Celebrated Dutch painter of Pont-en-Royans

Bob ten Hoope [1920-2014]

One of the most interesting individuals I encountered when I came to live in Choranche in 1994 was the Dutch painter Bob ten Hoope, who had decided to set up his home in Pont-en-Royans back in 1954. In the beginning, I was impressed by his sketches of men playing cards in a local café.

But I soon learned that this was a small domain of his work, which encompassed large oil paintings of nudes and many local landscapes.

It was through her friendship with Bob ten Hoope that the sculptor Tineke Bot discovered this region, and decided to settle down in Choranche.

                        — photo by Roger Latton [2013]

The last time I saw Bob, maybe a decade ago, he had set up his easel and painting material on the Rouillard Bridge, just down the road from my place. He was already afflicted with arthritis in his hands, making it extremely difficult for him to carry on painting. Finally, he decided to move back up to his native land.

And that is where he died, last Saturday, 18 January 2014.

Strange fruit

Whenever a village is flooded, small boats arrive on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere.

Then, as soon as the floodwaters subside, the small boats disappear magically. One might wonder where they've gone. Where are they stored, up until the next flood, awaiting their reappearance? It's a mystery... as Christine liked to point out from time to time (so our children tell me).

In Pont-en-Royans, an old photo shows us a small boat on the Bourne, with fishermen.

These days, there are no longer any boats on the Bourne. I suspect that boating has become hazardous because of surges of fast-moving swirling water whenever the operators of the hydroelectric dam at Choranche decide to open valves releasing huge quantities of accumulated water. As in the case of flooded villages, the same question might be asked: Where have all the boats gone?

Yesterday, while wandering along the right bank of the Bourne, I found a partial answer to this question. At a spot roughly behind the head of the fisherman in dark clothes, I came upon an old boat (maybe the one in the photo) that had been hoisted up into the branches of a tree.

[Click to enlarge]

Although the context is far removed from the happy context of boat fishing on the Bourne, I was reminded of the title of a celebrated song by Billie Holiday, evoking the ghastly massacres of black slave workers in the American South.

Magic water

In the domain of magic, maybe the most celebrated liquid of all time was mercury.

Medieval alchemists looked upon this weird substance as primeval matter—in the spirit of Aristotle—out of which all metals evolved. As a schoolboy at Grafton High School, I remember well my first encounter with this amazing but dangerous metal, under the guidance of our aging chemistry teacher Jerry Spring. Once upon a time, it was used by dentists: a bit like installing a toxic battery in the patient's mouth.

Questing after miracles, modern believers in the supernatural seem to be placing their trust in a far more humble liquid: ordinary water.

Jacques Benveniste was a distinguished French specialist in immunology. In 1971, he discovered an organic chemical substance known as PAF [platelet-activating factor], which plays a basic role in the process of hemostasis (the stopping of bleeding) and other vital physiological functions. Benveniste—maybe with a Nobel Prize in the pocket of his lab gown—might have gone down in medical history as a result of this discovery. Alas, the curiosity of Jacques Benveniste led him into an esoteric field of research, inspired by the beliefs of homeopathy. Working under contract for the French pharmaceutical company Boiron [click here to see my article entitled Herbal and homeopathic products], Beneveniste published a controversial article in a 1988 issue of Nature in which he put forward the hallucinating idea that molecules of plain water might possess a mysterious "memory".

If so, then it would be quite normal (!) that the functions of an active ingredient within an enormously-diluted homeopathic preparation might in fact be "remembered". Quod erat demonstrandum. When shit of this superior nature hit the science media fan, it provoked a huge scandal that I won't attempt to summarize here. [See the Wikipedia article on Jacques Beneviste.] The discoverer of "water memory" retired from the French INSERM medical research organization, and the scientific community wondered whether their prestigious colleague might not have been led astray... into ridicule. Today, few serious scientists believe that Beneveniste's speculations incorporate the slightest grain of objective truth.

Whereas Jacques Benveniste obtained nothing more than an ignominious pair of Ig Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in 1991 and 1998, the French biologist Luc Montagnier was awarded a genuine (shared) Nobel in 2008 for his discovery of the Aids virus, HIV. Since then, at the height of his scientific glory, Montagnier has made astonishing claims that homeopathy works, and that Benveniste might have hit the nail on the head. Once again, I leave my blog readers to follow up this affair through Google and Wikipedia.

Let us move from "water memory" to the equally-exciting theme of "water fuel".

Agha Waqar Ahmad is a 40-year-old Pakistani engineer who operates normally in fields that are far removed from the Nobel domain. This employee of the police department claims to have invented an automobile that runs on ordinary water. Ahmad's scientific credentials: a degree in mechanical engineering from a technical college in Khairpur, in the southern province of Sindh. Water is water, universal and ubiquitous, and it knows no geographical, intellectual or cultural barriers. So, it is tempting to to draw parallels between the magic homeopathic memory of Benveniste's water and the magic power of water as the unique fuel in Ahmad's experimental cars. In both cases, we are faced with phenomena that modern science refuses to accept.

In Pakistan, there was intense excitement after the release of demonstrations of Ahmad's water-fueled automobile. TV journalists presented him as a savior of Pakistan, stricken gravely by the energy crisis. Once again, I invite my readers to use Google to learn more about Ahmad's miraculous invention.

Meanwhile, I remain an old-fashioned adept of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which I once learned in 1957, as a student at Sydney University, in the celebrated textbook of Mark Zemansky, which has accompanied several generations of science enthusiasts. I therefore refuse to believe that you can obtain an energy advantage by attempting simply to extract the oxygen and the hydrogen that compose water. The challenge is real, but Ahmad's alleged solution is surely chimeric.

