Читать книгу On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town - Susan Loomis - Страница 8

I flew to France on my own for two weeks to find a house for us to live in. For so long I had dreamed of returning, hankered after the life I had known, my friends, the fragrance of golden butter, fresh bread and coffee that is simply part of the French ethos.

By now Michael and I had our two-year-old son Joseph, a chubby, curly red-haired bundle of sweet energy and constant motion, and we thought it would be wonderful for him to grow up bilingual. Moving to France to live while I researched a cookbook would give him that chance. Michael was personally less enthusiastic about the idea of going to France because he has no inherent passion for the country. But doing creative work and being with his family is what is important to him and France, he decided, would offer him that.

After poring over the map of France and considering every region we knew and some we didn’t, Michael and I had decided we would live in Normandy. We wanted to be near Paris and near friends, and we’d grown to love the Normandy coast on earlier trips. So on arriving I took the train to Le Vaudreuil, in Normandy, where my dearest friend Edith Leroy met me at the station. She was delighted at the idea that we were moving back, and had not only asked if I would stay with them while I looked for a place to live, but had offered her help.

We wasted no time, after making coffee and toast, which we enjoyed with her homemade blackberry and redcurrant jelly, in beginning to plot how I should go about looking for a house. I decided to consider anything within a thirty-minute drive of Edith and Bernard’s village. We didn’t care if we lived in the village, but we wanted to be close to it since we knew almost everyone who lived there and were comfortable with its rhythm. After our breakfast I went out to the village café and bought newspapers, brought them back and checked the ads. I made several appointments to see houses, and the following day set out early to look.

Mostly what I looked at were contemporary bungalows which didn’t fit my romantic notion of a house in the French countryside. I spent another day looking, going all the way to Vernon in the east, to Houdan in the southeast and Honfleur in the northwest, though that was getting pretty far afield. I didn’t find a thing.

After two days I regrouped. A friend of Edith’s, Christine, a woman I didn’t really know, said I was going about it all wrong and offered to accompany me the next day. ‘I’ll show you how we rent houses here,’ she said. The next morning we headed off into the countryside stopping to ask everyone we saw if they knew of anything to rent, including hailing a tractor and asking the farmer inside. We discovered a few places but nothing fit my criteria. I was looking for space – both Michael and I work at home – proximity to a choice of schools for Joe and shopping so that I didn’t have to live in the car, charm, a low price.

I decided to try the realtor in Le Vaudreuil. Edith, out of curiosity, came with me. The man had nothing to rent but as we flipped through his book of available properties he pointed out two houses for sale, both in nearby Louviers. Michael and I had no money to buy, so I discounted them. Not Edith. ‘Allez, Suzanne, let’s go look, it’ll be fun. I’ve always wanted to see what these places looked like inside.’ I decided I could take a break from my house search, and away we went in the realtor’s car.

We arrived in Louviers, a mid-size town whose centre is a tasteful blend of ancient and post-war architecture. It was badly damaged during the Second World War – burned by the Germans on their way through – and, like so many towns throughout France, it had to rebuild itself quickly afterwards. The rebuilding was done with style – shops and lodgings are capacious, cream-coloured stuccoed buildings with sharply sloping, slate roofs. A boulevard surrounds the centre, with small streets coming off of it into the heart of the town, where a central cherry-tree-lined square serves a multitude of purposes. Mostly it is a parking lot, except on Saturdays when it hosts the farmers’ market that transforms Louviers into a vibrant fete. The square is also used for special presentations; go-kart races; a twice-yearly, town-wide garage sale where individuals set up stands and sell everything from antiques to children’s trading cards; and a spring plant and flower sale.

Another large, grassy square which is about a five-minute walk from the main square is bordered by homes, and the police and fire stations. It is here that, regularly, huge stages are erected and theatre performances and concerts are held, and big tents are erected for traveling circuses.

Louviers was once an important textile town and still has one textile factory to show for it, as well as a series of canals which once powered the textile mills. Houses built along these canals are generally large and prosperous, and they have private, often fanciful wooden bridges that allow them access from across the water. Louviers also boasts the remains of cloisters from a Franciscan convent which was built in 1646, supposedly the only cloisters in France ever built over a canal.

The town is known for its extremes of government. When we first arrived, the mayor was a woman known for her conservative and rather bungling ways. Shordy after we arrived elections resulted in an administration which leans increasingly far left and has a permanent overdraft in its bank accounts, primarily because one of its mandates is to provide the citizenry with regular music and theatre performances which it offers free of charge.

The river Eure runs through Louviers, and it is in the process of being rediscovered. The current mayor and his administration want to resurrect its banks, which are mosdy wild and overgrown, making it a focal point of the town. A kayak club is already based on it at one end of town, and there are a few riverside paths that are pleasant to walk along, though they eventually peter out into wild growth.

The streets of Louviers, which are generally very busy during the day and empty quickly after 8 p.m. when shops close, vary from wide – the main boulevards -to extremely narrow, winding and cobbled. There are ancient, leaning plaster and beamed houses which look right out of a fairy tale. Many are three stories high and just the width of a single room. Most of the older houses in Louviers have lots of windows that can be easily looked into – I admit, one of my favourite activities is peeking inside an open window and glancing at furnishings and style – but these are tighdy closed with shutters at the first sign of nightfall.

There are, happily, sidewalks throughout most of Louviers, though occasionally one is obliged to walk single file and on tiptoe to avoid being squashed by a speeding car – speed limit signs are placed for decoration rather than for observance, it seems. Parking places have been inserted wherever there is room for a car and many people park on the sidewalk, or angle themselves into impossibly tight spots.

We drove into Louviers, wound our way through a maze of streets and stopped in front of one of the tiny, room-wide houses. Outside it was charmingly derelict. Inside it was a complete wreck, and smelled like the Bowery. Piles of clothing and rags in a corner showed that it was a way-station for homeless travelers. We sped out of there.

