On Rue Tatin

by Susan Herrmann Loomis

The crisp fall weather outside meant the house was cold inside, and as I focused on the holes, the grit, the lath showing through the walls, it seemed worse than I’d remembered. What had I been thinking? What if Michael hated it? What if I’d made a huge mistake? These were questions I was to become extremely familiar with over the next years, as I watched Michael struggle not only with learning the French vocabulary involved in building, but with unfamiliar materials, dimensions, customs, and traditions.

  As we emerged from the last room, the one above the curious little “apartment” that the owner kept, which was even shabbier than it had been the first time I’d seen it, and made our way down the many sets of stairs, Michael’s blue eyes absolutely blazed with excitement.

  “I love it,” he said. I let out my breath. We walked hand in hand into the garden—it was overgrown and messy, but the old apple and pear trees that graced it were unmistakably charming, and the church loomed over all.

  While we stood there looking at the house with its boarded-up window on the ground floor, its lovely timbering, and the bell tower, an elderly lady parked her bicycle by the front door and went off to do her shopping. Pigeons cooed from under the eaves. We were caught up in the magic of owning such glorious real estate, of having a concrete project to work on. I was in a state of bliss to think that for the foreseeable future we would be in France, would come to understand its rituals and traditions, would no doubt make new friends and deepen the wonderful friendships we already had. And the thought of the food and the flavors that would be ours! I couldn’t wait for the adventure to begin.

  We drove on to Le Vaudreuil, for we were staying with the Leroys for our first few days. As I walked inside I was enveloped with the familiar aroma of lavender and fresh thyme that has always pervaded her house, and I felt I was home.

  We hauled in our baggage and settled Joe to sleep on a couch in the living room, which doubles as Edith’s painting studio. Finished and half-finished portraits and still-lifes in Edith’s characteristic vibrant colors, as well as a collection of paintings by other artists, provide the decor; the pleasant scent of oil paints the ambience.

  While Edith built a fire in the kitchen fireplace I made coffee, got out butter and honey, and cut the baguettes we had stopped to buy in the village into lengths for tartines. Edith’s children were in school, Bernard was at work in his office across the street, the house was quiet. All was right with the world, I thought, as I dipped my butter-and-honey-slathered tartine into my bowl of stiff black coffee before biting into it. We talked over our strategy for the next few days, then simply enjoyed this taste of France. Michael relaxed in an easy chair and fell asleep, while Edith filled me in on the local gossip.

  That evening we had a celebratory dinner with Edith, Bernard, and their now four children, and the following day Michael went to the house to poke around and I took Joe to look at the little house in Le Vaudreuil that I’d rented over the phone from the town mayor. We figured we’d need it for two to three months, the time it would take Michael to install enough electricity and plumbing to make the house in Louviers livable.

  Set on the back boundary of the mayor’s garden, it looked like a little timbered doll’s house. Its main room downstairs had a picture window looking out at the languidly flowing river Eure. The corner kitchen was adequate, the small bathroom functional, the two bedrooms upstairs charming. The only thing it needed was a telephone.

  I spoke with Florence Labelle, the mayor’s wife and our landlady, about the phone. I had asked her if we could install it before we arrived, but she couldn’t see the necessity for that. “We’ll do all that when you get here.” True to her word, she called the phone company directly. No doubt because she was the mayor’s wife they arrived later that day, but the news wasn’t good. They couldn’t install a phone in the back building because it wasn’t a legal residence. To Florence, this didn’t seem a problem. “You can use my phone when you need to,” she said kindly, not realizing how vital a phone is to my work.

  I panicked, just a little, explaining to Florence why I had to have a phone, how I had a great deal of research to do not just for the cookbook I was about to write, but for all the articles I had contracted to do. She had a private conference with the France Telecom representative, and the next thing I knew a date was set to install the wiring and hook up the phone. “So it will be all right?” I asked. “It’s not illegal?” She looked at me. “Bof!” she said, pushing back her hair. “All we have to do is trim a few tree limbs and not mention anything.”

  Michael returned from the house in Louviers with stars in his eyes. He’d spent the morning giving it a closer look. “It’s so beautiful,” he said. “It’s incredible.” For the rest of the afternoon he sat at a table in Edith’s house making drawings, chewing on his pencil, calculating.

  Our third day in France we signed the papers which made us the legal owners of 1, rue Tatin, in Louviers. We did this in front of the notaire, a sort of lawyer who handles real estate deals. A portly, officious young man, he greeted us in the waiting room and showed us down a long, wood-paneled hallway to his large, stuffy office. He abstractly shuffled papers on his desk while we awaited the owner. Michael and I gazed around at the stuffed game birds high atop his bookcases that looked as if they’d been there a hundred years. So did the stacked books, for they were covered with a thin veneer of dust. I knew a lot about him for he was Edith and Bernard’s notaire, and his father had been Edith’s parents’ notaire.

