We’d met the mill’s owner, Henri de Rességuier, a retired schoolteacher, on the night we arrived. He and his wife, Monique, had welcomed us with homemade pâté and tomato salad, and then Henri had shown us around our new home, demonstrating how to operate the windows’ archaic rod-and-latch mechanisms and instructing us to close the shutters on the windward side of the house during inclement weather. Small in stature and compactly built, with a full head of wavy gray-and-black hair, Henri had a courtly air and walked with a fluid gait, his body slightly canted to the right. Throughout the tour, Monique, a pretty woman with thick black eyeliner and a warbly voice, delivered an interesting soliloquy about the history of the le moulin.
Henri came by the house frequently, making the ten-minute drive from his home in a neighboring village to address a variety of concerns. He always arrived in the same attire: crisp khakis and a natty button-down shirt. Always, he greeted me with a barely there handshake and a cordial bonjour, and responded to my description of the problem with the same reassuring phrase: Je m’en occupe—“I’ll take care of it.”
And he usually did, sort of. When I inquired about procuring better-seasoned wood for our outdoor grilling, he insisted that the muck-coated logs in the mill’s musty storage room were perfectly fine, and to prove it, he dashed off to the butcher, returned with some fresh pork sausages, built a fire in the pit out back, and, showing a bit more panache than necessary, delivered us a hot lunch on a plate. A few days later, when we told him we had an ant infestation, he came over promptly, sprayed insecticide around the front door, and concluded the visit by saying, “They come every spring. The best strategy is simply not to look at them.” When we told him we didn’t have enough hot water, he made a few adjustments to the emulsion heater and, on his way out, said, “I wouldn’t worry. You won’t need it so much when summer comes.”
To his credit, Henri attacked other problems with impressive determination and know-how. When the house’s sewer pump failed, he rushed over, slipped a pair of knee-high rubber boots over his khakis, and, for the better part of an hour, wrestled with pipes and valves while standing in a foot of foul-smelling water inside a cement-walled hole at the base of the house. After reassembling the pump motor and getting things up and running, he rinsed his boots under an outdoor spigot and, as a parting salutation, offered his forearm for me to shake, in the classic manner of French butchers and plumbers.
One day, after he’d spent the morning weed-wacking the thick overgrowth that had colonized the banks of the stream, Henri, his face flecked with bits of vegetation, appeared at our front door with a stack of books in his hands. “Given your curiosity about la Gascogne,” he said, “I thought these might be of interest.”
When I thanked him, he offered the standard French nonplussed eyebrow-raise and took his leave.
I carried the books out to the balcony. One was about the historic water mills of the Gers. Who knew there were so many? Henri had bookmarked a page that contained a small black-and-white photo of Le Moulin de Saint Pierre Lesperet—as our mill was mellifluously named—in its turn-of-the-century heyday: The enormous mill wheel could be seen beneath the roof of the shed; some men with bushy mustaches were standing next to it. Another book was titled Les Gens de Gascogne à Travers la Carte Postale and contained reproductions of hundreds of postcards from a century ago showing Gascon paysans in traditional garb doing things like hunting pigeons, harvesting grapes, and washing their clothes in communal lavoirs.
Henri had also included a book prosaically titled Le Département du Gers, written in 1997 by one Renaud Camus. It had the austere matte cover favored by literary presses in France. An arts-and-letters-minded guide to the Gers, it was filled with wordy commentary about the region’s churches, châteaux, and ruins. I skimmed the introduction and paused at this observation: “To live in the Gers, to decide to live in the Gers, is to cast one’s lot with, to deliberately choose, a great deal of absence.” The author went on to state—a bit self-defeatingly, given he was presumably trying to entice readers to the area—that the Gers suffers from a chronic lack of cinemas, theaters, museums, and good pastry shops. He concluded on a slightly sunnier note. In the Gers, he wrote, “you can simply be.”
