Letter from My Mill

Roussillon, France

I always called Michel Bardagué le philosophe des champs: “the philosopher of the fields.” He had a little vegetable garden just across the stream that runs behind our moulin—our mill—in the Eastern Pre-Pyrenees in France, a couple of hours up the autoroute from Barcelona, just over the border from Spain. This is the poorest and least populated part of France: a place of twisting roads with sharp drop-offs on one side and stern, monumental climbs on the other. The soil here is very dry and good only for growing grapes. This region is quite isolated and a world away from the quaint villages of northern France. As one friend who came down to visit from Paris said to me, “Parisians don’t even know a place like this exists in their country.”

I bought the moulin with a childhood friend just before Europe went to the Euro in 1999. He had the cash, and I had the knowledge of France, so we went in together on the purchase. Precisely because the area is poor and remote, land is inexpensive here. We bought the moulin cheap, or, to put it in French, for trois fois rien: three times nothing.

The mill consisted of three structures. The principal one was habitable, though it needed work. What we got was, in fact, two mills: the old flour mill, which was the one a person could live in, and then a second, smaller mill that had been used for pressing olive oil. Finally, there was an old stone barn whose thatched roof was caving in but which had recently been used for livestock. The deep channels, where part of the Matassa river had been diverted to run first through the olive mill then under the flour mill, were still intact. So, too, were the old millstone and millworks in the cavernous room under the flour mill. It turned out that our mill was the best preserved in the whole region.

When people think of the South of France, they think of Provence, which has become a prettified vacation destination for the wealthy. But the hills that rise up from the city of Perpignan are rugged and inviting only to those who like a challenge. This is the area where Catalonia melds into France—a region that was fought over for centuries. This is also where in the thirteenth century the Cathar “heretics” refused to accept the authority of the corrupt popes in Rome. The only crusade ever mounted by Christians against Christians came down from the north and chased the Catharist members from fortress to fortress until their final castle at Monségur fell in 1244, whereupon some three hundred unrepentant heretics were burned at the stake. You can visit the partially destroyed defense castles the Cathars built at the top of seemingly impregnable crags. The effort that must have been required to drag thousands of pieces of cut stone up to such heights is staggering, and the Cathars did so at site after site. Knowing they would be targeted by the Catholic Church one day, they constructed a line of fortresses that could communicate easily with one another. When Simon de Montfort led the marauding “crusaders” down from northern France, everyone knew it would be bloody. The crusaders’ leaders set the tone in Beziers, the first city they conquered, when they told their men to slaughter everyone because afterward God would be able to separate the Catholics from the heretics.

Through the many centuries and right up to the present day, the region has been peopled by subsistence farmers who make wine to sell in the larger cities. Almost every village still has a cave coopérative that produces wine from the surrounding vineyards. The nearest grocery store or café may be over ten kilometers away, as it is for us at the moulin, but there is always a cave coopérative nearby where you can buy cases of the local wine.

My friend Michel Bardagué, like all the villagers, had lived almost his whole life within a twenty-kilometer radius of the village...