The second house was another story. It was across from the lavish Romanesque/Gothic church right in the town centre, which is so large and imposing that everyone refers to it as a cathedral though it isn’t, since it is not the principal church of the diocese. The house had been a convent for 300 years, and before that it was purportedly owned by an artist. For the past twenty-five years it had been the property of a Parisienne who had purchased it to live in, and to transform the ground floor into an antiques shop. It was dry and didn’t smell at all. Its old walls were timbered, its clay tile roof sported a tiny bell tower, the windows were paned with old, wavy glass. Inside, it was all blue and gray. And a wreck. The downstairs looked like an archeological dig – big holes, mounds of rubble, a mess. The walls were in terrible shape, their pale blue paint streaked with grime. Dust covered everything. But the house was filled with a palpable, warm presence.

We followed the realtor and his stiff gray pompadour up the beautiful staircase which curved gently around a corner, and emerged onto a landing awash in clear, soft light. As he babbled about the attributes of the house I looked out the window and caught my breath – the church was near enough to touch. I was transfixed. We proceeded through the house and Edith kept whispering to me, ‘C’est fabuleuse, cette maison. Ellle a besoin de la peinture et un peu d’éléctricité – c’est tout’ – ‘It’s fabulous – all it needs is a few coats of paint and some electricity.’

The house must have been a perfect convent for it rambled on and on, up and around short stairways, in and out of rooms, yet it wasn’t vast. It was very human – the rooms were quite small, the staircases short, the floors old wood, worn in many places.

The rooms were in varying states of decay. Some had graffiti scrawled on the walls and ceilings – ‘The owner allowed squatters to come, she is very open,’ said the realtor. ‘She is very spéciale.’ Spéciale is a word that means many things, from strange to difficult. I was beginning to get a notion about the owner.

On the second floor was a long, furnished room. A coal stove sat at one end, its pipe jerry-rigged out through a window. A single bed sat against a wall, with a large chunk of plaster in the middle of the bedspread, obviously just fallen there. At the opposite end was a small kitchenette with garish orange and yellow flowers painted on the wall. A lovely old buffet filled with dishes sat along another wall.

The realtor explained that this is where the owner, a single mother of grown children, lived when she came to stay. As I looked at the room, which had lovely proportions, I was amazed she hadn’t asphyxiated herself with the rigged-up stove pipe. Apparently the woman was an antiques dealer who, unable, for whatever reason (the realtor hinted at a family tragedy), to fix up the house and install her antiques shop downstairs, had instead stripped it of everything valuable, from fireplaces to the crystal ball that had once graced the stairway ramp. She seemed to have become somewhat folle- crazy – according to the realtor, leaving the doors unlocked, living in these makeshift conditions, letting the house tumble down around her.

Our final stop was the cave underneath the house, a fascinating vaulted dungeon filled with bottles, cobwebs, and who could see what else. I wanted to inspect it further but the realtor shooed us out with his wavery flashlight.

We emerged into the sunshine. I was captivated. I didn’t say much on the way back to Le Vaudreuil, shook the realtor’s hand when we got there and walked away with Edith. She was vibrating. ‘What a house,’ she said. ‘You have to buy it. Michael could fix it up in no time. All it needs is paint, some work here and there, a little rearranging.’ I listened with half an ear, discouraged beyond measure, seeing our romantic sojourn in France spent in one of the new bungalows I now knew were the preferred rentals in the area. I had loved roaming through the old house, but it just wasn’t possible.

Edith, who is passionate and highly strung by nature, wouldn’t stop talking about it. She remembered as a child growing up in Louviers passing by the house and seeing, inside a window right on the street, an elderly nun in her bed. ‘We always looked in on her. It is a sweet memory,’ she said. Her chatter about the house went on all day. When Bernard came home she told him about it. I had been thinking about it too – the quality of light inside it was unforgettable, as was that pleasant, warm feeling within its walls.

Bernard fixed me with his gaze. ‘What do you think of the house, Suzanne?’ he asked seriously. I faltered. I thought it was beautiful, but it was a mess. And we didn’t have any money to buy it anyway. I told him so. He wanted to go look at it, so I made an appointment for the next day.

I allowed myself to dream, just a little. Imagine not just renting, but owning in France. Imagine such a beautiful house. The location was perfect – smack in the centre of town, in proximity to shops and schools and everything. I didn’t know Louviers at all, but it was a big enough town that nearly everything was available.

As I thought about the house and the town I remembered spending an afternoon there on my own many years ago when I had been visiting Edith and Bernard. I remembered walking around the ancient cloisters in the centre of town – not far from the house, I supposed. I remembered the finely manicured public garden which looked like a tiny version of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The more I thought about it, the more memories surfaced. There was a wonderful store there filled with herbs and potions and organic foods of all sorts. The city hall and the museum were in a lovely old brick building surrounding a garden with a fanciful concrete-made-to-look-like-wood pergola in the centre. From what I had seen today, Louviers bustled, traffic sped through it, the sidewalks were busy with people.

Louviers comprises 20,000 inhabitants, making it the largest town within about thirty miles. It is the commercial centre for farmers in the immediate area, who go there for banking and their affaires, or business. It has a rollicking Saturday farmers’ market, another smaller farmers’ market on Wednesday, and its own collection of boutiques and food shops. There are dozens of banks, real-estate offices, insurance companies, travel agencies and a small, gracious hospital. Besides the ‘cathedral’, there is another Catholic church tucked into a neighbourhood less than a half-mile away. Cafés line the streets, and restaurants and pizzerias are dotted throughout the main part of town. There is a small, country supermarket in the centre of town, and two huge modern supermarkets on its periphery. One can live very easily in Louviers without needing to go anywhere else.

I called Michael that night to give him a report. I told him about the house, downplaying Bernard and Edith’s interest in it, simply describing it to him. He said nothing. Then he said, ‘Go look at it again, get more information.’

I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘But we don’t have any money,’ I countered. ‘We can’t buy a house.’

‘Go get more information,’ was all he would say.

I am hopeless when it comes to money. My department is dreams. I rely on Michael to see the truth, so when he said get more information I figured that maybe it was, somehow, possible.

The next day Bernard saw the house and loved it. He thought it was an affaire- a deal. He said that if we decided to buy it he’d loan us the down payment if we needed it, and co-sign the loan. Bernard is a very successful entrepreneur who started a quality-control company almost two decades ago, well before anyone else in France had the idea. The company has done nothing but grow so that now it does business in most countries of the world. Bernard sold it not long ago, making him a very wealthy man. He is still the director, however, and spends most of his time traveling to distant points on the globe. When Bernard says something is ‘interesting’ it pays to listen. I suddenly started to get very, very excited.

I called Christian Devisme, a friend, talented architect and Edith’s brother, and asked him to come inspect the house and give me his professional opinion. He and his partner arrived and spent at least an hour poking, prodding and literally inspecting like detectives. They finished in the back garden, where I joined them, and we all gazed at the exterior wall, which was so full of holes it looked like lace. I asked Christian what he thought.

He slowly cleared his throat, shook his head then looked at me sideways. ‘Il ne faut pas sous-estimer le travail,’ he said gravely. ‘You must not underestimate the work.’ That sent a chill through me.

Then he swivelled to look at the little brick building behind the house, which belonged to the church. ‘You should try to buy that too,’ he said. ‘It would add a lot of value to the property.’

‘So you think we should buy the house?’ I asked.

‘If I were younger I might think about buying it,’ replied Christian, who was then forty-five. ‘At this point in my life it’s too much work but it’s a beautiful house.’

I understood Christian’s point. He and his wife Nadine had bought an old farmhouse nearly twenty years before when they had three tots, and had lived in a tent in front of it for a year while they made it habitable. It is not an experience he would want to repeat and he is convinced he accomplished it only because he was young. Yet he obviously thought this house in Louviers was full of potential.

‘Its walls and roof are solid,’ he said. ‘If you have to pay someone to fix it up you can’t afford it. If Michael can do it himself, you should seriously think about it.’

I took that for encouragement.

Edith came to pick me up and before we left we went through the house again, deciding what should be where when it was time to decorate the rooms. I could just imagine all the soirees we would have there, in the shadow of the church, l’Eglise de Notre Dame. That night I reported everything to Michael, who knew all the protagonists and could judge their responses. He seemed very excited. I thought the world was turned upside down.

I called an engineer, a plumber, a roofing specialist to come see the house. I got estimates for installing electricity. I took photographs, pasted them together and fedexed them to Michael, along with the estimates and every shred of information I could find about Louviers. I talked at length with Bernard, who assured me that there were no complications for a foreigner buying property in France. He said he would introduce us to his banker, and that would help expedite matters should we decide to buy it.

Michael and I talked, we debated, we each agreed we didn’t have the money to undertake the project. And then, with Bernard’s help, we decided to buy it.

I was beside myself. With excitement. With dread. With panic. With desire. My dream of owning property in France – a dream I had never actually articulated, even to myself – had come true. It didn’t matter that we would be so far from our families and American friends. It didn’t matter that we were moving to France on a wing and a prayer. It didn’t matter that we were always seeming to scrape by. It didn’t matter that life in France was bound to be more expensive than life in the United States. None of the realities mattered, at least not to me. Never big on paying attention to reality, I definitely put on my softfocus lenses this time. If Michael thought we could do it, well then we could.

We made an offer on the house which was immediately accepted. I met the owner, who was very strange but presentable, and signed the compromis de vente, or the contract to buy the house. Bernard was true to his word, taking time to help with all the paperwork and signing where necessary. On my last night before going back to the US we celebrated. Christian and his wife Nadine came for dinner, bringing a dish of richly flavoured braised pigeons from their farm, where they raised 800 of the squeaky birds for local restaurants.

Edith and Bernard opened champagne. Christian made a toast. ‘To Suzanne and to Michael, who have just bought a house in the Marseille of the north,’ he said with an evil smile. ‘That your car doesn’t get stolen nor your windows broken.’

My heart stopped. Marseille, a lovely city, nonetheless has a reputation of being full of voyoux – hoodlums. Was there something I should know? I asked.

They all burst out laughing. ‘He’s just trying to scare you,’ Nadine said.

I left the following morning for Paris, where I was to spend a few days before returning home. I met an American friend for coffee and showed her a picture of the house. ‘It’s gorgeous. I’ve lived here fifteen years and always wanted to buy a house!’ she exclaimed. ‘How did you find the perfect house in one week?’ I told her I didn’t know. I was in a dream, pinching myself. We were really going to do it, I thought.

I returned home and Michael and I prepared for our departure. We loved our house in Maine and decided not to sell but to rent it. After all, we imagined, after our two to three years in France we might return and, meanwhile, it was a good investment.

We were busy packing and organizing, trying to decide what to take and what to leave. After doing comparative studies of moving costs, we decided we would bring the bare minimum – my kitchen equipment, which included a collection of heavy copper pots I had amassed over the years, knives, baking dishes, scales and dozens of other small necessities in the life of a cook and food writer. We would also bring my office chair (a luxuriously comfortable one), file cabinets and computers. We would bring Michael’s most essential tools, a futon couch, Joe’s stuffed animals and as many of his toys and treasures as we could fit. We decided to send our Subaru station wagon over and gave it a complete overhaul.

An American friend of mine – also a food writer – was moving back to the States from Paris and she made a list of things she wanted to sell, which included lamps and book cases, chairs and a table, and an impressive array of coffee grinders which she used to grind spices. We bought what we thought we would need – she threw in many things she didn’t want to sell but didn’t want to ship back either – and arranged to have it all moved out to Edith’s. Yet another friend, warning me of how expensive everything was in France, listed all of the things in her attic that she’d been going to give away but would save for us if we needed them. With all of that we figured we could get to work immediately. What we didn’t have we would gradually acquire.

We sold or gave away just about everything we weren’t going to take with us, which accentuated the feeling that we were embarking on a huge adventure, a new life. Joe observed all the activity and it made him nervous. Children don’t generally like change and he likes it less than most – I had to scheme to get rid of anything that had once belonged to him, for the minute he saw something he’d say, in his two-year-old English, ‘I love that, I just love it!’ and try to grab it.

Meantime, Edith and I talked regularly. She described the garden, the size of the apples on the gnarled old tree in the yard. The hydrangeas turned out to be purple, one of my favourite colours, the roses were pink, red and white. She and I planned the garden and talked endlessly about the house. I would report what she’d said to Michael, and then he and I would plan and scheme some more. He spent a lot of time with paper and pencil sketching out ideas for the house, all based on the photographs I had taken. We never talked about the financial aspect of it, which seemed daunting. Our attitude was: ‘It will all work out.’

We spent the month of September 1993 visiting our families and friends on the West Coast as a sort of farewell, then we embarked for France, landing at Charles de Gaulle/Roissy airport, where Edith met us. We piled into her turquoise VW van and she flew down the autoroute toward Louviers at 150 kilometers an hour, the equivalent of about 100 mph. I looked at Michael, who raised his eyebrows. It was great to be back in France!

Both Michael and I were so excited we could hardly sit still. Joe, a boy who doesn’t like to miss anything, had been awake for days, it seemed, as we took him to and fro to see family and friends. He hadn’t slept much during the twelve-hour plane trip either, but once the van started moving he conked out, draped over his father’s knees. I looked at his pale, chubby, toddler’s face. We knew he was upset at the move because he didn’t quite understand what was happening. We hoped it wouldn’t take him long to adjust.

Our first stop was Louviers and the house, for Michael’s first look. He removed the still-sleeping Joe from his knees and laid him tenderly on the back seat. Edith passed the house keys over to him and waited in the car with Joe while Michael and I went to look. The house was as beautiful as I had remembered, if a trifle gray and neglected. A large red and white vendu – sold – sign hung over the door, physical proof that the compromis de vente still held good. It gave me a sense of ownership, which helped override the panic I felt as I approached the front door. Michael opened it and we walked through. I held my breath as I wandered with him through the rooms. We didn’t talk. We were both too busy looking. I let out my breath as I looked at the curved staircase in the foyer – it was still as graceful as I recalled. Michael walked through the door into what I supposed had been the kitchen, a high-ceilinged room with a big window onto the back garden, an angled back wall and a beautiful fireplace – it was so filled with dusty antique furniture and piles of newspapers, buckets of stones and wood and other rubbish that it was hard to get a real sense of it. We poked our heads in the other rooms on the ground floor, all of which looked as if small bombs had exploded in them.

As we went Michael banged on walls, scraped surfaces, looked in nooks and crannies, wiggled doors, opened and closed windows, all things that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do. At the best of times Michael is a man of few words. He was absolutely silent, intent on his inspection.

The crisp fall weather meant that the house was cold inside, and as I focused on the holes, the grit, the lath showing through the walls, it seemed worse than I had remembered. What had I been thinking of? What if Michael hated it? What if I had made a huge mistake? These were questions I was to become extremely familiar with over the next years, as I watched Michael struggle not only with the French vocabulary involved in building, but with unfamiliar materials, dimensions, customs and traditions.

I had truly forgotten what a mess the house was in. I’m not sure I ever really noticed. Even now, as I stumbled over chunks of stone, tiptoed around holes in the floor and realized that there wasn’t one single room that could really pass for habitable, I felt an excitement bubbling inside. It was a blank slate, ours to recreate.

And, today was today.

As we emerged from the last room, the one above the curious little ‘apartment’ that the owner kept, which was even shabbier than it had been the first time I had seen it, and made our way down the many sets of stairs, Michael’s blue eyes absolutely blazed with excitement. ‘I love it,’ he said.

I let out my breath. We walked hand in hand into the garden – it was overgrown and shabby, but the old apple and pear trees that graced it were unmistakably charming, and the church loomed over all.

While we stood there looking at the house with its boarded-up window on the ground floor, its lovely timbering and the bell tower, an elderly lady parked her bicycle by the front door and went off to do her shopping. A man slipped in the front gate and went to the corner of the yard to relieve himself in the drain. Pigeons cooed from under the eaves. We were caught up in the magic of owning such glorious real estate, of having a concrete project to work on. I was in a state of bliss to think that for the foreseeable future we would be in France, would come to understand its rituals and traditions, would no doubt make new friends and deepen the wonderful friendships we already had. And the thought of the food and the flavours that would be ours! I couldn’t wait for the adventure to begin.

We drove on to Le Vaudreuil, for we were to stay with Edith for our first few days, stopping at the village bakery to get fresh baguettes. As I walked into her house I was enveloped with the familiar aroma of lavender and fresh thyme that has always pervaded it, and I felt like I was home.

Entering Edith’s house for the first time after an absence always brings to mind Michael’s and my wedding in Le Vaudreuil. Bernard had given a short speech about the appropriateness of the wedding and how it continued the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon communion with France, so prevalent throughout the ages in Normandy. Then he recited the vows. Michael, whose French was just barely nascent, was dreamily attentive. When it was his turn to speak I had to nudge him, and he jumped right in with a resounding ‘Oui’. He says now that he was completely off in another world, and still isn’t sure what he agreed to!

We all adjourned to Edith and Bernard’s house for a lunch, which Michael and I had prepared the day before, of cream of watercress soup, cannelloni á la crème, salad and Camembert. Patricia and her husband Walter had brought the champagne, one of our friends supplied the flowers, another loaned me a silk petticoat, and Madame Dancerne, Edith and Bernard’s elderly neighbour from across the street, contributed her homemade cider and Calvados. Our wedding cake was a marjolaine, which I had made the morning before in Paris, and which was transported to the wedding on Patricia’s special silver marjolaine tray. It was a gorgeous misty day.

We hauled in our baggage and settled Joe to sleep on a couch in the living room, which doubles as Edith’s painting studio. Finished and half-finished portraits and still lifes in Edith’s characteristic vibrant colours where light creates the magic, as well as a collection of paintings by other artists, provide the decor, the pleasant scent of oil paints the ambience.

While Edith built a fire in the kitchen fireplace I made coffee, got butter and honey and cut the baguettes into lengths for tartines. Edith’s children were in school, Bernard was at work in his office across the street, the house was quiet. All was right with the world, I thought, as I dipped my butter-and-honey-slathered tartine into my bowl of stiff black coffee before eating it. We talked over our strategy for the next few days, then simply enjoyed this first taste of France. Michael relaxed in an easy chair and fell asleep, Edith filled me in on the local gossip.