  The owner and her daughter finally arrived, breaking the silence. We shook hands all around then sat formally while the notaire handed us each a copy of the mortgage contract. He called us to attention and proceeded to read it aloud in a slow, excruciatingly formal manner. My thoughts wandered to all I had ever heard about notaires, who are incredibly powerful figures in France. No one could ever tell me what they actually do, but I did know they spent a lot of time and made a lot of money doing just this sort of thing, drawing up lengthy contracts then reading them aloud.

  His drone became mere background noise. My eyes were crossing. I looked at Michael and his were almost shut. Suddenly, the notaire’s voice came alive.

  “You must pay special attention to this part,” he said. We sat up. He began reading a passage about the church’s easement of our property. “You are sure you understand this part?” he asked. I hadn’t really been listening, so I asked him to repeat it. It had to do with the right of the priest and his domestics to walk through our property to get to his house, which was behind ours. The notaire stared at us. “I just want you to understand that this is a condition of buying this house,” he said. “You cannot change this. It is immutable.” He said it gravely, pushing us to understand the implications of it. I looked at the owner. “Oh,” she said quickly. “It’s not a problem, no one ever walks through.” Reassured, Michael and I told the notaire we understood and wanted to go through with the purchase. We would have many occasions in the future to think back to that moment and wonder if the notaire was trying to protect or warn us.

  Finally he finished reading the contract. We all initialed each page of each copy, then signed it in several different places. Above each signature we had to write lu et approuvé, read and approved, and a whole paragraph of other words all of which were intended to slow us down, I assumed, in case we suddenly got cold feet and didn’t want to buy the house, since it took forever. It seemed so old-fashioned and gracious to be writing things by hand on a cold, formal mortgage.

  We finally finished and the house was ours. We shook hands all around again, agreed to let the owner store her furniture in the house until she could have it removed, took our keys. The notaire said he was at our disposal if we needed him, then we shook hands again and walked out into the chilly sunlight. We stopped at a café for a celebratory café exprès, then hurried to the house.

  We stood for awhile in the garden, just looking. The sun shed a lovely, golden glow on the house. I breathed deeply for the first time since we had agreed to bu
y it.

  A young man who worked at the aumônerie, or parish hall whose property abuts ours, emerged from the building and came up to us. “Are you the new owners?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, expecting a welcome. “Well,” he said dourly, “if you decide to sell the house the church wants to buy it. They had hoped to buy it. They didn’t realize it was sold.” Then he walked away. Nice greeting. Michael and I looked at each other and promptly forgot him as we went inside the house to explore some more.

  We walked through every inch of it, stepping over the rubble and around the holes, talking about which room would be ours, which would be Joe’s. We stopped in one room to admire the eight-sided terra-cotta tiles, or tommettes, on the floor, and we stroked the wood beams in the walls. We opened a skinny hallway cupboard and found old books and jars. My heart started beating. Maybe we would find treasures in this house.

  After we reached the first floor we walked up another short staircase to a landing from which two other staircases departed, one around the corner to the left, and one immediately to the right. After exploring the two rooms on the landing, which were in truly lamentable shape—the walls and ceilings were covered with graffiti, rubble was strewn on the floor from a fireplace that had been ripped out, everything was filthy—we went up the narrow stairway to the right. What greeted us was even worse. We had seen it all of course, but now that it was ours we really took it in. There were two rooms that were complete shells, the ceilings rotted out so we could see the roof. The windows were either broken or hanging ajar, lath showed through the walls, and a fine black soot covered everything. Amidst all of this what struck me was an odd little window in the wall between the rooms. We tried to figure out what it was for. I guessed one room was a kitchen, the other a dining room, but it wasn’t large enough to pass a plate through. Then I thought maybe it was for confessions, but that didn’t really make sense—there was no screen in the window to hide the priest from the parishioner. To this day we haven’t figured it out, and as yet no one has been able to tell us what it was.

  What Michael first noticed was the brand-new waste pipe that had been installed in the landing. “That will make putting in a bathroom easy,” he said with a laugh.

  In all there were fifteen rooms in the house, though the two dilapidated ones were not in the architect’s drawing that the owner had given us. Evidently if the rooms didn’t appear on the architect’s drawings then they wouldn’t be included in the tax assessment.

  With all the rooms, closets, and landings there were, it seemed, hundreds of doors in the house. They were gorgeous and some of them, as the owner had explained to us, were very old and valuable. I remember her pointing to one and saying it dated to 1750. Many had tiny metal plaques with the letters N.D. on them, which I was sure stood for Notre Dame, our lady. All had large, old-fashioned keys in the locks, and I knew that one of my first jobs would be to label them. I could just see Joe, who was almost three, having a field day taking out the keys and mixing them up.

  Michael was eager to get to work. Before he could, however, the place needed to be cleaned out, for there was a great deal of junk and rubble in it. “The realtor offered to bring a dump truck over and clean out the house,” I said. “I think we should have him do it.”

