by Don Wallace
A process of preservation that could survive two centuries fascinated us. The old Waikiki had vanished in the ten years of Mindy’s childhood: hotel building had destroyed the shoreline, the reef, and its sea life. The Greece we’d seen was a disaster of unregulated development: cheap cinder block additions, concrete mixers in every yard, and sewers discharging directly into the sea. And I’d grown up during the great tract house explosion in Los Angeles, with shag-carpeted beachfront and high desert right before my eyes in hundred-mile swathes.
Later, working in Central California, I’d seen how it was done: houses stapled together in a week, then given a spray coat of paint and a filigree of prefab embellishments punched out of a sheet of plywood. One day, while painting false-front dovecotes that would go under the eaves of tract homes, I had the revelation that the children in this house would grow up waiting for the birds, and they’d never, ever come. It seemed like a nasty trick to play, and I wondered about the minds behind it. Surely someone had come up empty in the soul department. But was I any better, making my $11.25 an hour, going back to my trailer, and eating pizza from a box with a six-pack of Bud?
Once that job was done, I never worked construction again. But I kept seeing those birdhouses everywhere, along with giant billboards: “Welcome to Highland Castle Park, Regency Uptown Estates, Alta Huntington Arms…”
So how did Belle Île save itself from a similar fate, from the overdevelopment, the overpopulation, the craziness with cars that engulfed Saint-Tropez and Cannes in the south or the isles of Jersey and Guernsey to the north? Where did all these moral houses come from? Or, more to the point, how and why and when did the people here decide to take a different path than the obvious one of bigger, cheaper, uglier?
The answer, once we skip over the first 30,000 undocumented years, emerged from an irreproducible mix of war, sardines, valor rewarded and ruinous folly, literary and artistic fame, and location, location, location—in particular, happening to be the place where some of the earliest icons of celebrity culture frolicked for the news media.
From the start, Belle Île was one of those Helen of Troy islands, always seemingly desired by somebody, always starting wars. Populated by toolmaking Mesolithic and then Neolithic peoples since 7000 BC—when it may have been connected to the mainland at low tide—the island was always a stopover between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Phoenicians paused to water and provision while picking up loads of tin from Cornwall’s mines; they were probably the first étrangers.
Basque whalers, pirates, monks in rowboats: every navigator knew Belle Île as the safe place to put in, away from the mainland’s sweeping tides and rocky coasts. But it first entered recorded history around 56 AD as the site of a Roman naval battle won by Brutus, with his superior, Julius Caesar, looking on. After the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, the island proved hospitable to mainland Bretons and monks from Redon but, unfortunately, all too handy for foreign navies, Viking raiders, and more pirates.
Around 1000 AD, the Benedictines took over and turned the land to cultivation. The King horse-traded the Benedictines off the island in the sixteenth century because of their inability to stem piracy and as a reward for a battle-tested Medici partner, Albert de Gondi, who also received Provence on the same day in 1573. (A good day to be a Gondi.) After a hundred years of the Gondi family, Nicolas Fouquet, the flamboyant, Trump-esque finance minister of France, made the Italians an offer they couldn’t refuse.
The Benedictine order had run Belle Île like a forced labor camp, yoking together men to pull plows and making them sleep in barracks. The Gondis developed trade and fishing. Fouquet had a different notion: turn the place into a Fantasy Island, complete with strolling musicians strumming mandolins. In three years his vision rivaled Versailles. But Louis XIV, the Sun King, was jealous and suspicious of the expense. Fouquet was arrested and returned to Paris, it is said, by none other than d’Artagnan of the Three Musketeers. It does not do to rival the Sun.
One hundred years passed. The most important event for the Bellilois was now at hand: the island’s 1761 capture by the English. France would lose that war with England, and when the redcoats sailed from Le Palais two years later, the farmers and villagers were given title to their land and homes. Imagine that: a monarchy giving the means of production to the people. Or this: a democratic redistribution of wealth before the American Revolution started a decade later or the French one after that.
