Port Racine, Normandy

A Christmas Day walk "in the footsteps of Jacques Prévert"

(This blip has been re-loaded in order to include more information.)


Port Racine

A delightful cross-country walk requiring several hours starts and finishes at Port Racine.

This intriguing little port has no connection with the dramatist Jean Racine; it is named after the corsair (or privateer) François-Médard Racine, who created it in 1813.  The partial privatisation of war at sea by issuing “letters of marque” was a useful way for nations to pressurise and attack their opponents while reducing the high costs of maintaining their own navies.

The port is tiny and has an intricate system of ropes which ensure that the 25 boats which it harbours can come to no harm from each other.  Just 14 of them appear in this photo.


Christmas Day walks

The end of the year demands enormous stamina of the French.

As Christmas approaches French TV and newspapers regularly exalt the virtue of using Christmas Day for burning off the calories acquired during the "Réveillon" of the night before.  (Loose translation: meal during which you eventually lose count of the number of courses and wine bottles consumed.)  The media seem to forget to take into account that a further Réveillon is scheduled for 31st December.  So what's the point, anyway...?

Some quirky British residents in France take the view that one Réveillon is more than sufficient.  They realise that Christmas Day is ideal for walking, and that the large volume of traffic on the roads is merely transporting the locals towards further gastronomic exercises in preparation for the forthcoming Réveillon.  


Jacques Prévert (1900-1977)

The best-known and deservedly best-loved French 20th century poet; for instance, "Les Feuilles Mortes" ("Autumn Leaves"), set to music by his friend Jacques Kosma.  But he was much more than just a poet  A friend of Picasso and his cronies, surrealist with Marcel Duchamps for a while, and a screenwriter for some of the finest mid-century French films - e g "Les Enfants du Paradis" 

Prévert had visited Normandy during the 1930s, and after the war he moved from Paris to the village of Omonville-la-Petite, close to the north coast of the Cotentin Peninsula... and within walking distance of Port Racine, one of his favourite spots.

His friend the set designer Alexandre Trauner, who had collaborated with him on several films, joined him in Omonville. They, with their wives and Prévert's daughter now lie buried in adjacent plots in the village churchyard.  Their graves are covered not with the massive stone slabs which seem obligatory to all French cemeteries, but with a mixture of camellias and other bushes.

A little taste of Prévert, in his poem "Paris by Night" (chosen by virtue of being the shortest that I could find):

Three matches lit one by one in the night
The first to see your face in its entirety
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And the darkness all around to remind me of all of them
As I take you in my arms.