On Friday we had lunch outside in the square at La Romieu. The village gets its name, likening it to Rome, from its magnificent church and the Collégiale St. Pierre, a 14th-century cloister with a tower (above).
There is a legend about a young orphan called Angéline born in La Romieu in the 14th century. She was taken in by a childless couple but misfortune fell on the region. A series of crop failures led the population to starve, surviving only by eating anything including the cats. Angeline hid two of hers in the attic and was indulged by her foster parents. Eventually good times returned but the village had a plague of rats and no means of killing them. Angéline produced her cats, which by then numbered some twenty, and was hailed as a saviour.
This charming (yucky?) legend went largely forgotten until a sculptor came in the 1990s and started making stone cats, placing them all over the village. They sit on window sills, stalk along roofs, disappear into holes in the wall and so on. We had lunch at the Étape d’Angéline – logo, three cats.