On Rue Tatin

by Susan Herrmann Loomis

  Louviers also boasts the remains of cloisters from a Franciscan convent, which was built in 1646, supposedly the only cloisters built over a canal.

  Unlike in many old French towns there are decently wide sidewalks throughout most of Louviers, though occasionally one is obliged to walk single file and on tiptoe to avoid being squashed by a speeding car—speed limit signs are merely for decoration rather than serving any practical purpose, it seems. Parking places have been inserted wherever there is room for a car, and still many people park on the sidewalk, or angle themselves into impossibly tight spots.

  We wound our way through a maze of streets and stopped in front of one of the tiny, room-wide houses. Outside it was charmingly derelict. Inside it was a complete wreck and smelled like the bowery. Piles of clothing and rags in a corner showed that it was a way station for homeless travelers. We sped out of there.

  The second house was another story. It was across from the lavish Romanesque/Gothic church right in the town center, which is so large and imposing that everyone refers to it as a cathedral, though it isn’t, since it is not the principal church of the diocese. The house had been a convent for three hundred years, and before that it was purportedly owned by an artist. For the past twenty-five years it had been the property of a Parisienne who had purchased it to live in, and to transform the ground floor into an antiques shop. It was dry and didn’t smell at all. The old walls were timbered, the clay tile roof sported a tiny bell tower, the windows were paned with old, wavy glass. Inside, it was all blue and gray. And a wreck. The downstairs looked like an archeological dig—big holes, mounds of rubble, a total mess. The walls were in terrible shape, their pale blue paint streaked with grime. Dust covered everything. But the house was filled with a palpable, warm presence.

  We followed the realtor and his stiff gray pompadour up the beautiful staircase, which curved gently around a corner, and emerged onto a landing awash in clear, soft light. As he babbled about the attributes of the house I looked out the window and caught my breath—the church was near enough to touch. I was transfixed. We proceeded through the house and Edith kept whispering to me, “C’est fabuleux, cette maison. Elle a besoin de la peinture et un peu d’électricité, c’est tout.” “It’s fabulous—all it needs is a few coats of paint and some electricity.”

  The house must have been a perfect convent for it rambled on and on, up and around short stairways, in and out of rooms, yet it wasn’t vast. It was very human—the rooms were quite small, the staircases short, the floors old wood, worn in many places.

  The rooms were in varying states of decay. Some had graffiti scrawled on the walls and ceilings. “The owner allowed squatters to come, she is very open,” said the realtor. “She is very spéciale.” Spéciale is a word that means many things, from strange to difficult. I was beginning to get a notion about the owner.

  On the third floor was a long, furnished room. A coal stove sat at one end, its pipe jury-rigged out a window. A single bed sat against a wall, with a large chunk of plaster in the middle of the bedspread. At the opposite end was a small kitchenette with garish orange and yellow flowers painted on the wall. A lovely old buffet filled with dishes sat along another wall.

  The realtor explained that this is where the owner, a single mother of grown children, lived when she came to stay. As I looked at the room, which had lovely proportions, I was amazed she hadn’t asphyxiated herself with the rigged-up stove pipe. Apparently the woman was an antiques dealer who, for whatever reason (the realtor hinted at a family tragedy), hadn’t been able to fix up the house and install her antiques shop downstairs. She instead stripped it of everything valuable, from fireplace mantels to the crystal ball that had once graced the stairway. She seemed to have become somewhat folle, crazy, according to the realtor, leaving the doors unlocked, living in these makeshift conditions, letting the house tumble down around her.

  Our final stop was the cave underneath the house, a fascinating vaulted dungeon filled with bottles, cobwebs, and mystery. I wanted to inspect it further, but the realtor shooed us out with his wavery flashlight.

