The cloisters have a rather gloomy double arcade at each end, and above, there are seventeenth century apartments. They feel more like a market hall in a decayed county town than a cloister; boys illegally play ball on the grass in the centre. No provision was made for the monks' accommodation; presumably they found digs in the town, like extra-mural students. It has had several incarnations; first used as a brandy store; then bought by the council as a foie gras market in 1880. The usual catalogue of blasphemous uses, like the Parthenon used as a magazine; uses vary, but buildings stay, remarkably unchanged.
Condom is full of classical houses, even mansions (such as the Ryst-Depeyron chais, formerly Hotel de Cugnac); pedimented doorcases seen from the side in sunlight on a descending street create a series of light edges, an articulation of the curved wall.
Somewhere in Condom is the quintessence of antique shops, or rather the epitome; a window through which can be seen, in a clear shade, a few, just a few, really excellent pieces, and two scintillant candelabra. I enter; no-one is there, but there is a fire in the grate hissing, casting its orange shades on the mahogany furnishings and the chiaroscuro madonna. It is like trespassing in Snow White's castle.
Condom is a newcomer, an eleventh century foundation; but it has the feel of old riches, its economy always firmly based on the wine trade. An English town for three hundred years; the cathedral now has an altar to Joan of Arc. And besides the English, we find Protestants here; Nérac, close by, was the headquarters of a Protestant literary circle around the d'Albrets, including Marot; Eauze also was a reformed town, with its half-timbered house of Jeanne d'Albret, a heavybrowed crazyleaning construction on the main square.
The next day is back to mist and drizzle. Purple-grey clouds hang motionless, unwilling to move. Then suddenly about two of the afternoon the half of sky behind me was completely blue, just a few wisps of pure white, and the half in front covered in leaden clouds which were not yet quite heavy enough to believe in a real storm. The climates divided almost exactly at the zenith; a schizophrenic vault.
I did not fulfil my vow of luxury in Condom; I passed by the three-star hotel, the Trois Lys, set in its own courtyard and small enough for intimacy, and stayed instead at a cramped hotel and ate a dinner of tinned asparagus, cold gristly steak, a stale rhum baba. So the luxury had to wait until Montréal, a royal bastide indeed to go on the evidence of its restaurant, where by luck I passed two bars, hurrying to see the arcade, and following a faded sign discovered Chez Simone. The Gascon menu; asparagus, salmis de palombe with delightfully dark flesh and gravy ink-black; magrets de canard; finally croustade, little points of crisped pastry over apples in armagnac. A Côtes Saint-Mont, full and sweet. To finish a Floc de Gascogne, like a sweet muscat, but sharp, and cold. Like the country, the cooking; dark and rich, but with a sharpness of the wind blowing, of the hardness of life, not like the creamy, yellow, sunlit feel of Normandy. Armagnac like the spirits of distilled angels. It cost me a walk in the dark and the rain into Eauze, and I did not care.