That evening we had a celebratory dinner with Edith, Bernard and their four children, and the following day Michael went to the house to poke around and I took Joe to go look at the little house in Le Vaudreuil that I had rented over the phone from the mayor. We figured we’d need it for two to three months, the time it would take Michael to install enough electricity and plumbing to make the house in Louviers habitable.

Set on the back boundary of the mayor’s garden, it looked like a little timbered doll house. Its main room downstairs had a picture window looking out at the languidly flowing river Eure. The corner kitchen was adequate, the small bathroom functional, the two bedrooms upstairs charming. The only thing it needed was a telephone.

I spoke with Florence Labelle, the mayor’s wife and our landlady, to see about the phone. I had asked her if we could install it before we arrived, but she couldn’t see the necessity for that. ‘We’ll do all that when you get here.’ True to her word, she called the phone company directly. No doubt because she was the mayor’s wife they arrived later that day, but the news wasn’t good. They couldn’t install a phone in the back building because it wasn’t a legal residence. To Florence, this didn’t seem a problem. ‘You can use my phone when you need to,’ she said kindly, not realizing how vital a phone is to my work.

I panicked, just a little, explaining to Florence why I had to have a phone, how I had a great deal of research to do not just for the cookbook I was about to write, but for all the articles I had contracted to do. She had a private conference with the France Télécom representative, and the next thing I knew a date was set to install the wiring and hook up the phone. ‘So it will be all right?’ I asked. ‘It’s not illegal?’

She looked at me. ‘Bof!’ she said, pushing back her hair. ‘All we have to do is trim a few tree limbs and not mention anything.’

Michael returned from the house in Louviers with stars in his eyes. He’d spent the morning giving it a closer look. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said. ‘It’s incredible.’ For the rest of the afternoon he sat at a table in Edith’s house making drawings, chewing on his pencil, figuring.

Our third day in France we signed the papers which made us the legal owners of 1, rue Tatin, in Louviers. We did this in front of the notaire, a sort of lawyer who handles real-estate deals. A portly, officious young man, he greeted us in the waiting room and showed us down a long, wood-paneled hallway to his large, stuffy office. He abstractedly shuffled papers on his desk while we awaited the owner. Michael and I gazed around at the stuffed game birds high atop his bookcases that looked as if they’d been there a hundred years. So did the stacked books, for they were covered with a thin veneer of dust. I knew a lot about this notaire for he was Edith and Bernard’s, and his father had been notaire to the Devismes, Edith’s parents. Those stuffed birds, I knew, had always been the subject of much amusement in the Devisme family, standing there looking down on all proceedings with their dead, glass eyes.

The owner and her daughter finally arrived, to break the silence. We shook hands all around then sat formally while the notaire handed us each a copy of the mortgage contract. He called us to attention and proceeded to read it out loud in a slow, achingly formal manner. The office was stuffy, the sun was shining in, and the dusty game birds were staring at us. My thoughts wandered to all I had ever heard about notaires, who are incredibly powerful figures in France, a cross between lawyer and seigneur. They are particularly powerful when it comes to real estate, and connected to absolutely everything and everyone by thousands of tiny, thin threads. No one could ever tell me what they actually do, but I did know that they spent a lot of time and made a lot of money doing just this sort of thing, drawing up lengthy contracts then reading them aloud.

His drone became mere background noise. My eyes were crossing. I looked at Michael and his were almost shut. Suddenly, the notaire’s voice came alive.

‘You must pay special attention to this part,’ he said. We sat up. He began reading a passage about the church’s easement of our property. ‘You are sure you understand this part?’ he asked. I hadn’t really been listening so I asked him to repeat it. It had to do with the right of the priest and his domestics to walk through our property to get to his house, which was behind ours. The notaire stared at us. ‘I just want you to understand that this is a condition of buying this house,’ he said. ‘You cannot change this. It is immutable.’ He said it gravely, pushing us to understand the implications of it.

I looked at the owner. ‘Oh,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s not a problem, no one ever walks through.’ Reassured, Michael and I told the notaire we understood and wanted to go through with the purchase. We would have many occasions in the future to think back to that moment, and wonder if the notaire was trying to protect or warn us.

Finally he finished reading the contract. We all initialed each page of each copy, then signed it in several different places. Above each signature we had to write lu et approuvé – read and approved – and a whole paragraph of other words, all of which were intended to slow us down, I assumed, in case we suddenly got cold feet and didn’t want to buy the house, since it took forever. I was charmed – it seemed so old fashioned and gracious to be writing things by hand on a cold, formal mortgage.

We finally finished and the house was ours. We shook hands all around again, agreed to let the owner store her furniture in the house until she could get it removed, and took our keys. The notaire said he was at our disposal if we needed him, then we shook hands again and walked out into the chilly sunlight. We stopped at a café for a celebratory café express, then hurried to the house.

We stood for a while in the garden, just looking. The sun shed a lovely, golden glow on the house. I breathed deeply for the first time since we’d agreed to buy it. Michael loved it, I loved it, life was fine.

A young man who worked at the aumônerie, or parish hall, whose property abuts ours, came up. ‘Are you the new owners?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, expecting a welcome.

‘Well,’ he said dourly. ‘If you decide to sell the house the church wants to buy it. They had hoped to buy it. They didn’t realize it was sold.’ Then he walked away.

Nice greeting. Michael and I looked at each other, and promptly forgot him as we went inside the house to explore some more.

We walked through every inch of it, stepping over the rubble and around the holes, talking about which room would be ours, which would be Joe’s. We stopped in one room to admire the eight-sided terracotta tiles, or tommettes, on the floor, and we stroked the wood beams in the walls. We opened a skinny hallway cupboard and found old books and jars. My heart started beating faster. Maybe we’d find treasures in this house.

