Savoie is behind us. The bags went south this morning and by the early afternoon I was standing in Avignon with a river running down the middle of the street, working out how anybody here gets anything done.
Rue des Teinturiers. The dyers’ street. They pushed the Sorgue through this lane and put it to work from about 1440, first for wool and silk, later for the printed cottons that half of Europe wanted. In 1817 there were twenty three wheels turning along here. Four are left. Turn the sound up if you can, this is one of them.
That is the thing I keep chasing. Water with a shape in it. The paddles come up loaded, tip, dump, come up loaded again, and there is half a second at the top where the wheel looks like it has stopped and only the water is still moving. Old animator brain woke up immediately and started counting the frames. Moss on every paddle, iron bolts gone orange, and the whole lot held together by habit.
I got in a day late for the theatre. The festival finished on the twenty sixth, eightieth edition, and the town was still wearing it. Posters four deep on every wall, bunting strung between the balconies, and that flat quiet of a place that has just had eighteen hundred shows walk out the door. Lunch was chips and mayonnaise on a burger wrapper, which is not Provence at all, and I am not the least bit sorry.
Then I walked east, away from the good streets, and got what I actually came for. A wall. Limewash gone off the stone in continents, grey underneath, ochre where the sun has been at it, the whole surface reading like a map of somewhere that does not exist. No subject in it. Pure surface. I stood in front of it long enough to feel slightly ridiculous, photographing a wall in a city full of palaces.
And ten minutes later, the boss of the street. White chest, brown ears, standing up at the railing of a first floor window with the shutters half closed, giving me the full inspection. I shot him twice. Once in colour, then straight away in black and white, because I wanted to see whether the picture still held once the warm stone was taken out of it. It does. Better, if anything. He goes from a nice dog at a window to a shape in a dark rectangle, and the light down the shutters does the rest of the work.
I did the proper sightseeing too, for about twenty minutes. Up to the Palais des Papes, the biggest Gothic palace in Europe, thrown up between 1335 and 1364 when the popes lived here instead of Rome for the best part of seventy years. Enormous, pale, completely unbothered by us. I stood in the shade watching the market umbrellas and the crowd flowing round the corner, and thought about how little of that I want in a drawing.
By evening I was where I am actually staying for the next week. L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a bit over twenty kilometres east, and here is the part that made me laugh… it is the same river. The water Avignon borrowed for its dyers comes from here. This town had sixty six wheels at its peak and about fifteen still turn, they call it the Comtadine Venice, and people have been dealing antiques on these quais since 1596. Tomorrow the list says sculpture museum and a proper look at the gallery spaces along the water. Tonight the bags are down and the whole town is full of running water. More soon.
The famous Sunday market at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, walked from twenty to nine while it was still cool. Rusted chairs, a canal hung with old linen, a wall of masks, and a lesson in selling from a leaflet.
Saturday’s list said one thing, go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and find paper. What I got first was a cliff with a castle stuck on top of it, a ruined garden, and a river that comes out of the ground and will not tell you where it has been.
An early loop around the town before the shutters went up, which turned into a dog in a doorway, a cat under the postcards and a brocante with nobody in it. By midday the lot of it was in blue biro.
