How Gray the Batiments

 I am walking down an alleyway. Actually it is a street, or what passes for a street in Saorge. All the streets look like cobbled alleys, narrow and mysterious and full of surprises. Beguiling architectural details catch the eye, as do sporadic signs of human habitation: a  water bottle tucked on a step by a door that is so battered and rotted it is hard to believe it has been used in a hundred years, A steep staircase lined with potted plants, a cat — there is almost always a cat, a different cat every time. Tabby cats, golden cats, black cats, gray cats. One sees almost as many cats in Saorge as one does people. (There are no cars and all the dogs are on leashes, so the cats can slink and strut without fear.) A plaza holds temporarily abandoned scooters and bikes — my presumption thusfar is that there is little petty theft in this town — it is so small and bounded that what would be the point? Your neighbor would notice you playing with his bike, or saw, or whatever it is that you left lying in the plaza last evening. 

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> This town does not seem remotely haunted, at least by anything evil or frightening, but I swear I would not be surprised if I saw a gray figure emerge from the gray stone to drift up the rue, queer clothing and all. Saorge seems outside of time somehow. This citadel town is simply steeped in visuals and atmosphere.

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 Every time I look around, every time I look up at these massive, soaring stone structures, all sorts of medieval words start popping into my head. Ramparts, merlons, embrasures, turrets, crenellations. Okay, maybe not turrets, as there aren’t so many turrets, but ramparts and crenellations and whatever those narrow arrow slits cut into the massively thick walls are called. (They are called loopholes, Mala explains: fentes de flèche. Mala is an expatriate from New York who speaks six or eight languages and apologizes for her poor French even as she helps me communicate with the locals. She and her husband Jim escaped the heat and the crowds of Monaco several years ago and went looking for cooler vistas. They found themselves in Saorge. They were bedazzled, and now own the house they stayed in for those first two nights.)

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Gazing upward, it is not hard to imagine Saorge defenders dropping stones through murder holes or firing from embrasures. I have never felt safer in a town, but the atmospherics of so many shades-of-grey, painstakingly quarried-by-hand batiments make me want to pen some murder mystery set years in the past. Like those Ellis Peters chronicles of brother Cadfael, the Crusader turned monk turned medieval detective who labors in the 1130s-40s during the English Civil War between Empress Matilda and King Stephen. Only perhaps I should update the era to the present day, with a Saorge summer resident brutally struck down in one of the village  narrow byways, his blood spilling darkly against the smooth cobblestones. Was he killed by a resentful local, a day hiker, or another summer inhabitant like himself? Somebody take this and run with it.  But don’t take it to heart, because an actual murder in this idyllic village might ruin it for me.

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>>>>> My friend Cara is right: some of these passageways look like the entrance to Diagon Alley, Or at least what I imagine the entrance to Diagon Alley looks like. If that reference eludes you, it is only because you are one of the 12 people on the planet who has not delved into the Harry Potter books. We don’t judge here in Saorge.

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