After the first floor we walked up another short staircase to a landing from which two other staircases departed – one around the corner to the left, and one immediately to the right. After exploring the two rooms on the landing, which were in truly lamentable shape – the walls and ceilings were covered with graffiti, rubble was spread on the floor from a fireplace that had been ripped out, everything was filthy – we went up the skinny stairway to the right. What greeted us was, if possible, even worse. We’d seen it all before, of course, but now that it was ours we really saw it. There were two rooms that were complete shells, the ceilings rotted out so we could see the roof. The windows were either broken or hanging ajar, lath showed through the walls, and a fine black soot covered everything. Amidst all of this what struck me was an odd little window in the wall between the rooms. We tried to figure out what it was for. It wasn’t large enough to pass a plate through – I had guessed one room was a kitchen, the other a dining room. Then I thought maybe it was for confessions, but that didn’t really make sense – there was no screen in the window to hide the priest from the parishioner. To this day we haven’t figured it out, and as yet no one has been able to tell us.

What Michael first noticed was the brand-new waste pipe that had been installed in the landing. ‘That will make putting in a bathroom easy,’ he said with a laugh.

In all there were fifteen rooms in the house, though the two dilapidated ones were not in the architect’s drawings that the owner had given us. Evidently if the rooms didn’t appear on the architect’s drawings then they wouldn’t be included in the tax assessment.

What with all the rooms and all the closets in the rooms and on the landings there were, it seemed, hundreds of doors in the house. They were gorgeous and some of them, as the owner had explained to us, were very old and valuable. I remember her pointing to one and saying it dated back to 1750. Many had tiny metal plaques with the letters ND on them, which I was sure stood for Notre Dame – Our Lady. All had large, old-fashioned keys in the locks, and I knew that one of my first jobs would be to label them. I could just see Joe, who was almost three, having a field day taking out the keys and mixing them up.

Michael was eager to get to work. Before he could, however, the place needed to be cleaned out, for there was a great deal of junk and rubble in it. ‘The realtor offered to bring a dump truck over and clean out the house,’ I said. ‘I think we should have him do it.’

Michael looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘There’s got to be something of value here or he would never have offered,’ he said. ‘That statue, for instance.’ We rushed around to the back of the house where we’d seen a plaster statue of an angel holding a child by the hand. She was still there. We hastily moved her inside. Then we walked down the stone steps into the cave, and turned on a powerful flashlight. The dusty bottles we’d noticed were all there. We brought several upstairs into the light. Each was a different hue, from celadon green to a wispy blue, and all were hand blown. ‘These are what he wanted,’ Michael said. ‘These bottles will put Joe through college.’

The following day we moved ourselves into the tiny house in Le Vaudreuil. It was ideal; Florence and her husband Edouard and their two children – Marine, a girl of about eight, and Quentin, twelve – the perfect landlords. Florence insisted that Joe use the swing set and sand box in her garden, as well as the toy room that took up an entire floor in her house and which Marine used only very occasionally. She seemed delighted to have us living in her back garden. The only cloud was her dog, Diva. A golden Labrador, she was as vicious as a pit bull. Florence kept her in the house, but if ever she forgot and left her outside, the minute we showed ourselves in the garden she hurled herself in our direction, hackles up, teeth bared. She was terrifying, and the only ones who could control her were Florence and Edouard.

The dog aside, those first months were idyllic. Michael went to Louviers each day to work on the house. I stayed in Le Vaudreuil and worked on my book. We had arranged for our favourite babysitter from Maine to join us for several months and she amused Joe, taking him on walks and bicycle rides. Michael was in a stage of discovery about the house that left him excited, full of plans. I reveled in the beginning stages of my book, living in Le Vaudreuil, seeing Edith all the time, being part of village fabric on a daily basis.

Le Vaudreuil is a charming, well-to-do village of 5000 people whose government is generally centrist. The river Eure runs through it, and its main street ends in a small square with a café on each side, a pharmacy and a boulangerie, a tiny épicene with basic supplies and fresh vegetables, and two small restaurants offering simple country fare, from steack frites to various preparations ‘à la crème’, in true Norman fashion. Tiny streets lined with quaint stone houses wind away from the square, and there is a church at either end of town, with parishioners staunchly devoted to one or the other.

Before Joseph was born, when I visited Edith and Bernard in Le Vaudreuil, friends and villagers who greeted me looked at my stomach before looking in my eyes. ‘Not pregnant yet?’ they would ask. To them it was unthinkable that a married woman would wait so long to have a child. I got used to it. Like most Americans, Michael and I worked around the clock. We wanted children and felt we had time, though I did occasionally fear I would be like the woman in the cartoon who, at about age forty, put her hand to her forehead in great surprise and said, ‘Oh my God! I forgot to have children.’ I used to look at my French friends, most of whom had at least three children and were my age or a few years older, and marvel at them. Through them I realized what a different culture we lived in. To them, having children was what one did – there was no weighing of advantages or disadvantages, no sense as in America that they needed to develop a career first, no hesitation about how a child would fit into life. Instead they simply had them, one after the other, and managed their personal and professional lives around them.

Admittedly, France is set up for small children. Working mothers get a lot of time off to have children, and a good deal of financial support from the state as well. There are many options for their babies when they do go back to work – either a state-run crèche, which is like a day care centre but more personal and set up for tiny babies and very young children, or a nounou, babysitter, who generally works at her home and takes no more than three children at a time. At age three children start school, and they can stay there from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. each day if parents desire, as lunch, snacks and nap time are provided.

When I, aged thirty-five, finally had Joe the news was greeted with great joy by our friends in France. When I first brought him to visit, at eight months, Edith’s brother Christian the architect, who has four children, said, ‘Now that you’ve started you have to continue.’

When we moved to France in 1993 Joe immediately became the chou-chou, or pet, of every gathering we attended, since our friends all had much older children. With his head of curly red hair and his round apple cheeks, he was a novelty.

As we settled into living in Le Vaudreuil I realized how different our child-rearing was from that of our French friends. No one could understand why we didn’t immediately put Joe in day care, a thought that never crossed our minds. How could we? He didn’t understand a word of French, for one thing. For another, we’d just moved and he was unsure of everything.

Edith couldn’t believe how much time we spent with him. ‘Why do you do that?’ she would ask. ‘It’s not good for him. He’s going to get too used to having you around. Put him in day care. Of course he’ll cry, but crying is necessary. It will make him stronger.’