  I was captivated. I didn’t say much on the way back to Le Vaudreuil. When we said good-bye to the realtor Edith was vibrating. “What a house,” she said. “You have to buy it. Michael could fix it up in no time. All it needs is paint, some work here and there, a little rearranging.” I listened with half an ear, discouraged beyond measure, seeing our romantic sojourn in France spent in one of the new bungalows I now knew were the preferred rentals in the area. I had loved roaming through the old house, but it just wasn’t possible.

  Edith, who is passionate and high-strung by nature, wouldn’t stop talking about the house. She remembered as a child growing up in Louviers passing the house and seeing, inside a window right on the street, an elderly nun in her bed. “We always looked in on her. It is a sweet memory,” she said. Her chatter about the house went on all day. When Bernard came home she told him about it. I’d been thinking about it too—the quality of light inside it was unforgettable, as was that warm feeling within its walls.

  Bernard fixed me with his gaze. “What do you think of the house, Suzanne?” he asked, seriously. I faltered. I thought it was beautiful, but it was a mess. And we didn’t have any money to buy it anyway. I told him so. He wanted to go look at it, so I made an appointment for the next day.

  I allowed myself to dream, just a little. Imagine not just renting but owning in France. Imagine such a beautiful house. The location was perfect—right in the center of town, in proximity to shops and schools and everything. I didn’t know Louviers at all, but it was a big enough town that nearly everything was available.

  As I thought about the house and the town I remembered spending an afternoon there on my own many years ago when I’d been visiting Edith and Bernard. I remembered walking around the ancient cloisters. I remembered the finely manicured public garden, which looked like a tiny version of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The more I thought about it, the more memories surfaced. There was a wonderful store there filled with herbs and potions and organic foods of all sorts. The city hall and the museum were in a lovely old brick building surrounding a garden with a fanciful concrete-made-to-look-like-wood pergola in the center. From what I’d seen today, Louviers bustled, traffic sped through it, the sidewalks were crowded with people.

  Louviers comprises twenty thousand inhabitants, making it the largest town within about thirty miles. It is the commercial center for farmers in the immediate area, who go there for banking and business. It has the rollicking Saturday farmer’s market, another smaller farmer’s market on Wednesday, and its own collection of boutiques and food shops.

  I called Michael that night to give him a report. I told him about the house, downplaying Bernard and Edith’s interest in it, simply describing it to him. He said nothing. Then he said, “Go look at it again, get more information.” I couldn’t believe my ears. “But we don’t have any money,” I countered. “We can’t buy a house.”

  “Go get more information” was all he would say. I am hopeless when it comes to money. My department is dreams. I rely on Michael to see the truth, so when he said get more information I figured that buying the house was somehow possible.

  The next day Bernard saw the house and loved it. He thought it was an affaire, a deal. He said that if we decided to buy it he’d loan us the down payment if we needed it and cosign the loan. Bernard is a very successful entrepreneur who started a quality control company almost two decades ago, well before anyone else in France had the idea. The company has done nothing but grow, so that now it does business in most countries of the world. Bernard sold it not long ago, making him a very wealthy man. He is still the director, however, and spends most of his time traveling to distant points on the globe. When Bernard says something is “interesting” it pays to listen. I suddenly started to get very excited.

  I called Christian Devisme, a friend, talented architect, and Edith’s brother, and asked him to come inspect
the house and give me his professional opinion. He and his partner arrived and spent at least an hour poking, prodding, and snooping around like detectives. They finished in the back garden, where I joined them, and we all gazed at the exterior wall, which was so full of holes it looked like lace. I asked Christian what he thought. He slowly cleared his throat, shook his head, then looked at me sideways. “Il ne faut pas sousestimer le travail,” he said, gravely. “You must not underestimate the work.” That sent a chill through me.

  Then he swiveled to look at the little brick building behind the house, which belonged to the church. “You should try to buy that, too,” he said. “It would add a lot of value to the property.”

  “So you think we should buy the house?” I asked.

