Béziers – Poilhes
There is so much to do and see in Béziers that we have divided our journal into two parts. Picking up where Ian left off, I shall chat about some of the other things we found to entertain us in and around this delightful city.
Folies Gruss
Erik and Marisca, from Onderneming, with whom we shared many a soirée on Catharina Elisabeth,
told us about a ‘circus’ they had been to the night before.
Encouraged to see it for ourselves, I booked tickets online, and late one afternoon we set off on our bikes. This was becoming a familiar trip for us. The route took us along the port, up past the lock at the far end of the port, along a short pont canal, and up beside the Fonseranes lock staircase (described below) to a site complete with a big top and associated outbuildings. For a moderate fee, you were seated on one of a number of large hay bales, set up as an outdoor communal picnic area, with pallets between the bales as tables. Space was shared with 8-10 people. Wait staff came past, took your food order electronically and delivered it back in no time. It was, however, still horrendously windy (which was why we were still moored here), and Ian lost a good portion of his meal when it was blown away. While we ate and drank, we were entertained by a band and treated to some acrobatics by the circus performers.
After eating, everyone was led into the circus tent to take our assigned seats. We had not been settled long when we were asked if we would like to move further down towards the front. When the performance commenced, the acts seemed to be centred around making horses and camels trot around the ring and do tricks. It made us feel a little uncomfortable, but once they got that out of their system we were treated to a wonderful series of clever performances from a very skilled troupe. Some of the acts were truly amazing. Based around a story telling the history of the local region, including the burning of the people inside the Madeleine church, and narrated in very fast French, it was still a very enjoyable evening. Filming was of course forbidden, (so the photo below is not ours) but that meant we spent our time watching rather than capturing images for later.
When the show was over, several hours later, we got back on our bikes for the ride back to Catharina. It was of course completely dark by now, and very little of the route had any lighting. With my bike headlight playing up, it was with some relief that we made it back to the port without incident.
Just across from where Catharina was moored
is a striking Art Nouveau house with a beautiful Burgundian-style roof.
It has an interesting story, part of which we gained from talking to Phillipe, one of the capitains of the port. The three-level house, ‘Saint Felix’, was built in 1887 by a wealthy industrialist. As part of the construction, he commissioned the sculptor Injalbert to sculpt decorations on the facade. Long abandoned, it fell into rack and ruin, was inhabited by squatters and was due to be condemned. In circumstances that Phillipe hinted might have been less than transparent, the building was sold to a local builder in 2019 (other sources say that other bidders withdrew when they saw how dilapidated the interior had become). He set about restoring the outside and the very badly run-down inside of the house. He did this with great care and was eventually rewarded with a gold medal and a special jury prize in the category ‘Renovation of an existing house’, and with the sale of the house for a tidy sum, a bit north of half a million euros, for a €190,000 profit.
During the next day we cycled back up the hill above the port (getting used to this, on a very regular basis), and made it into the Église de la Madeleine, which is only open a few times a week.
As Ian mentioned, this was the site of a dreadful slaughter of innocents during the Massacre at Béziers in 1209. The church was set on fire, and traces of charring, apparently, can still be seen. The church is also noted for its part in an earlier event depicted in this painting that hung on the wall.
The story goes that the Viscount of Béziers, one Raimond de Trencavel, (grandfather of the unfortunate Raimond from the previous Béziers blog – plainly the role of Viscount of Béziers was fraught with danger) was returning from a military campaign when a horse was stolen by a commoner from Béziers. Raimond sentenced the man to a humiliating punishment. The citizens of Béziers were outraged, and a meeting was called on the 15th of October, 1167, for the Viscount to make amends and apologise. Raimond attended the church, but as he entered, he was set upon and killed. For this outrage, the Pope excommunicated the entire town.
The church, while in good condition (it had been extensively renovated in 1999), was relatively austere.
Because it was around lunchtime, we paid a visit to the market (les Halles) to find it was entirely populated with a vast array of cultural food stalls, where you bought your plates of choice, and sat at one of the many tables inside the venue. The food was fantastic.