There was a small recipe book, too. Its pages were brittle and had turned the color of toast. The cover bore the title La Cuisine du Pays: 500 Recettes de Cuisine, Pâtisserie, Confiserie—Recueillies par Simin Palay. The volume was a collection of old Gascon and Basque dishes compiled three-quarters of a century ago by—to judge from what little I was able to find on the author—a poet-linguist from the Béarn, the ancient province on the mountainous frontier of greater Gascony. Each chapter contained a few folksy proverbs in the old Béarnais dialect. I found one I particularly liked: “Dab boune sauce, machant tros que passe”—“A good sauce helps the tough morsel go down.” I perused the recipes, which were peppered with phrases like “Ask your tripe seller for his cleanest veal tripe, as well as the cheeks and rumen.” Or “Nail the lamprey’s head to the wall, cut off the tail, and let the blood drain into a bowl.” One specialty was a fried pastry called pets-de-nonne, or “Nun’s Farts.” The recipes—written in an archaic style, with less than exact measurements—weren’t really inspiring me to wet my toes in Gascon cuisine.
The truth was, little of what I’d been cooking since our arrival belonged strictly to the local culinary canon. I cut myself a break, considering we’d just made a 4,000-mile move and I was now having to do all my chopping and mincing with a plastic-handled, dollar-store–quality knife. Mostly I’d been making simple meals cobbled together from produce, meat, and fish from the weekly market. Yet this in itself was an education: The ingredients were fresher, tastier, and all-around better than what I was able to get regularly back home. Lamb chops were sold unfrenched and cut thin, with an extra rib bone attached, and were edged with the most delicious fat. Another of our favorites, Basque brook trout, was very fatty, too; its skin became cracker-crisp in the skillet while the pink flesh stayed perfectly tender. The chickens and guinea fowl, sold with their heads on, were long-legged and rangy, with less meat but more flavor. The fresh sausages, which I took to serving atop Puy lentils, were coarsely ground and super-savory. The strawberries, of a local hybrid variety called gariguette, were no bigger around than a penny, but exploded with candy-like sweetness and dissolved on the tongue. Then there were the magnificent pâtés and salaisons—Basque chorizo, skinny saucissons, smooth duck-liver terrines, and the silky dry-cured ham known as jambon de Bayonne.
Arguably the most Gascon aspect of our meals was how long they were. Suddenly we were spending more time at the table than we ever did in Chicago. It just felt like the natural thing to do. For one thing, we were a lot less busy. Michele didn’t have an office to go to; I didn’t have pressing deadlines; and while Charlotte hadn’t started classes yet, I knew that once she did, there wasn’t going to be a packed dance card of after-school activities. There didn’t seem to be any on offer. Distractions after dark were few: maybe a coffee at Le Plaisantin, the seedy café near our house, or a post-dinner walk on empty village streets prowled by house cats. Such walks confirmed my assumption that the world occupied by the residents of Plaisance, and by Gascons in general, shrunk to the confines of the kitchen and the dinner table after seven thirty or so. That said, to judge from the flickering blue light I’d seen emanating from dining room windows here and there during my evening strolls, watching TV after dinner, or even during the meal, wasn’t frowned upon. But for us, at least, it wasn’t an appealing option. One night, upon discovering that in clear weather our television actually got a couple of channels, we tried to watch for a while, but after toggling for ten minutes between a dubbed episode of Stargate and a talk show featuring French book critics in rimless glasses, we switched it off.
Also, Michele and I were drinking more wine than we used to, which tended to make our meals altogether more relaxed affairs. We could get through most of a bottle of low-octane white or rosé at l
unch, and kill a brawny Madiran at dinner. For a time, my doctor’s admonition—“No more than two glasses a day”—rang in my ears, but eventually the ringing stopped. Also, we discovered that our local wine co-op packaged a respectable table wine made from tannat grapes grown in the hills north of Plaisance. A five-liter, sous-vide container fitted with a plastic spigot, it cost about as much as bottled mineral water. I pulled out one of the etched-glass decanters from the buffet, and in the evenings I got in the habit of filling it from the wine tap. Using the decanter gave our suppers a fancy, upstairs-downstairs feel.
