Trip to Aude / Midi-Pyrénées:
Day 8
Early next morning, we headed out of Lourdes
for the thing for which I had really
come to Lourdes .
My main interest in Lourdes ,
if you recall, was due to the fact that I had based one of my novels there:
Perl and the Psychotic Mutant Space Cattle (Read about it here). But the town
of Lourdes
itself features very little in the novel: just the final climax scene happens there.
Most of the action takes place in the outskirts of Lourdes ,
in a fictional farm in the foothills of the Pyrenees .
I had written Space Cattle without ever having seen the
Pyrenees, or Lourdes , or even France . Now at
last I was going to get to see in real life the places I had seen so clearly in
my imagination. By the way, you might wonder why I chose to base my novel in a
place I had never seen. Don’t novelists like to base their stories in places
they are familiar with? Nope, not experienced novelists. Only beginners stick
to the tried and true. Once you have written a couple of novels (I have written
six), you like try new things. There is something so incredibly liberating
about writing about people, places and things of which you have no firsthand
knowledge. It sets the imagination free. Like most beginners, in my first novel
I had stuck to locations I knew like the back of my hand: Bangalore ,
Munich , Singapore
If you’ve read Space Cattle, or if you clicked on the above link to read the synopsis, you would know that the novel is about a herd of
Lourdaise cows in a farm in the outskirts of Lourdes , who start singing opera. Perl and
Hari, scientific detectives, are called in to investigate. In Chapter 3, they
land up in the town of Lourdes
to rendezvous with the project manager for the musical cow project.
Right, so here we were, following the route that Perl and
Hari take from Lourdes
to the farm with the singing cows. Perl and Hari take D821 out of Lourdes , heading south towards the Spanish border, and the
Pyrenees . A couple of kilometers out of Lourdes , they take the
first branching road on the left.
Here we are, at the branch.
They then take a narrow country road heading up into the
lower Pyrenees .
A bubbling brook flows along beside the road; bemused sheep dot the neighboring mountain meadows. Here is the bubbling brook exactly as
described:-
I had of course seen that brook on Google Earth, while
researching the novel, but I had no idea if it bubbled. I was glad to note that
it bubbled like billy-o. But of sheep there was nary a one, bemused or otherwise. I checked up with a
local peasant. He said that all the sheep had been driven out to high pastures
in the upper Pyrenees , just days ago. Had I
come a couple of days earlier, I would have seen my sheep, all suitably bemused. I was relieved. (By
the way, farmers in these parts drive their goat and sheep into high mountain
pastures in summer, and use their own meadows to make hay, which they then feed
to their livestock in winter, when mountain pastures are inaccessible and their
own meadows unproductive. All of which, as you can imagine, bemuses the sheep like nobody's business).
But there were lots of moss-covered slate-stone rustic cottages and farm houses on the way, exactly as described in the book.
On the way, Perl and Hari stop at a small hamlet where there
have also been unconfirmed reports of singing cows (it turns out to be a false
alarm). Here it is, a small hamlet on the way.
They then go higher into the Pyrenees ,
to Lanterre’s Farm, the farm with the singing cows. I describe the farm as
clinging to the side of a hill, accessed by a narrow country road. A gray rock
face looms above it to one side, and on the other, a daffodil encrusted meadow slopes
sharply away into a valley. Now, I hadn’t really pinpointed a farm like that on
Google Earth. I had made that up. But anyway, we took a high mountain road at
random, and drove around till we found something interesting.
There were lots
of farms, but nothing looked exactly right. Blandine parked, and we
decided to hike in the hills for a while.
And Bingo! We hadn’t walked more than
about half an hour, when I saw something that might have popped right out of my
novel.
There it was, a hill with a gray rock face...
...falling to a
daffodil infested valley on one side...
.. and midway on the hill, a farm that
looked exactly the way I imagined Lanterre’s farm to be: a main house, a barn
and an outhouse. A narrow country road led up to it.
I asked Blandine to take a zoom shot of the farm with her fancy Pentax. I had no
idea if the farmer would be welcoming.
I then gathered up my courage and iPad,
and approached the farm.
I was met by two dogs barking their heads off, and a
very suspicious old farmer in faded corduroy trousers. He could well have been
a duplicate of old Lanterre in my book. He looked at me inquiringly. I told him
I owned a website that featured attractive country houses (Liar, Liar!), and
that I loved his house and could I please feature it on my website? He looked
at me disbelievingly. I can imagine how much more disbelieving he would have
been if I had told him the truth. He said he wasn’t interested. He did however
let me take a shot of the house from where I stood (well beyond the gate, safe
from the dogs).
Like Fou, Germs has a small church and a single pub. Some of
the action takes place in that pub.
I also saw many herds of Lourdaise cows, or at least, what I
took to be Lourdaise cows, based on what I know of them (it is a breed specific
to the Lourdes
region, with a yellowish hide).
Here is one old cow who could virtually be a
template for Matilda, the old Lourdaise cow on Lanterre’s farm who starts
singing opera:-
I stood beside her a long time, waiting for her to break
into a piece from Aida, or at least Rigoletto. Nothing doing. Possibly Matilda
was not in the mood that day.
