The Arts festival of the local villages is just about to happen again this year.
It is called Les Nuits de la Terrasse et del Catet it is this year offering two unmissable events.

As the little Ruelle/Steps, Rue del Catet goes just by the side of our house we cannot miss Sundays performance there.
The steps are covered with cushions for the occasion and it becomes a little mini-amphitheatre.
This years performance at the bottom of the steps will be a recital of Chopin on the piano. (Only in France…….)

The other must-go-to is a production of The Barber of Seville in the local Big House, Domaine d’Asties.
This is not the opera but the original play by Beaumarchais on which Rosinni based his opera.
Wanting to go and to understand it I ordered the Beaumarchais play in translation from Amazon, it came complete in one volume with its sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, the very same one on which Mozart based his wonderful opera.
I read the two of them with great attention, particularly Act Five of The Marriage which has always remained a mystery to me despite many performances attended.

I now think I know what happens, it involves so many mistaken identities that at one stage the Count kisses his page Cherubino, mistaking him for Suzanna.
But it is OK folks, there is no trace of homoeroticism here, Cherubino is always played by a woman.

What Mozart does leave out is a long soliloquy by Figaro near the end of the play.

It has one piece in it which is entirely prophetic of events of recent years.
Figaro is giving an account of how he came down in the world and ended a barber.
At one time, he tells us, he wrote a play:

Alas I might as well have put a stone around my neck ! I fudge up a play about the manners of the seraglio, a Spanish author could, I imagined, attack Mahomet without scruple, but, immediately, some envoy complains that some of my lines offend the Sublime Porte, Persia, Tunis and Morocco.
Behold my play scuppered by a set of Mahommedan princes who habitually beat a tattoo on our shoulders to the tune of “Down with the Christian dogs “

Beaumarchais wrote these words about 230 years ago.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose