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

by Don Wallace

“Ooooh. Donny, where did you learn to cook?”

  “I always cooked. In Boy Scouts, in college.”

  “Not like this. I tasted your cooking in Santa Cruz. So where was it?”

  “Here.”

  “Who taught you? Gwened?”

  “No…” Anne kept staring at me, so I shifted in my chair and started over. “I guess I started tasting food, really tasting, when Mindy first brought me to France. First tasting, then really paying attention to ingredients, then practicing in New York. One month in Belle Île, then the rest of the year trying to duplicate recipes, tastes. You can find anything in New York. Well, almost. I haven’t tasted a good American peach for years.”

  “This is so amazing,” Anne said. “You know, it’s a whole world you have here. I want to spend more time here. Can I come next year?”

  “You’d better!” Already, though, I had my doubts.

  • • •

  The boys are back, pulling up on their bikes to shout through the window: “No surf!”

  “You’re sure?” I ask. “Who was in the water?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Will you be quiet, please?” calls Mindy from the dormer above.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ve been going crazy listening to your mangled French all morning, discussing the most incredible banalities under my window.”

  “Time to feed the Mommy,” I say to the boys, loud enough so Mindy can overhear it. To feed Mindy means dividing the omelet—to Devo’s dismay—then cutting bread and setting out little goat cheeses from my friend the cheese lady, who appreciates my French. Tomatoes and lettuce, oil and vinegar. At the foot of the staircase I call: “Lunch!” It’s only eleven o’clock, but food fuels good humor as well as activity.

  And we must have activity.

  The boys lay out their spear guns and masks and wet suits, talking of the fish they’ll hunt today when we finally head out. They eat, then resume the chess game. Time stops. I grab a book and sit out on the thin ledge of concrete that runs along the base of the foundation, toes in the grass. Bees buzz around. Swallows dip and nip midges. An hour passes. The king is trapped, the game resigned.

  “Let’s go!” shouts Rory. We fill the bright Duty Free and striped Lancôme gift bags, now redolent of salty fish guts and sand, load a straw bag with towels, a thermos of hot tea, cookies, a Wiffle ball and bat, the Herald Tribune.

  At the last second, Mindy joins us and insists we strap her surfboard on the roof rack. The old Renault turns over, smoking and shaking. As I work the choke in and out and feather the gas, the bright car of the movie starlet who lives at the top of the lane creeps out from between the hedges. She’s got her Garbo goggles on and a Japanese Red Army Faction head scarf, right out of a Godard film (which she hasn’t been in). Her blond daughter, Rory’s age, is nowhere to be seen, thank heavens. Or maybe that’s a bad thing—we have to keep an eye on her. She grew up in Hollywood, and there’s a touch of Lindsay Lohan in her tempestuous nature.

  Once the movie star is past, I can back up and point the car’s nose down the rutted lane. Staggering, blowing blue smoke, we scrape between Suzanne’s massed hydrangeas. The blossoms beating against the windows remind me of cheerleaders waving their pom-poms at football players as they emerge from the stadium tunnel.

  Twenty feet later, the car stalls in front of Le Vicomte’s. “Rick” and Yvonne are sitting under an umbrella playing cards in cardigan sweaters and flannel trousers, while one bare-chested son, Thierry, smokes a cigarette and stuffs weeds into the flaming open hearth of a roofless sixteenth-century ruin. Everyone waves and offers salutations as I try to start the car.

  Eventually we crawl up the road through the tunnel of trees. Madame Morgane scuttles away up her drive, her daughter-in-law going the opposite direction to her own house. We exchange nods. At last we’re through the gauntlet and into open fields. But here comes an oncoming car. It’s Pierre-Louis and Sidonie, another psychiatrist couple—Lacanians—who live ten villages away from us. Stopping alongside, chatting through open windows, reaching out for a handshake, we make plans for an aperitif the following day and drive on. We’re getting there.

  “God, it takes so much time to do anything here!” Mindy shifts irritably in her seat.

  We take a left turn and run past the former surf shop, now reverted back to a cottage, the half-pipe gone where skateboarders used to practice roller coasters and rail grabs. We pass the house of the lawyer for the Big Important Newspaper, hidden by a dense palisade of tall straight Norfolk pines.

