The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All

by Don Wallace

  “Someone did this on purpose,” says Mindy. I’ve already had the thought.

  Who kills a rose?

  • • •

  Back in June when we’d written Madame Morgane about accommodations she’d regretfully informed us that her son had a friend come by with a tractor to drag away the cabane. He was afraid it would detract from the pleasure of the renters as they sat in their cheap plastic chairs at an outdoor table under a beach umbrella and stared across the stubble field. What kind of man sees a forty-five-year-old wooden cabin, cunningly crafted and tight as a drum, barely large enough for three people, hidden away in a grove of trees, as a threat? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  Perhaps, we think, a man whose tractor-driving friend kills roses.

  We trail the offending tracks up the road to the edge of our house. Rory is like a tawny two-legged bloodhound, narrating: “Then they drove up here. These are wide tires. There are five different mud squishes here, so they must have had to back up and go forward to get around the corner. This was a big truck.”

  We think he’s imagining things. We should know better. When we come around the corner and look, again blatantly breaking the rules because (again) outraged, we see the most horrifying sight yet: Madame Morgane’s hundred-foot-long stone house is gone. As in gone.

  Gone, from left to right: the stone stable and cowshed; the barn, with its exterior staircase of stone to the upper hayloft, a fixture now rare on Belle Île; the main building with its bedrooms and sitting room. Parts of that house dated to the mid-1700s, parts to the early 1800s. All that’s left is the far end, the all-in-one Breton kitchen where we would sit during the winter of 1980, squeezed between an armoire for dishes and an armoire for M. Morgane’s elderly parents.

  In its place is a raw dirt hole with fallen beams and crushed interior paneling sticking out. It looks like a bomb crater. “Poor Madame Morgane,” says Mindy. “She didn’t even mention it in her letter about the cabane.”

  We stare and stare. Then Mindy gives herself a shake. “Let’s go,” she says. “We shouldn’t be looking. What if Madame Morgane were to see us?”

  • • •

  It takes almost all week to worm it out of her, but Suzanne does tell us how Madame Morgane’s son’s friend with the tractor returned one day with a clamshell-shovel backhoe. He said he was going to use the clamshell to lift materials, new slates and two-by-fours, up to the roof for repairs.

  While Madame Morgane was in her kitchen making coffee with Suzanne and listening to the radio, there came a powerful shake and shudder. A cloud of plaster dust and stone chips billowed in. Hitching up their skirts and running outside, the two old girls found the house collapsed right up to the kitchen wall.

  An accident, said the backhoe operator. Then he began dragging away the old stones, some of them scavenged from the Neolithic tumulus that was built in the field five thousand years before. A friend came by in a dump truck and hauled them away. What else are friends for?

  • • •

  There had also been no room for us at Gwened’s inn this summer, but we can hardly complain, as she has packed her house and barn with students of kyudo, the Japanese way of the bow, most of them Belgians. We see them wandering through willow-hedge mazes and pacing the edges of threshed fields, in couples and in small groups, heads bowed, often dressed in white gi. They seem to regard Gwened as a guru. (Ah, yes, where have we heard that before?)

  We stay away from her property at the back of the lane, not from wounded pride but for safety’s sake. Sometimes Rory and I tiptoe close enough to hear the creak of a bow, the twang of a bowstring, the whoosh of an arrow. Red flashes fly across Gwened’s jardin toward a paper bull’s-eye pinned to an old horse cart leaning against a hayrick. But, Rory snickers, they rarely hit. They don’t even come close to the target.

  As much as we keep our distance, Gwened keeps hers. It’s as if she doesn’t want any reminders of her life before donning the white habit of a shin-zen-bi (truth-goodness-beauty) archer. Fine. Whatever keeps cancer at bay. And it does seem to be working.

  So where are we staying? Our house, out of desperation. There’s nobody we can rent from in the village. Though the kitchen-dining area’s rotten floorboards were trashed and hauled away when the workmen renovated the upstairs, the back bedroom still has a floor of sorts. In our absence, the new neighbors of last year threw out a sofa, which somebody, perhaps Denis LeReveur, has dragged in.

