Whether practical or emotional, it’s all propped up by the marketing forces. Digital technology in particular has made it much easier to find out about available property in a place you haven’t yet visited. Online forums for “expats” make it easy to ask other incomers about life when you have little idea of what you are coming to. Some of the questions asked by newcomers on the Ariège forum indicated they had only a basic familiarity with the Ariège region, perhaps gained from a holiday or two, or even just from surfing the internet. New members referred to themselves as newbies and talked about how they were looking forward to becoming fluent in French, as if it was that simple. English isn’t widely spoken in the Ariège and I wondered how they’d manage in the early years.
I guessed that the existence of an online forum for English speakers went some way towards giving people confidence that they’d get the help they needed when they arrived. It was clear from the posts that some members viewed the forum as a kind of crutch to support them as they made the big move, asking about where their children could go to school and hoping that an English-speaking doctor would exist somewhere. Some of the newcomers were like sponges, passively absorbing whatever information was thrown at them as they requested members to please keep any advice coming. I detected an air of desperation when one newcomer implored that all advice [is] appreciated, good or bad. Was that just a careless, throwaway comment, or was their lack of knowledge so profound that even bad advice would be welcome, just as long as someone was prepared to tell them something?
All of this drove me to find some of the people behind these voices and to hear their stories for myself. A starting point was to find out if the English really knew what they were coming to when they uprooted themselves to this depopulated corner of France. The rural Ariège is a long, long way from the vineyards and gastronomy of Mayle’s Provence and what Etrillard described as an English fetishisation of French lifestyle. Restaurants closed on a summer Saturday? Bars closing at 8pm in summer? To some people, Ariège is ‘the back of beyond’. Surely it would be easier to settle in the popular plains of the neighbouring Aude, perhaps around Carcassonne or towards Perpignan, or even a little further north to the Lot and its canard-with-everything menus?
The Ariège landscape is wonderful for walking but those drawn to the idea of old-fashioned community might be spooked to see so many abandoned and decaying houses littering the wooded foothills. I’ve met drivers, both English and French, who are unnerved by the twisting narrow roads that chase the rivers and then rise precipitously along high ground. The English often cite our weather as a reason to move to France, but Ariège dwellers will need to find something positive in a month when it rains every day, especially when it’s August. And anyone who feels uneasy with the mix of people, including the pierced and dreadlocked neo-ruraux with their battered vans, might feel a bit out of place.
So the Ariège could be an odd choice for a Francophile, as at times it can feel very much apart from the rest of France. Events of history, plus the landscape and the geographical proximity to the Spanish frontier, have left the département with an enduring association with sanctuary and resistance – what Edward Stourton refers to as an unmistakeable genus loci, or spirit of the place, in a most secretive region.11 It had been a place of sanctuary for the Cathars in the 13th century, and many thousands of Spanish republicans fled Franco to take refuge in France, making their way over the Ariège Pyrenees. Shortly after this was the flow in the opposite direction of those evading the Nazis and the Vichy government, with many escape lines once again passing through the Ariège over the Pyrenees into Spain. The decades of depopulation and the influx of retirees and neo-ruraux have done little to change the landscape, and even now there are dark valleys and secluded villages that seem utterly detached from the 21st century.
The area’s aptitude for concealing fugitives wasn’t just confined to wartime. One particular house perched above Massat had been the final hiding place of Xavier Fortin and his two sons, a fugitive trio who fled from the boys’ mother in 1998 when the children were aged six and seven. Evading the mother’s attempts to track them down, they criss-crossed the country, living a nomadic existence among communes, tipis and borrowed apartments until they finally arrived in Massat in 2007 and lived in a secluded spot until their discovery in February 2009. It was a sensational story for the media, who descended on Massat so they could tell the world about this wild valley where a man and his children could hide from the law, undisturbed. I expect journalists were delighted when they tracked down the ramshackle barn that had been home to the fugitives, seeing visual evidence that would add to the implication of child deprivation and illiteracy. Images showing the barn from the most unflattering angle – above – looked down on the misshapen tin sheets that formed a roof, and the only colour to liven the dreariness of winter was the white of a few chickens and the melting snow. Bearded locals who’d been happy to assist the family suddenly became unhelpful when faced with the reporters, smiling as their city cars skidded around in the snow. The maire of Massat, perhaps mindful that his commune was getting a reputation for sheltering criminal savages, went on record to insist that the family was friendly and open, as well as educated. The boys and their father subsequently wrote a book about their experience, which has been made into a film: Vie Sauvage.
An empty landscape is not just useful for evading the law, as it can also bring a sense of liberation to anyone who takes the trouble to walk it. That emptiness can also be hugely inconvenient, as public transport is non-existent in some areas and at times the lack of people can feel creepy. One August Saturday lunchtime we strolled around the town of St Lizier, one of the most historical towns of the region and on the UNESCO World Heritage list, looking for somewhere – anywhere – to eat. We eventually gave up, marvelling that the only person we’d seen was a woman lying asleep on a bench.