  “If I were younger I might think about buying it,” Christian, who was then forty-five, said. “At this point in my life it’s too much work, but it’s a beautiful house.”

  I understood Christian’s point. He and his wife, Nadine, had bought an old farmhouse nearly twenty years before when they had three tots, and had lived in a tent in front of it for a year while they made it livable. It is not an experience he would want to repeat and he is convinced he accomplished it only because he was young. Yet he obviously thought this house in Louviers was full of potential.

  “Its walls and roof are solid,” he said. “If you have to pay someone to fix it up you can’t afford it. If Michael can do it himself, you should seriously think about it.”

  I took that for encouragement.

  Edith came to pick me up and before we left we went through the house again, deciding what should be where when it came time to decorate the rooms. I could just imagine all the soirées we would have there, in the shadow of the church, L’église de Notre Dame. That night I reported everything to Michael, who knew all the protagonists and could judge their responses. He seemed excited, too. I thought the world was turned upside down.

  I called an engineer, a plumber, a roofing specialist to come see the house. I got estimates for installing electricity. I took photographs, pasted them together, and FedExed them to Michael, along with the estimates and every shred of information I could find about Louviers. I talked at length with Bernard, who assured me that there were no complications for a foreigner buying property in France. He said he would introduce us to his banker, and that would help expedite matters should we decide to buy it.

  Michael and I talked, we debated, we each agreed we didn’t have the money to undertake the project. And then, with Bernard’s help, we decided to buy it.

  I was beside myself. With excitement. With dread. With panic. With desire. My dream to own property in France—a dream I had never actually articulated, even to myself—had come true. It didn’t matter that we were moving to France on a wing and a prayer. It didn’t matter that we were always seeming to scrape by. It didn’t matter that life in France was bound to be more expensive than life in the United States with sky-high prices for everything from gasoline to farm-raised chickens. And it didn’t matter that we would be so far from our families and American friends. Never big on paying attention to reality, I definitely put on my soft-focus lenses this time. If Michael thought we could do it, then we could.

  We made an offer on the house, which was immediately accepted. I met the owner, who was a small nervously sad woman, and signed the compromis de vente, or the contract to buy the house. Bernard was true to his word, taking time to help with all the paperwork and signing where necessary. On my last night before going back to the United States we celebrated. Christian and Nadine came for dinner bringing a dish of richly flavored braised pigeons from their farm, where they raised eight hundred of the squeaky birds for local restaurants.

  Edith and Bernard opened champagne. Christian made a toast. “To Suzanne and to Michael, who have just bought a house in the Marseille of the north,” he said with an evil smile. “That your car doesn’t get stolen nor your windows broken.” My heart stopped. Marseille, a lovely city, nonetheless has a reputation of being full of voyoux, hoodlums. Was there something I should know? They all burst out laughing. “He’s just trying to scare you,” Nadine said.

  I left the following morning for Paris, where I was to spend a few days before returning home. I met an American friend for coffee and showed her the picture of the house. “It’s gorgeous. I’ve lived here fifteen years and always wanted to buy a house,” she exclaimed. “How did you find the perfect house in one week?” I told her I didn’t know. I was in a dream, pinching myself. We were really going to do it, I thought.

  I returned home and Michael and I prepared for our move. We loved our house in Maine and decided not to sell but to rent it. After all, we imagined, after two to three years in France we might return and, meanwhile, it was a good investment.

  We were busy packing and organizing, trying to decide what to take and what to leave. After doing comparative studies of moving costs, we decided we would bring the bare minimum—my kitchen equipment, which included a collection of heavy copper pots I’d amassed over the years, knives, baking dishes, scales, and dozens of other small necessities in the life of a cook and food writer. We would also bring my office chair (a luxuriously comfortable one), file cabinets, and computers. We would bring Michael’s most essential tools, a futon couch, Joe’s stuffed animals, and as many of his toys and treasures as we could fit. We decided to send our Subaru station wagon over and gave it a complete overhaul.

