The first day that we arrive at one of my favorite places in the world, I look in my diary to check the date of our departure. “Stop using the calendar,” CC advises. She’s an expert on deep relaxation. I have to work on it.
But it’s not a big challenge, even for me, to unwind here.
We’ve been to La Bastide de Moustiers, this hotel in the alps of Provence, many times since CC discovered it in a fancy travel magazine while waiting in an oncologist’s office. She prayed for a visit before she kicked the bucket. Decades and many visits later, we’re back like observant and grateful pilgrims. “Welcome home” are the first words we hear. We catch up on our personal lives with the manager, Sarah; we greet long-time staff with a kiss on both cheeks; we move into our familiar bedroom facing the mountains; we sit at the same table on the patio under an anything-but-plane tree planted almost fifty years ago; we eat our daily picnic in a shaded meadow, next to an organic garden that stretches out of sight; we consult with a brilliant chef about the nightly menu; and we book massages with a woman from the village who knows how to unknot the most overwrought shoulders.
Every morning, we follow our well-trod routes through and beyond the village of Marie Ste. Moustiers, one of France’s “plus beau villages,” a miracle of construction above the Gorge Verdon. When we are not scrupulously placing one foot in front of the other, we stop, look, watch, listen, breathe, be.
In the afternoons, when it’s too hot to go out, even for mad dogs and Englishmen, I work in the hotel’s library. “Your office,” says Sarah. Here, I read the news from home about the election race between fascists and warmongers, and about one climate crisis after another. I write about humanity at its worst – land grabs, grave-robbing, white supremacy – but still I manage to leave my angst in the library and dive deeply into the pleasures of this place.
One day, on the advice of Moïses who has lived in the area all his life and knows places off the tourist grid, we borrow the hotel car, follow the winding road above the sparkling green river that splices the gorge, turn left at La-Palud-Sur-Verdon, and follow an even narrower road that climbs above mountain meadows and goat farms. We park and complete the journey on tired feet, uphill, always uphill, until we reach what is now the unpeopled “village abandonée” of Chateauneuf-Lès-Moustiers (literally, The-New-Castle-Near-Moustiers) that overlooks the Baou Valley. We try to imagine how people built a thriving village here in the 11th century, added a castle in the 13th century (thus its name), and worked the land below for another seven centuries.
In my research, I’m used to contemporary narratives that pretty up the past and gloss over its sorrows and tragedies. Back home, California’s extraordinary beauty is drenched in bloodshed, yet my university’s public relations department in Berkeley would no doubt describe Chateauneuf’s demise as an inevitable surrender to Progress.
We huff and I puff our way to the entrance to the village. The first and only text that greets us is a memorial to the young men of the village whose lives were wasted during World War I. Eleven “enfants de Chateauneuf morts pour la patrie” are listed by name, some clearly related. Elsewhere, I read that the number of dead could have reached twenty. A few years later, the surviving women and old men left the village, unable to sustain themselves.
Not too long ago, a commercial real estate company had the idea of building upscale housing on the site. But descendants and local residents blocked the idea.
This village is not abandoned. It’s a living memorial and a forewarning.
August 30, 2024, Haute Provence, France.