Lazing It Through Languedoc

Toulouse is the third largest city in France, Carcassonne one of its major tourist attractions. Tonight we are tied up halfway between the two along the still (and murky) waters of the Canal du Midi; no signs of civilization to be seen, lying aswedoin the protective cocoon of the canal banks. Now in the fading minutes of daylight we stroll along the towpath, the light filtering through the tall plane trees (sycamores) that border the canal on either side. The fishermen have folded their aluminum chairs and gone home to dinner. A pair of ducks and their half-grown ducklings skitter away from the bank, roiling the water. It was warm today, hot enough so that we welcomed the brightly striped umbrellas that were raised on the deck of our converted coal barge, but tonight it has cooled off. There is no sound other than the breeze teasing the leaves above our heads: we hear no cars, no trains, no planes, but neither do we hear—except as the imagination evokes it—the cursing of the drivers and the braying of the mules that for two centuries or more pulled barges, not unlike in outward configuration the one in which we now luxuriate, along the twisting channel that connects the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

One man’s dream: Pierre Paul Riquet, collector of the King’s salt tax. Was it on a tax-collecting mission that he perceived what generations from Roman days on had failed to see, that the waters needed to power a Canal des Deux-Mers, as it is also called, might lie in the Montagne Noire, twenty miles to the north? The waters were there. With a charter from Louis XIV, but with his own cash for the most part, Pierre Riquet started in 1666 to dig his canal and to build a great dam, the Bassin de St.-Ferréol, which, with the smaller and lovely Bassin de Lamy, collected the waters that still, some three hundred years later, fill the canal and its system of locks: 24 stepping up from Toulouse to the high point at the Col de Naurouze, and another 77 down to the sea again, but this time to the Mediterranean Sea, at Marseillan and Séte.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Toulouse is the third largest city in France, Carcassonne one of its major tourist attractions. Tonight we are tied up halfway between the two along the still (and murky) waters of the Canal du Midi; no signs of civilization to be seen, lying aswedoin the protective cocoon of the canal banks. Now in the fading minutes of daylight we stroll along the towpath, the light filtering through the tall plane trees (sycamores) that border the canal on either side. The fishermen have folded their aluminum chairs and gone home to dinner. A pair of ducks and their half-grown ducklings skitter away from the bank, roiling the water. It was warm today, hot enough so that we welcomed the brightly striped umbrellas that were raised on the deck of our converted coal barge, but tonight it has cooled off. There is no sound other than the breeze teasing the leaves above our heads: we hear no cars, no trains, no planes, but neither do we hear—except as the imagination evokes it—the cursing of the drivers and the braying of the mules that for two centuries or more pulled barges, not unlike in outward configuration the one in which we now luxuriate, along the twisting channel that connects the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

One man’s dream: Pierre Paul Riquet, collector of the King’s salt tax. Was it on a tax-collecting mission that he perceived what generations from Roman days on had failed to see, that the waters needed to power a Canal des Deux-Mers, as it is also called, might lie in the Montagne Noire, twenty miles to the north? The waters were there. With a charter from Louis XIV, but with his own cash for the most part, Pierre Riquet started in 1666 to dig his canal and to build a great dam, the Bassin de St.-Ferréol, which, with the smaller and lovely Bassin de Lamy, collected the waters that still, some three hundred years later, fill the canal and its system of locks: 24 stepping up from Toulouse to the high point at the Col de Naurouze, and another 77 down to the sea again, but this time to the Mediterranean Sea, at Marseillan and Séte.