Philobiblon

Since the forecast was not for beach weather today, I decided to head for the hills, intending to go to the La Bastide Parfumeur at Mouan-Sartoux, a botanical graden seeking to preserve traditional perfum plants while also looking at ecological issues such as composting and producing slurry. But when I got to the train station the sky was slurry and the rain solid, so I stayed on the train to Grasse, where they’d be more other things to do, a good choice as it turned out, since even in the rain the walk up to the perched citadel of the old town was one of those lovely twisting, narrow steep climbs that delivers a delight at every corner – an ancient wall, a light post with a lamb holding a Christian standard, an open door giving a hint of the steep, twisting, highly defensible staircase within.

The Cathedrale Notre Dame du Puy is definitely worth the climb – the 17th century decorate-everything-to-within- an-inch-of-its-life crowd had a go at it of course, but most of what they put up seems to have fallen down, leaving the lovely pure Romanesque lines of the 11th and 12th century – when they really knew how to build a column – solid, weighty, wrap your arms around and hug the stone warm. (Can you tell I’ve a weakness for the Romanesque?)

I was walking around the church thinking that when our current civilisation has all gone to hell, and most 20th-century structures have fallen into heaps, these columns will still be standing. A really good earthquake might take them out, but otherwise they’ll be here for a great deal longer.

Also displayed around the church are some lovely fragments from this an slightly later periods (a 14th-century brightly painted coffer in low relief – naive in the way of some artist with natural talent but no training or experience of art is naive), but leaping with life and energy.

Then came a short cheese stop for a lovely Mistralou vache, from this cheesemaker – “tome de vache enrobée d’herbes de Provence et de poivre”, which managed to even make rice cakes taste edible, a longer stop in the bistro in the place aux artistes for a coffee and a play with the lovely little York terrier there and a visit to a striking “technotrash gallery. (No prices on anything – which I took to mean, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford”.)

Then it was on to the museum, a better than usual provincial collection ranging through the early paleolithic to the modern perfume bottle, the selection made more by chance than logic. (And Grasse itself seems to date only to about the 11th century.)

Still, past the well-equipped but frustratingly little-labelled old kitchen in the grand mansion that houses the museum – what ARE those giant pincers of the table for? I dread to think – is a lovely, fascinating display of giant oil jars dating back to the 14th century. By the 15th they were appearing thoughout Provence and along the Med, in sizes ranging from 60 to 600L, so standing up to four foot or more tall. I laboriously wrote down the French technical description of how this happens, but luckily a friendly member of the museum staff exolained the salient points – mainly that the jars could be builtly only an arm’s height at a time, then the clay had to be left to dry sufficiently to bear the weight of the next layer (built up with coils). Only the inside are glazed – but they make beautiful, simple, evocative pieces. (And I thought it interesting that such large-scale production starts so early.)

Nearby is the other unforgetable piece from the museum, not heavy, serious, important like the oil jars, but a mark of human frivolity. To give its full description, it is a “filet pour le maintien de la moustache la nuit, tulle, plastique, cuir, France debut XXe.s”. When I first saw it I thought it might be an eye mask as now worn on planes, but wondered why it was made of a light mesh – when I found the label, I knew. As the friendly museum staffer said, you’d want to hope that in deference to any “lady friends”, the user would only don it after the light was out.

To a devotee of the period the 18th-century mansion in which the museum is housed would also be of great interest (confess it isn’t really my period). They’re very proud of the surviving original wallpaper – fairly enough; I’ve seen similar or a bit older leather wall coverings in grand chateau, but never that I can recall paper of this age.

There’s also a nice little collection of bidets (of the pre-indoor plumbing type). Was surprised to learn that the word was only invented in 1750 (and the device not long before that – obviously sensibilities were developing…)

Around the corner is a museum of costume – interesting how early “oriental” (from India) patterns reached deep into society, to the level of the small town artisan – by the 1680s the French government was passing protectionist laws to try to keep out Indian textiles.

And there’s also the Fragonard perfume museum, with a small factory with tours in the basement. Unfortunately I find myself increasingly unable to tolerate perfumes – the stench gives me a headache and makes my nose run, so I didn’t last long in there.