Easter and Translation

A Quiet Easter
Easter has been quiet because the weather hasn't been good: overcast skies and one day of drizzle. However, today spring/summer returned with a temperature of 24 degrees and bright sunshine. That meant: gardening, a (successful afternoon of boules) and tourists roaming around the village. There's no competition here to spot the first tourist (as there used to be in The Times to report the first cuckoo) but tourists roaming around and taking photos are definitely a harbinger of summer. And I have seen the first poppies appearing at the roadside. There can be whole fields of these when they really get going and a few have already self-seeded in my garden.

Translation
The previous few days of inclement weather have made me do more work on translating the village guided tour. I'm now on page six of ten. I came across a phrase I couldn't translate, droit de souquet, and couldn't find in my dictionary. So I tried it on the crowd at the pizza tonight in the Bar du Pont and no one there knew what it meant either. Daniel knew it. It was a right endowed on communes in the late Middle Ages to exact a tax on the consumption of alcohol, which for some unknown reason had to be 17% (of purchase price). The revenue from the tax could be used by the commune as it deemed fit. This tax was levied in Mollans and, perhaps ironically but very appropriately, was used to fund piping water from a nearby spring into the village via a fountain and wash-house circa 1713. That was the first time that the village had had fresh water other than from the river or rain water butts.

Another interesting fact to emerge from the translation work was an explanation of why the chapel at one end of the bridge spanning the Ouvèze and which overhangs the river bed doesn't just fall into the river. It has no obvious support. It turns out that stones were cut to run under the floor of the chapel and into the adjacent square with a sufficient weight and length to counterbalance the weight of the overhanging chapel. The chapel also was built in the early 18th century so somebody around the village then understood those old Greek mathematicians. But, if somebody in the future drills a hole in the wrong place in the square...................