I looked at her. I looked at Joe. We did spend a lot of time with him, and he was upset right now, which meant we spent even more time with him. He occasionally woke at night crying inconsolably, and during the day his face would suddenly fall as he asked, bewildered, ‘Where is my house with all my coats?’ He didn’t like being the centre of attention wherever we went. He didn’t like the French custom of kissing. He was happy at home with us or with the babysitter, and he liked going to Edith’s, but he became shy and worried whenever we went to a new place. All those friends back home who’d said that as long as we were happy he’d be happy were, I realized, talking through their hats.

I walked into his room one day and he was babbling to himself. ‘What are you saying?’ I asked him.

He looked at me, startled. ‘I’m speakin’ French,’ he responded. That was when I understood. Much of what he heard was senseless babble, so of course he felt confused. We realized he needed to learn the language, then he could relax. Maybe Edith had a point.

I went to the local public (state) nursery school in Le Vaudreuil, which had a very good reputation, to see about getting him in. I met with the principal, Annie Grodent, a lively young woman who listened to my story then agreed to take Joe, even though he wasn’t propre, or potty trained. He had been, but moving to France had made him revert to his baby ways. It was highly irregular to take a child who wasn’t potty trained, but she didn’t care as long as we understood that no one would change his diaper. They weren’t set up for that.

We agreed to bring Joe for an hour a day. Michael and I walked him to school the first day, and we handed him over. He burst into tears. Annie, who as well as being the principal was also the teacher in his class, waved us away. I sat on the edge of a chair at home for an hour, then went to retrieve him. He was still crying – he hadn’t stopped. We repeated the exercise that week and the next, two of the worst weeks of Michael’s and my life. By the end of the second week he wasn’t crying, but he wasn’t letting go of Annie, either. She was wonderfully patient. None of this ‘A little crying is good for him’ or ‘It will make him strong’ that one hears so much in France in reference to children and their painful ordeals. She held him, sang to him, took care of him, all the while conducting her class.

By month’s end, Joe was comfortable enough to play with the children, and we left him for two hours at a time, then three. By the end of three months he told us he had a friend, though he wasn’t sure of her name. One Sunday we went to a children’s program at the salle des fêtes – village hall – and his eyes lit up. ‘Mama, there she is, my friend,’ he said, pointing to a gorgeous little bright-eyed girl. I went to meet her and her parents, overcome with gratitude. They said they knew all about Joe. Annie had told me how their daughter, Lydia, though only three years old herself, had taken Joe under her wing and how they’d become fast friends. Thanks to Lydia, Joe looked forward to going to school, and after another three months he was speaking French like a native.

Once Joe was comfortable to stay the morning at school, we could pay attention to what he was actually doing there. It was remarkable – Annie had the kids doing craft projects, music, theatre, gymnastics. She welcomed songs in English, which she tried to teach to the other children. They went on field trips, and had circus performers come and teach them juggling and balancing. It was wonderful, and Joe ended up loving it. We regretted that first month that was so hard on him but it was such a relief to see him integrated. His night awakenings stopped, and he visibly relaxed.

Héloïse Tuyéras, a friend in her early seventies who once had a day care centre in her home and took care of Joe from time to time, lives in Le Vaudreuil, and her house is the depot for the local Catholic charity. This means that people with goods to give away simply drop them outside her front door, and she spends her time sorting, mending, cleaning and ironing everything that comes her way, then making sure they go where they are most needed.

When I stopped in to see her during our first week, she pointed out a stack of things she’d been collecting for us. I was surprised. ‘Héloïse, we’re not needy, we can get these things for ourselves,’ I said, imagining truly needy people going without.

‘Don’t be silly, Suzanne,’ she said. ‘I get so many things, you need so many things.’ She convinced me not to rest on my pride, and handed me a large bag of Lego for Joe, and an ironing board. That began a stream of goods which came our way from Heloise. One day, while we were still in the little house by the river, which Joe referred to as ‘France’, she called to see if Michael could pick up a four-burner stove that was almost like new. ‘You can have it if you want it,’ she said. ‘It belongs to a woman who wants to get rid of it, doesn’t want to sell it, doesn’t need the money.’ This was a gift from heaven. I was cooking on the two burners which were in the house when we moved in, managing, but I couldn’t do any real serious cooking or recipe-testing. We’d been putting off buying a stove, however, for even the simplest are very expensive. Michael returned that afternoon with the stove, which was a modern, dark-brown Rosières, a well-known brand. It had three gas burners and one electric, a curious but common quirk in French stoves. The electric burner was like an emergency burner should the gas be cut off, apparently created after the Second World War when this often happened. Michael made room for it on our little corner kitchen – with Florence’s blessing – and I was back in business. I could cook real meals again.

We now refer to Héloïse as our guardian angel for during that year she watched over us, continuing to supply us with things we needed, even before we realized we needed them. She lived just a few houses away and would stop by with toys, books and clothes for Joe, or to tell us about furniture that was available. One day she brought over a laundry rack, the next day a small chair for Joe, or a beautiful cotton sheet – small things that made life easier for us. She also invited us over for memorable meals which we shared together in her small house.

As the months progressed toward winter, rain and bone-chilling days set in. Michael set off early every morning for the house in Louviers while I got Joe off to school, then worked in my office. Michael would return at noon to pick up Joe, then he worked on plans for the house while Joe napped, and played with him while I worked. We’d been in the little house by the river for two months by then, about the amount of time we’d thought to stay there. But things on the house in Louviers were going slowly, and it was impossible for us to move in yet. Everything was taking much longer than we expected since it was all so different from anything Michael had ever worked on, from the electrical system to the plumbing. I checked in with Florence, who reassured us that her little house was ours for as long as we wanted it. We settled in even more.

The babysitter’s tenure was over so we saw her off one gray day. Life began to take on a rhythm. I needed to travel for work, so at least once a month I left on a Monday and would be gone most of the week, making sure to return in time for the weekend. Then we went to the Messy House, as Joe called the house in Louviers, which was paradise for him. He could build sand castles in the dining room, where Michael stored his pile of sand, or bang nails into boards while Michael and I worked alongside.

