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

by Don Wallace

  “I guess we’ve taken all the water,” I tell Rory. “See, we’re good for something.”

  He has a fierce look. Uh-oh.

  “Shall we give them a little? To fill their moat?”

  “No!”

  Well, he is only two and a half years old.

  “S’il vous plaît!” The father gestures impatiently. “L’eau! L’eau!” He makes digging motions, and I can see the thought forming behind his thick eyeglasses: Hey, American moron, can’t you see what’s at stake here? The national patrimony of France!

  “We should share the water, Rory,” I say gently.

  Rory pouts.

  “But I’ll tell you what. We’ve got to get up to the village for dinner, anyway. So let’s share all of it.”

  His eyes darken at first, but a smile lights up his face as my suggestion sinks in. We take up our positions, legs wide, bent at the waist, hands prepared to scoop. “Ready? Set? Go!” We make a breach directly above a natural spillway that leads straight to the sand castle thirty feet below us.

  With cries of anguish, the man and his son dance about, throwing handfuls of sand in the path of the flood. But all is in vain. In a matter of minutes, Azay-le-Rideau is no more.

  A crowd, drawn by the shrieks of the boy, heaves a huge communal sigh: “Ah!” Heads turn accusatively toward us, then swing back to the father, to see what he will do. There’s no doubt where the sympathy lies.

  Wearily, a bit sore in the back, the father straightens up. He lays a hand on his son’s shoulder to comfort him. Then he turns, draws himself erect, and wags a finger at me. His eyebrows make a black V in his forehead. He is doing his best to act out his outrage at our villainy when I think I detect a histrionic note and a wee glint in one eye.

  Drawing myself up, I place my hands on my hips and glower back at him.

  He squares his stance. “À demain.” Tomorrow. He stretches out a hand to his ruined castle. “Içi. Pour la satisfaction d’honneur.”

  I nod. “Avec plaisir, Monsieur. À demain!”

  The crowd gives a thrilled titter and someone claps as we walk down to greet our new friends.

  • • •

  It’s easy for Rory to make friends at the beach, and life in the cabane grows on us. We cook on a camp stove. Rory follows roosters and hens around, narrating their inner lives. To fool the mosquitoes as night falls, we learn to close the doors and windows and tell stories in the dark; after an hour, it’s safe to turn on our battery-powered Itty Bitty Book Lights and read.

  The village feels quietly preoccupied and insular, as before. We see few people, although we sense them—hanging laundry behind their hedges, clattering away in their kitchens. Who are they? Relatives from the mainland, come for off-season holidays. Houses dark in winter show a light at night. A stick figure with a dog walks in silhouette at the edge of a threshed field. Blue-black smoke drifts at treetop level, bringing a subtle mist of charred sardines.

  We’re glad these villagers make no particular fuss over us, the careworn gypsies in their midst. After all, we’re preoccupied ourselves, what with the daily business of shopping and preparing meals on our camp stove, carving our steak au poivre with matching Swiss Army knives. True, we feel a bit abandoned, left to our own devices, because Gwened has rented out her house to bring in money for needed repairs. This is quite a change from our summer of moral and cultural instruction three years ago.

  Our other village friends, Franck and Ines, are scarcely to be seen. He’s sold his sloop and invested in these new things, planches à voile—windsurfers. Requiring calm water for the tourist trade, they operate from a large tent on Grand Sables on the other side of the island. Too exhausted to return to Kerbordardoué on the weekends, our friends sleep on beds of damp wet suits. The children love it, naturally. The parents walk with a rubbery gait familiar to us, fellow members of the fraternity of exhaustion.

  Her cataracts cured by surgery, Madame Morgane still occasionally squints at us as if we are poachers who’ve snuck onto her back forty. She dotes on Rory, however, and her somber formality—that of the lifelong country dweller—seems to gratify his own childlike sense of self-importance. She enjoys our after-dinner visits, which always begin with cups of instant coffee and conclude with a purchase of eggs for the morning, but her days are reserved for her chickens and garden. And, lately, a new old friend, who has made an appearance in the village.

