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

by Don Wallace

  The weeks we’ve spent in Kerbordardoué tending a yellowed stoneware bowl full of bubbling, temperamental buckwheat batter has shown us how simple doesn’t always mean easy. But that hasn’t stopped Mindy from tackling classic French dishes out of Tante Marie, France’s equivalent of The Joy of Cooking, now sadly out of print.

  Over the years, we’ve both grown bolder but have never deluded ourselves about mastering French cuisine, which is justly renowned for complexity, for being rich, diverse, and informed by an obsession with terroir, freshness, and technique. We take to heart the only remark by President Charles de Gaulle that will go down in history: “It is impossible to govern a nation of 400 cheeses.” We know we will never claim citizenship in the Fifth Republic of Fromage. We’ve barely scratched the surface and will never get very deep. But we’re not sad. For us, it just means that wonders will never cease.

  These days we set our sights low, mind our ingredients, and enjoy gratifying results. We notice and borrow how Celeste packs barely seasoned ground pork into a hollowed out garden tomato for farci; see how a head of frisée from a neighbor’s garden can change from a salad to an entrée after a quick toss into a pan of seared lardons; listen carefully when the fishmonger, having sold out of lotte, recommends the other ugly fish, le grondin, roasted in a pan with butter, shallots, and fenouil.

  Sadly, the ugly fish never tastes the same back home in the United States (if you can even find it—we don’t do ugly very well). But the recipes can travel and, in an American kitchen sourced from a farmer’s market, do just fine.

  The cultural rules of French eating travel even better. We paid heed to them after noticing that we always returned home thinner and healthier despite all the butter, cream, and other indulgences. (The only time I fit into my old Agnes B suit was the week after Belle Île.) What was up with that?

  After years of polling Celeste, Sidonie, Yvonne, and the other women on the beach, Mindy thinks she has the formula: no between-meal snacking, no processed foods, no sweets (except a square of dark chocolate on the half hour when writing), smaller portion size (and no seconds), no soft drinks (including, at my insistence, diet cola—Mindy’s one weakness), lots of greens and vegetables, plenty of olive oil, and fruit or cheese, or both, for dessert.

  I’ve told Mindy that I can accept all of the above, with the occasional forgivable lapse, if there’s a loophole allowing tarts, cakes, and other pâtisserie on a more-or-less daily basis. No? Then why did you take me to France in the first place—to torture me? Yes, there has been give-and-take on the topic. When my argument was about to prevail due to superior logic, Mindy called in my ami Henry to betray me.

  “But, Don,” he said, “you know, one does not eat the special dessert every day.”

  “Come on,” I replied, man to man. “Don’t tell me that you aren’t tempted when you walk home from the office, passing all those glass-front displays of Gâteau Bavarois and Bombe Chocolate, not to mention the cute little chocolate mice, Petit Souris, and those gorgeous tartes, oh my god, aux fraise and au citron and, dear me, those of mûres et framboise…” (I’ll take one of each, please, by the way.)

  “No, Don.”

  “You really need to have some special sort of occasion?”

  “Yes, that is true,” Henry said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like when you visit with your famous appetite.”

  All of this has gone into the pot, grist for the moulin; it has inflected our shape, our health and, in subtle ways, our careers.

  Meanwhile, in our adopted country, nothing stays the same. Plus ça change is no longer the rule. France has only 300 cheeses now, I hear. The long siesta has been curtailed by European Union membership, hurting small bistros and shuttering many. The women we so admire for their knowledge and culinary savoir-faire shake their heads at us, saying that we’re idealizing a role they are glad to give up. It doesn’t reflect the reality of a France where women began working longer hours decades ago. I remember Gwened’s complaint, going on almost twenty years now, about the toll of living up to the French feminine ideal. Our friends still resent the pressure.

  During the same time in the United States, attitudes toward food and diet have changed dramatically—going in the green, ingredient-based, if not exactly French direction—while on the Continent, McDo and BK have made real inroads. At least we have yet to see a food fast joint on the island, or an obese îlien.