In short order, meals became the organizing principle of our daily life. This was partly out of necessity. Like other newcomers to rural France, we were quickly discovering that the preparation of lunch and dinner required a good deal of forethought. If we didn’t get our shopping done in the morning, we were out of luck come lunchtime, as all commercial life ceased promptly at 12:30 p.m. and didn’t resume until two or three hours later. Nowhere outside of Gascony had I seen the sanctity of the lunch hour observed with such zeal. As early as 11:30 a.m., there was a change in the cadence of villagers’ comings and goings. Cars breezed past stop signs, their drivers speeding home for the midday meal, and in the main square, one could observe a frenzied ballet as people zigzagged about, conducting any final items of business at the bank or the pharmacy or the hardware store before all human endeavor turned to the sacred ritual of lunch. By 12:15, the streets in Plaisance were empty, except for the pitiable straggler making a desperate dash for the bakery, which by then was mostly cleaned out anyhow. If you walked around Plaisance on a warm day between 12:30 and 2:30 p.m., the only sounds to be heard through the open windows were the clinking of silverware or the crackle of some fatty thing frying in a skillet.
THE DAY BEFORE CHARLOTTE STARTED classes at Plaisance’s école primaire, we decided to take a drive and have a picnic—the gentle hills of the Gers being very conducive to both activities. The morning had dawned bright and warm, with a scrim of haze hanging in the sky that gave the landscape the white-tinged brilliance of an overexposed photo. I piloted our rented Peugeot hatchback along a tortuous route communale that climbed from the Adour River Valley into the hills. The road entered a patch of woods and emerged into the open to reveal a vista of grazing pastures bordered by hedgerows and populated by cream-colored cows. Farther on, vineyards alternated with fields of sunflowers that hadn’t yet bloomed. We passed signs for places with funny-sounding names, like Monplaisir (My Pleasure) and l’Église de Croûte (the Church of Crust). Charlotte was in back with the window down, her hair whipping around her head. It didn’t seem possible on such a lovely day, but we were the only car on the road.
After a while, we crested a ridge and passed a hamlet called Bières (Beers), at which point the road doglegged around a wood-steepled chapel and a cemetery. I pulled over. Beside the church, in a clearing partly shaded by an immense oak tree, sat a picnic table. The grass around it had been freshly mowed, and some thoughtful person had planted geraniums in hollow tree stumps arranged along the clearing’s edge. Across the road, the quilted landscape sprawled to the horizon.
I spread out our déjeuner champêtre: thin slices of Bayonne ham, a loaf of bread, brandade de morue with crackers, pâté de tête, fresh cherries, and a cucumber salad dressed with olive oil and fresh mint. I’d also bought more of Amandine’s chèvre at this week’s market. She’d remembered me from my first visit and offered the suggestion of a smile when I complimented her cheese. Progress.
To drink, I’d packed a label-less bottle of rosé, filled from our “tap” and chilled that morning. It wore a fine pelt of condensation and sparkled in the sun. The whole scene was so pretty that I almost didn’t want to mess it up by eating.
After lunch, I walked around the tiny graveyard next to the chapel. A squat date palm stood just inside the rusted gate, giving the place an exotic feel. Some two dozen gravestones in varying states of decay were crowded inside the cemetery’s stone walls. Many were adorned with fresh flowers. Some were decorated with polished-stone tablets engraved with a poem or words of endearment: “To our nana,” “To our friend,” “To our comrade in arms.” Many bore testament to long lives that began in the nineteenth century and ended well into the twentieth.
Down the road, we paid a visit to Lupiac, a hilltop village with a vast, sun-hammered central square surrounded by narrow, tile-roofed houses with closed shutters. The place appeared to be evacuated of all human life. According to a sign we’d seen as we drove into it, the village was the birthplace of none other than Charles de Batz-Castlemore, better known as D’Artagnan, Gascony’s most famous son. This caused me some excitement, as I’d just been reading The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas’s nineteenth-century fictionalization of D’Artagnan’s seventeenth-century exploits.
