Mdme Sparkle commences her campaign of being seen in Paris.

... and on the job as photographer on Le Tour de France ...

... and as official photographer for Middle Eastern royal houses ...

... and chronicler of life in Place Edith Piaf, in the 20th Arrondisement.

And, finally, as good, old fashioned private tourist, challenging her long held fear of heights at the point, the top point, of the Eiffel Tower. She was a very brave girl.

	Left: The grocer on the corner: Galleries Lafayette.

Shopping with friends in Paris.

	Left: Mdme Sparkle always shops at Galleries Lafayette.

"Don't fuzz the the picture this time, darling, and you'll get your reward... "

There are 20,000 Frenchmen and women in the Catacombs below Paris, including guillotined revolutionaries. Sadly, they didn't attach tags. For all we know, one of these is Robespierre.

The World's Biggest Barbie, French style: the world's biggest pan of paella, in the markets at Loches.

As soon as Mdme Sparkle heard that she was to visit The Sleeping Beauty's castle in the Loire valley, she went into raptures. And, sure enough, the chateau of Ussy lived up to it ...

With a series of displays using used store models illustrating The Sleeping Beauty. Here, the evil fairy conjures her spell in her garret. Earlier visitors are in the background.

La Caravage, a bar on the river at Loches. A very pleasant place.

	Top: This was to be a highlight of Mdme Sparkle's Grand Tour of Yrp: Mont St Michel. The birthplace of Frenchness 1300 years ago. Sadly, it's dominated now by the tourist industry, and it's such a silly place. It needs someone to turn over the tables in the temple.
	Left: And why was Mont St Michel such a disappointment. In can be summed up in this dish: "Traditional Normandy Stew", the restaurant called it. But it was tripe. Tasting of chemicals. And it was inedible.
	Below: The Bay of Mont St Michel - spectacular. Pity about the rest of the place.

Mdme Sparkle bought a new hat in the markets at Arles just so that she might stand out on the telly back home as the Tour de Fronce whizzed past. So far, we have yet to find anyone who spotted her.

The prelude to the peleton is the caravan, when the Tour sponsors zoom past in a parade of all kinds of vehicles and floats throwing trinkets to the spectators. It inspires a cargo-cult scramble for goodies, much as if they'd been throwing out euros. Most of it was rubbish, of course, but it certainly whips the crowd into a frenzy. The entire procession of vehicles which are part of the tour -- caravan, support staff, team voitures, etc -- takes hours to go past, including coppers on motorbikes, but not including the hundreds, hundreds, of amateur cyclistes heading up and down the hill before the Tour comes through.

As the "yellforcadel.com" car came through, we shouted to Mdme Sparkle, "Yell for Cadel ... we'll take a pitcher ..." So we did, and she did.

Sheesh! Do you fancy all this for a quiet ride in the countryside? The leader of the day's stage when they zoomed past us was, on Bastille Day, a Luxembourger, Schleck, we think. He had about 1:33 on the next pursuivants at that stage. But they caught him on the way up to Hautacam.

Le group Evans heads into the switchbacks on the way down from the Col du Tourmalet. You can spot the yellow jersey at the back. Our vantage point was 14 km from the summit and there was another eight to ten kms to the bottom, before they headed up to Hautacam to the finish.

We maintain that it was our cheeing on the switchbacks over Luz Saint Sauveur that provided Cadel Evans with the go-juice that got him, by day's end, a one second overall lead -- and the maillot jaune -- that day in the Tour de Fronce.

Entering the switchbacks, all concentration for some.

We think this is a Dutch cycliste named Nicky. He's smiling not at us, or at Mdme Sparkle, but at five Dutch kids -- Wendy, Eva, Joris, Walter and Siem, our friends for the day -- who sat next to us on our roadside wall obove the switchbacks above Luz Saint Sauveur. They yelled like crazy at him, by name, just as we had at Cadel Evans, and you can see him here acknowledging them. And as he descended below us from one hairpin to the next, at 50 or 60 kph, he looked up to them, up the steep, steep hillside, he lifted his right hand, and he smiled and he waved. That was one of the most touching moments we've witnessed in sport. What a nice bloke.

The true peleton at last.

Those Tour de Fronce cyclistes are so intent on descending high mountain passes that they fix the sheep on the roadside with bells and spots of red paint, just so that they might spot them. The sheep have an unnerving habit of wandering across the road in the path of oncoming traffic. A car might be able to stop, but a cycliste at 100kph might not.

Not a finger or a handkerchief over the lens, but we're about to rise through the cloudline on the way up to the Col du Tourmalet.