  Denis also donated two rickety chairs and an equally unstable pale wooden table from a failed boîte de nuit, nightclub, he’s redesigning. An old futon mattress is waiting for us, donated by Franck and Ines, who, it turns out, relocated to town and now live above the small business they bought. No stove, no sink, no refrigerator: we’ll continue to cook over our Bleuet Campingaz stoves and run cold water (no hot) in pots down from the upstairs bathtub.

  It’s quite a comedown from Gwened’s immaculately appointed kitchen and comfortable hobbit-burrow bedrooms. Our one piece of good luck is marvelous weather—beau temps, Suzanne assures us when she comes by for an inspection. She doesn’t seem to find our squalor disagreeable. Then again, her own hut is a layered midden of paper and kindling and open sardine tins, dark and smoky, hopping with skittish kittens.

  We notice a pile of cans and dirty implements in a corner, covered with old newspaper.

  “L’homme,” says Suzanne.

  “What man?” asks Mindy.

  Suzanne shrugs. The man who lived here for a while before Denis booted him out.

  We are living a true upstairs-downstairs life; the funny thing is we’re playing both roles. Downstairs life is dirty, uncomfortable, and lacking in modern conveniences. Upstairs, once we’ve climbed the twenty-foot ladder, the same relic we cached in the tall weeds last year, we’re in a shining magical treehouse. We’ve got two bedrooms with those big dormer windows; ceilings of bright, varnished knotty pine; and a bathroom with a deep tub and a skylight overhead. The clean white walls have never been blemished by so much as a fingerprint in all these years.

  There is no question of sleeping upstairs, however. The ladder is giddy-making and the drop from the top of the second floor, which has no railing whatsoever, is vertiginous. Just the thought of Rory wandering around in the dark with a twenty-foot fall awaiting him is enough to cause my stomach to do a flip-turn. We will sleep on the futon on the ground floor and make up a pallet for Rory to sleep near us.

  That we are emulating the homeless homme is a thought to keep far, far from the surface of our minds.

  • • •

  Lucky us, we can stay out all day—which stretches for eighteen hours—if we please. This is the longest spell of beau temps anyone can remember. Every night we go to bed thinking the beautiful time is over; every morning we wake to that preternatural stillness and clarity. Excellent lizard weather for Rory, it inspires Mindy to start digging a trench, twelve inches wide, alongside the house. I take over when her back and palms give out.

  “What are you doing, Don?” asks Gwened, drawn out from behind her screen of hydrangeas by the clink of the pick on hardpan. She’s in a white gi cinched tight at her waist by a black belt, quite fetching. We’ve noticed several of the Belgian youth are also quite fetching, in a Flemish school of painting, ca. 1540 AD, sort of way.

  “Preparing the soil,” Mindy says, stepping from the interior shadows into the doorway.

  Gwened waits for elaboration. “For what? Are you planning something?”

  “Trench warfare,” I quip. This doesn’t go down so well.

  “Mindy, this is not your land to do with as you please,” says Gwened gently. “It’s part of the road and the square.”

  “You mean like the other road?”

  Gwened smiles beatifically. It’s like she flipped a switch; suddenly she seems to emit rays of goodness. “I can understand how you would like a garden. Wh
y don’t you come up and use mine?”

  Poker-faced, Mindy nods, but her sidelong glance at me is devilish. It’s a funny thing—when we’re confronted, insulted, even mocked, all I have to do is look at Mindy. We exchange a glance, and it’s enough. “I think a little grass and some flowers will improve the look of the place,” says Mindy.

  Gwened shakes her head.

  “We already have weeds,” I point out. “We’ll just put in some nicer weeds.”

  “I’m afraid if you do, someone in the village will report your fosse.”

  Wow, is this a threat? It has always rankled Gwened that we went for a common septic tank instead of buying the famous nuclear-powered feces furnace like the legendary old lady of Le Palais. Still, our fosse is perfectly legal.

  I’m trying to not forget my manners when Mindy replies. “You mean the same person who killed our rose?”

  Touché.

  Gwened draws back visibly, surprised that we know it was no accident. Connect the dots and it becomes obvious that she’s one of those who didn’t speak up. And now that she knows we know it, she can no longer claim ignorance the next time someone decides to murder our rose. She will have to ask herself if she’s become un collabo, a collaborator.