  An American friend of mine (also a food writer) was moving back to the States from Paris and she made a list of things she wanted to sell, which included lamps and bookcases, chairs and a table, and an impressive array of coffee grinders that she used to grind spices. We bought what we thought we would need and she threw in many things she didn’t want to sell but didn’t want to ship back either, and arranged to have it all moved out to Edith’s. Yet another friend, warning me of how expensive everything was in France, listed all of the things in her attic that she was planning to give away but that she would save for us if we needed them. With all of that we figured we could get to work immediately. What we didn’t have we would gradually acquire.

  We sold or gave away just about everything we weren’t going to take with us, which accentuated the feeling that we were embarking on a huge adventure, a new life. Joe observed all the activity and it made him nervous. Children don’t generally like change and he likes it less than most—I had to scheme to get rid of anything belonging to him, for the minute he would see something leaving he’d say, in his two-year-old English, “I love that, I just love it!” and try to grab it.

  Meantime, Edith and I talked regularly. She described the garden, the size of the apples on the gnarled old tree in the yard. The hydrangeas turned out to be purple, one of my favorite colors, the roses were pink, red, and white. She and I planned the garden and talked endlessly about the house. I would report what she’d said to Michael, and then he and I would plan and scheme some more. He spent a lot of time with paper and pencil sketching out ideas for the house, all based on the photographs I’d taken. We never talked about the financial aspect of it, which seemed daunting. Our attitude was “It will all work out.”

  We spent the month of September 1993 visiting our families and our friends on the West Coast as a sort of farewell, then we embarked for France, landing at Charles de Gaulle/Roissy Airport where Edith met us. We piled into her VW van and she flew down the autoroute toward Louviers at 150 kilometers an hour, the equivalent of about 100 mph. I looked at Michael who raised his eyebrows. It was great to be back in France!

  Both Michael and I were so excited we could hardly sit still. Joe, a boy who doesn’t like to miss anything, had been awake for days, it seemed, as we took him to and fro to see family and friends. He hadn’t slept much during the twelve-hour plane trip either, but once the van started moving he conked out, draped over his father’s knees. I looked at his pale, chubby, toddler’s face. We knew he was upset at the move because he didn’t quite understand what was happenin
g. We hoped it wouldn’t take him long to adjust.

  Our first stop was Louviers and the house, for Michael’s first look. He extracted the still-sleeping Joe from his knees and laid him tenderly on the backseat. Edith passed the house keys over to him and waited in the car with Joe while Michael and I went to look. The house was as beautiful as I’d remembered. A large red and white vendu, sold, sign hung over the door, physical proof that the compromis de vente still held good. It gave me a sense of ownership, which helped override the sense of panic I felt as I approached the front door.

  Michael opened it. I held my breath as I walked with him through the rooms. We didn’t talk. We were both too busy looking. I breathed a little easier as I looked at the curved staircase in the foyer—it was still as graceful as I recalled. Michael walked through the door into what I supposed had been the kitchen, a high-ceilinged room with a big window overlooking the back garden, an angled back wall, and a graceful fireplace—it was so filled with dusty antique furniture and piles of newspapers, buckets of stones and wood and other rubbish that it was hard to get a real sense of it. We poked our heads in the other rooms on the ground floor, all of which looked as if small bombs had exploded in them.

  Michael banged on walls, scraped surfaces, looked in nooks and crannies, wiggled doors, opened and closed windows, all things that wouldn’t have occurred to me to do. At the best of times Michael is a man of few words. He was absolutely silent, intent on his inspection.

  I’d truly forgotten what a mess the house was in. I’m not sure I ever really noticed. Even now, as I stumbled over chunks of stone, tiptoed around holes in the floor, and realized that there wasn’t one single room out of the fifteen in the house that could really pass for livable, I felt an excitement bubbling inside. It was a blank slate, ours to re-create.