Over the top at the Col du Tourmalet. Very different up here from down in the valley. For one thing, the temp dropped from c. 30 deg C to 9 deg C.

Proud Dutchman.

The view from van Gogh's "bedroom" in the asylum at St Remy.

Two points of interest: the town of Glanum, outside St Remy, dates from Ligurian and Gallic times about 400 BC. It later became a Greek town, then a Roman town. Van Gogh spent a year in an asylum next door, and we suspect the church he painted in his Starry Night work was the church at St Remy, as seen from some lookout point not far from here. In those days (1889-90), van Gogh would have had little idea about Glanum, which was excavated only from the mid-1920s.

Among the roons.

"What have the Romans ever done for us? ..." For one thing, they built the Pont du Gard over 14 years from 38AD to 52AD. They used 1,000 men and 50,000 tonnes of stone, fitted together without mortar.

The Fronch added the coffee shop later.

It's big.

... and it's covered in graffiti.

"Don't do it!!!" ... Enthusiastic supporter of le Tour gazes out over the Pyrenees on the day the tour is due over two enormous climbs: at this stage, now we had our possie on the switchbacks below the Col du Tourmalet, all we had to do was to wait seven hours for the cyclistes to arrive.

Arles street.

"You look gorgeous, sweetheart!"

We stumbled across this garden in Arles. Felt we'd seen it before ... couldn't quite put our fingers on it ... Ah, yes ... Van Gogh painted this garden, and here we are, standing in it.

Markets in Arles.

The onion seller.

At the markets in Arles, very pleased with her sausages.

Mdme Sparkle's new best friend, Christian Lacroix, applauds Arles Fete d'Costume at the town's Roman-era Theatre Antique. Lacroix came from Arles. Over a couple of weeks, Mdme Sparkle attended several events also attended by Christian. She also went to his shop in Arles. Didn't buy anything, but she went to his shop.

"Chapeau! ... Chapeau!"

The ladies of Arles got done up in their Arlesian finest for the annual Fete d'Costume, which truly was spectacular.

You can get pretty well anything in the markets. Even high visibility vests, curtains, hardware, lethal knives, and beds. Queen sized ones. But wait: there's more! And paella, ready to eat.

"Dried newt! Bat's eyes! ..." All kinds of snack foods are available at Arles' Roman arena.

Mdme Sparkle had her first pastis in Place Voltaire, after the bull races.

Anyone can visit the café immortalised by van Gogh in Arles. Even bald, fat gits. We were surprised to find, however, that the food was quite good and very competitively priced.

Something from left field, or from some field, somewhere: rabbits in the markets, Arles. They got theirs, alright.

The light, and the colours, around Arles inspired van Gogh.

Arles' Roman arena. They don't build public infrastructure like this any more, indeed like the Pont du Gard (see above), either. Can you imagine Morris Iemma or Eric Roozendaal, or any one of your state of federal politicians in Stray'a, sponsoring projects like this? Can you imagine the Olympic Stadium in Sydney still being used for public events in 2000 years?

The Roman arena is the venue for many public events. Mdme Sparkle's favourites were the "bull races", highlighted by the Cocarde d'Or. Not so much races as "tauntings and runnings away", they involve a bunch of young blokes who get into the ring with an enraged bull. The bull has some colourful strings attached to and between his horns, and the lads try to grab them from him. Those who get them win money. The bull gets very confused, and really quite angry, as you might expect. With these brash lads running at him from different directions, seemingly (to him) from all over the place, you can understand his consternation. The bull tries to catch them and punish them, of course, which involves lots of pawing the ground, charging, attempted gorings, etc. The lads run out of the way and jump over a 1.5 metre fence set inside the arena's perimeter, for protection. This is spectacular in itself. All the while, a ground announcer comments on the action, calling the winners, revving up the crowd, etc. Above the commentator, there's the arena band, led by a flamboyant maestro who is as much an act as the bulls and the boys. At the baseball in the US, this is all done electronically. In the South of Fronce, it's all still performed in real life.

Not satisfied with just scaring these rude lads away, the bull sometimes follows them over the fence.

Crowd section: they're an impressive lot in themselves. Can you spot the Judean People's Front? Or the People's Front of Judea?