  After a switchback series of turns into and out of dirt lanes and paved roads, passing the estate of the Majestic Madame Who Fought in the Resistance and Survived Auschwitz, we reach the stark “Village of Merde,” as we privately call this windswept cluster of houses, and slo-mo slalom around cats, ducks, chickens, a hog, several small children in Wellingtons splashing in lakes of animal shit, and finally a string of horses and Shetland ponies, all saddled up and ready to go. Poney Bleu à votre service, Monsieur et Madame! Stages, randonnées, promenades…

  “Surf check,” Mindy says at the next crossroads. The boys complain, but they sound guilty. They probably blew it off this morning. Then again, boys always sound guilty.

  Past some hunched-over whitewashed houses, once again in open fields, we carefully overtake cyclists and the occasional oblivious couple pushing a baby carriage in the middle of nowhere. And there’s Dede, pedaling his old clunker. The proprietor of the village, he is a large man in blue overalls and Wellingtons, huge head tucked into a newsboy’s cap, tin pail in his hand, going blackberrying on his lunch hour. “What’s for lunch?” asks Devo. Because it is, incredibly, lunchtime again.

  The road dead-ends at the old ramparts of a fort, either Roman or Celtic, later repurposed by Napoleon and tweaked again by the Germans during the Occupation. Now it’s just a grassy ring by a graveled car park. At the cliff’s edge, we look down on Donnant, the most changeable beach in creation. After a minute Mindy decides she’s staying to see if the tide will bring a bump to the thin, glassy waves. She unstraps her yellow board and shoulders her backpack with towel, wet suit, second lunch. Down the cliff she goes on a narrow rock ledge, sure-footed on her wide-splayed toes—luau feet, they’re called in Hawaii. Below on the glitter-green sea a couple of our surf crew float on their boards, talking.

  With the mommy gone, the car goes tribal. Devo takes shotgun and slaps the venerable cassette into the car stereo. There’s only one song for going spearfishing: “Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone. Heading down the corrugated dirt road with dust boiling in our wake, we sing at the top of our lungs while I pump the brakes in time.

  Today’s dive spot is a rocky fjord with a beach of round stones. Ten feet out, a subterranean stream creates an underwater freshwater spring over a sand bottom. Thick kelp stalks swing in the slow pulse of swells. Once the boys signal that the water quality is good, I take off on foot up a narrow trail and follow the shattered cliff edge of the Côte Sauvage back toward Donnant. I bring my swim fins in case there is surf, but one look at Mindy and the crew floating on their boards is enough to keep me high and dry.

  Walking back to the cove on a rabbit trail, I feel the sun drawing near and discharging great ripples of heat over the moor. Spongy mossy knobs under my feet sprout little red and blue and white flowers, and the gorse flares yellow. Even the thorns shimmer invitingly. When I reach the cliff overlooking the fjord, the boys are directly below, swimming slowly about a hundred yards from the rocky beach. They dive, cruise deep, surface with snorkels spouting.

  Climbing down, I take up a place on a flat shelf of rock that isn’t too uncomfortable, lie back on my towel, and open my newspaper. Every few minutes a shout goes up, Rory and Devo devising tactics to drive their quarry into the open. I nap. When I open my eyes again, a fat, lime-green fish impaled on a spear is being thrust at me by a creature wearing a glass mask, w
ith lips blue and teeth chattering. Fish and boy look remarkably alike.

  • • •

  So far the dive at the fjord has resulted in the single vieille, a soft-bodied rock cod of no great taste. I’ll need to supplement it with another fish, so a visit to Sauzon, our nearest town, is in order. I’ll have to fight the crowd at the quay when the boat comes in. The prospect makes me savor the Herald Tribune, squeezing every last drop of useless information out of its twenty-two pages. Financial tables, European soccer news, Italian politics—as long as it is in English, I’ll read it.

  Eventually the boys tire and strip off their wet suits and drape themselves over hot rocks. Then we load the car and shudder up the dirt road, over ruts like small canyons. I drive back to the old ramparts and we head down the cliff, only to find Mindy freezing and ready to leave. The thermos of tea and a slice of bread and cheese revive her. She decides to walk up the valley to the village to warm up and enjoy a quiet house. The boys join a loose gang in kicking a soccer ball over the long, wet sand flat left by the ebbing tide. A game starts.