Losing the war also meant France lost North America, and in 1765 the Minister of Defense got the idea of sending some of the Acadians expelled from Maine, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island to reinforce Belle Île. Le Grand Dérangement, as it was called, settled seventy-eight families on the island. Many were separated from their relatives, some of whom ended up in Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns. The Acadians of Belle Île were given a house, a horse, a cow, and thirty measures of land—the amount a farmer could plow in one day. None settled in our village, Kerbordardoué.
Some say the Bellilois, who then numbered about five thousand in population, didn’t take kindly to having strangers placed among them and given a starter farm complete with animals. But, ironically, the French government wasn’t trying to do the Acadians any favors. Far from it. The new arrivals were expected to serve as frontline fodder in the event of invasion and were placed in stone houses of special design, in rows facing outward with no rear doors or windows. It must have been like living in a shooting gallery, knowing that, if the redcoats were coming, the commandant at the Citadelle would pass out muskets and force you to stay and fight until slaughtered.
Fortunately, neither the Acadians nor the Bellilois had the leisure to sit around waiting for the next war. And while they may have held a grudge for the next two hundred years, they mixed, danced the two-step at the fest-noz, and married. They also applied the Acadian custom of exterior decoration to the new Breton style of house. This usually took the form of a thin band of color stenciled around the windows—pink or pale blue, more rarely yellow. The color of the wooden window shutters was pale green for farmers or blue marine for sailors.
By the time the next invasion rolled around—the German one in 1940—the idea of the house as pillbox was moot. It would be nice to think that the houses were just too pretty to be used for fighting, but in truth the mass devastation visited on the mainland passed Belle Île by. It was no longer of strategic importance.
What it had become was a fishing center, way back in the 1850s. After a brief boom in sending lobster to Paris on the new railway, the island became one of the first places to export tinned sardines. The perfecting of a safe method of canning food—by a Frenchman, Nicolas Appert—created a Gold Rush in the little fish, heretofore rare and a favorite of gourmands.
The island served as a home base to a thousand chaloupes, sloops slung with nets, their cantilevered masts making a forest out of every estuary and creek. When this fleet came in after netting one of the enormous sardine schools that swarmed the Bay of Biscay, the entire island population gathered at the Le Palais cannery and worked straight through until the last can was sealed.
The wealth of sardines stabilized the fortunes of Belle Île during a time of upheaval and industrialization elsewhere. Many Bellilois owned chaloupes or took shares of the catch; the rest made cash from canning. This money went into the pockets of the naturally frugal Bellilois, raising their standard of living and allowing them to hang on to their farmlands and houses. Even after the sardines mysteriously vanished in 1911—the same year they disappeared from the Monterey commemorated in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—the island retained a proud identification with the noble pilchard. And, fortunately, by 1900 the island had found a new fish to fry: tourists.
Tourism elsewhere has been synonymous with development and the death of a regional culture. Belle Île was lucky to be separated from the mainland by twenty miles of water, and lucky that the first tourists followed on
the heels of poets and painters, particularly Claude Monet and John Peter Russell. Visited by the most famous person in the world in 1900—Sarah Bernhardt, who was the Muhammad Ali and Lady Gaga of her time—Belle Île famously won her heart and hand.
Bernhardt bought a retired fortress on the most forbidding piece of coastline, made the island her home between world tours, and ensured that Belle Île would be the center of many a news story by doing such well-publicized stunts as shooting seabirds while lying in bed taking her morning coffee and receiving the Prince of Wales for a farewell-to-all-that night of love while en route to his coronation as king.
By the time the national railroad service began flogging the masses into motion with the notion of tourism, Belle Île was perfectly positioned in a number of ways to thrive without losing its soul. First, most tourists chose to stay on the mainland, convenient to the railroad terminus, which had the effect of turning Belle Île into a day trip. The closest mainland towns, Quiberon and Carnac, got the Edwardian-era hotels, the arcades and dance halls, the promenades along the beach with their endless cafés, and the bustle-skirted ladies with parasols and yapping poodles.