  A better word than “appearance” might be “apparition,” since we’ve hardly caught a glimpse of her. Considering that she is our neighbor, occupying the ruined hut at the end of our row of attached houses, this is quite a feat.

  The first time we’d come up late from the beach and surprised her picking green plants out of the water ditches. In an instant she was off, darting up the lane, cutting through the hedges, weaving through the tall corn, off into the fields. She resembled a large hare wearing a faded blue denim shirtdress—with a complementary apron in a blue floral print.

  Mindy and I looked at each other: “What was that?”

  At first we didn’t connect her to the ruin at the end of the row, which continued to present an unlived-in appearance. It hardly seemed habitable; you could easily miss the door behind all the ivy, hydrangeas, and a growing pile of dank compost, which gradually became a mountain of decaying vegetal matter sprouting pale green shoots. It was the compost that gave her away, of course. But we couldn’t be sure it was our female apparition until the kittens appeared, romping through the overgrowth, pausing to sip from a saucer filled with milk. Putting two and two together, we realized this had to be our neighbor. But who? Why?

  We didn’t get a satisfactory answer until the universal and mandatory French vacation ended and Gwened herself arrived.

  Gwened looked surprisingly good, tanned and rested and spiritual, her lips bent in a slight but constant smile as she looked us over. “I am very happy to see you here, at last. Come, help me pick some beautiful garden vegetables for our dinner.”

  Classic Gwened: not even here for ten minutes and already taking charge.

  We went for a walk, following her lead. Each villager has his or her private routes. Each family has an itinerary on the first day back, stations of the pilgrimage of return. To be invited on Gwened’s was an honor. And somehow, by the time we got back to her house for dinner, the place had changed. We could see the other villagers, standing in their yards, strolling the lanes, waving casually. It was as if the village had woken up now that the witch was back.

  • • •

  Now the long island September was truly upon us: the peace and quiet, the endless days, the weather hot and dry and crisp, the nights clear and starry. We walked amid a myriad of seasonal reminders: lizards and pheasants made bold by the departure of the tourist crowds, a thresher moving across a burnt gold horizon, a flock of sheep herded by barking collies across Donnant’s beach at low tide, a dozen white flowers blossoming in the sky. The latter slowly floated earthward onto Madame Morgane’s fields, where they turned into parachutists on a military exercise and walked toward us gathering their silks around their waists, like Victorian ladies on promenade.

  When we dined late at Les Embruns, the quayside crêperie in Sauzon, we often had the place to ourselves. In the town to the south, Bangor, we attended a fest-noz that would go until morning, Bellilois dancing the two-step I’d seen Cajuns do. Mindy swayed with sleepy Rory in her arms as the accordion wheezed and the bombarde and the binioù, Breton horn and bagpipe, squealed and droned. A bonfire blazed against the white wall of the Bangor church. We ate grilled sausages and drank cidre brut, the alcoholic kind.

  • • •

  With the tourists gone, the windsurfer business fell off sharply. Franck and Ines and their children, now up to three with a new baby, filled the gaps in our social calendar. If we didn’t eat with Gwened, we ate with them. And if by chance neither invited us, somebody always seemed to
leave a bowl of fresh sardines on our stoop, or a wicker basket of tomatoes and yellow runner beans.

  After meals, we walked around, usually crossing paths with Madame Morgane on her own stroll, trailed by a tabby cat, and once in a while her son, a brooding figure who lived in Nantes and, we were told, only liked to come when pheasant season opened. I soon learned to carry a flashlight; also, a spare bag in my hip pocket to fill with the bursting-ripe blackberries that overwhelmed nodding vines.

  Gwened didn’t join us on the longer walks, saying she preferred to meditate. Of course this worried us, but given her steely composure, we didn’t dare ask about her health. In a sense, one look at her told us all we needed to know. She was brown (and probably brown all over) and she was strong, something we realized the day we accepted her invitation to dig up the potatoes in her garden. How she made the dirt fly! The former archetype of French womanhood now had muscles.

