Weeknote #20: visiting Chassiers

Week 31 (31 July–6 August 2023)

This week came and went really fast! It was a bit less hot but we didn't do much, friends of F's were visiting, we stayed home a lot, reading gardening computering watching (mostly thoughtless) movies. Still, a few things:

Visiting Chassiers

Went on a guided tour of Chassiers, the largest village (thus name of) our municipality, and one of Ardèche's villages de caractère¹. A guide showed us around and I was surprised—Chassiers is pretty quiet and I didn't think it would be so interesting! Some notes:

• Churches: the oldest church in the village (Roman, may date back to a 6th century monastery) is unique because it has two naves ending in two apses at the east end, one circular and one decagonal. (Read up on church architecture terms but I might be misusing these, it's pretty complicated.) One theory is that one nave was sacred while the other was not. The largest church in the village (Gothic, rebuilt in 1396) was built during the Catholic-Protestant religion wars so it's fortified: there are holes to drop things on enemies from the tower, ways to barricade the door, a narrow staircase that Protestant invaders would have to climb in a line before ducking to come out right under where a defending Catholic would wait with an axe. Protestants never attacked.
• Silk: between the 16th and the 19th centuries silk was commonly made in the region, first in homes and then on a larger scale with dedicated magnaneries. This influenced the designs of traditional cévenol homes: a covered, first-floor terrace was called "couradou" (sounds like "courant d'air": a breeze) and that's where people would unwind silk worm cocoons after they were boiled—it turns out that boiling live worms can really stink up a place.
• Silver: silver was another major industry in the region, and Chassiers is right by Largentière, a town that sits on former silver mines and takes its name from the French "argent" (silver). Silver mining brought along a lot of benefits (prosperity, employment, a dot on the map), challenges (population increase) and issues (diseases, accidents). The Largentière silver mines closed as late as 1982
• Vines: walking around the village I also really liked seeing a number of really old vines, sometimes climbing on a fence all around a house, probably centenarian. It reminded me of some vines from the Vitis Prohibita documentary that we saw a few weeks ago, it would be great to know which varietal they are!

I'm sure that a lot of villages around have stories like this. Would love to learn about them!

Garden update

I wake up at 6am these days and after coffee I go down to the garden with F. There's not a lot to do (most of the work weeding, weedwhacking, preparing the soil and structures was done in the spring and early summer) so we mosty look at veggies and water them and chat.

There are lots of tomatoes and zucchini and eggplants and green beans and and and. Different varietals of each. The only veggie we really buy is cucumber, they were planted a bit late here so we don't have a lot. That means that we don't go to the market much anymore, and when we go it's mostly for bread² and cheese.

Fruit-wise plums³ are ripe in the garden, a full month after another varietal that our friend N has. We've made the first plum pies and are planning to dry/freeze a bunch more, and make jams. We ate the first wild blackberries and picked a kilo for more jams. Peach⁴ season is ending, we're eating about 10 a day in a sort of race against mold.

Watching

Continuing from last week with blockbuster franchises, and starting to watch centenarian films.

• Rocky III (1982) by Sylvester Stallone 4/10
• Felix in Hollywood (1923) by Otto Messmer 6/10
• Barbie (2023) by Greta Gerwig 8/10
• Rocky IV (1985) by Sylvester Stallone 2/10
• Rocky V (1990) by John G. Avildsen 3/10
• Rocky Balboa (2006) by Sylvester Stallone 5/10
• Creed (2015) by Ryan Coogler 7/10

Reading

Still deep in Nicolas Bouvier's excellent L'usage du monde, should finish it next week.