Belle Île became the place to go for a breather from all the froth and excitement, a place to take a deep breath and enjoy nature like a celebrity, as sublime spectacle. You came, you swooned, you sunburned, you went home. Plenty of trinkets, saltwater taffy, and postcards got sold in Le Palais, but the island’s beautiful vistas and vertiginous coastal crags were left alone—and still are.
But how did the Bellilois manage to control their fate during all this, or at least keep their dignity and their land? Why didn’t they pander, succumb to temptation, take the money, and run? Perhaps the money wasn’t good enough. Perhaps they were just stubborn, preferring to live on their farms the way their forebears had. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (famous for Democracy in America, but equally on point about his native country) speaks of the intensity of the peasant’s attachment to the land. Alternatively, perhaps the Bellilois were never taxed to the point of surrender by developer-controlled city councils, which is California’s story.
As part of the refurbishing of France’s architectural patrimony that went on after World War II, someone in the national government must’ve realized natural beauty deserved protection—probably someone with a second home on Belle Île, who after a trip to Saint-Tropez appreciated its harmony anew, saw how easily it could be lost, and in 1975 managed to push through zoning that would protect the coastlines from development. Other laws soon forbade deviation from the stripped-down style of Breton maison.
Not everyone was happy to have their options restricted; every family with land has a member who’d gladly bulldoze for dollars. Every decade there has been a fight over expanding village limits to allow development. But today anyone with eyes can see the regulatory experiment validated: just drive or take the train out on the Quiberon peninsula to the ferryboat landing at Port Maria and you’ll see a crazy quilt of houses and neighborhoods and villages jammed together, every structure bloated, Hobbity, touristy, and grotesquely corrupted by the freedom reinforced concrete affords to tiny, kitschy minds.
This was French regulatory style on Belle Île, and this was why we were hiring Denis LeReveur. Because if we were to ask for a nonfunctioning birdhouse under the eaves, he’d tell us no straight off. He had to live here. Whereas a Parisian, or any other mercenary from the Continent, would rub his hands together and ask, “How many chambers for ze bird?”
• • •
Our stay was drawing to a close, but we couldn’t seem to summon any sense of urgency. The sun stayed up so late at this northern latitude—setting at ten o’clock when we’d arrived in August, now sinking into the mirror-bright Atlantic at eight thirty—that it had confused our internal clocks.
Often we’d find ourselves wandering the moors like Lapland reindeer herders, hours after dinner in the long-extended twilight. In our hearts, we knew this was the summer before the storm of renovation, a last soap bubble of innocence soon to burst. Gwened encouraged us, knowing what was to come. She’d had a baby. She’d restored a house. She knew.
Only nobody knew. What really was about to happen, not even a seer of Gwened’s abilities could divine.
For the two weeks that Gwened had been gently but insistently imparting all her knowledge, giving her utmost, staging our days, Mindy and I had conspired to ignore any suggestion that these were “last instructions,” her way of passing the torch—just in case. But we could do nothing about the seasonal turning toward fall, and Belle Île’s elegiac landscape of dry threshed fields and rolled-up balls of hay, the flocks of sheep moving to new pasture.
Try as we might to ignore it, the metaphor was everywhere. Having our poor ruined house as a focal point allowed us to talk about what otherwise was unspeakable: we would bring it back from the dead. And if we kept faith with the house, perhaps this would be a way of saving Gwened, of staving off the inevitable, of diverting that scythe-toting shade from his appointed rounds.
• • •
On our last day, we had another noon drink with Denis LeReveur on Gwened’s graveled patio, from which, if we craned our necks, we could just glimpse the slumped roof of our sad little ruin. Denny the Dreamer looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep, but he’d pulled together a sheaf of estimates and sketches, apologizing for their unfinished appearance. They looked fine to us, crisp and professional. More than fine: magical, a house resurrected, better than ever.
