The Perigord: Profoundly France
By Byrne Fone, Le Domaine de La Millasserie, The Perigord, France

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In the opinion of some arch city dwellers, mostly Parisians, the Périgord  is located in the far reaches of la France profonde, deep France, a term both spiritual and geographical, that carries a hint of urban condescension for country ways, yet also harbors a bit of that fond nostalgia that all French cherish for the terroir, the countryside - whether it is La Vendee,  Le Berri, Le Limousin, Le Larzac, or any one of the many rural regions of France, including the Périgord itself - to which all the French like to trace their roots.

But the Périgord need accept no disdain from any city or region, for it was inhabited millennia before Paris had ever been imagined, before Rome had set its eagles on the soil of Gaul, before Celtic tribes walked France’s dark forests.

Indeed this region of south western France, nestled in the heart of ancient Aquitaine and only two hours from Bordeaux possesses a recorded  and continuous history more ancient than that of  any other part of France.

For 40,000 years people have gone about the business of their daily lives in the Périgord, raised families, tilled the fields, created places in which to live, whether they were caves filled with magical paintings, grand chateaux, simple  round stone shepherd huts with conical stone roofs, elegant manor houses standing at the end of long drives bordered by rows of symmetrical trees, or practical farmhouses with deep-red tile roofs and  thick walls made of golden stone that look as if they had been drawn by an inspired architect to conform to some ideal of  the intensely picturesque.

For what you see in the Perigord would fill a thousand picture books. The intensely visual is everywhere: the conical “pepper pot” towers of a distant chateau rising from its grey stone walls where it stands perched high on some jagged cliff. The Romanesque calm of an ancient chapel lost in a deep forested wilderness.  Go back to a village - Daglan, perhaps or Urval, Belves or Moliere.

Look at the old doors: rough wide unpainted planks, some studded with broad-headed nails, others adorned with a  wash of brilliant  blue or chalky green with the classic doorknocker - huertoire in French - of a closed hand. Begin to distinguish  the infinite if subtle  differences of the architecture. The style is general - tile roofs stone walls, a pigeonier - but the variety is infinite: a window  mullion like one you’ve never seen, the pitch of a roof that speaks to singularity. The architecture of the Perigord grows from the land. It is not planted upon it or built in despite of it.

Some great classical buildings, in Paris for example,  though undeniably grand and wonderfully elegant, exist despite the landscape that they have also largely displaced. But in the Perigord, houses and  the earth are one in a remarkably perfect harmony.

In the country-- the deep country, la France profonde - stand at any vantage point  and look across the  countryside. First you will note the trees. They are everywhere and this is because France has more standing forests than any country in Europe.

Then look more closely: a rich patchwork of neat fields, many separated by low stone walls, crops planted in precise and orderly  rows. These rolling fields are ancient ones, worked from time out of mind,  and their  crops follow the orderly procession of the seasons-- rich black earth tilled in early spring becomes a light green carpet of budding crops in early summer and then produces a high summer of lush richness - wheat, tobacco, sunflowers, maize, walnuts from carefully tended trees planted in straight even rows, the ground beneath the branches swept clean like farmhouse kitchen floors. 

Late summer haying creates striking images: on either side of a narrow country road fields  display huge rolls of hay - 3 feet wide and four or five feet high, painted in variegated  gold, and when after resting there a few weeks, becoming earthy brown or striated silver reposing on a carpet of emerald green. They are dotted about as if they were an installation made by some agricultural modern artist.

This signals  that the mellow gold of fall is about to come again and with it the vendange when the grapes are harvested from the region’s vineyards: sweet Monbazillac from around the great chateau that gives the wine its name; nearby Saussignac, not so well known but to some better than its haughtier neighboring vintage; the wines of the Bergeracois, especially the incomparable Peycharmant, rich, fruity tannic, the best of it often rare. When the grapes are picked people look for cepes, huge earthy meaty mushrooms, in the forests, and farmers  watch for evidence of hidden crops.

In the corner of a field, beneath scrub oak, is the earth dry and bare? Are the tell-tale flies hovering? Then truffles may be there. Soon  the frosty carpet of winter falls and the land waits for the cycle to begin again as it has done since time began. 

Perhaps because men and women  have for so long worked the fields and every inch of land that can be tilled, the entire countryside has the effect of having been landscaped by some master hand. That stand of ramrod straight  dark green cypress trees just over  there - is it by chance that it grows in such an elegant placement, seemingly deliberate in its  arrangement against the amazing blue of the late summer sky, standing as a vertical backdrop to the vast horizontal  swath of  golden sunflowers that cover the hillside, yellow heads peering up at the sun and turning to follow it?

Picturesque sheep graze; complacent cows, mellow red coats alive against the green, stand or lie together beneath a shady  tree. A lonely donkey forages in a field. In the distant valley, in the cleft  between two tall  rocky crags  a thousand year old village dozes in the sun, the church tower just visible, the deep red roofs and ochre stone  of its houses washed by the setting sun, windows catching the golden gleam, reflecting  that very special light of the Perigord.

Surely, a dozen centuries ago, a village architect stood at this spot and surveyed the vista and  said, “There! There  is where we should build, to catch the light  of the setting sun.”

A Village in the Perigord

As the sun rides low in the sky, from the village church a bell sounds. It is the angelus, rung every day as it always has been in the Perigord, and in the distance in village after village, other bells answer in reply.

History  sounds in those bells  and it is present  there just as it is in the lichen-covered golden stone of every ancient house, in the narrow streets of ancient tiny villages, in the hauteur of a forbidding and crenellated chateau that towers imposingly  next to a rushing river.

History is always present in the Perigord; there are ghosts wherever you turn in this rich and  mysterious land. Just as the Perigord possesses  more  prehistoric sites than any other region in France, so its stock of medieval  and renaissance architecture is very nearly the richest.

There are more than 1500 chateaux, manoirs, chartreueses, gentilhommieres,  and maison de maitres, to use some of the classifications given to great houses in the region. There are 800 churches, most in the Romanesque style. Indeed the Perigord can fairly claim to have the largest number of historic sites in all France outside of Paris.

In the Perigord each of its regions is named because of what it looks like, because of the color of its soil and land and by what grows so richly therein. The truffle laden Perigord Noir is full of pines and oaks and rocky gorges. Rolling green fields identify the Perigord Vert. Wine and rich dark grapes give a name to the Perigord Poupre, as do the sunny uplands and limestone plateaus to the Perigord Blanc.

To these gay people who live here have added another name for our own special community: Le Perigord Rose. The Perigord may not be for those who look for cliché gay vacation spot activities--we have no circuit parties, there are only a handful of gay bars in the larger towns of Bergerac, Perigueux and Brive.

But like Paris, the Perigord is for lovers— and also for lovers of rest and relaxtion, superb food, fabulous scenery, and  more historic sites than can be seen in a  lifetime.

Every summer at our Bed  and Breakfast, we welcome lovers like these gay men and women who come from haughty Paris, from Spain, from the Netherlands, from England, from America, to spend a different kind of gay vacation  in the  Perigord, a mythic  land born with the magic that scholars claim the cave paintings may have been trying to conjure,  and which some say is indeed the most magical  and the most beautiful region in all of France.

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