  One morning Rory got us up very early and insisted on a ramble into the village. We’d passed Gwened’s house and were on a narrow lane to nowhere when suddenly something flashed past. A bird? No, an arrow. We could hardly believe it, but there it was, quivering in a bale of hay. Peering over a scraggly hedge, we beheld a figure wearing a white karate gi with a black sash and a white headband: Gwened, standing stock-still and holding an enormous bow. As we watched, she reached behind her back and pulled an arrow out of a quiver.

  We retreated.

  We got the story later in the day. In the years since her diagnosis, Gwened had dedicated herself to mastering the ancient art of Japanese Zen archery: kyudo. The money she’d saved from renting her house would go toward converting her old cowshed, what she’d laughingly called her dojo, into a real dojo, with students, she hoped.

  Gwened the guru? Nothing, it seemed, was beyond our mentor’s powers.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Game of No

  By the last week of September, Kerbordardoué had come all the way back, as if from the dead, resurrected for us out of the mists of memory like the mythical Brigadoon, the Scottish village in the Lerner and Loewe musical that only comes to life every hundred years.

  All that was missing was our architect, Denis LeReveur. We’d paid a call at his office soon after we arrived, and he’d greeted us warmly. He looked exactly the same: the same rumpled handsome face, the same glinting rimless glasses, the same thick sweater and open-collared shirt. In fact, we actually joked that he hadn’t changed clothes since we’d last seen him three years before.

  As was proper on Belle Île, the small talk stretched on…and on, except we never got to the important part: getting down to business. Instead, we made dinner arrangements. Denis wanted us to get to know his wife. Right now, he was in the midst of the busy construction season, so we’d set a date later.

  Mindy and I had been exchanging glances as he edged us toward the door. “But,” she protested, in her finest florid French, “we are absolutely chagrined not to have received a bill from you in such a long time. It is deeply embarrassing not to know what to pay you.”

  “Pay me?” Denis looked astonished. He glanced down at the piles of paper on his desk and pretended to search among them. “I’m sure you have already paid me…”

  “No, really, Denis, we haven’t even received a bill. In fact, we were thinking perhaps it was sent to the wrong address.”

  “But here is your address: see?” Denis pointed to a 3x5 card tacked to the wall, where, in Mindy’s hand, our address was written. “Is it not correct?”

  “Yes, but we never got a bill for the roof, the construction of the bedrooms and the bathroom…”

  “Oh, well, then, I’m sure it will soon come.” With an encouraging nod, he put a hand on each of our shoulders. “Do not worry. The French post office is very good.” He twinkled. “One of the only things the government does well.”

  Gently but firmly he guided us out the door. Stood there waving as we walked off.

  Once we’d turned a corner, we compared notes on what we thought had just taken place. Did he honestly think we’d paid him? Was he actually saying he hadn’t sent the bill yet? Or that the bill was in the mail? Or was he stalling for another reason? Perhaps he was gauging how much to gouge us?

  To give even a moment’s consideration to such a disloyal thought was depressing. But as New Yorkers, weren’t we compelled to at least acknowledge the possibility? My experience in the American construction industry had already told me to brace myself for chicanery. And there had been a moment in the beginning of the renovation, funny in retrospect, that had taken us aback.

  Gwened had written us a year or so after we’d signed the devis. Her usual circumspect self, she took a few paragraphs to get to the point. But then:

  “My dear friends, I have heard something from the people of the village about your renovation. I did not quite believe it, even though Franck and Ines both assured me it was true. But in the off chance that this is not what you wish for the house, after all our discussions of what is appropriate for Kerbordardoué, I hope you do not think it forward of me to inquire whether you did, in fact, order a rather enormous bathtub, of pink enamel, with gold faucets and gold taps for your chambre du bain? Because upon my arrival here today, that is what I see on the ground floor, awaiting installation.”

