The Dauphin Fountain

The Fountain Celebration

This weekend has been a series of celebrations of the 300^th anniversary of the Dauphin fountain, the first source of water in the village other than the river. The fountain is quite famous locally, not only because of its age but because it uses a play on words to have a dolphin sculpted on it (Dauphin being both a dolphin and an heir to the throne) and because it was on the Comtat Venaissin side of the river and was supposed to be cocking a snook at the Dauphiné territory on the other side. The ten other fountains in the village date from around 1878 and piped water didn't arrive until 1964.

The celebrations have included Tahitian dancers (don't ask), a couple of clowns making merry, some lectures in the library, a file of people bringing water from a fountain on the other side of the village, an exhibition of plans of the time to bring water to the village, a photo competition and a choir singing songs about water. I was involved in the last two.

I found the 18^th century plans particularly interesting. The initial construction failed, partly because of broken ceramic pipes but also because those tasked with the construction messed up the slope required for a drop of 9 metres over a kilometre. The Roman engineers who built the Pont du Gard viaduct to Nimes had little more than that drop over some 26 kms and managed to get it right, so some engineering knowledge was clearly lost over the intervening millennium a half.

The choir, suitably dubbed the Voix De La Fontaine, was assembled and rehearsed by friend Jo and we duly sang A la claire fontaine, Au bord de la rivière, Sur le bord de la rivière, L'eau vive, La source and By the rivers of Babylon, this last thought of by Jo after the Charlie Hebdo affair, when the fountain event was being planned. We sang on Friday evening and twice on the Saturday and received an enthusiastic reception. I was particularly pleased for Jo because she had put a lot of work into the choir and we ended up not singing on the Friday where or at the time we thought we were supposed to, which had her tearing her hair. It turned out that the published programme had been written with a typically Provençal cavalier approach to times and locations. The typically Provencale corollary, of course, is that the muddle gets sorted out amicably and all's well that ends well, as they say.

The song La Source intrigued me because it recounts a story that was the subject of an Ingmar Bergman film that I remember seeing in the early 1960s entitled (in French) La Source; the English title was Virgin Spring. I wondered whether there was any connection and was told that the song originated from about 1968, when Isabelle Aubret won some kind of prize for singing it. That suggests that the song writer picked up the Bergman theme rather than vice-versa but it's a strange kind of story to write a song about and the tune is something of a dirge.

The fact that my submission to the photo competition (above) didn't win it I can put down only to blatant prejudice on the part of the judges.

French Sayings

Despite my asking all my French friends and acquaintances for current popular sayings that provide insight into times past, and some of them are scribes or literary cognoscenti themselves, I've only been told of five so far. Pleuvoir à verses is mooted as a reference to emptying chamber pots from upper floors into the street in mediaeval times; tenir le haut du pavé is most probably a reference to walking away from the centre of V-shaped roads in the same era; changer de crèmerie refers to a style of restaurant in the 19^th century; pendre la crémaillère, which I had to think of myself, refers to a style of cooking long gone; and tomber comme à Gravelotte refers to a battle with an inglorious end (for the French). It's a rather disappointing result so far, unless French really does have far fewer of such sayings than English does. I found around 50 sayings in English with origins in times long gone with no difficulty at all.