Over he goes.
As a footnote, sitting, meditating in nearby Place Voltaire after the Cocarde d'Or, a truck loaded with bulls inched through the crowded festive scene,on the way back to the farm. We could see the tips of the horns appearing above the truck's high walls. It stopped for a moment, waiting for the crowd to clear -- it was like the Dunbar Hotel used to be after a rugby test at the SCG, all crowds and drinkers spilling out over the footpath and blocking the road -- and it stopped right next to a couple of the boys who, an hour before, had been taunting those same bulls in the ring. There was, suddenly, a loud BANG!!! Yes, it was taureau (in Spanish, Toro), letting them know he was still there, and looking forward very much to their next meeting. Mdme Sparkle says she expects the bulls actually quite enjoy a rough and tumble game of "tauntings and runnnings away", such a change it is from standing about in fields all day eating grass.

Take that!

... And that!

Almost gotcha.

This is one for Glistening Dave: Storm over Arles.

This is an unashamed plug for our favourite restaurant in Arles, Media Luna, just over the road from our digs. Ask for Karim (this won't be hard: he is its only waitstaff). Tell him we sent you. We had a lot of fun and some very pleasant dining under Karim's care at Media Luna.

Waiting for Christian: On Sat'dee night in Arles, one (if it's both of us, should it be "two"?) had an engagement with Mdme Sparkle's new friend, Christian Lacroix. It was one of those fashionably late appointments that the Fronch do so, so well: 10:15pm, at Arles' Theatre Antique, built for them by the Romans. A retrospective show of his work over the last few decades, or something like that. It all looked very new to us, but then we'd never seen anything like that before. To us, if it wasn't in K-Mart, it hadn't happened.
They start these shows late because the sun doesn't go down until 9:30, and they have to wait for the dark. But there also was a storm, so they also had to wait to see whether it was going to keep raining. As it happened, they kept us outside, in the dark, until 11, and the show didn't start until close to 11:30pm. That was not so bad in itself: they were brave to put it on, being in an outdoor theatre (for, whilst the Romans built the theatre, apparently they hadn't invented roofs yet), and in those conditions.
The worst of the conditions turned out to be the other patrons, however. Far from the cream of Paris's "A" list, as Mdme Sparkle had expected, donning her grooviest outfit from the bottom of her backpack, it was the dregs of its Bohemian community, instead. Lacroix was hosting that week in Arles a conference or series of seminars of photography, and it had attracted the worst of the would-be-if-they-could-be photodrunks from around Fronce, the UK and the USA. The Americans were oh, so serious, generally zealous amateur photographers from the the country's best colleges, it seemed. The ones from Yrp were your genuine, down at heel photodrunks, your erstwhile paparazzi, all two-day whiskers, chain-smoking, foul-breathed, loud-mouthed, intrusive and brash. They all thought they were very arty, apparently, but they actually were a very, very vulgar crowd.
There were some genuine enthusiasts there, too, who were very noice. But, overall and generally, you wouldn't hang out with this lot if you had your druthers.

Without knowing anything about haute fashion (there were lots of hats on display), it truly was a spectacular show. There must have been 20-odd grossly overpaid models displaying the Lacroix creations, against a backdrop of music and movie clips. The models would amble out, around a hemispherical catwalk, and back before the big screen. The outfits were spectacular, indeed, even to our heathen eyes. The truly impressive aspect, however, was the physical presentation of the models, who slouched and ambled around the catwalk, some of them barely able to walk in their heels. One alarmed Mdme Sparkle particularly -- Mdme Sparkle is a health professional in daily life -- for she truly appeared anorexic. Several of them appeared unable to walk out of a shuffle, and all of them exuded an aura of monumental disinterest. They slouched, they stared blankly, they almost fell over. One of them, to her credit, took off her high heels just as she got to the big screen and carried her shoes in her hand. She was one we'd especially been concerned about: from the moment she entered the catwalk, you couldn't see her getting around it without falling off it. You would never see yourself chatting small talk to this lot at a party, indeed, even if you could speak the same language.
But, hey, who are we to pronounce on matters of style, good taste and grooviness! Overall, apart from the vulgar crowd, it was a spectacular show.

This has nothing to do with the pic above, but we note that the Lacroix show was capped by a display of photographs by the Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka, taken at the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. They had been smuggled from the country at the time and published by a photo agency, but only after the death of the photographer's father could they be attributed to him. Some of the pics hadn't been seen before. Having visited Prague a few weeks earlier, there was a poignancy for us. Dramatic and moving.

The climax of the show, Christian Lacroix and his models do their grande paradé around the catwalk. He gave a particular wave to Mdme Sparkle, seated 23 rows back in the midnight-dark amphitheatre.

Everyone knows Yrp can be expensive, particularly after hob-nobbing with the likes of Christian Lacroix. In the South of Fronce we had to send Mdme Sparkle out to work to make ends meet.