  The French lunch hour is over. People appear at the gap in the sand dunes where Les Sauveteurs en Mer have constructed a wooden stair. The families carry folding chairs, tents and sunshades, parasols and rubber boats. Babies cry; young people run, scattering sand. The tap-tap of endless paddleball games begins. Lifeguards stroll up and down in their bright emergency orange vests and Speedos, carrying waterproof walkie-talkies and swim fins clamped under one armpit. The elegance is itself reassuring.

  It’s now or never for me, so I grab my fins and start down to the water, wishing Rory, Devo, and I could rethink our pact to never wear wet suits when bodysurfing. The water temperature is 61 degrees! Oh, the things we do to impress our kids and teach them the proper hardiness…

  Of course, I want to impress the French, too. Show them we are true Americans, Californians, Hawaiians, endowed by our creator with a superhuman ocean sense and testicles that shrink to the size of raisins in the icy temps. Mustn’t let down the side. With a shudder, I push into the first ankle-high waves and begin the slow slog out to the impact zone a hundred yards offshore.

  Forty-eight minutes later, I emerge to find half the village lounging on the hot sand. People leap to their feet to kiss my cheeks (and wince at how cold they are): Celeste and Henry, our village psychiatrists; Sidonie and Pierre-Louis, the psychiatrists from ten villages down; Yvonne, wife of Le Vicomte; and a handful of friends visiting from other villages or Paris. Gwened lies on her towel a discreet thirty yards away—like Mindy, she prefers calm and quiet, less of a rhubarb, one of those quaint English words that has never lost the ability to provoke laughter in France.

  The soccer game breaks up and the boys of several villages crash the circle of towels, plundering sacks of cookies: Le Petit Ecolier, Sablés Beurré Nantais, and the chocolate-and-orange-zest-covered marshmallow domes whose name we never tire of saying: “Goooters.” Girls scoot their towels closer, joining the circle. A couple of the older teens light up cigarettes, drawing eye rolls from the adults—except for Sidonie, who turns to a fifteen-year-old.

  “May I bum a smoke?” she asks in English, deadpan. Looks at me: “Bum is correct, Don? It eez not ze same as ass, no?”

  I nod, but Celeste’s husband, Henry, wags a finger. “No, ze bum is ze ass, but only for ze Anglais. Yes, Don?”

  “No, Henry,” I reply. “One must not forget that, pour les Anglais, ze ass is ze arse.”

  Sidonie’s husband, Pierre-Louis, smacks his head. “Oh, but of course! Ze arse Anglais.”

  The kids blush, trying not to look shocked but totally flustered. The cigarette pack goes back into a purse. Score one for the psychiatrists. Everyone cackles, trading double entendres, and an hour passes in beach blanket Babylon: French people trying to speak English, French teenagers practicing American rapper slang with the American boys, and the lone American adult addressing men as women and women as men and referring to himself as both—a psychiatrist’s idea of heaven, for sure.

  A football comes out and the boys began throwing and catching, moving ever closer to the sea. At their gestures, I heave myself up and join them—activity, we must have more activity! Running brings the heat back into my limbs. Another hour passes.

  Even at four o’clock the sun is bright, high overhead, but by French rules it’s getting late. People pack and drift back through the dunes to the parking lot. Just as I’m wondering what to do about dinner (I’ve missed the boat at Sauzon), Mindy comes across the sands carrying a straw basket filled with salami, apples, baguettes, beets in vinaigrette, and an oval fresh-baked cake.

  “Hmm,” says Devo, eyeing the cake. “The chocolate football.” Another hour passes. With Mindy here, the conversation switches back to French, too fast and subtle for me to do more than nod and smile.

  The crowd at the beach thins out. The twenty or thirty who remain scattered over a half mile of sand and rocky cul-de-sacs are revealed as a class: lovers and beachcombers and a few Bellilois come for an after-work plunge. We know quite a few. We are all thankful that, at this hour, discreet waves of the hand may be substituted for the usual getting up, going over, and kissing.

  A loud air horn indicates Les Sauveteurs en Mer are going off duty. True lords of their domain, they receive salutations as they stroll up to their shed. Henry and Celeste and Sidonie and Pierre-Louis say they must go. We decline offers to join them for an aperitif and they don’t press the issue, knowing from long experience and surprisingly earnest debate that at certain tides, we simply will not leave the beach.

