This is les Dentelles de Montmirail. Seen from our own rock la roque alric, where Lovejoy and I had been staring at the rising peaks, moving into our seventh bottle of wine. Lovejoy had been falsely slagged by his wife in a national magazine, she blamed him for turning her into a dyke, so he and I mulled over that one while pouring Gigondas down our throats, and arguing which is the best of the four major "caminos" or paths to Santiago de la Compostella, from Puy, Vezelay, Arles, or Paris.
The Sarasins had a weak spot for the Dentelles whenever they were conducting raids into infidel territory. After you climb up the sheer chalky cliffs, your main challenge is not to fall off the top. It's like playing rooftop tennis in Dubai, make sure the soles of your shoes grip well.
I haven't seen Lovejoy since that al l nighter, but I heard his ex-wife did a major recant on a morning talk show somewhere around the time we were communing with the mistral gods, claimed she was a victim of a femme fatale who was secretly recruiting women for a terrorist sisterhood, then made a public plea for the return of her once maligned ex-spouse.
That morning, I climbed the Dentelles again, and stayed there for a week alone, pondering the route to Santiago. Only 48 hours previous, I'd been planning to leave after a year's prep. But, that Gigondas wine, it moves you to flush out the useless details, and to get on with things.
There were a few people on my list that I had to get around to outdoing, or out absurding, or outdrinking, or outwriting, and at the top of the class, was the chief clown himself, Franck Rabelais, of the Rabelais, rabble rousers chapter.
Franck was convinced he was the funniest man alive, and there were a whole lot of priests who agreed with him. They were dying to ask the man a few questions. Dr Franck had gone incommunicado, that was my aim, to be issuing missives from unknown locations.
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