Toulouse, la Ville Rose

When reality and imagination mingle myths are created. Once that myth is born it persists and grows and becomes part of one’s personal folklore.

I was seven or eight years old and on a coach from London to Malaga with my younger brother and mother. We were not unused to travelling, but usually it was on an aeroplane and the journey was over in a couple of hours. This was our first real adventure, this was a different kind of travelling. I don’t have very clear memories of all of this journey but I have some powerful images of moments of it. I remember having to drink down a bottle of orange juice for my grimacing and writhing brother to pee in. I also remember stopping at service stations in the dark to let mysterious strangers on and off the coach. I remember the two drivers, heroic and exotic knights (they were French, I think) battling our great metal steed through the untamed wastelands, occasionally winking conspiratorially at us boys. We were thrilled, we would be knights one day too. I remember more than anything else the night we spent in a hotel in Toulouse. I remember an immense red brick building with huge windows, a winding staircase that seemed to spiral upwards for eternity, a vast room with an impossibly high ceiling and french windows with tiny balconies beyond them. There were two great beds with iron bedsteads – would these bed knobs transport us into a magical undersea world? Down on the street a whole different world was passing by. Our mother needed to go and get us something to eat. After much fretting she decided to lock us in the hotel room. There followed dire warnings not to open the door to anyone, not to go onto the tiny balconies, not to ……. not to…… and to this list I added in my own mind not to twist the bed knob! She left and I was in charge. I needed a plan in case she never came back. What would I do to escape from this locked room? Where would I go? Who could I trust to help us? As I was pondering all this the key turned in the lock. My heart stopped. There was our mother with a bag of the biggest, greenest apples I had ever seen, magic apples……

Jump forward 12 years. I’m 19, a student back in the city of that first adventure. It looked familiar but in the intervening years it had shrunk to a more normal size. The streets, however, were still teeming with all kinds of unfamiliar people. It was colourful and noisy but the sounds I was hearing were not the rhythms of the French I had been studying and had come here to perfect. There was Arabic and there were west African languages and when I did detect French it was not the French of our university lecturers. This was rapid and musical and gathered pace and each galloping phrase ended with an expletive, “putain” and “con” and sometimes both. It was boiling hot, and people were sitting outside chatting, reading, laughing and loving. The girls were beyond beautiful, everyone looked trendy and at ease. I launched in.

Back in cold, grey London reality mingled with imagination once more, the myth deepened and strengthened. I longed for Toulouse, for the south, to be warm, to be full of delicious food and just drunk enough on heavy red wine to lay my book down beside me and snooze the afternoon away on the banks of the river Garonne.

Jump forward 15 years. A slightly hunched, dark haired man shuffles on to an outdoor stage. The full moon hangs in a sky bejewelled with stars. The air is warm and limpid, scented with jasmine. The crowd is silent, expectant, a note plays, hangs lazily in the air, the man begins his great love song to Toulouse…. “Qu’il est loin mon pays, qu’il est loin”, the crowd holds its breath, every line rings out into the night and rings true, the final line seems to last forever, “Ô mon païs, ô Toulouse, ohooo Toulooooouse”! The crowd erupts.

Reality mingles with imagination.

Jump forward 15 years. A taller version of my nineteen year old self, a beautiful girl on his arm, saunters across a sunlit square surrounded by red brick buildings. He’s tanned and relaxed and cool and lives and breathes and speaks to the rhythms of this place. We embrace, kiss on both cheeks. My son is at home. I’m back in the city that I have been visiting for forty six years, sometimes in the real world, sometimes in the world of my imagination.

We set off to rediscover the city of my dreams. I’m not disappointed. The words of Claude Nougaro’s song accompany me, “ Je reprends l’avenue vers l’école”. We walk up towards the school. The University of Toulouse was founded in the first half of the thirteenth century and became one of Europe’s greatest centres for the study of the law. We walk on towards the Basilica of St Sernin “l’église St Sernin illumine le soir”.

St Sernin is one of the great Romanesque churches of Europe, a centre of medieval pilgrimage in its own right and an important stage on the way to Santiago de Compostela. The Basilica contains the relics of St Sernin, the first bishop of Toulouse, martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Decius in 250 CE. Constructed between 1080 and about 1120, the church is the biggest Romanesque building in Europe and contains some of the finest examples of Romanesque carving. It is a UNESCO world heritage site and an extraordinarily beautiful and peaceful place to shelter from the hustle and bustle of the city and the heat of summer.

We emerge from the church, squinting as our eyes grow accustomed to the dazzling sunlight. My memories of Toulouse are always peopled with an array of characters. All of the city is for all of the people. Of course, there are areas of the fourth largest city in France with serious social problems. However, the divisions between rich and poor do not seem apparent in the city centre. Everyone appears to find their place there. As we come out of the church the streets are as I remember them.

We continue into the narrow roads behind St Sernin, here the atmosphere is different, the buildings a bit run down with graffiti on the walls. There are bohemian bars and galleries and the contents of hardware stores spilling out onto the pavements. People are buying fruit and vegetables at market stalls. Children are playing in the street. Deep inside a building someone is shouting. The lyrics of Nougaro’s song spring to mind again, “ici si tu cognes, tu gagnes”, here if you punch, you win. I imagine that here on this street, on a hot night, after a few drinks, a fight could easily break out.

We continue our walk, heading now to the river. The city looks beautiful in the morning sunshine. The brick buildings glowing in the light, the plane trees casting dramatic shadows on the pavings. We reach the river. The Garonne rises in the Spanish Pyrenees and flows for over 600km through Toulouse and on to Bordeaux where it joins the Atlantic Ocean. Toulouse owes its economic success to the river, facilitating trade with countries all over the world. Once the Canal du Midi was completed in the seventeenth century, Toulouse was at the heart of a navigation system linking the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. We stroll along the banks of the river. People are out jogging, walking, reading or just contemplating the water. We sit and enjoy the warmth of the sun on our faces and watch the reflections on the arches of the sixteenth century Pont Vieux.

Leaving the river, we head back into the heart of the city. People are sitting, chatting in the squares. Children and dogs are playing and pigeons are foraging for crumbs.

We stroll up towards the Capitole past the mural of Claude Nougaro. “Voici le Capitole, j’y arrête mes pas”.

We do just that, stopping in the square to look at the majestic eighteenth century town hall. Families are enjoying the last days of the ice rink set up on the square for the winter months. There’s a little flea market and the cafés and restaurants are doing a roaring trade. We sit down, order a steak frites and a glass of wine and turn our faces to the sun.

Around the edges of the square riot police stand in groups reminding us that despite our idyllic morning something is rotten in the state of France. Those worries are for another day and we tuck into our lunch with gusto.

After lunch my son says goodbye and disappears in to the crowds, back to his life of study and work and friends.

I had one more place I wanted to go. A short walk from the Capitole is the Couvent des Jacobins, the thirteenth century Dominican monastery. It is a jewel of gothic architecture with its soaring church, tranquil cloister and associated monastic buildings. It would be the perfect place to conclude this wonderful visit. It was. The church was filled with a gorgeous light. The cross on the altar, containing the relics of the Dominican philosopher, theologian and Doctor of the Church, St Thomas Aquinas, shone brightly as a shaft of sunlight struck it.

In the peace of the cloister, my mind jumped back to my first visit, the fear mingled excitement of that hotel room, then to my second visit as a student about to embark on a new chapter of his life, then to this visit. Who would have imagined that the son of that eight year old child passing through on his way to Spain would end up here, finding his way in life, finding love, friendship and happiness?

When reality and imagination mingle myths are created and perhaps a little magic too.