  “I see,” she says. “I’m afraid you will be disappointed again next summer when you come, but I see.”

  • • •

  With the long bout of beau temps, the ocean this year seems different, too. We’ve been used to rows of snarling, chaotic walls of white water marching up and down the sand. The crisp, glassy tubes Mindy compared to Pupukea in Hawaii during our first winter must’ve been a one-time event, or even an illusion. Or so we were beginning to think, until now. Suddenly we find ourselves pausing in our sand castle building and Frisbee throwing to stare in rapt concentration at waves, real ones. We turn to each other and chatter excitedly. Yes, this is definitely surf. And it looks good. Cowabunga!

  Lacking boards, we still can bodysurf. At first we take turns heading out, the other keeping watch. There are no lifeguards and nobody else around who looks like they can swim more than a stroke or two. Despite the beau temps, the water is shockingly cold—59 to 61 degrees Fahrenheit—but having to constantly kick and stroke and duck dive at least provides some heat or distraction. It’s a strong swell, with swirling currents. The waves are quick, shifty, hard to gauge. Afterward, comparing notes on the sand while shivering under towels and sweatshirts, we agree that we need better tools. Swim fins, definitely: we use them in the big surf of Hawaii and California.

  What about surfboards? No, no, no. Really. Mindy is wistful. Sure, honey, eventually. (I’m lying.) Sure, really. (Let me get this straight: You want to haul a surfboard on a New York City taxi to JFK, then take a plane, a Paris taxi, three trains, a taxi to the port, then a ferry, and finally one last taxi? With a five-year-old in tow? Are you crazy?)

  Of course not, dear. I want you to haul it. (Mind reader!)

  A couple of days later, Franck and Ines come out for an apéro and to see the old village. When we mention that we’ve been swimming at Donnant, Franck pales. “That’s crazy!” he shouts. “You will drown. Every year tourists die there, swept away.” He sputters and stares and shakes his head—we are dumbfounded. Finally Ines calms him down while saying to us in her tiniest voice that the reason Franck is so upset is that a good friend drowned horribly right in front of his screaming family, after being swept off the rocks of Donnant.

  Belle Île’s best baker, Momo, was collecting pousse-pieds, the great delicacy of the European mid-Atlantic region. Americans at the seashore never give these goose barnacles a second glance, let alone consider taking and eating them. But off the coast of Portugal and Brittany, locals and itinerant crews have harvested them down to the lowest level exposed by the super-lowest of tides. This creates a situation ripe for disaster, as extreme low tides often come back up fast and hard.

  We try to explain how surfing makes us safer than the average pousse-piedophile, because we know waves and aren’t scrambling around on rocks to start with, but in vain. Franck keeps shaking his head and growling. This seems odd, considering he built his business on windsurfer rentals. But his beachfront shop was on the calmest, sweetest Continental side of the island, the Côté Douceur, on a wide beach of powdery white sand. There were never any waves except during the rarest of storms. His clientele was timid and respectful of Franck’s authority. And in those early days of windsurfing, the boards were little more than small flat sailboats. It had all worked very well for Franck and Ines, although they’d ended up exhausted and selling the business.

  The idea of wild Americans opening up Belle Île’s western frontier, the Côte Sauvage, is the last thing they needed to hear. Publicly we make our reassurances. Privately, after they’ve gone, we laugh. What wimps. The whole point of surfing is going out when it’s big, even a little scary. In Hawaii and California the best-formed waves often come out of a wicked storm, rolling out like shiny, smooth sculptures from a howling maw.

  When we go back to Donnant the next day, however, we find we’ve caught Franck’s fear. Objectively speaking, the beach can be fearsome. First the ocean’s energy, gathering for weeks across a 2,500-mile open fetch, is funneled by steep cliffs into a bulb-shaped bay. All the while, tides of up to forty feet sweep up and back, turbocharging the rollers. They turn the bay into a boiling cauldron at high tide, and at low, expose the sands all the way to the entrance, where gray-green closeouts slam the door. Finally, the half-mile-long horseshoe of sand is cleaved at the middle by a large rock ridge that divides the waves, setting up a refractory backwash that sends giant waterspouts ten to twenty feet into the air.

