Auberge du Poids Public St Felix Lauragais; Hotel Ste Foy Conques France

Toulouse is a vibrant city of some 400,000 inhabitants, to my mind the finest in all the south of France. It's greatest glory is undoubtedly the great basilica of St Sernin, which dates from the 1060's, with some of the finest early Romanesque sculpture anywhere in the world. In addition there are beautifully laid out eighteenth century arcaded squares where one finds a great profusion of luxurious shops as well as several specialty food stores which rival what is on offer in Paris. I find I can easily spend half an hour just looking at the show windows of one of these, the mere sight of all those delicacies evokes Lucullan feasts. Unfortunately, as is the case with all the big cities in France, hotels present a problem. The big ones are overpriced (although not to the degree that this is the case in the capital) and the smaller ones tend to have marginal amenities and to be noisy. My solution to this problem is to stay at the Auberge du Poids Public in St Felix Lauragais, a twenty minute drive to the southeast. The hotel, formerly a coaching in which was the public weighing station for the little town (the old scales are still in place in front of the building) is a quintessential example of what, in my introduction, I said about the relationship between food and lodging in France. Only the dining room has any scale to it, the salon is infinitessimal, the bedrooms small. But the restaurant, which has a Michelin star, is very good indeed. It offers a delectable prix fixe of regional dishes for $42 and has a number of good and affordable local wines that you won't encounter elsewhere. A room is about $100 for the night.

Hotel Ste Foye Conques. Conques, about an hour's drive to the northeast of Toulouse, is an abiding wonder. One drives for many miles on winding roads through the all but uninhabited region of the gorges of the river Tarn, toward the end there's an uphill stretch, one rounds a bend, and there, suddenly, as if by miraculous intervention, one is confronted by an enormous Romanesque abbey sitting in the middle of a tiny hamlet of some three hundred souls. What in God's name (so to speak) could ever have led to such an anomaly? The story is straightforward enough. Conques sits athwart the Pilgrimage Road to Santiago but there was nothing there to cause the pilgrims to halt their progress. So one day, early in the twelfth century, the village elders came up with a plan: they infiltrated a local priest into a monastery of a nearby town where the relics of an important saint, Ste Foy, a little girl who had been martyred in Roman times, were kept and where the pilgrims routinely made an overnight stop to venerate them, which of course resulted in considerable financial gain for the inhabitants. The priest spent some years gaining the confidence of the monks until he was entrusted with the key to the reliquary, whereupon he stole the relics and brought them to Conques. When the townsmen appeared, demanding their return, the vilagers appealed to the saint herself: she should give a sign where she wished to be interred. And, lo, blind men in the crowd suddenly saw and cripples suddenly danced. So Ste Foye remained in Conques, the pilgrims now flocked there, and the proceeds of her translation were so ample that the great abbey could eventually be built. The massive tympanon on the West Portal is one of the eternal glories of High Romanesque. The Hotel Ste Foye, which overlooks the abbey, is a seventeenth century stone structure which has been well renovated. It's a mixed bag: the rooms, with nice old exposed beams, are however not large and, at $150 for a night;s stay, are clearly overpriced. On the other hand the restaurant serves nice regional food, there's a good prix fixe at $25.