MINING SALT FROM THE SEA AND THE LAND: A RENAISSANCE POET, FIEFMELIN, aND SALT FOR ROADS IN 2016

Day Two of the Paris conference on islands included a fabulous paper by Julien Goeury (Université de Picardie Jules Verne- see also here) about the (almost totally forgotten) André Mage, Sieur de Fiefmelin, a sixteenth-century French poet born on the île d’Oléron (off the Atlantic coast of France). I won’t try to summarize Goeury’s excellent paper- I will only mention briefly the fact that, as an inhabitant of an island, he is particularly in tune with the material world, especially with water and salt, and how the two are combined (and separated) in seawater. In one of his poems, “Le Saulnier,” he writes as follows:
 
Je veux donc evanter sur l’accent de ces hymnes
D’où et comment se font le Sel et ses Salines:
Non le fossile, ou cuit meslé de terre et d’air,
Mais le sel gemme née ez costes de la mer.
 
(Quick translation: “I thus wish to set in the wind of these hymns,  / From where, and how, salt and salt evaporation ponds [salines] are made: / Not that mineral [salt], cooked up from earth and air, / But that rock salt [in French “gem salt!”] born from the coats [or ribs] of the sea” (lines 55-58, quote from Goeury’s edition of the Saulnier). Here, Fiefmelin sets up a distinction between the exterranean (salt that is mined) and the exmarine (salt taken from seawater). Thanks for Goeury, mention will be made of this in “On the Exerranean” to compare the fabulous history of salt mines to that of taking salt from seawater. In some senses, the different is purely one of time, which is interesting, because rock salt results, after all, from the drying up of enclosed lakes and seas. There is one remaining salt mine in France, at Varangéville (in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department, in the Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region)- images here; video below.

The salt evaporation ponds on the île d'Oléron today