The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All
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Copyright © 2014 by Don Wallace
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map of Belle Île
Top Ten Facts about Belle Île
Instructions: Opening the House
Chapter 1: Far Breton
Chapter 2: Le Grand Détour (Year Zero)
Chapter 3: The Third Island
Chapter 4: At First Sight
Chapter 5: At Home Abroad: Four Easy Lists
Chapter 6: Summer Plans
Chapter 7: Seeing and Believing
Chapter 8: French Regulatory Style
Chapter 9: The Black Book
Chapter 10: The French Position
Chapter 11: Wards of the Village
Chapter 12: The Game of No
Chapter 13: Belle Île-en-Hudson
Chapter 14: Who Steals a Road?
Chapter 15: Who Kills a Rose?
Chapter 16: The Dream Team
Chapter 17: The Parent Trap
Chapter 18: The Sole of Solitude
Chapter 19: La Chienne
Chapter 20: Beau Temps
Chapter 21: La Fontaine Wallace
Chapter 22: Trop Beau
Chapter 23: Ankou
Chapter 24: A Last Swim in September
Chapter 25: Village Elders
Author’s Note
Resources and Attributions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Mindy and Rory
Any one of us
can tell our story
in terms of fate,
in terms of luck,
or in terms of choice,
and never know
with exact certitude
what is working.
—Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing
Top Ten Facts about Belle Île
1.It swims offshore like a fat sole fried in butter, but its bones are blue-green granite.
2.It is located ten miles out in the Atlantic from the coast of Brittany, in what is called the Bay of Biscay.
3.Its golden fields are held aloft by sharp-toothed, bone-shattering cliffs, like an offering to older gods.
4.One hundred fifty-two little villages, most amounting to only a half dozen houses, bask in valleys cut by trickling creeks or huddle in the lee of low knolls.
5.Each village has its own personality and schedule and history. Each has a cow. Each has a mystery. (Who owns that cow?)
6.Each village also shares a daily rhythm with everything else here, because of the way the island breathes with the tides. All of it, farm and beach and rockbound coast, drawbridge and fishing boat and mud-burrowing clam, the wiggling sardines soon to become the daily special on the chalkboard outside the crêperie Guerveur, even the lines of wobbling tourist cyclists clogging the island lanes—all seem to wax and wane, rise and fall, along with the sea’s inhalation and exhalation, those sweeping tides that come twice a day, twice at night.
7.It’s beautiful here, often dramatically so.
8.But, as always, beauty comes at a cost. There are too many tourists in July and August, although they’re good for the local economy. There is pressure to build on open farmland to accommodate development. Pollution is a problem, mostly from outmoded septic systems. Young people can’t find jobs to suit their education level and feel they must move to the Continent. As my wife, Mindy, knows from leaving her native Hawaii, this can be painful: it’s never quite the same after you go away.
9.There is an ancient and unresolved drama revolving around the island. It looks postcard-pretty upon arrival at Le Palais, the walled port on the protected side that faces the French mainland. It presents a brave face on its western coast, too, the aptly named Côte Sauvage. But it is trapped in an abusive relationship with the treacherous Bay of Biscay, taking the brunt of whatever mood the sea is in. Cliffs crumble, dark masses of seaweed cover the beaches, rows of cypresses fall, ripping up the earth with their roots. Fishermen and tourists are washed away to become crab bait. Early in the morning after a storm, the island tries to convince you that its bruises mean nothing, calling your attention instead to the sun-kissed mists and drifts of spume, taller than a man, that collect in the coves and creeks. The shadow of violence in her eyes haunts you, however. Never turn your back on the sea.
10.But the island is also gentled by the warming tickle of the tail end of the Gulf Stream. It gets a lot of sunshine, less rain than the Continent, and periods of scintillating glassy calm that, in summer, occasionally peak in what the local Bellilois call beau temps: a day or two of warm, windless clarity and peace, almost psychedelic in nature, when orb spiders weave tapestries of bedewed diamonds along the valley path, shiny green lizards dart underfoot, and people talk in whispers out of an instinctive awe and reverence.
In other words, it is called Belle Île for a reason.
Instructions
Opening the House
Bonjour et bienvenue—
There are a few things that have to be done immediately when you open the house. Please read ALL these points carefully. First, however, apologies if the ocean was rough on the ferry ride over. We hope nobody got seasick. If somebody did, please check, and clean, the soles of their (not yours, I hope) shoes.
