by Beth Arnold
An ongoing series about uprooting our lives in America and moving to France. For what's happened before, see previous Jours of Our Lives entries here.
THE WIND HOWLED, and rain steadily pounded the roofs and streets, land and sea throughout the night. The leak in our skylight, that streamed down Matisse's “Odalisque á la culotte grise” for the first time when we were away, was back and silent drops of water were glazing the floor. I stayed up and read. I was close to finishing Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser, and since I've become quite fascinated with "that Austrian woman" as the French would say as a slur during the lifetime of this much and wrongly maligned Queen of France (in Ms. Frazier's opinion and now mine as well), I couldn't put the heavy tome down.
I am on a course of reading French history to understand the roots of the country I'm in. I've gone from Middle Ages to Revolution, or, to put it another way, from murder, mayhem, and pillaging to murder, mayhem, and pillaging. Some things don't seem to change in time—with the exception of who’s doing it to whom. Constant warfare together with inhumane atrocities weren't a daily routine in the France of the 18th century, as they had been in the 11th and 12th, when survival often depended upon the whims of one's ruler and/or conqueror, as well as on the Pope and Church, and on what terror was improvised and who owed what revenge to whom. That is, until the people rose up against the royal family and aristocracy and chopped off so many heads that streets ran thick with blood. As the heads, hearts, and various other entrails of whoever was the last to be tried and found guilty of some treason real or made up were paraded upon pikes around town, the rioters were literally covered in the sticky red fluid that courses through life or drains from the lack of it. The radicals were evidently delighted to mutilate bodies, which is a bit disappointing, but the blood of their victims reflected some sort of (twisted and anti) communion with their freedom. The point of changing the system in France was valid; these actions were dubious at best. But this is inevitably the question of revolution: Must it be murderous and violent?
Archduchess Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (1755-1793), Kunsthistorisches Museum, (Image via Wikipedia)
I love a good storm and the uneven lament of the wind. My sun and moon chimes on the balcony were jangling so hard I worried they would be ripped apart and tossed to Ceret, but I left them alone. Even after I crawled under the covers at 2 A.M., I listened as the driving rain hit the tiles on the roof and the wind yowled through the black night.
Last Saturday in Collioure, the day after the storm, it rained on and off and the sea was in turmoil. Waves crashed and sprayed against the ramparts of the Chateau Royale and covered the path around it. There was no beach. Debris had washed up and down streets. Fervent surfers dressed in wet-suits caught and rode gigantic waves into a rock wall for shore.
In my dictionary of symbolism, the storm is said to represent "a powerful manifestation of the gods and their will." For me, it is true that part of a storm's attraction is its natural majesty, and in my novel Innocent Lanier the whole book is turned on a potent tornado that spins the characters' worlds around. I dream of these whirling winds as well.
If storms carry messages of the gods' will, then the world must have thundered when France revolted and massacred the establishment that needed to be reborn. And in a quieter fashion, a tempest blew again to split open the bindings of art when Matisse and Picasso covered canvas with their rich imaginings. They were riders of the storm that they themselves created, and they were lucky enough to catch the cultural wave and tame it.
But no matter where the lightning strikes, as the winds of change howl, so does man. We all must ride the storms that are thrown us. Or get bucked off and drown.
Beth Arnold
February 2004
Collioure, France
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Unless otherwise indicated, photos by Beth Arnold. Not subject to use without permission.
Beth Arnold lives and writes in Paris, where she produces her "Letter From Paris" new media project.
Jours of Our Lives illlustration by artist (and couturier) Elizabeth Cannon. To find out more about her, click here.
You can find the Chasing Matisse book by James Morgan here at Amazon--or you can find it in or order it from your favorite book store.
If you'd like to start at the beginning of Jour of Our Lives, click here.