  By the time Mindy and I had gotten over our fit of hysterical laughter, the implications were sinking in. What else might Denis be dreaming of? Mirrored ceilings? A disco ball?

  It required phone calls (expensive and rare in those days) and letters and Gwened’s stern visit to Denis in his office to effect the removal of “the solid gold bathtub,” as the offending object would henceforth be known. We also took pains to establish our taste in fixtures generally—which could be summed up in two words: simple and cheap. But we forgave Denis. The roots of the whole misunderstanding probably lay in Gwened’s suggestion that we order an extra-large hot water heater. In her visits to America, she’d become addicted to the long, languorous bubble bath.

  Here was the basis for our twinge of paranoia. Even before this incident, though, we’d been at the receiving end of a nonstop stream of suspicions directed at us by friends, acquaintances, and parents. They never let up: Who’s minding the store? A Frenchman? Well, that was smart. And you’re using local contractors? God, they’ll take you to the cleaners. They’ll pad the bills, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. You’re screwed. Doesn’t it make you mad to know they’re taking advantage of you because you’re American? Here we saved their butts in the war and they do this to you. Don’t you just hate the French? I don’t know what possessed you to buy a house over there…

  However reluctantly I floated the idea, Mindy flat-out refused to play along. She shook her head and said: no, not, never. Not Denny the Dreamer. We looked at each other. We believed in our Denis, in our Belle Île, in our sense of people. Call us fools, call us idiots, but that’s who we were. Even if the skeptics were proved right, we wouldn’t trade places with them in a hundred years.

  So then the question was, now what? It all felt impossibly tangled. There was only one thing to do. We turned around and marched back to his office.

  Denis glanced up over his spectacles and did a double take, followed by a greeting that was note for note as effusive as the first one. “What! You’re back so soon? This is wonderful. You honor me. Please, come in.”

  “Denis,” said Mindy, as firmly as she could between involuntary smiles, “I think you did not send us the bill. And even if you did, it has not arrived. Can you therefore please make us a copy of the bill, so that we may be assured of receiving it?”

  “But of course! Why, I can do it today!”

  “Now? Perhaps? Please?”

  His expression fell into melancholy. “Ah, no, not now. I am terribly sorry.” He indicated the piles of paper. “There is a client who demands a plan and I am
late. Can you give me until tomorrow?”

  “Of course… Can we come by to pick it up?”

  “Of course, of course. We can have a coffee around the corner.”

  The next day we made a swing through Le Palais in the afternoon. The sign on Denis’s door said: Fermé. We’d lost him. Afterward, our shopping trips to Le Palais never coincided with Denis being in his untidy office off the Place du Général Bigarré.

  Suddenly, with about a week to go, we awoke to the realization that we still hadn’t seen the bill and probably wouldn’t, at this rate. Neither of us liked the idea of leaving without paying. We knew that bill would never make its way to America.

  We decided that we’d somehow confused Denis in our first meeting. Perhaps he’d had trouble with our accents—well, my accent. Yes, perhaps it would be better for Young Strudel to just shut up next time there was serious business to be conducted, and stop trying to make those stupid bilingual puns. Young Strudel, however, seemed to remember not having any problem going alone to the notary’s to buy the house. It was only in the renovation that we seemed to be having problems. Perhaps, Madame, the fault lay somewhere else?

  Once that little tiff was over, we vowed to somehow trap Denis, even if it meant going to his home at night. We would not return to America without paying our bills!

  It was then that Mindy remembered the Game of No. She’d come up with it during our rambles across the hinterlands of France and Greece. In social situations, particularly among the older generations of country people, we’d come to realize that nothing good happens until you say no three times. If you sit in a parlor, you will be offered tea or coffee three times, offered lump sugar three times, offered sweets three times. Also, the deeper into the country you travel, the more likely you’ll be offered some absurdly generous favor or invitation three times. The trick, we’d learned, was to say no. Not once. Not twice. But three times—with a sort of last second caving in to the host’s supplication. It was a kind of passive-aggressive dance that honored both parties in the transaction.