The famous GR10 long-distance path across the length of the Pyrenees crosses through the Ariège with a number of extensions and diversions, all spectacular, but the emptiness of the landscape has often caused problems for hikers; some GR10-ers have been known to buy a tent on entering the Ariège, or miss it out altogether. Even Nicholas Crane missed the opportunity to describe the Ariège section on his epic walk across the mountains of Europe; one chapter ends with walking down into the green Ariège, and the next chapter takes up the walk over the border in Pyrenees-Orientales.12 The lack of tourist accommodation in the Couserans might encourage incomers to plan a business from renting out gîtes, but the reality is a very short season of perhaps 4–5 months per year.
Yet incomers who deliberately seek isolation will find no end of options in terms of hard-to-reach villages, hidden hamlets or even one of the houses that the estate agents advise can only be reached on foot. The higher up you go, the narrower and more decrepit the road or track, but the longer the sun shines on your house. And in the lowlands there are many attractions for a certain kind of person. Members of the online forum made it sound like a wise choice. One woman who’d lived there for five years encouraged another who was thinking about it by saying: It is a great place to live, the locals are friendly and the air non-polluted and just a wonderful area to live all year round. Your children will benefit from one of the most beautiful areas of France. People talked about the slower way of life in an area that was a little behind the times, summarising it as a low-population area of France with marvellous natural history and a laid-back attitude. The forum gave barely any indication that it wasn’t always ideal for a new life, but there was enough evidence of people leaving to show that the Ariège didn’t suit everyone. I suspected that for people who’d invested financially and emotionally in the big move, it would be an embarrassing loss of face to admit that they’d made the wrong decision.
A House At The End Of A Track
The first time I drove into the Ariège I crossed the baking plains of the Aude into what gradually became a humid jungle; the steep wooded hillside
s steamed as the morning rains evaporated in the heat of the August afternoon, the air lying trapped and oppressive within the valley. My eyes scanned the green for signs of habitation, marvelling at the huddles of old houses in shades of brown that were livened by the occasional rebel in dull pink. How different it felt in November, when the foothills had taken on their brown winter coat to accept the coming snows. The car swung around the tight bends of the Col de Port, past what I’d always assumed were abandoned houses – yet at dusk they awoke, their dull lights hinting of life behind the windows as the tang of wood smoke wafted into the car.
That November I’d just signed away a moderate inheritance in return for a set of keys to an old stone house in the Couserans that had the date of 1876 carved roughly into the lintel above the door. The house maintained a refrigerator-like temperature indoors throughout the year, which made a useful saving on anything as fancy as air conditioning during the high summer heat. The exterior walls, built of stone, appeared to be counting down a half-life, as on exceptionally hot days I watched uneasily as clumps of baked mud mortar pinged off into the grass. The roof was covered with roughly hewn slates and heavy stones known as lauzes. It was a house with no right angles, a skewed parallelogram positioned to catch the most of the sun before it disappeared behind the hill opposite. This was another bonus, as its height meant that the sun warmed the stone a good hour or so longer than those sitting in the valley. Walking back from a long walk on a still-warm evening, I would catch the scent of dry heat radiating from the old stones, and I would spend a few moments sitting there, with my back to the wall, letting the warmth massage my aching shoulders.
The house had been wedged into the hillside at the end of a brittle track that was little wider than a car. It sat above an ambitiously named “parking” area, where a slip of the foot during the seven-point turn might easily nudge a car over into the steep wooded ravine. Some years after moving in I was told that this had already happened twice – to the postman and to a previous occupant of my house. The postman had survived. I was told not to worry; the other driver had been under the influence, but I began to experiment with parking the car down in the valley. It meant a walk of 21 minutes up and 19 minutes down a sodden path along the river, but I grew fond of the walk, stepping carefully to avoid the colourful fire salamanders that had made their home in the damp foliage.
The hamlet had just three houses. The adjacent house was an almost derelict and little visited holiday home, although the third house was occupied all year round by Vincent and Juliette. Their house lay just down the slope so that my windows were level with its chimneys, and my house often filled with the tang of their wood fires. Unlike most of the houses where I visited the English incomers, mine lacked the two things that the English seemed fixated on: privacy and a proper garden. Although the house was perched above a dead-end track, a few people regularly toiled past on their way up to a barn higher up the hillside, glancing in and waving as they passed my window. They always carried huge rucksacks. I never found out what they were carrying or why the packs were always stuffed full on the way up as well as down. It felt impolite to ask.
Most of the time the window was filled with a close-up view of the other side of the narrow valley. A forested spur lay directly opposite, a huge pyramid that blocked out much of the sky, although it was a useful indicator of the seasons. After the trees opposite became thickened by spring, the dense green of summer would shift to a faded brown, when leaves carpeted the ground, and previously hidden buildings and pathways became visible again through the skeletal branches. At any time of the year there could be days when curtains of mist slunk up the valley to block the view, making it easy to imagine a horizon that was endless, not just a mere stone’s throw.