An amusing detail of the Pakistani affair was the high-level support given by the Pakistani Minister of Religious Affairs, Khurshid Shah, who drove the engineer’s car during his demonstration and said he was amazed by the performance of the water kit.

It's unlikely that that the inventor Ahmad might have been aware of, let alone inspired by, our Judeo-Christian beliefs, but there's a strong case for alleging a possible infringement of Roman Catholic patent rights concerning the power of water. After all, we've been using this powerful stuff for ages in baptisms, and we continue to sprinkle so-called Holy Water upon the coffins of our deceased.

In a nutshell, if ever Vatican lawyers were smart enough to demonstrate convincingly that the sacred Popemobile runs purely (as we all believe) on Holy Water, then this Pakistani heathen will be well and truly screwed. Here at home, in Pont-en-Royans, we are proud (?) of our Water Museum, imagined by the mayor Yves Pillet.

Don't ask me, though, what on earth this local museum is supposed to exhibit. Homeopathic health-impregnated water? Pakistani energy-impregnated water? Exotic shark-infested waters from afar? Maybe simply the water of the Bourne? Or the wind upon the waters...

Virtual house in Pont-en-Royans

I've been pursuing my investigations into the possibility that a thatched house drawn in 1870 might have actually existed in Pont-en-Royans, in the vicinity of Blackbird Street [rue du Merle].

If this were indeed an ancient scene at Pont-en-Royans (as I firmly believe), then the main structure in the foreground would have been located on the lower slopes of Mount Barret, on the left bank of the Bourne, whereas the line of buildings in the background would have been located on the other side of the river, in the center of the village of Pont-en-Royans, on the lower slopes of the mountain (vaguely visible in the background) called Les Trois Châteaux. If we don't actually see the Bourne in the drawing, that's because it was hidden behind lots of trees and vegetation that lie between Blackbird House and the river.

Notice the presence of part of a second building behind the main house:

I shall refer to the main house as Blackbird 1, and to the second building (whose roof appears to be tiled, not thatched) as Blackbird 2. Both structures have ample balconies, supported by hefty wooden beams and diagonal props. This is an architectural feature of the so-called "hanging houses" (maisons suspendues) that have made Pont-en-Royans famous.

Clearly, there was no water beneath the balconies of Blackbird 1. But the balconies of Blackbird 2, as well as those attached to the line of buildings in the background, probably all jutted out over the Bourne, like the balconies and lofts that we find on today's hanging houses.

Residents and shopkeepers have always been preoccupied by the challenge of finding as much usable space as possible (both for living and for storing wares) on the precious real estate in the vicinity of the bridge linking the Vercors mountains to the plains.

To ascertain the likely locations of Blackbird 1 and 2, I was guided above all by the angles of the background buildings in the drawing.

Today, to be able to see the façades and the side walls at that angle, you have to move to an observation point quite close to the Picard Bridge. Finally, when I take account of all relevant factors, I'm convinced that Blackbird 1 was located on allotment #127 of the Napoleonic Cadastre.

Blackbird 2 would have been located on allotment #128, quite close to the edge of the Bourne, and the woman and child were seated on the grassy slopes of allotment #126. The stone wall in the drawing corresponds to the curved path leading down towards the river, which still exists today. Here's a view of the Picard Bridge from an upstream vantage point:

Blackbird Street rises behind the car on the left, at the place where a blacksmith's forge was located for ages, and up until only a few decades ago. (My neighbor Madeleine told me that, from her grocery shop at the other extremity of the Picard Bridge, she looked out over the blacksmith's place for 30 years!)  The pair of buildings, Blackbird 1 and Blackbird 2, would have been located (preceded by a short row of hanging houses on the allotments #102, #103 and #104) within the empty space that I've encircled.

There have been several fine illustrations of the blacksmith's workshop, at the southern extremity of the Picard Bridge.

The following nice illustration in color is no doubt a relatively recent copy of the monochrome engraving:

Notice that the central part of the building forming a portal over Blackbird Street has disappeared by the time the Napoleonic Cadastre was drawn, leaving only a narrow fragment overhanging the Bourne.

Normally we should be able to find representations of the Blackbird Street buildings in other old drawings. That's to say, we need to find drawings done from roughly the spot, in the following photo, where Sophia's tail is located.

Here is such a drawing:

I would say that the building in the upper right-hand corner is probably Blackbird 2. Notice, too, beneath the arch of the bridge, on the left bank of the Bourne, the presence of hanging houses that have long since disappeared. In the following engraving by General Bacler d'Albe [1761-1824], we've moved our vantage point a little further downstream:

In the upper right-hand corner, we're still looking up (I think) at Blackbird 2, with the balcony of a hanging house a little further back. The stone arch in the wall supporting Blackbird 2 can still be seen, in the photo of Sophia's tail, above the fisherman. The following elegant illustration was possibly inspired by the Bacler d'Albe engraving:

Finally, I have to admit that there seem to be no other illustrations in which I can clearly distinguish a house that would appear to be Blackbird 1. In a way, this is a positive conclusion, in that it suggests that my drawing of 1870 might in fact be a unique document.

Here's a montage in which I've tried to place the drawing in a modern photographic context:

My attempt to insert a distorted version of the drawing is rather clumsy (the image would need to be transformed magically into a three-dimensional representation, and then rotated in an anticlockwise sense through a third of a circle), but it gives you a rough idea of the location of the old house.