or shop, he greets everyone already there with a “Bonjour messieurs-dames!” and for his friends in the assembled company, kisses (around Castellane it’s just a kiss on each cheek, but in Sisteron and further north it’s three kisses). As a stranger I’m given just the slightest glance, to make sure I’m not somebody who needs to be kissed, and then I’m completely ignored by everyone but the bartender until it comes time for someone to leave the bar; at which point, as part of the customary leave-taking all around they usually look me right in the eye and tell me to have a good day. It’s all very civilized, for a bunch of hollow-cheeked dipsos whose leathery look might be as much the product of pickling as of days picking apples or cherries in the mountain sun. But I’m never sure if the same rules apply in the street, so if during the rambling portion of my few hours in Sisteron I happen to see a group of familiar barflies making an impasse of a narrow street, I choose a different alley, knowing that if I recognize them they certainly recognize me.
With all this killing time I’m waiting for my next bus, which takes me further north along Napoléon’s road toward Gap, crossing over into the Hautes-Alpes department. (My department was called les Basses-Alpes, from the creation of the departments in 1790 until 1970, when it was changed to les Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. I suppose people would rather be Haute anything than Basse something...) I get off at Tallard and am met by my new friend Stephen Ducke, a flute player from Athlone who has been living on a mountaintop above the village of Théus for about ten years.
From Steve’s house you’re looking at the real, crunchy Alps, to which the mountains in my area, and even Steve’s, are just the footstools.
Steve organizes Irish music workshops and sells instruments at festivals and on his website Tradschool, where he is also quite prolific about posting nice versions of some very tasty tunes.
His daughter Sinéad is well-versed in the Irish arts; she performed her own version of Riverdance, complete with costume changes, glitter, instrumental bits, a demonstration on how loudly I was to applaud when I wasn’t doing it properly, and a well-practiced haughty look over the shoulder at the end of every number.
Meanwhile her older brother William wasn’t really talking to me yet, but Steve assured me that the plastic dinosaurs he kept assembling and bringing downstairs to show his papa while Sinéad danced were entirely for my benefit. Later he shyly told me that he is a vampire, but that he wouldn’t bite me if I didn’t make fun of him, and after that we were friends.
Their mother Maïna has recently taken over a herd of goats from her parents, who live on the same hilltop, and she sells her cheeses at several markets per week.
There are around 70 goats in the herd,
including kids of various ages, like this little mewling fellow still all wet from having just popped out of his mother, who was in a bad humor about the afterbirth dangling from her backside.
They’re milked by hand twice a day
by Maïna and her cousin, who’s real name is Roger but who everyone calls Roy (after Roy Rogers), and who in his spare time uses the workshop at the back of the goat-shed to make armor for medieval reenactments. His people, he told me, used to be lords of Castellane.
There are almost as many cats as goats on this mountaintop.
Steve tells me they were colonized some years ago by a mother cat who decided their barn was a better place to raise her kits than wherever she’d littered, and that after the population exploded there were some serious problems with inbreeding, culminating in one poor wall-eyed eejit who walked in circles and shat everywhere. But with a modicum of feline husbandry on Roy’s part they’re all looking relatively sane and healthy, and there’s not a rodent in miles.
As evening falls Steve and I drive down the mountain and up another to collect Peter Keilty, a bouzouki and mandolin player, singer and carpenter who has also been living here a while with his French wife and their children; and two of Peter’s neighbors, Thierry and Jean-Michel, who’ve become our traveling fan club, partly owing to their evident enthusiasm for Irish music, but by default as well, I suspect, since there are no pubs in their own village and they’re quite happy to drink pints in Oraison on a Saturday night while we play. With this detour Oraison is about an hour and a half south of Théus, in the valley of the Durance, and one of its several bars is the Connemara, a crêperie/pub operated by Florence and Eddie Fitzgerald, another Franco-hibernian couple. The pub is small and dinner while we play is by reservation only; when passers-by see us playing in the window and try to come in Flo has to turn them away because there’s simply no room for them. We’re met in Oraison by Hubert Chenot, the fiddler I’ve been playing with on as regular a basis as possible since last spring.
all session photos: Florence Fitzgerald
It was Hub that sought Steve out when I was away from France in the autumn; it was Hub that knew we all had a good deal in common in terms of taste in tunes and pacing and all ought to be playing together, despite the hundreds of mountainous miles that separate us.
It’s rare enough even in places where there’s a high concentration of Irish musicians to find the ones with whom one really shares a common aesthetic and approach to the music. To find such like-minded players in the wasteland that is traditional Irish music in the southeast of France is not something we take for granted, and we’ve all been working at each other’s tunes, shared via email or during long afternoons of tune-swapping whenever I’m at Hub’s house or Steve’s.
A good session depends not only complicity among the musicians but on the good-will and leniency of the publican. At the pub where Hub and I (and at least a dozen other musicians) sometimes play in Marseille the Irish bartenders don’t even try to hide their scorn for everything we do, so the Fitzgeralds’ hospitality in Oraison is something we don’t take for granted either. The space is such that we can hear each other clearly, even when all the diners are chatting away, and the walls are decked according to the whims of Eddie Fitzgerald’s obsession with American movies, Westerns in particular. I don’t mind staring at Steve McQueen or Paul Newman while I play, and the pub’s tiny water-closet is dominated by two of Hollywood’s most impressive sets of chompers: a poster for The Shining on one wall and Jaws on the other. We play for as long as we like, usually long after the last listeners have gone home, and then we stand at the bar with Flo and with Eddie, who’s been cooking in the kitchen all night and is eager for a bit of a chin-wag in English over a few last jars ‘for the ditch.’ We’re all lucky and we know it, and that’s something to be savored before we hit the high road.
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