  C’est le même chose: a Frenchwoman, even exhausted, can still outcook us all.

  • • •

  With inputs like these that she gets on Belle Île, green journalism has suited Mindy well. Combining our sixties idealism and writing, it allows her to put her law degree to use without the drudgery of a practice. It’s a good fit, too, with her Tiger Mom’s obsession with what exactly goes into what: chemicals in fish and breast milk, pesticides in applesauce and baby food, hormones in shampoo and herbicides in genetically modified plants, and so forth.

  Moving from The Trust for Public Land (TPL) to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet, before going out on her own, Mindy has worked closely with scientists and researchers and honest-to-god farmers literally in the field. She’s done global, local, and urban green; worked with Kennedys and Rockefellers, Martha Stewart and, in particular, Meryl Streep, cofounder of her newsletter. Mindy’s affinity for sifting and blending the input of all those experts and practitioners has won her national honors.

  So we live the green life. Not as a once-a-year Earth Day thing, like those special issues in the mainstream magazines (where Mindy is often asked to contribute), but as a conscious daily practice. I’m cool with that. Sure, I used to get tired of the constant grilling about my food shopping choices—that, and lectures at the dining table—but now I’m up to speed. Ask me anything. Go ahead, ask me about my butt. You see, I use this special French crème…

  Only on Belle Île can we and she relax the cycle of constant vigilance and interrogation. The fish come straight from the sea, the lamb from the fields. Even the beef (which she avoids) is culled from island bulls. She allows me to gnash the occasional contre-filet to keep my incisors sharp. Toss in cheap organic vegetables from the farm at Kerzo or Gwened’s garden, and all the cidre brut biologique you can drink; now, that’s a real busman’s holiday.

  Visiting Belle Île is like visiting some breakaway green republic. Okay, the French still smoke; but we’re working on it.

  • • •

  As for my own career turnaround, or evolution? Hot Water became a one-pound résumé. It took me places. Opened doors. When my former colleague Tom hooked me up with Evan, who was leaving some indescribable but very upscale-sounding gig at Condé Nast, it was the novel that became the convincer. That and the Washington Post review.

  So I made it past HR, whose Cerberus had her doubts, I could tell. Going in to meet the editor in chief, I knew I still lacked the inner je ne sais quoi of a fabulous person who belonged in The Land of All-Black. I looked at Mindy. She nodded her head. It was time for the suit.

  I put my fate in the hands of Mr. Agnes B. Homme, who slid like a flat, black matte silhouette up Madison Avenue. He got off the elevator at the twenty-second floor and charmed, I’m told. It was only the second or third time I ever wore it, and it felt a little tight at the waist and at the ankles, but that suit hugged my chest and shoulders like Spandex.

  As books editor, my job was to read books. And be fabulous at it. Not a stretch. Well, until I had a few too many long literary lunches, and then, malheureusement, popped a button and had to buy something roomier to accommodate all the dunnage.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  La Fontaine Wallace

  In the spring of our thirteenth year, we made the momentous decision to add an outside faucet to rinse sand from our feet after the beach and to be able to attach a hose for watering the garden and washing down wet suits
and surfboards. Mindy called a plumber. The first summer after making the decision, the plumber almost came. The second summer, never almost.

  Laurent was a fine guy, a Bellilois, who’d taken over the business from his father, who’d plumbed our lines years ago. We occasionally saw him surfing late in the evening after a day of rushing from tourist and second-home jobs. In the lineup, with the sun low on the horizon, the points of surfboards serrating the horizon like shark fins, he’d make promises that we both knew he could not keep. Then he’d paddle away.

  The rumor of a second plumber came courtesy of our maître du bâtiment, Theophile, who’d started as apprentice to our first master builder, Denis, and had eventually taken over the business, including our own slow-motion renovation. (Here insert a TV announcer’s voice: Now in its twenty-seventh year!) Theophile was a young man with a bright glint in his eyes. We were not great clients from a financial perspective, and certainly not as a means of furthering one’s reputation, given that we owned a former ruin that still looked as if it could lapse any day now back into ruination.