Note: do not start to unpack or have that stiff drink, however well-deserved, or chase af
ter cats and lizards and movie starlets, no matter how adorable, until after you have completed all the opening tasks. Otherwise, there may be a small disaster, such as not having hot water for your bath, or a bigger one, such as open faucets flooding the upstairs.
But perhaps you’re not here yet. Perhaps you’re reading ahead (recommended) or else, like us thirty years ago, you’ve arrived to find yourself standing in the middle of a rural village without any idea of where you are and searching for a cottage you must locate without a street sign or house number in sight. If the latter, here’s hoping you stashed these instructions in a place where they can easily be found. Because you’ll need them.
Finding the House
Imagine the village as a bicycle lying on its side in the cornfields. Our first dusty intersection is the rear wheel hub, the spokes of which form four shady lanes. Follow the right-hand lane uphill.
The first house you pass will look on the verge of collapse or abandonment. Its windows are without glass, and the drystone walls are covered in vines that might be the only thing holding them together. You may see feminine underwear hanging on various bushes. You may see kittens. You will probably not see Suzanne, especially if she has sensed your arrival, or that of any stranger, but this is her house.
Next up, in the middle of our row of three, is a small, narrow cottage painted a gleaming white with pink and green trim under the eaves and around the windows and door. Everybody exclaims at how pretty and perfect it is, so go right ahead, squeal: “It’s so cute!” We’re used to it.
The date of its construction is chiseled over the lintel: MDCCCXLII. We guess this goes over well with the tourists, this boast of semiantiquity, but just so you know: this is not our house.
Our house is the one next door, up the lane, toward the sky and the sunset. It’s older than the cute house with the date—in fact, the second oldest in the village—but what really impresses the locals is that it has never sheltered farm animals. In Belle Île, that’s high-class.
In case you were wondering, the house was built over one hundred eighty years ago, and in all that time, only its plank floor and slate roof have needed to be replaced—once each. The stone walls and many of the beams are original. Now consider, as a point of reference, the plywood-and-drywall frame of your average house in an average American development, which begins to delaminate or crumble in about twenty years.
It is our hope that all of this sounds impressive enough to distract your attention from the peeling paint, the exposed wires and bent nails, the cracked glass in the cabanet, the rickety furniture that looks like it could collapse any minute, the tar-stained green nylon fishermen’s nets strung between rafters like hammocks, the blackened chimney, and so forth. But we know it’s hopeless. Nothing takes away from the fact that we basically bought a ruin, one that is still awaiting renovation so many years later. We’re just glad we’re not here to see your face.
That was supposed to be a joke, by the way. Go ahead and laugh—at the joke, at the house, at us. We’re used to it.
The Key…
…Is with Suzanne. Yes, the owner of the other ruin in our row of houses. She is our elderly Breton friend and a former cowherd, always chic in a blue dress and blue floral apron. Her black hair may look as if it has never seen the interior of the Elle-Lui Salon du Coiffeur in Le Palais, but you’d be wrong. She gets it done maybe four times a year. Suzanne is about eighty years old. She’s a wonderful gardener—those are her flowers all over the village. She wanders around with cuttings in her blue apron pockets, fitting them into the chinks in the stone walls and gaps in the shrubbery. I think she talks to them. (At least her lips move.)
We’re pretty sure she’s a secret Druid, Veneti, Celt, or whatever you would call the remnant culture going back to the pre-Christian era. That’s when the Romans under Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and Britain and squeezed the fleeing Celtic Britons and Bretons together into a cul-de-sac of a French peninsula called Brittany. Suzanne is descended from these mystical ancestors and has spent her entire life within three miles of our village here. Brittany’s coast is only ten miles away by ferry from Belle Île, but to Suzanne it might as well be ten thousand, for all the times she’s visited.
The village of Kerbordardoué has always been a beauty, but it was under wraps when we first came. Since Suzanne moved in twenty years ago, though, the center lane from her drystone shed to our house has become a miniature Hanging Garden of Babylon, with giant bobbing hydrangeas, tiny red-slippered and yellow-bloomed things, boldly blushing roses, purple-belled hyacinths, daisies, and lately, taking advantage of sodden spots where we wash off our surfboards and wet suits every evening, delicate violet-and-white lilies transplanted from the marshy places and hidden springs Suzanne visits on her rounds.
About Suzanne: she is shy. She speaks through her flowers, her fragile one-toothed smile, and her lace. When we first met her, or rather glimpsed her, Suzanne was literally afraid to be seen. She darted in and out of the village, too fast to catch, much less detain for a conversation. Everyone called her La Femme Sauvage for a while.