Our first weekend there together was magic. It was cold, so we were all bundled up as we worked. We hauled and scrubbed and organized as Joe ran around trying to help. Mid-morning Michael and I both had a longing for coffee, so we all went to the café across the street to take a break and warm up. The owner seemed to know who we were. ‘Next time if you’d like to take the coffee back to your house you may,’ she said in a friendly way. We accepted her offer. On days when we were all in the house, Joe and I would go to the café and I would order two grands crèmes and a chocolat chaud, which the owner would put on a tray. Holding Joe’s hand and the tray, I would navigate my way across the busy street feeling like a native. We would all sit in whatever room had a ray of sunshine coming into it or, if it was a particularly nice day, outside in the garden to sip our coffees and chocolate.

Once Michael got a good electrical line installed I was eager to make coffee in the house. I bought an electric coffee-maker and some coffee, brought cups from home, and went to our favourite local bakery, J. Gosselin, to buy sablés, Normandy’s traditional butter cookie. At morning break time I made coffee in the room upstairs where the owner had lived and where Michael had installed a plug. This coffee would be the first thing I had prepared in the house, and this was a momentous occasion. My hands trembled as I fit the paper filter into the machine and measured the coffee into it. I’ll never forget the eerie feeling I had smelling that first tempting, warm, human aroma in the house. Michael and I looked at each other. I could tell he felt the same way. How many people throughout the ages had made coffee, or the equivalent hot, comforting drink, in this house?

That was the first of many pots of coffee brewed in the upstairs room, where we often lunched on one-portion quiches, or small tomato pizzas, or baguette sandwiches stuffed with ham or cheese or hard-cooked eggs and vegetables from the bakery.

Progress on the house was steady, but slow. Every time Michael started on a room, expecting to be able to proceed easily from point A to point B, he’d find something that needed fixing first – a rotten beam that needed replacing, for instance. Before he could replace it, however, he’d have to move a wall, or shore up the floor, or go in some other direction before he could actually get back to point A. He desperately needed a helper, not just for the physical help but to assist him in interpreting the language and the system for buying materials, but that was out of the question. With the price of sheetrock (plaster-board) alone triple what it was in the US we needed every centime we had to pay for materials. So Michael worked on alone, slowly developing systems. He would often come home after a materials-buying trip so frustrated he could hardly speak. ‘People here just don’t want to give out information,’ he would fume. ‘In the States if you have a question you go in a store and ask the people working there and they fall all over you trying to answer it because they want your business. Here, there are a bunch of no-nothing Napoleonics working in the stores and they hear my accent and act like they can’t understand a word I’m saying even if they did know the answer.’

Over time Michael learned to avoid the larger stores, where prices were generally lower, and head for the smaller ones, which were somewhat more expensive but were more likely to have someone who knew something.

Within a few months of his starting work on the house the plumbing was functioning, the electricity installed. After we had decided which room would be my office Michael went after it, cleaned it up and installed enough electrical outlets for all my machines. Edith and I painted it one afternoon, and the next day I moved in. What a relief it was to move my office out of our bedroom in that tiny little house on the river. Now, we wouldn’t be woken up by those late-night faxes from the States.

I had two phone lines installed, arranged my file cabinets and Michael painted a lovely wood panel turquoise and laid it atop them as a temporary desk. He built bookcases and put strips of wood on the wall next to the desk. I pounded tiny nails into the strips and hung a bulldog clip on each one, so that I could hang up current projects to keep track of them. Once all the machines, from fax to answering machine to computer and printer, were installed I settled in to work.

From then on, the minute I dropped Joe off at school I went to work in my office. There was no heat in the house but if I got really uncomfortable I simply plugged in a powerful little space heater and aimed it at my feet.

I loved working in that clean room amidst the mayhem, with its window looking over the garden, the street and the side of the church. I would shut the door and revel in the white walls and the desk and get to work, stopping occasionally to look out the window. The church bells, which ring on the hour, quickly became a beloved sound. I came to distinguish the funeral dirges from the regular bells and whenever one began I would look at the scene spreading out before me, as the hearse arrived along with the florists and their massive bouquets. Far from being morbid the funerals are simply part of the church’s daily commerce, right along with the weddings which become a nearly daily event in the month of June.

I am a lapsed Catholic but I enjoy going to mass from time to time. I expected to go once in a while since it occurs within fifty yards of our front door, but somehow, hearing the hymns and organ music and occasionally the congregation praying was enough.

I do delight in watching weddings, though, and the wedding tradition in France calls for a civil ceremony at the town hall, which is up the street from us. Once that is over, the wedding party makes a procession to the church, stopping at the side door, directly across from my office window. When the entire party is assembled it proceeds inside. For large weddings a set of double doors is opened which affords me a view of the interior all the way to the altar. I can see the glint of candles and the outlines of everyone inside. It’s lovely.

Joyfully ringing bells signal the end of the ceremony, and moments later the bride and groom come out the front door onto the parvis, or square in front of the church, followed by the crowd and a storm of tissue-paper hearts, many of which float on the wind into our front yard. When Joe was small he loved to chase them all over the garden, carefully hoarding his handfuls. The wedding parties gather outside to await the gaily decorated cars that come to pick them up and whisk them away to what will be hours of eating, dancing and eating again. Some days there are two or three weddings in a row. If I’m in my office I see the priest finally emerge from the church at the end of the day and lock the door with a satisfied flourish before going on his way.

After my office, the next room to be finished was Joe’s room, then our room, then the bathroom and finally a temporary kitchen, which meant the house now had a working fireplace. All of this took a full year, during which time we stayed in our little cottage on the river. We continued to love it, often taking long walks along the river during summer evenings, when it is light until 11 p.m. I worked steadily on the book throughout, continuing to travel at least one week a month and sometimes more. That first year I drove the winding wine routes of Alsace, knocked side-view mirrors with another car in the Pyrenees as I went to visit a cheese-maker, shivered in the cold waters off the coast in Brittany during a visit to oyster beds, and had the thrill of harvesting mussels right outside of Bordeaux. After each trip I would return laden with specialties – bottles of fruity Alsatian Riesling and an assortment of sausages, an entire Ardi Gasna (Basque sheep’s milk cheese) weighing just over two pounds, or cannelles – custardy little pastries from Bordeaux. We tasted these as I recounted my adventures, making them real for everyone.