On an indoors day I would be drawn to the window, sitting in front of it to paint the view or write, my eyes moving from the forest outside to the wooden panelling that surrounded the interior walls. People frowned when they came into the house and gazed around at the extent of the chestnut panelling that the previous owners – a visiting family of hunters – had used to disguise the jagged edges and disintegrating mud mortar of the old stone walls. I just shrugged when they asked me if I liked it. In truth I’d never really given much thought to the inner decor, but I grew accustomed to it. If anything, the panelling was a natural domestication of what was visible out of my window.
Looking diagonally from one edge of the window to the other, I could see a minor summit rearing its head beyond the forested pyramid. This peak of Tuc de la Coume was the first thing I looked for each morning; if it was clear, the first light of sunrise would illuminate the upper section with gold. In late September it became a rusty orange, followed by the bare rock of autumn before the snows. One August I awoke to see the peak dusted with a thin layer of icing sugar snow that was gone by nightfall. When the true snows came, they remained stubbornly on its pinnacle, drawing attention to the peak against the winter-coated forest.
Although the house had nothing recognisable as a “garden”, it came with some fairly useless bits of land scattered around, a common consequence of French inheritance laws that split a property between surviving children. I did have a steep section of slope at the rear, although most of it lay directly behind the house next door. I was baffled to find that I also owned half of a ruin in front of their house, a shell so overgrown with ivy that I hadn’t even realised that there were stone walls beneath it. There was a ruined barn adjoining my house but it belonged to Vincent, whilst outside his house was a tract that I owned, a square of weeds where I’d sometimes spotted visitors taking a pee. Eventually the three houses did an exchange, allowing me to swap my distant half-a-ruin for the closer one, which I flattened into a wonky terrace.
Vincent and Juliette seemed typical of the French incomers in this laid-back part of the Pyrenees; people drawn by the lack of rules, who were largely self-sufficient in their old stone houses that seemed to stand without anything resembling mortar. They grew their own food and firewood, and generally helped one another out. Anything resembling a newish car stood out among the dented and daubed Citroen 2CVs, the Renault vans and the odd Citroen DS. I was not surprised that the no-frills Fiat Panda was popular there, but the number of first-generation Pandas was only slowly being outnumbered by the newer models.
Wandering or driving around the Couserans, one is taken by what an English woman described as a strange mix of people. One comes across a few remaining Ariégeois, often elderly and always polite, as well as the more alternative incomers. It wasn’t uncommon to see a battered van, with cracked windscreen and tattered curtains, parked far from visible signs of habitation, a clue that people were living somewhere in the woods, perhaps a mile or two away.
The area around the town of Massat, known as the Massatois, is perhaps the place most strongly associated with the alternative incomers. Reactions to these marginaux seemed mixed; some bemoaned the reputation of the Ariège as an “anything goes” area, as one local confided to me when we stood watching people gyrating and snogging among the more sedate locals on the dance floor at Massat festival. On the whole, however, I felt that attitudes were largely accepting. I’d been told that people had sometimes been allowed to live in empty houses and barns in exchange for basic upkeep; a kind of official squatting that was useful to owners who didn’t want the hassle of formal letting and associated maintenance. The maire of the commune promotes its motto – libris et fieris – free and proud – as genuinely reflecting the spirit of Massat, one that welcomes the incomers for their contribution to rural regeneration where around 40% of the population is aged 60 years and over. No doubt mindful that the alternatives are regarded less positively in some quarters, the maire speaks positively of them and encourages others to be more accepting and supportive of those who have chosen a different way of life, rather than try to exclude them. I liked his use of irony to challenge people to cast off their pre-conceptions and dare to meet the Massatois; do not
be afraid: even “hippy-communists” aren’t savages!13
Hand in hand with these associations comes another, that of marijuana. A few years back I’d been proudly shown around a tiny vegetable plot that had the tell-tale plants interspersed among the tomatoes, all part of subsistence. I’d once overheard a visitor asking where they could buy some, and the reply, in shocked tones, that it wasn’t grown to sell. An envelope was duly passed to them without any money exchanging hands. Undoubtedly some growers did sell it, and the occasional news item about raids on marijuana crops never failed to exploit the town’s association with the “hippy” incomers of 1968.
The daughter of one such couple has been busy writing up her memories of being brought up as one of eight ‘wild children’ near Massat. Djalla-Marie Longa was born to a German mother who arrived in the 60s with a dog and a guitar, and then settled down in determined non-conformity with a French partner. The family lived in Figuets, “a hamlet like no other”, with candlelight, no running water and no plastic toys; the children weren’t schooled but instead worked on the subsistence farm, and transport was a horse-drawn cart. Clothing was whatever they managed to make, although the mother herself, sporting a curtain of hennaed hair, sometimes rebelled against the social norm of getting dressed. Djalla-Marie became a rebel herself at 16, but it was a resistance against the way of life enforced by her parents, as she became drawn to what she knew of the other life “down below”. Now a business owner in Massat, she balances some of the family’s ideological values with a little comfort – using solar panels but driving a car, for example – and aspects of her wild upbringing have been woven into books that combine fact and fiction: Mon enfance sauvage (2011) and Terre Courage (2013).
A House at the End of the Track Page 3