  We talk it over and decide to cool our surf fever until the following year, when we will bring the swim fins and, for Mindy, a wet suit.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Dream Team

  Our new life on Belle Île was taking shape in our minds. Around us was still dirt, dust, mold, exposed nails, and blackened greasy walls, but if we turned our faces skyward, a celestial city awaited. All we had to do was ascend, like Jack on his beanstalk. Why not now, we argued, lying on the floorboards that never got clean despite Mindy’s daily scrubbing. Why wait, when Rory was strong and coordinated and fearless.

  The next day I began scrounging two-by-fours and other pieces of scrap from the collapsed barn. No carpenter, yet still I trusted in the power of a nail, many nails—hammered in at all angles, linking up struts and cross-pieces—to create a barrier around the L-shaped edge of the second floor. Done, I surveyed my work from below. It looked like a logjam on some Western river. But that was okay. Beauty wasn’t the issue; safety was. And Rory would have to use a crowbar to get through that wall.

  Now, at night, we climbed the ladder as a family: first Rory, then me with my body arched over his as we climbed in unison, step for step, handhold for handhold, with Mindy hovering just below, arms open wide, ready to spring into action.

  Going to bed with the dormers wide open to the soft night air, we cuddled and said our good nights and turned out the little electric lantern. Up high, we could really appreciate the quiet and peace, and it might have been a beautiful night if either of us could’ve fallen asleep. Instead we waited in the dark for Rory to rise and wander. When I finally drifted off, it was to wake up in silent dread, uncertain if I was dreaming or reacting to a scream.

  The next night we brought rope. Stringing it from pillar to post, we created a web that might catch Rory, he of the innocent “Who, me?” eyes, if he should outwait us and then, when we were asleep, bust through the flimsy barricade. Yes, flimsy. In the mind’s dreaming eye I had appraised my work and found it lacking.

  Short of tying Rory to a doorknob, what were we to do?

  For now, put him to bed between us and the wall, so if he tried to escape he’d have to crawl over us both.

  • • •

  A long tramp on t
he moors, heading north along the Côte Sauvage. Rory has reached the indefatigable stage and his little legs pump as we follow the trail, narrow and bounded by blue-green succulents, dark green pincushion mosses with red ruby flowers, and ankle-biting gorse (flowering bright yellow as if to draw us closer). But heading down on the shaded side of the little valleys we swim through fields of softly waving ferns, head-high in places where the rutted path has worn itself five feet deep into the hill.

  Up and down goes the côtier sentier, the coastal path. The sea shines like silver out to the horizon, an electric blue-green at our feet—well, fifty to sixty feet below our feet. The cliffs of the Côte Sauvage are no joke, and once again we wonder what possessed us to bring Rory into the presence of such great heights. Mindy covers him as closely as she can, short of tying a rope around his neck. But he’s motoring on, strong and agile as a mountain goat.

  After a couple of hours we’re tired and hot. Fortunately the trail dips to the edge of a white, rocky beach with an enticing grotto and a roche percé, pierced rock. These demand to be explored. We spread our picnic out on a shared towel and take off our sweaty shirts, lying back on the hot, white, polished stones, emitting little yelps of pain and pleasure. Within moments we’re up and racing for the big, brilliant blue.

  Beau temps has now reached out and stilled the sea. We head inland on the path we think will take us home: there are no signposts. Up a verdant green valley of ferns and marsh rushes, we find a welter of paths, some for cows, some for sheep. One is for us—but which one? The moor is open for miles. Over the top of a nearby windbreak of cypress we think we see the top of the moulin blanc. Triangulation makes it possible to devise a course. We come to a road, barely a track, but rutted by car tires.

  There’s a shoal of cypress trees, yanked to one side by the wind. Their green-needled branches twist together like the tresses of a goddess. As we walk past, we see a glint of silver under upswept boughs: a gleaming motorcycle with a classic 1940s sidecar. A spiffy khaki rainfly roofs the sidecar; it looks designed, like something L. L. Bean would make if he joined the Hells’ Angels. Another tarp covers a collapsible safari table. A blue bubble tent sprouts like a psychedelic mushroom off to one side.