Over by the church, I noticed a plaque directing visitors to Le Musée D’Artagnan. While Michele sought a shady spot where she and Charlotte could have a rest, I walked over to the tiny museum, which occupied a former chapel next to the church, and paid my admission fee to a friendly woman who informed me I was her first visitor of the day. The museum featured, among other things, mannequins in the tricolor livery of a seventeenth-century musketeer, a life-size statue of D’Artagnan carved from linden wood, pages of the first serialized excerpts of The Three Musketeers, and vintage movie posters bearing the likenesses of some of the many actors who’d played D’Artagnan over the years.
Though the museum skewed toward the myth of D’Artagnan, there were some texts and engravings concerning the real-life musketeer, too. He’d been born into the family of a recently ennobled merchant by the name of Bertrand de Batz, who was the owner of a château called Castlemore and had married a woman from a noteworthy family that went by the considerably more musical name of De Montesquiou d’Artagnan. When he came of age, Charles adopted his matronymic. Like a lot of young Gascon men, D’Artagnan left home to join the military, in this case the king’s guards. The rest of his life, as far as I could tell, played out as a series of brawls, skirmishes, and intrigues, first in the service of Louis XIII and then under that monarch’s more famous successor, Louis XIV, and the king’s scheming adviser, Cardinal Mazarin. Aside from passing through the region as part of the wedding procession of Louis XIV in 1660, D’Artagnan never came back to Gascony. Not that this last fact had prevented locals from claiming D’Artagnan as the very paragon of Gascon-ness itself, at least if one was to judge from how freely they traded on his name.
I SERVED CHARLOTTE A SPECIAL breakfast for her first day of school: a chocolate croissant from the bakery, a bowl of fresh raspberries, and a soft-boiled egg, which I presented to her in one of the porcelain egg cups from our dining room’s vast collection of tableware. Our eggs were from the weekly market; they’d cost pennies apiece, and their yolks were a deep sunset-orange.
Charlotte was too nervous to eat. I was, too. The assurances of Plaisance’s school principal notwithstanding, I knew that Charlotte wasn’t the type to handle change easily. She loved her routines, and resisted embracing new things until she was convinced she’d mastered them. Today, we were tossing her routine out the window, and drowning it in the river while we were at it.
Before we left, I handed Charlotte a gift that Henri’s wife, Monique, had dropped off the day before. It was wrapped in a large brown envelope bearing a handwritten note: “Bon courage on your first day of school! And remember, cooking is a great way to learn a language!” Charlotte opened the package and pulled out a red-and-white apron with a recipe for crêpes embroidered on the front.
The school was just a short walk from our house. Charlotte, her plaid backpack from Target slung over her shoulders, was holding back tears as we approached the front gate. All around us, parents were chatting and kissing their kids good-bye. The principal came out and introduced us to Charlotte’s teacher, a slim, unsmiling woman with her hair in a Parisian updo: Maîtresse Nathalie. I asked the Maîtresse if she spoke any English; looking slig
htly embarrassed, she confessed that she could recall only two phrases: “water closet” and “I don’t understand.” At that moment, Charlotte started to cry, upon which Maîtresse Nathalie gently pried Charlotte’s hand from mine, drew the girl toward her, and looked at me and Michele with an expression that was both tender and tough.
“Ça va aller,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”
Then she led Charlotte across the school’s gravel courtyard to the blue wooden door of her classroom.
Michele hooked her arm through mine and we walked home. “She’ll thank you for this when she’s older,” she said.
Later, at lunch, I drank more wine than usual.
That night, I decided to make ham-and-cheese crêpes for dinner using the recipe from the apron Monique had given us. Charlotte had made it through her first day without any disasters; there’d been some tears because she didn’t know how to ask for the bathroom, but after that things had gone fine.
I measured out the milk and flour and grated some Emmentaler. For want of a mixing bowl I used the receptacle from the salad spinner, and, unable to locate a whisk, I beat the ingredients with a dinner fork. On assessing our kitchen’s ascetic inventory, I’d considered buying some new knives and tools, but instead I decided to do my best with what we had, partly because I didn’t want to spend the money and partly out of a determination to be more débrouillard. To be débrouillard is to be resourceful, in a MacGyver kind of way.
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