Armagnac: Larressingle, the Séviac Mosaics and the Treasure of Éauze

Required Activities

• Taste at a chai between Éauze and Condom and put the two glasses side by side: the armagnac, aged in oak, and the Floc de Gascogne, which is not distilled at all but two-thirds grape must stopped with one-third young armagnac at 16 to 18 degrees. Then find out which denomination you are in — you cross from Bas-Armagnac at Éauze to Ténarèze at Condom on this trip — and see whether you can taste the prune the Bas-Armagnac sands are supposed to give.

• Walk the polychrome floors of the villa of Séviac at Montréal-du-Gers under their translucent roof — 625 square metres of them relaid in 2018, part of the School of Aquitaine group that the specialists call unique in France, laid between the last third of the 4th century and the first half of the 5th. Find the mosaïque aux arbres of about 420-440 in the great reception room and work out why it is the odd one: it does not repeat any of the usual patterns

• Walk the whole 270 m of Larressingle's polygonal rampart, almost complete except on the east side, and go in the only way in: through the high gate with its brattice on the west, where a fixed bridge now stands in place of the drawbridge. The abbots of Condom built the place in the 13th century as a fortress, and its ruined keep still stands in the middle of a village of a few dozen people

• See the Trésor d'Éauze in the town's archaeological museum: 28,003 coins, almost all silver with a few in gold and bronze, plus jewellery and precious objects, dug up on 18 October 1985 near the old station in the Cieutat quarter — and work out from the latest coin why someone buried it all in 261 and never came back for it

• Find the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli's bronze of d'Artagnan and the three musketeers beside the cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Condom, and work out which of the four is d'Artagnan before reading the plaque — then go into the cathedral cloister next to it, which is the real 16th-century Gascony the novel borrowed