“Oh, look!” exclaimed Mindy. “There’s a dormer window!”
Denis beamed. One bedroom had a neat A-frame thrusting out like a balcony, overlooking the square. After peering at the drawing, Gwened pulled back with a polite smile that did nothing to hide her disappointment.
“Do we sign now?” asked Mindy.
“No, no,” Denis said. He still had to get a few more estimates; some of these weren’t nailed down. But there was one thing we could do. He rose from his chair, smiling. “Now we make the handshake.” He laughed at our expressions, proud of his one English phrase, and extended his hand.
Mindy and I looked at each other. She nodded. We rose at the same time. Our three hands collided in the center of the table. Laughter, then an exchange of firm handshakes.
“Bon,” we said over and over.
“Excellent,” said Denis. “Very good.”
More laughter. Then kisses, including a trio from him for me, our two sandpapery cheeks a prelude to the job itself.
Farewells brought forth more handshakes. And then we said good-bye.
“Non, pas au revoir,” scolded Denis. “À bientôt.”
Not good-bye—see you later.
Once we were alone, Gwened turned up her radiance. “Next year you will have a beautiful house. I guarantee it.”
Mindy and I exchanged a coded glance. Not if we can’t pay for it.
“Maybe we can just get the roof done,” Mindy said.
“Hold off on the other stuff,” I added.
“I think not,” said Gwened.
Suddenly the three of us were back to playing our game of poker: House Hold ’Em. I checked my cards. Mindy laid hers on the table: “We can wait for the devis and then just sign for the minimum amount of work to be done.”
Gwened shook her head. “Mindy, there is only one opportunity to convert the attic space into chambers, and that is when the roof is replaced. You will need to get as much work done as you can right away. Workmen here have plenty of jobs. They won’t wait for you. Everything must be done at once, scheduled so that as soon as one thing is done, the next is ready. Once it begins, it all goes quite quickly. You will see.”
“Gwened, we’re worried about money,” Mindy said. “We didn’t think I’d get pregnant.”
This was not quite true. While I was in Belle Île inspecting the house and shaking hands on a deal, Mindy had been
researching an article on childbirth statistics for Glamour. By the time I’d come home, she had a number in her head. That night we went off birth control. The pregnancy made itself known in July, just as our bank balance hit zero.
“I think the devis will be quite reasonable,” Gwened replied, confidence unshakable. “He will be fair, and he will pick only the best and most honest contractors. They will not gouge you the way they might if you’d hired one of these Parisian architects who come in and think they can have their way, not use local people, and show no respect for the local architecture.”
We’d heard this speech before.
“It was a surprise to see the dormer,” she added. “He must have spoken with the owner of the neighboring house—he’d have to grant his approval. I’m sure he also spoke with Madame Morgane. The Bellilois don’t take change lightly. That is why it was so important that you chose a Bellilois.”
She looked at the drawing of the dormer window again. The roof over the other bedroom had a tiny square in the center: a skylight. She looked at it so wistfully that I almost felt sorry.
• • •
Not long after we were back in New York, we had a drink with our Breton lawyer, Sylvie, to tell her our stories and show her the devis. She looked at the front-view sketch of the house. Nodded. Spoke:
“Two dormers. No discussion. Each bedroom must have a window for light and for air, and a dormer to extend the square footage. Understand?”
We sent back the change order, our only one.
It would be two years before we set foot on the island again, and eight years before we spent the night in our completed house.
Chapter Nine
The Black Book
Before we’d gone to Belle Île, the owners of our building in Manhattan had sent a letter to say they might turn it into a cooperative to sell the apartments on the open market. If so, state law mandated that renters would get a special insider’s deal, half the estimated price, once they signed the initial offering. In New York, these kinds of apartment conversions had been building to a frenzy.