Bastille Day

This essay is about July 14^th, 2023. As I said at the top of the last post, I’m catching up on the summer before getting to fall adventures in Rome.

Today is Bastille Day, a national holiday, the French equivalent of Independence Day.  It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison and marks the beginning of the French Revolution, and the beginning of the end the monarchy in France.

This year it falls on a Friday, which means a three-day weekend.  We are spending it with his parents, in a small town in the northern part of the Drôme department, and we are having a barbecue.  I know better by now than to get my hopes up.

My dad and most of my friends in Minnesota have real barbecue grills: charcoal, wood, or gas ones with multiple burners, all capable of doing the kind of barbecuing that leads to flame-grilled deliciousness.  When I think of barbecue, I think of this:

I have to admit that this is pretty high level barbecue though, and probably belongs on a show called Grill Masters: my dad is finishing ribs on the wood fired Santa Maria grill that he made himself in his welding shop. Thanks Dad!

I love eating food from the grill, and I’ve asked Christian many times over the past several years why we can’t get a small gas grill for the balcony of our apartment in Lyon.

“Because it’s forbidden.” 

Excuse me?  It turns out that the rules of the coproprieté, the cooperative through which apartment owners also own and maintain the building, expressly forbid grills on balconies – along with laundry racks, railing fencing that alters the uniform look of the façade, and so on. 

We live on the 5^th floor, and I take him outside to the balcony and point to our neighbors on the 4^th, 3^rd, and 1^st floors who not only have grills on their balconies, but use them regularly, causing the mouthwatering odor of grilled meat to waft through our open windows.

“Yes, but it’s forbidden.”  Hmph.

We could buy a grill for his parents’ house: we are here pretty much every other weekend.  They are both approaching 90 and increasingly need help with grocery shopping, property maintenance, and paperwork.  But gas grills are expensive in France, and I don’t think we would use it enough to justify the price if it’s kept an hour and a half away from our apartment.

So Christian is grilling sausages for lunch on the “barbecue”, but I put the word in quotes because I burst out laughing when I saw it.  It’s tiny, flimsy, and electric, plugged into an outlet just inside the house.  It looks more like an overgrown toaster than a grill. 

He’s cooking two kinds of thin sausages: godiveau and merguez.  The godiveau is similar to a chipolata, a  veal sausage in a natural casing.  Godiveau is a local version, from the region of France known as the Dauphiné that from the Rhone river to the Alps and the Italian border in south central France.  It is still made with veal, but it contains more fat, specifically leaf lard from around the kidneys, and the casing has to be sheep intestine.  Merguez is sold everywhere in France, though it is more popular in the south: it is traditionally a North African lamb sausage, though now often made with beef, with North African spices.  Some French people consider it spicy, but to me it’s just flavorful.  I prefer the merguez, while Christian’s parents prefer the godiveau, so that works out nicely.

• Godiveau on the left, merguez on the right

We have the apéro while the sausages are cooking; this is a holiday meal, so the apéro is required (I’ll do a whole post about the apéro ritual at some point).

After the apéro we move to the table, where we have a caprese salad (with bufala mozzarella of course) that is my contribution to the meal for the entrée, the first course.  Note that the entrée is literally the entry to the meal.  We made a very confusing mistake in the US when we started using that word for the plat, or main dish.

My mother-in-law made ratatouille this morning; re-heated and served with the sausages at lunch it is even better.  We have the cheese course after the plat, then fruit for dessert: fresh peaches which are in season and local.  Christian grew up in this very house, in this part of the Drôme that is covered in vineyards and fruit trees: cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, nectarines, and chestnuts. 

We do the dishes after lunch and everyone takes a siesta. The late afternoon and early evening is occupied with household chores, then we have a light dinner around: salad, a half of a leftover sausage each, and fruit.

Much to my surprise, Christian wants the two of us to go and see the fireworks.  It’s been at least a decade since I’ve seen fireworks on the Fourth of July, not since my daughters were in middle school and I endured it for them.  I am a morning person: I wake up easily between 6 and 7 am without an alarm, but that means that I’m tired and ready for bed by 10.  I am also a mosquito magnet: mosquitoes will fly hundreds of meters to bite me while leaving Christian and anyone else nearby completely untouched.  A mid-summer fireworks show sounds dreadful to me: staying up later than I want to, being bitten by dozens of mosquitoes, and being stuck in traffic for an hour after it’s all over. 

I thought he was joking when he said “Let’s go see the fireworks.”  “Ha ha, very funny,” I replied.  But it turns out that Christian LOVES fireworks, more than any other adult I know.  He was completely serious. He proposed driving half an hour to a small town on the Rhône river.  Great, I thought: even more mosquitoes. But he could not be dissuaded, and he really wanted to share the experience with me.

We left at quarter to 9 for a show scheduled to start at 10.  We found parking, followed the crowd to the riverbank and found a good spot.  We were far too late to be in the front row, but we had a good view thanks to the children in front of us.  Then we waited… I was still feeling grumpy about being dragged to the show so I read on my phone rather than talking to him.

The show started just after 10 and it was spectacular.  Beautiful fireworks burst over the Rhone, reflected in the water, and the crowd made appreciative noises.  At one point, cascades of light tumbled in waterfalls from the edges of the bridge over the river. 

I found myself surprisingly moved by the blue, white and red bursts representing the French flag, and suddenly remembered that it was 15 years ago today, Bastille Day 2008, that I arrived in France for the first time, never imagining that I would be where I am now: in a small town that I’ve never heard of, with my French husband, watching the fireworks after spending the day with my French family. 

We held hands watching the finale, and I thanked him for insisting on the outing. It was a magical moment - and I didn’t even get any mosquito bites.