  But, he asked, weren’t we the Americans who had introduced surfing to Belle Île? Well, Theophile had watched us in the waves when he was a boy, and now he was a surfer, too. Was it true Mindy was Hawaiian? Superbe! And you, Don, you will have to go out fishing on my father’s boat. We know where the sea bass sit in their holes. We will get drunk and sing to them until they come out and bite our lines.

  There was no decision to make; we’d already adopted each other.

  But even Theophile couldn’t summon a plumber. Instead, one day he asked us if we’d heard the story about the Midnight Porsche. How late at night, long after the last restaurants and bars had closed in the three towns, a blinding streak of light occasionally went flying down the central route from one end of the island to the other, all eleven miles of it, Locmaria to Pointe des Poulains. Like a mirage, or a silver bullet.

  My ears pricked up. Yes, I could’ve sworn I’d heard the redline screaming of a fast car’s gearbox being rammed through the changes. It was a sound hauntingly familiar to me, who had lain in bed as a child listening to the ecstatic love moans of candy-colored, dual-carb, superhemi funny cars floating up the Los Angeles River’s dry concrete bed all the way from Lions Drag Strip in Wilmington.

  I remembered one such night late in the fields of Kerbordardoué when we’d walked out to watch the Perseids. Instead, Rory sidetracked us into looking for the glowworm that lit each summer in the same spot, year after year, climbing the same stalk of tall grass (or so it seemed). And there she was, shaking up a booty cocktail of luciferin and luciferase, lighting the old green lantern for the boy worms on the prowl, when suddenly a streak flashed up ahead like horizontal lighting: the phantom Porsche. Or else a giant rival she-worm.

  To Theophile I said I recalled spying, while on a rambling bicycle ride over and through the hamlets and farms, a sleek silhouette covered by a tarp in a graveled driveway. Theophile affirmed that this was not just a phantom Midnight Porsche, but a plumber’s Porsche. He gave us his number and name: Benedict.

  “He is not Bellilois,” said Theophile, which we understood to mean he understood that we wanted this faucet badly enough to risk going outside our established island network. But we ought to be careful that word did not get around, especially in the surf. Laurent would be hurt. It might actually affect his mood in the water. And he might never come when we really needed him, not just for something trivial like a faucet.

  Mindy made the call and charmed Benedict, not a small thing, given that this was such a small job. He said yes because he was curious, we suspected, and we prepared for the Bellilois ritual, long and glacially paced, of getting to know each other before work would start. I filled the coffee filter and put on water, Mindy set out a bowl of the archaic sugar cubes so beloved of Bellilois and the blackberry butter cake she’d made the day before. When a panel truck came bumping up the lane and parked a safe distance from Gwened’s barn, we sighed. We really had hoped he’d roar up in the Porsche.

  Benedict was large, with a rugby player’s torso and a big, handsome head. His hair was styled. He had the well-brought-up French person’s social distance that makes conversation astringent until, without warning, it erupts into hilarity. With Benedict the moment came after polite offers of coffee and cake, which he declined once, twice, three times before giving in “avec plaisir”—but only, he insisted, after inspecting the job.

  That took all of five minutes, including a visit to his truck for a length of pipe, tools, and a butane torch. Then he decided he wanted to work first and have coffee later. Recognizing that once again we’d been out-mannered, Mindy excused herself to go upstairs and write. I settled into a wicker chair to watch. Our son, age twelve, toyed with a chess problem on the dining table. Unable to keep up my end of the conversation without Mindy to translate and make excuses, I reached over to the cassette tape player and punched Play.

  On his knees with a wrench and a rag, Benedict raised his head. “Joe Cock-aiiiiiiirrr?”

  “Oui, Joe Cock-aiiiiirrrr.”

  “J’aime Joe Cock-aiiiiiirrrr.” He inhaled deeply and shook his head. “Pour vingt ans, j’étais un chanteur du rock.”

  “Vraiment? Mais, je suis un chanteur du rock!”

