Day 77. Talmont St. Hilaire. Oct 22 2001

Last night was a nightmare collage of wracking coughs, fevered dreams and aching muscles. Every time I surrendered to exhaustion and slumped down to the beaten and broken mattress my lungs protested and sent me upright in a volley of coughs that sounded terribly like the vicious barking of a dog. So violently did I cough that my head began to explode with pain with every movement. Even as my body shook I castigated myself for imagining that I could bike across France, let alone a significant portion of Europe. Only as daylight touched the casements of our window and cast first hesitant rays of light across the mossy kitchen roof was I able to find the solace of sleep.

I woke to an incessantly pounding head and church bells that no longer sounded sweet, merely loud. Heather dressed then disappeared out the door to find food to sustain us. I crawled feebly into the booth that served as our shower and curled up on the floor, allowing the scalding water to cascade over me as if in a metal and plastic womb. By the time Heather returned the room had filled with a choking steam.

Heather hadn’t merely purchased groceries but had braved an unfamiliar tongue and a slightly deaf pharmacist to bring me soothing drugs and cough syrup. She was flustered and embarrassed, trying to convey her exact needs in a foreign language had been hard for her and she kept apologizing, as if I cared that she had mispronounced the word for “husband” or “heaving cough.”

After being drugged and having a rest I began to feel human once more. Unable to merely do nothing we set out, if not energetically, then at least with a little enthusiasm, to see Talmont Castle. The castle rose from a series of decaying fortifications on a rocky outcrop near the centre of town, its crenelated and corroded peak almost lost behind a swirling murder of crows that made the place seem sinister even in daylight. We climbed the steep path that led to the wooden shack that served as the twentieth century gatehouse. The castle seemed wilted, in a way that only a tourist attraction in the final days before closing can be. They had lost their credit card machine so we were forced to dig into our dwindling supply of coins.

Built by William the Bold in 1025 and modernized by Richard the Lionheart with ideas brought back from Syria, the castle sprawled out, a conglomerate of accreted pieces. The wall that separated the lower courtyard form the upper had disappeared with age, the majesty that once must have been the lord’s manor had crumbled to dust and the castles defensive face had fallen to reveal the bones building beneath. William the Bold had built his castle over the church of Saint Peter and the beautiful arches and vaults of the bell tower peered out from surprising corners.

We climbed the staircase of the western tower and stopped at its first branching. Here was the base of the ancient bell tower, a niche almost walled over during the hurried building of outer walls. A silent room with a single entrance and windows so high and narrow they could scarcely be seen. Here William, and Richard after him, had stored their money, their jewels, and their suits of ceremonial amour. Here was a treasure chamber any thief might have given his arm to find and we stalked its floors and casually appraised its vaulted ceiling.

Then we climbed again and climbed, to the second floor that opened to the wall walks and higher still to the command room that had opened to the sky as the ceiling collapsed and higher still to a terrace beneath the flapping flags of Richard and a view from here to the sea. Below us the clustered red roofs of town bunched together in silent huddles, their red paved surfaces a highway about the streets.

We followed the passages to the latrines, to the murder hole above the gatehouse and through a maze of stones and dim light that almost left us lost. The castle seemed a mountain, stones that had been heaped one atop another in careless disregard, and then hollowed to make space for those who inhabited it. Artificial caves in an artificial hill a hundred feet above the town.

We descended an endless stair on the castles far side, sure that we must be descending far beneath the ground, only to emerge on green grass. Outside an ancient defensive tunnel disappeared deep into the earth, its hidden recesses gated off from prying eyes.

We left the site and wandered outside and only then did we realize that even the hill on which the castle stood had been fortified, the walls serving now as the rear walls of sheds and houses. The castle had been shattered by Louis XIII and the famed Richelieu so that the region's Protestants would have no place to hide.

We returned to our hotel room, how strange to write that, my pen almost automatically wrote "campsite", our hotel room and we began to pack. There is a lively debate in my mind tonight about whether we will leave at the first sign of light tomorrow or rest another day with a solid roof and bed beneath us. We cannot really afford to stay. We will pack tonight and see how things are in the morning.

As we pack we are desperately trying to lighten our loads. There is so much that we carry that we do not use but we cannot easily bring ourselves to part with. Things of sentimental value or things those we “might use if…” I am trying to learn the mystical art of packing. How do you arrange things so that you can get at what you need without flinging everything else across whatever space you have? There is the story of the Greek man, I forget his name now, who wanted simplicity and so owned only his robe and a drinking cup, until one day he saw a beggar using his hands to drink from a fountain. With a cry of joy he threw away his drinking cup. We need resolve like that.

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