Albi

Due to my electricity unexpectedly being cut off, I spent last weekend with a friend living in Albi, a town (on the same river as Villemur, incidentally) about an hour north east of Toulouse by train. The cause of my stay was unfortunate, but the trip itself was delightful. Albi (pronounced just like “well, I’ll be”) is lovely and my hosts were both kind and entertaining. The weekend took us on many adventures, sight-seeing, social, and culinary.

Albi is a UNESCO world heritage site because of its incredible cathedral and its sinuous medieval streets: exactly the things that are so intriguing and charming to me as an American (although not uninteresting to French and German sight-seers, of which there were so many in the streets on this sunny weekend that my hosts, English assistants from California, complained constantly about tourists). I got to play the tourist on Saturday afternoon, when we went to explore the Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile. The cathedral is enormous, and it’s placed in an open square in the middle of town so you can see the whole building in all its imposing elegance. The exterior is a solid mass of brick, excluding the delicately carved white stone entrance, which makes the brightly colored interior all the more incredible to behold. The ceiling is blue and gold, the walls many different patterns of blue, yellow, and red. But most impressive to me was the front wall where the organ was, because the whole height of it was covered in a mural of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. The demons of Hell were imaginatively painted and all the more evil-looking for being at eye-level.

After an evening that was surprisingly eventful for a town with only one pub, on Sunday we went to the covered market where we found delicious herb sausages and cheese that tasted just like a petting zoo. (That’s one of my favorite things about France: at markets, you can get high-quality meat, cheese, and produce that are less expensive than the products at the grocery store.) In the afternoon, I went to the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, which houses a permanent collection of the paintings and lithographs of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the avant-garde artist famous for depicting the nightlife of Paris’s cabaret scene. I was not allowed to take pictures, but I was much impressed by his intense palate heavy on green and deep purple, and by his style of painting portraits that are so expressive they’re almost caricatures. The work that made the biggest impression on me, though, was a black and white lithograph of a woman in her bed (below). The way the simple lines portray such languish, such delicate fatigue and fear and sadness, made me return to that picture twice after I initially moved on, and I was disappointed when I could find no poster or even post card of it in the gift shop.

It was fun to be a traveler again and not the confused outsider trying to settle into a new city I normally am for a few days. When I returned to Toulouse, though, I was glad to be surrounded by its now-familiar tree-lined streets and bright metro system.