Street Fun and Fireworks: Bastille Day in Avignon

The Palace of the Popes, Avignon

Let me set the scene.  It's a high summer day, the sky blue, the air hot and aromatic with the scent of pine, laurel, lavender.  If a wind rises--and the wind can blow!--it flips over the leaves revealing their soft silvery side.  White doves coo; cicadas sing.  The honeyed heat empties mid-afternoon café chairs.  But diners reappear under the plane trees at dusk.  In one restaurant where we consume spring rolls with mint sprigs and fish sauce served on delicate Vietnamese plates, a caged bird whistles the Marseillaise.  We climb up to the park above the Palace of the Popes, the Palais des Papes, and feed bits of bread to the pigeons, ducks, and swans.  Sometimes, we go there for picnics taking along baguettes of fresh crusty bread and rounds of goat cheese, slices of ham, plump apricots peaches cherries figs, a bottle of red wine, paper cups.

My sketch of the swans and ducks

It's July and we're in Avignon during its maybe two-week-long film, arts, and theater festival which coincides with Bastille Day celebrations.  The city then becomes its own al fresco theater--the Palace walls, steps, stonework, the streets and sidewalks are all part of the set.

A "bird cage" (which children love to enter) covering much of the sidewalk.  (Note the two towers at this particular gate in the city walls.)

Same sidewalk, on up a ways--a maze to walk through if anyone is so inclined.

A square in the middle of town with a set of drums in the upper right.

Out in the square by the Palais des Papes, ZouZou, the mime, either commits hara-kiri twice a day (for stealing his mother-in-law's jam) or he becomes Tarzan, dividing those of us in his two-hundred-plus audience into groups of animals.  When he gives his jungle call, the elephant group bellows.  The lions roar and show their teeth.  The monkeys (our group) chatter and scratch.  The snakes hiss and flick their tongues in and out.  Then Jane appears, combing her hair.  Tarzan's eyes roll.  He sidles over and strangles a troublesome lion on the way.

ZouZou outside the Palace of the Popes

Elsewhere, a puppet grandmother keeps liquor in her teapot and smokes a pipe.  A three-legged man and two girls on stilts maneuver the streets.  A dwarf tap dances but never walks because his hands belong to one man and his feet to another.  A green girl with hair hanging down over her glass eye hands out leaflets.  Peruvians play pan pipes and drums.  Someone with his eyes shut pretends that a folding ruler is a saxophone.  (The actual saxophone player is underneath a large piece of plastic.)  A goat balances on a platform the size of a teacup.  A man wearing roller skates and a tall crown of advertisements carries a chair, sets it wherever he pleases, and sits awhile.  A man follows people imitating their moves.  Someone sells bird whistles that fit inside the mouth.  We get a silhouette cut and two caricatures done.

The man with his roller skates and tall crown of advertisements

With evening, everyone drifts down toward what remains of Avignon's medieval bridge over the Rhône, the same that inspired the well-known song, "Sur le pont d'Avignon."

Avignon's medieval Pont St-Bénézet that no longer spans the Rhône River

There, on the bridge, costumed boys toss flags.  Girls in Provençal dresses hold hands and dance a serpentine.  Letters spelling "liberté" light up as red smoky flares seem to engulf the whole bridge in flames.  Then to the soundtrack of electronic squeaks and boops, combined with French folk tunes and a hint of something Japanese, fireworks sizzle up over the river like climbing golden insects to fall and climb again in white sparkles.  Some wiggle like colored worms.  Some zoom up like the trunks of trees and then shoot off like branches.  Some seem to hang in the air like great golden jacaranda blossoms.

Our visits encompassed two Bastille Days.  July 14, 1980 and 1984.  (Followed by other non-Bastille Day stays.)  It's a favorite spot that I always remember this time of year, along with its blue sky, honeyed air, and that crusty bread.