Sketches
Source
There is something special anywhere fresh water springs out of the ground. In Pagnol's film La Gloire de mon père, little Marcel asks his friend Lili des Bellons why his grandfather died without telling anyone the location of his secret spring. 'Cela ne se dit pas,' says Lili simply. You just don't say.
In the deep valleys around Rennes-les-Bains, water squeezes out between the rocks, rises through the loam and vegetation, running quickly into rivulets, then streams, then rivers. They merge and torrent, tugged downward by gravity along the paths of least resistance. Then they dilute and lose themselves in the mighty Aude that will carry them down to Carcassonne, past Sallèles d'Aude to the sea.
Where these tributary rivers rise is almost always damp and hidden. Dark leaves overhang. They are a source of mystery, too.
And perhaps, round here, the most beguiling of all is the source salée, a salt-water spring so strangely distant from and so enigmatically far above the Mediterranean, running more briny than seawater itself out of the hillside above Sougraigne.