I agree, an unfortunate nickname. We stopped using it after we glimpsed Suzanne as we sat at an outdoor garden table at Gwened’s place up the lane. Among the guests were some rather supercilious Parisians, renters of the MDCCCXLII house adjoining ours. One of them made a show of sneaking around back and ambushing Suzanne, who was peering shyly through a hedge. “La Femme Sauvage!” they hooted at the sight of her leaping over a ditch with petticoats flying, like a large, elderly bunny woman, to flee into the fields. I don’t think I’ve been more ashamed of myself, just to have been sitting there and to have said nothing.
I do believe those Parisians were the reason it took a year for Suzanne to be coaxed back into village life. Le Vicomte, the village’s gruff old patriarch, did the coaxing. I hope you get a chance to meet him. Aristocratic yet democratic in his tattered black sweater, “Le Vic” has a sly way of sniffing “trop snob” whenever his fancier visitors put on airs—which many do, under the impression that’s what a vicomte (or viscount, as we would say if we were English) would prefer.
He treats Suzanne with light but loving consideration, recognizing, I think, that they are two of a vanishing species—the village lord and the cowherd—who have more in common with each other than with the more recent arrivals. That’s his house at the bottom of the lane, adjacent to a ruin that is as carefully preserved in its ruination by Le Vic; his wife, Yvonne; and their children, Thierry and Philippe, as their own whitewashed house is immaculate.
By the way, Suzanne knitted the lace over our windows, the real stuff. When you greet her, she will blush like an eighty-year-old teenager. So if your French is shaky or you’re nervous or tired from the long trip and it’s late at night, don’t worry. Being shy herself, Suzanne is fluent in tongue-tied.
But while she shies away from company, finding her shouldn’t be a problem. She is usually around. If she isn’t at her shed at the head of the lane, try the farmhouse whose turnoff is in the middle of the first tree tunnel you drove through. Suzanne visits there regularly with Madame Morgane, her best friend since girlhood.
Madame Morgane is the cornerstone of our village, not so much for being active, like Le Vic tending to his ruins or Suzanne to her flowers, but for her status as the last of the village Bellilois to have been born here and lived here and worked here all her life (except for four years on the Continent during the Nazi occupation). Her word carries weight among the rest of us. Her presence lends gravity to a chance meeting; her approval matters. Warning: her disapproval devastates.
A farmer’s widow, she bears a popular and powerful family name and is, with Suzanne, Kerbordardoué’s last link to the Breton agrarian tradition. (That’s a mouthful, I know, but the clichéd term, “peasantry,” would be insulting and inaccurate. These folks are the owners and shapers of their lives.) Madame Morgane owns the surrounding fields and, at the time
we came here, a dozen cows. She also married, unlike Suzanne, and has children and grandchildren. For all this, then, she is always Madame while Suzanne is Mademoiselle.
To find the key to our house, “Je cherche a Suzanne pour la clé du maison Wallace” is the lingua franca. It literally means “I’m looking for Suzanne for the key to the Wallace house.”
Go ahead and say it: “Jay. Share-shay. Lay clay. Duh may-zone Wall-Ass.” Please, try not to giggle.
Oh, Mindy says that my French is incorrect, once again. The proper phrase is… Great, now she won’t tell me!
• • •
Among ourselves we like to call the house Chez Jeannie, after the last of the original family to live here. Jeannie (Guer’ch) Morgane was aunt or mother or grandmother to many of the villagers, including Madame Morgane. She exuded spirit and joy, it is said. But the villagers, unsentimental in the way of country people everywhere (or so I’ve read in books by sentimental city people), surprised us by not going along with our little gesture, no matter how well-meant. To them the house is ours, and so I’ve heard it spoken of as “Duh May-Zone Wall-Ass.” Doesn’t quite flatter us, I agree.
Okay, you’ve found it. Here’s the drill:
1.Electric. When you open the door, there is a cabanet to your right. This is where the electric switches are and the water line.
2.Water. In the same cabanet, at the bottom, is a water line with a cutoff valve. Turn the valve all the way open. Important: we leave the taps open during the winter so they won’t freeze. Please, go immediately upstairs and check the bathtub and sink faucets in case you are the first user of the new year, in which case they will sputter and then begin to gush.
3.Water heater. To turn on the water for the water heater, go to the closet across from the cabanet. It is full of sporty stuff (tennis rackets, golf clubs, swim fins, masks and snorkels, spear guns, wet suits, Frisbees, bocce balls, all of which you may use after you complete every step of these instructions).