In that year (1977) I traveled as
much as I could around France. Traveling was my escape from myself, as for most
travelers. With what I saved from my teaching I went on a grand old vinous
ramble down France’s Routes du Vin with the spirits of Gargantua and Pantagruel
and enough varieties of Burgundy and Bourgeuil and Vouvray and sundry vins
de table to make me a mini-connoisseur, or
a pseudo-one. It was as a wine-drinker that I met the French, and the French
are very accommodating of same. Back
and forth across the Hexagon via bus and train went I, from Paris to Lyon and
Strasbourg and Clermont-Ferrand, once at the wheel of someone else’s Peugeot,
meticulously returned to its original parking spot after a nocturnal joyride.
And one day I found myself on the ramparts at the chateau of Angers on the Maine, staring at the front page of the local newspaper, L’Angevin, whose black headlines mourned a king’s death: LE
ROI EST MORT, referring not to an actual
monarch but to Elvis Presley. As it does Mao and the Old King Lud in London,
History’s whim permanently links in my mind the general and the particular: the ancient walled fortress-city of
Angers, the slow and languid Maine below, and the hip-gyrator of Graceland,
acknowledged as a king in a place of kings.
