A lovely morning, no wind, cool and sunny.

Over breakfast of peaches and nectarines, we recalled the previous day’s conversation with the Moroccan. We were still intrigued by his seemingly paradoxical account of the flood of 1940.

A little later, while on an errand in the village, I learned that the puzzle had a simple explanation.

I had just come out of the Huit à Huit, having purchased a chocolate bar seductively labeled Désir Noir, when I spotted my eventual informant, a white-whiskered villager slumped dozing in a sunlit doorway. He responded to my question in a local lingo with many Spanish words jumbled with French—for example asking if I were by any chance "Inglese"—but patience and good will triumphed over the language gap. Here is what he told me.

With the idea of protecting Padern in the event of an overflow of the Verdouble, in the 1930s the village authorities built a the stone wall that ran along the river’s south bank, just a few meters from where we were standing. But the floodwaters of 1940 came not from the river but from the other direction, runoff after an exceptionally heavy rainstorm over the ridge to the south. Far from protecting the village, the wall acted as a dam to hold back the escape of the water and so made the flood more destructive.

To make sure this didn’t happen again, the authorities cut gaps every few meters along the wall’s length. My informant pointed to the nearest gap.

And if the water of the Verdouble should rise to the level of the wall?

Never has and never will, white-whiskers said, chortling and shaking his head. Recounting the story of the wall had made his day.

Like a miniature of the Maginot Line to the north, scene of the larger disaster of 1940, the wall of Padern serves as a reminder of human capacity for gross miscalculation. But at least it is a good place to sit in the shade on a hot summer afternoon.

We drove to Cucugnan, this time for lunch at a restaurant with a view:

Cucugnan (04 68 45 40 84)

We took lunch under a large awning shading an outdoor terrace from which we had a stupendous view over the valley: to the south, in ranks upon rank the foothills and the peaks of the Pyrénées in successively paler shades of blue.

We drank a pleasant, medium strong and spicy Domaine du Révérend Corbières (F90).

A salade verte was routinely good.

La cuisse de canard confite: A fatty and somewhat hard-to-manage duck confit with excellent mushrooms and oven-roasted potatoes.

La tranche de foie gras maison et sa gelée au muscat: A slice of coarse-textured pâté, not quite free of filament but with excellent flavor. It was served with a slice of lightly toasted bread and a glass of one of the local muscats, Rancio de Maury. Sweetness anchored by rancio, the tang of wood aging, made this wine an excellent match to the foie gras.

Le ris de veau à la crème: Undercooked, tough, tasteless…the less said about these sweetbreads the better.

The desserts, a commercial sorbet au citron and a scorched, hence inedible crème à la Catalane, deserved to be swept into the memory hole along with the sweetbreads.

A cheese tray included a sufficiently good Cantal to bring the lunch to an up-beat conclusion.

***

Places whose names appear on wine labels exercise a romantic attraction over us, especially if we liked the wine and the food that went with it. The savors of foie gras and Rancio de Maury, still resonating in short-term memory, prompted us to set course for the muscat’s place of origin. Our route included the high point Grau de Maury, from which we made a gentle scenic descent to the next valley. We made several stops along the way to admire vistas of the Pyrénées, every view at least as fine as the one we had from the restaurant.

***

Back at the gîte, towards evening we observed from the window what might have been an oft-rehearsed scene in Padern. Two girls on horseback came ambling along the road from the village. The pair were about to turn right on to the bridge over the Verdouble, when one of the horses suddenly propped directly in front of the corner house, the blacksmith’s as we had come to call it, and wouldn’t take another step. Perhaps the equine mind had recognized the place to stop for a new set of shoes. At any rate the horse stood still as a statue, despite the young equestrienne’s despairing efforts to get it moving again. Then a strongly-built man, the blacksmith as we supposed, came out of the house, smiling good-naturedly at the girl’s predicament and calling out jocular advice. The horse still refused to budge. At length, after he had squeezed the fun out of the situation, the blacksmith went up to the animal and whispered something in its ear, whereupon it resumed its amble as suddenly as it had stopped.

Wasn’t that kid on the horse one of Luisette’s? We weren’t sure, but this line of thought led us to the conclusion that we should again park ourselves outdoors, with a bottle of cider and a salad and perhaps a crêpe, at:

Padern

The evening was clear and still. We felt good, particularly after we had explored Luisette’s entire repertoire of salads and crêpes. We leaned back in our chairs and stared up at the darkening dome of the sky. At 9:50 pm a star blinked on, and then another and another until the entire sky was spangled. The dark line of the high ridge beyond the village had softened and disappeared, so that land could be distinguished from sky only by the absence of stars. At 10:00 pm a church bell sounded, not a carillon but the single tone of a medieval gong. A few minutes later floodlights snapped on to illuminate the Château, so that it seemed suspended overhead.

After we don’t know how long, we heard the brisk tapping of Luisette’s heels as she crossed the road toward us, and we made out her person by some sort of lights she was carrying. We exchanged remarks along the lines of—Uh oh, she’s closing up shop and now she’s coming over to kick us out.

We were mistaken. Smiling, eager to please, she bore complimentary glasses of her husband’s home-made marc, and a candle to see it by.