![]() We slip into seats next to a brother and sister in their 30s from Bordeaux who’ve come at the bidding of their grandmother, who lives a few villages away and is sitting at another table with neighbors. More tables are hauled in, and from what I can see, no one is turned away. ![]() Bonnefon says 700 tickets were sold, but he guesses that about 750 showed up. At least a hundred more overflow outside under a tent. Hundreds of people wedge along communal tables, surrounded by frescoed walls. Slowly we make our way toward La Félibrée’s pièce de résistance, the midday taulada served in St.-Cyprien’s former tobacco-drying house. They pound drums, collapse accordions, and squeeze cabrettes, a common bagpipe-like instrument. Then Bonnefon and I follow a parade of costumed musicians under a tunnel of wisteria-like flowers. I can make out only a word or two of his Occitan lyrics, a salad of syllables and sounds resembling French, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. Like groupies, we get a spot up front, stage left, and we watch the girl of no more than 20 years old, clad in ankle-nipping skirt and bonnet, twist a parasol and sway in time to Pascal’s crooning. It draws an estimated 20,000 people, though there never seems to be an oppressive crowd.īonnefon’s son, Pascal, is also a musician and balladeer, and is in the main square about to serenade the queen of La Félibrée. He decided to start his band and be active at events like La Félibrée, which is the biggest of its kind in the region. Bonnefon says he realized, at age 24, he was linked to a language and culture that were very rich but in danger of disappearing. For a child in the 1950s and ’60s, however, it was punishable to teach or speak it in French schools, pushing Occitan into the linguistic margins. Bonnefon learned Occitan from his parents and grandparents, who spoke it at home. Like the troubadours, the medieval storytellers and performers who roamed the continent and entertained the courts of Europe, Bonnefon is a modern-day wandering musician who traverses the region to perpetuate the oral traditions of his ancestors. Bonnefon has been the front man for an Occitan band called Peiraguda for 40 years, and he writes and sings in the disappearing tongue. ![]() “This is a day that celebrates the Occitan roots of our people and is a good way for those who are new to the region to understand our culture,” he says. Now Bonnefon, a member of the festival organizing committee in the village of St.-Cyprien, is showing me what I’ve been missing all this time. Over the years, I’d heard about La Félibrée, seen the floral remnants of this annual fete dangling over villages, but never attended. “In Périgord, we are very attached to our country and our differences, but at the same time we are a true land of welcome,” says Jean Bonnefon, a dedicated Occitanist. The heat is relentless, and the sun beats on white bonnets and crimson bandanna-like scarves, emblazoned with a yellow heraldic cross and one word: “Périgord.” A group of women in long skirts, lace-collared blouses, and bonnets hook arms and circle, square-dance style, with men dressed head to toe in black, including hats that could be distant cousins of the Stetson. Beneath a sapphire sky and rows of hanging paper-flower garlands, schoolchildren fidget before the cameras of their doting parents. “It is necessary to go in order to realize how lucky we are to live in this paradise,” he tells me. His sons have moved to larger cities for work since I last saw him, but he’s confident that they will return. Although it sounds very cosmopolitan, Manouvrier calls himself an old dinosaur of the Périgord (I remind him we are the same age), whose roots run as deep in the fertile soil as those of the oak trees that produce its treasured black truffles. He includes them in some of his ice cream but mostly ships them to pastry chefs and restaurants around the world. His latest obsession is crystallized roses, violets, jasmine, and other flowers, which he preserves via a patented process that maintains their organoleptic and aesthetic properties. I find him in his factory on the outskirts of the already outskirty village of St.-Geniès, where he makes his unusual flavors of ice cream with local ingredients (goat cheese, foie gras, chestnut). He’s corrected my French so many times that I call him mon prof, my teacher. My go-to guy for Périgord and language questions is Roland Manouvrier, an artisanal ice-cream maker, whom I first met in 2006.
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