  Rory, whose French was already considerably better than mine, was aghast at this development. Particularly as, unbeknownst to me, my reliance on an ever-present tense had Benedict thinking I was actually the real thing, a rock singer, hiding from my public in this tiny hamlet. Even after we got this straightened out, with much laughter, Rory dreaded what was coming next: a comprehensive shout-out of our favorite groups.

  Rolling Stones! Oui!

  Kinks! Oui!

  Cream! Oui!

  Benedict knew them all and soon was reeling off stories of his life on the road in a van with a band, playing clubs and discothèques all over Europe.

  He finally stood and, instantly grasping the acoustic potential of our tiled kitchen floor, joined me in a reverberating chorus: “Do you need anybody? I need someone to love. Can it be anybody? I want someone to love.”

  We looked at each other and grinned: we both had the big rock voice. Mindy came scrambling down the stairs at the commotion, and Rory covered his ears in protest.

  This was our cue to twist spasmodically, knock-kneed, a la Cock-airrrr, and to bellow: “I get high with a little help from my friends…”

  • • •

  At last we had an outdoor faucet. We also had an invitation to an aperitif at Benedict’s house—un apéro, as it is called here, by second-home owners. (The Bellilois don’t do apéros.)

  The tradition of the apéro on Belle Île can feel like tyranny. For many second-home owners and renters, it is the chief form of entertainment during the summer—not only for the conversation, but for the gossip surrounding who invited whom. Of this we were blissfully unaware for our first eight years, because we lived in such a state of disrepair that entertaining never crossed our minds. (Please come by the Wallace lean-to at 5:00 p.m. for peanuts and cheese breads served on a Frisbee.)

  The few invites we had to accept—from Gwened, Franck, and Ines—were reciprocated eventually, as in years later. When we did, we were inevitably observed pointedly by those whom we owed an apéro for some kindness they’d done us (we borrowed a lot of stuff, beginning with rides to the market) when we couldn’t return the favor. Others whose invitations we’d declined now moved us into the category of fair game and began laying snares.

  This led us to formulate the concept of the damage control apéro—one dreamed up to forestall hurt feelings. Since we owed or were in arrears for apéros with everybody, we tried to clump ours together, only our efforts never seemed enough. It was like a rolling credit card balance, gathering more and more interest despite your efforts to pay it off.

  The problem was the Belle Île apéro’s resemblance to a
certain Pacific Northwestern tribal rite, the potlatch. “Drinks at home” among my parents’ generation when I was growing up—and as lately revived by hip young things inspired by retro television programs—featured a spartan if punishing lineup of martinis, peanuts and olives, crackers and cheese roll-ups. For the rest of us in the States these days, it’s enough to meet in bars or just fall by for a beer on the deck. Jars of salsa and bags of chips are opened.

  Such a lack of effort would never do on Belle Île. With very few exceptions, such as Le Vic and his wife, Yvonne, whose soirees are a model of moderation because they’re followed by a real dinner, the apéro is often an unending onslaught of nibbles and delicacies, both plain and elaborate, lasting for hours and frequently extended by the merging of rival apéros from other residents in the village and even other villages. Once an evening of apéros kicks off, you won’t be able to extricate yourself until the last can of sardines in the back of the pantry is pried open with a Laguiole folding knife, and you can count yourself lucky that no one cuts himself trying.

  By this point in our story, the Season of the Outdoor Faucet, we’d recognized that the chief hazard of the apéro was, surprise, the morning after. The resulting slowness and inertia was incompatible with our quest to take advantage of Belle Île’s eighteen-hour summer sun. The apéro also interfered with our surfing, since windless evening glass-offs, while unpredictable, were glorious when happening.

  With Benedict, we knew there was no way out. Of course the chosen evening was a perfect, hot, calm one. Naturally our Bellilois surfer friends were all out in the lineup between the cliffs of Donnant. And where were we? Dressed up and sputtering along in our rattletrap Renault, looking for a well-hidden house in another village. The gray shrouded silhouette of the Porsche in the graveled drive gave it away.