Lunch by the Loire River

Author: Philippe Leguyon (French)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This book is part of the "White Series / Paris Series." The author recounts a meeting with Gracq. Two men, or rather, two generations of writers, meet by the Loire River. The story has almost no plot—a, an old house older than him, and a river older than the house. The dialogue is endless. They talk about Paris, writing, history, Breton, Tourneur, Aragon, Roland Barthes, the old Parisian publishers, Mittrand, and the Elysée Palace. In the near-stopped time, the legendary life of the former geography teacher, the Surrealist movement, the rejected Goncourt Prize—everything becomes casual talk, simple yet piercing. For a long time, I dreamed of him as so distant. In his legend, he wears a halo, unattainable. A great magician. He is not a person one can casually meet to talk about rainy seasons and sunny days, about the meaninglessness of the past. His legend, the legend spoken of in people's mouths, and my endless reverence for his books, set him apart from everyday relationships. He is not necessarily aloof, just far away, on the other side of a near-sacred threshold. Yes, I read his books, write about his books, and build a myth, making him a hermit in the wild, an image of a rare and almost luxurious writer. We occasionally corresponded. On a night in November 1979, I received his letter in my student apartment mailbox. Black, bold script. A few simple words. Amidst the noise of that black month, it was like a signal from the person I loved. I seemed to knock clumsily on the glass door, and he actually answered me. More letters followed, regular and never lost in the ordinary days. From 1987, they became more frequent. This wasn’t correspondence, nor a conspiracy in the passing of time. Our exchanges generally had specific, concrete real-world contexts—greetings on holidays, sending a book. He never took long to reply. Polite, and gradually grew closer. Last night, before leaving Paris, I wanted to reread a few pages of his writing, from his later published books. I wanted to intertwine my journey with fragments of thought, reading, scenery, and childhood memories. Those memories burst forth unexpectedly, memories of different stages of life, different geographical landmarks. I wanted to reread the walk in the Semois Valley, the Ardenne gorges overgrown with trees and water plants; I wanted to reread the narrative of that lunch on the Cauisses plateau, when a van suddenly appeared, full of excited elderly people; I wanted to reread how Balzac knighted Stendhal. While waiting for the train at the Angers station café, I was still flipping through these pages, familiar content, a friend’s notebook. Beside me, a few university students with large backpacks were reading a travel guide. Amsterdam’s drug tolerance excited them. For a while, their talk pulled me out of my daydreams. At their age, I too had gone to Amsterdam, discovering the treasures of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. The dead water of the canals. Northern words. The drugs on the palette, which I have never left since. The train crossed the Loire River, its lively, sparkling water spread before me. This Friday, February 6, was so cold that trees, riverbanks, and the edges of the railways were frosted. This short trip would last only thirty minutes. The train was full of middle school students returning home. I no longer had the desire to read. The scenery captured my heart. Those poplars stood tall like masts in the mist. Marshes, grasslands soaked in water. All the small twigs on the river must have drifted there. Just after the golden mist, a water landscape fell into sleep, impossibly high. Those black boats kept passing, disrupting the scenery. Flat black boats, square at the ends. They were all there, right by the railway, ready to set off fishing or carrying passengers at any moment. They were like decorations in the scenery, food to provoke meditation. People almost forgot the reality around them, forgot how much contrast the train’s passage created. The drifting of water in this region, the festival of Grand Meaulnes. The dreamlike kingdom of alders and water. A little further from the peninsula that clung to tradition, Brittany begins. P5-7