  Our village rises as one, gathering towels and heading up through the dunes and into the grassy valley. As they go, they pass the next shift arriving: local surfers coming for the evening glass-off. Soloists scramble like goats down the cliff, boards snug under one arm and already in their wet suits. Others with families march up the sandy throat of the canyon loaded down like Bedouin caravans.

  It is seven o’clock and I’ve been outdoors for five hours. Yet this is when the real action begins. The tide is coming up, and the little bump of this morning is now a swell with two distinct lines in the middle, a point break at each side caused by the rock islets that bookend the beach, and even a decent shore break where the kids with bodyboards go wild. The surfers are mostly Bellilois, with a few regular summer visitors. The lifeguards come down and join us, shedding their orange vests. Everybody in the water!

  I join Rory and David and Celeste and Henry’s son, Marc, in the bare-chested bodysurfing brigade. We duck dive and kick under the onrushing white water. Eight minutes later, we’re on the outside looking in, floating on the heaving Atlantic with the cliffs and golden sand dunes glowing in the evening sun. An hour later and we’re still there, plus or minus a few friends who’ve come or gone, giving and taking waves.

  The sun sinks slowly, yet I’d swear the water feels warmer. It’s because of the waves, of course—our engine rooms are stoked by the constant kicking, diving, stroking, and best of all, the adrenaline rush of sliding down the steep faces. Sluicing along in the concave half-pipe of green sea. Making section after section, passing your friends paddling out, hearing them hoot.

  I gather myself at the peak of a large swell. As it starts to topple forward, I slice down on my chest and angle for the heart of the tube. Inside, for a moment, all is quiet and hissing, then the walls implode. The breaking wave takes me into an underwater world that alternates from light to darkness, rolling me and spinning me. My heels strike the sand bottom a good ten feet deep as the wave plunges silently past, like a waterfall. A hard hold-down, followed by a twitchy release from the ocean’s coils that says: Okay, I’m done with you, for now. Just don’t try that again.

  Far inshore, on the beach in the advancing shadows, I can just make out specks of people walking the beach. The after-dinner contingent has arrived. And still we linger.

  Chapter Two

  Le Gran
d Détour

  (Year Zero)

  It wasn’t always this way. Fifteen years ago, in fact, we had no idea that Belle Île even existed. But then, in the aftermath of a dream trip to Paris that turned sour, Gwened threw a net of enchantment over us. Like Circe in The Odyssey, she made us captives of her realm on her island. We never knew what hit us until it was too late.

  • • •

  Belle Île hove into view, a low, dark coastline under a moonless night and fast-moving rain squalls. As the aging diesel ferry Guenveur heaved to the tops of swells and crashed down the other side, sending walls of green water over bolted-down windows on the main deck, Mindy and I peered anxiously in search of the bright lights that might indicate a hotel, an outdoor café, anything resembling life. But there were only a couple of navigation beacons on a long stone mole against which waves exploded in curtains of white lace.

  It was past nine o’clock on a Friday night in frigid mid-January. No one would be waiting for us at the quay. Gwened had said that in the off-season there were no taxis or buses.

  When we’d dragged our bags and battered psyches to Gwened’s door in Tours, a medieval town famous for being the gateway to the Loire Valley and its châteaux, we thought we’d settle in for a weekend of absentee mothering, jolly conversation, heavenly food, and delectable wine. The Grand Tour of Europe we’d been saving up for over the previous five years had turned into a train wreck: London a costly disappointment, Paris a disaster, then a panicky flight to Athens that was followed by a howling mistral that canceled ferries and trapped us on the Greek island of Santorini—for six weeks! Six weeks living in a whitewashed cave, eating feta and cabbage…

  So we were in crisis. But Gwened was in the midst of dealing with her own crisis. Her teenaged son, Daniel, threw a typewriter out his bedroom window the evening we arrived, after which her elegantly bearded accountant husband abruptly excused himself from the dining table to descend to his wine cave and count out the week’s cash receipts. In the morning, Gwened simply handed us a page of directions to her Breton farmhouse on the island where her grandfather had been born. We walked to the train station and, like zombies, headed out to the frigid Atlantic coast of Brittany.