I chose from the Spanish stall (getting ready to enjoy some Spanish tapas next summer).
After which, some ambulatory exercise was called for. So we made our way to the Fayet Museum, pleased to find it open, and spent some time wandering around. The building was once a hotel, built in the 17th-century on mediaeval foundations, and the rooms were beautifully reminiscent of the times. The museum is named after Gustave Fayet, born in this family hotel, who was an avid collector of art and particularly fascinated with Japanese objects. There were several photos of his family, who were regularly clothed in Japanese style, the women wearing kimonos.
Other displays taught us that a collector of champagne lids is a placomusophile; a collector of Pokémon cards is a pokémoncartophile; and a collector of snow globes is a chionosphérophile – keep those in mind for your next trivia night.
Fayet experimented with techniques in his own right as an artist. One of these was his desire to represent plants and flowers like Japanese artists. He developed a style of painting in water colours using very thin, almost transparent paint, on blotting paper, resulting in an impression of movement.
We saw plaster scale models by Jean-Antoine Injalbert, the sculptor born in Beziers in 1845, responsible for the statues we had passed so many times in the Park of the Poets.
Cute historic tale: Hannibal and his army, including 37 elephants according to legend, trekked across the Pyrenees and along the southern French coast towards the Alps to avoid the Roman navy guarding the coast. His route is purported to have taken him across the River Orb and the River Hérault, and almost certainly passed through or near Béziers. Searching for the ‘tourist’ marking of this event, we found a small sign, mounted on a tall pole in a tiny square on one of Béziers hilly streets, announcing Hannibal and his elephants passed through here. So it must be true.
Knowing that once we left the port, and passed through the second of the locks that bookend it, our next lock experience would be the Fonseranes staircase. On our second reconnaissance, we made sure to arrive while boats were going up the staircase. This is a sequence of locks, where the far gate of each becomes the front gate of the next. So once you begin, you are committed to completing the passage. Travel in the two directions is carefully controlled to accommodate boats going up or down. Boats are raised 21.5 metres over a distance of 300 metres.
The flight was originally built as an eight-rise, the ninth lock being the écluse de Notre-Dame, to allow boats to cross the Orb River. The ‘nine locks’ name dates from this. In 1858, an aqueduct was built to replace the crossing of the Orb. Boats now enter and leave the lower end of the flight through the side of chamber seven, which is permanently kept filled at its upper level. So essentially, the flight is made up of six locks. The lower gates of the seventh chamber are permanently closed. The eighth chamber and the ninth lock are now disused. Confusing? Sure. But regardless, this was still going to be the largest flight we had yet navigated.
A separate project was the building of the Fonseranes water slope, adjacent to the locks. This was meant to facilitate the movement of commercial traffic too large for the locks. An engine with a kind of snow plough in front pushed a pond of water, with the barge afloat in it, up the slope (and takes boats down on the reverse run). But after years of technical problems (which included the failure of its braking system, resulting in it descending at great speed and causing a tsunami of water to crash down the canal!), it was abandoned. We were not able to get a photo of the engine, but found this one:
Fonseranes Staircase
The day finally came when we thought the wind would not be too challenging for us to take on the Fonseranes locks and the cruise to our planned destination, Poilhes. The wind was not too bad, and delightful as Béziers was, it was time to get moving. A couple of interesting side notes should be made here. One: having discussed at reasonable length the contribution of Pierre-Paul Riquet, in the design and construction of the canal, the subcontractors for these locks were two illiterate brothers, Michel and Pierre Medailhes. And two: many of the workers were women.
Andrew, the Aussie chap we met on our first day in Béziers, offered to come along with us and help as we made our way through this lock system. No reason to refuse a friendly hand, the three of us set off to meet the schedule of boats heading up, and so when I got off, as required, Ian drove in, Andrew threw me a rope, and I was able to drop it on a lock bollard, whereupon he could put it round the second of our bow bollards, allowing much greater control as the lock filled. Ian had a stern rope to manage, and the engine was off, as instructed. We were also sharing the lock with another much smaller boat.
It’s also worth noting that the staircase is a very popular tourist spot – and there were plenty of people watching and critiquing our performance to add to the stress of the exercise. As we entered the first of the locks, the gates were opened to form a longer chamber with the second lock. It seemed to moderate the flow of water as we rose. As soon as the team of éclusiers were ready, and before the first lock was at its full height, we were told in no uncertain terms to drop the ropes off and make our way into the next chamber. My voiced concern about our skeg (1.35 m draft) fitting over the sill between the chambers was met with a frown and a pointed hand, “Allez, allez” (get moving). Even after the écluse is half-full, the flow is pretty fast, and the strain in keeping Catharina Elisabeth close to the wall is visible at the bow and the stern.
My job was to take the entire length of heavy rope back from Andrew, who remained on board, and drag it up a flight of steps between each lock chamber, and then drop it back down to Andrew. Snagging it on broken stones, steps and the lock mechanisms notwithstanding. When we reached the top and final chamber, Andrew hopped off, I hopped on, and he set off to return to his boat, still in the Béziers port. Andrew would be cruising in the opposite direction to us.
Tunnel de Malpas
A little farther along the canal, we came across the only tunnel we would see on this canal.
Built between 1679 and 1680, the Voûte de Malpas was Europe’s first navigable canal tunnel. Pierre-Paul Riquet was determined to build a tunnel to carry the canal under the d’Ensérune hill in Hérault for reasons of efficiency and so that the canal would pass through Béziers, the town of his birth. However, the initial surveys of the hill indicated that the sandstone rock might not be able to support tunnelling. Colbert, the French Prime Minister, halted work on the canal and sent a committee to determine if the route of the canal should be changed. While this was being arranged, Riquet, in secret, ordered his engineer to proceed with the tunnel works, and it was dug out and completed in just eight days in time before the arrival of the committee – fait accompli! A brilliant piece of engineering, another first of its kind, the tunnel was Riquet’s last major project as he died a few months after its completion.
Poilhes
We decided we would try to stay at Poilhes if there was a space for us, delaying the unknown of Capestang (‘the lowest bridge on the Midi’ – although, I can tell you there were plenty of tricky bridges on the Midi) for just one more day. It is worth mentioning that the Midi is also unusual in that it is very curvy, and we had to be constantly attentive to what might be around a corner. A long blast of Catharina’s horn was a regular feature of our cruising, and we found that for a good portion of the Canal du Midi, I spent several hours on the bow, looking for moored or travelling boats as we neared the many tight corners and the bridges.
The approach to the Poilhes mooring was around a very sharp starboard turn, so we cautiously slowed and kept to the port (left) side of the corner and gave a long blast on the horn. It’s a place where an accident is waiting to happen. We saw boats heading in both directions, too fast for the corner and overshooting. Cutting that corner runs a very real risk of a T-bone collision. The canal isn’t very wide at this point, and ninety-degree turns make me nervous.
Just after that turn in the canal, we pulled up to a pleasant mooring near a low wall just before two bridges.
Beyond these bridges were a large number of permanent moorings, and it was unlikely we would find a space for us. So we tied off just in time for a light lunch and a walk. (Actually, let’s be honest here – a beer on the aft deck is the first thing we do once cruising is done for the day.) A hire boat was behind us, and another came in front of us, pretty much filling all the available space. However, both just hung around long enough to check out local lunch options (none) and then took off again. A hotel boat or two appeared around this tight corner, and I must say, we were very grateful they took it slow, or we might have been collected on the way through.
We took a wander around the place, but it was very small with little sign of life. There was a restaurant right beside our mooring, but it appeared to only open later in the day. The permanent moorings were full of boats of all kinds and conditions. Here’s one named after the city that we lived in for two years in the ’80’s:
On our walk, we came across some information about the tree planting that is being undertaken by the VNF, the organisation mostly responsible for maintaining the French waterways. The loss of the plane trees that have had to be removed because of a disease is being repaired by the VNF by extensive plantings of other trees along the lower reaches of the canal.
Next – Capestang, and the famously terrifying bridge.