  Michael looked at me as if I were crazy. “There’s got to be something of value here or he would never have offered,” he said. “That statue, for instance.” We rushed around to the back of the house where we’d seen a plaster statue of an angel holding a child by the hand. She was still there. We hastily moved her inside. Then we walked down the stone steps into the cave, and turned on a powerful flashlight. The dusty bottles we’d noticed were all there. We brought several upstairs into the light. Each was a different hue, from celadon green to a wispy blue, and all were hand-blown. “These are what he wanted,” Michael said. “These bottles will put Joe through college.”

  The following day we moved ourselves into the tiny house in Le Vaudreuil. It was ideal. Florence and her husband, Edouard, with their two children, Marine, a girl of about eight, and Quentin, a boy of about twelve, were the perfect landlords. Florence insisted that Joe use the swing set and sandbox in her garden, as well as the toy room that took up an entire floor in her house and which Marine used only very occasionally. She seemed delighted to have us living in her back garden. The only cloud was her dog, Diva, a golden Labrador with a vicious temperament. Florence kept her in the house, but if she ever forgot and left her outside, the minute we showed ourselves in the garden she hurled herself in our direction, hackles up, teeth bared.

  The dog aside, those first months were idyllic. Michael went to Louviers each day to work on the house. I stayed in Le Vaudreuil and worked on my book. We had arranged for our favorite baby-sitter from Maine to join us for several months and she amused Joe, taking him on walks and bicycle rides. Michael was excited and full of plans for the house. I reveled in the beginning stages of my book, and I loved living in Le Vaudreuil, seeing Edith all the time, being part of village life on a daily basis.

  Le Vaudreuil is a charming, well-to-do village of 5,000 people. The River Eure runs through it, and its main street ends in a small square with a café on each side, a pharmacy and a boulangerie, a tiny épicerie with basic supplies and fresh vegetables, and two small restaurants offering simple country fare, from steack frites to various preparations “à la crème,” in true Norman fashion. Tiny streets lined with quaint stone houses wind away from the square, and there is a church on either end of town, with parishioners staunchly devoted to one or the other.

  Louviers, which is about five kilometers and a ten-minute drive from Le Vaudreuil by a small country road, was once an important textile town and still has one textile factory to show for it, as well as a series of canals diverted from the River Eure, which were used in the textile industry. It is known for its extremes of government. When we first arrived, the mayor was a woman known for her conservative and rather bungling ways. Shortly after we arrived elections resulted in an administration that leans increasingly far left and has a permanent overdraft in its bank accounts, primarily because it has as one of its mandates to provide the citizenry with regular music and theater performances, which it offers free of charge.

  Louviers also offers many services. There are dozens of banks, real-estate offices, insurance companies, travel agencies, and a small, gracious hospital. The main church—our “cathedral”—is in the center of town, with another Catholic church tucked into a neighborhood less than a half mile away. Cafés line its streets, and restaurants and pizzerias are dotted throughout the main part of town. There is a small, country supermarket in the center of town, and two huge modern supermarkets on its periphery. One can live very easily in Louviers without needing to go anywhere else.

  Before Joseph was born, when I visited Edith and Bernard in Le Vaudreuil, friends and villagers who greeted me looked at my stomach before looking in my eyes. “Not pregnant yet?” they would ask. To them it was unthinkable that a married woman would wait so long to have a child.

  Like most Americans, Michael and I worked around the clock. We wanted children, but felt we had time, though I did occasionally fear I would be like the woman in the cartoon who, at about age forty, exclaims, “Oh no! I forgot to have children.” I used to look at my French friends, most of whom had at least three children and were my age or a few years older, and marvel at them. Through them I realized what a different culture we lived in. To them, having children was what one did—there was no weighing of advantages or disadvantages, no sense as in America that they needed to develop a career first, no hesitation about how a child would fit into their life. Instead they simply had them, one after the other, and managed their personal and professional lives around them.

  Admittedly, France is set up for small children. Working mothers are given a lot of time off to have children, and a good deal of financial support from the state as well. There are many options for their babies when they do go back to work—either a sta
te-run crèche, which is like a day care center but more personal and set up for tiny babies and very young children, or a nounou, a baby-sitter, who generally works at her home and takes in no more than three children at a time.

  At age three, children start school, and they can stay there from 8:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. each day if parents desire, as lunch, snacks, and nap time are provided.

  When I finally, at age 35, had Joe the news was greeted with great joy by our friends in France. When I first brought him to visit, at eight months, Edith’s brother Christian, the architect, who has four children, said, “Now that you’ve started you have to continue.”

  When we moved to France in 1993 Joe immediately became the chouchou, or pet, of every gathering we attended, since our friends all had much older children. With his headful of curly red hair and his round apple cheeks, he was a novelty.

  As we settled into living in Le Vaudreuil I realized how different our child-rearing was from that of our French friends. No one could understand why we didn’t immediately put Joe in day care, a thought that never crossed our minds. How could we? He didn’t understand a word of French, for one thing. For another, we’d just moved and he was unsure of everything.

  Edith couldn’t believe how much time we spent with him. “Why do you do that?” she would ask. “It’s not good for him. He’s going to get too used to having you around. Put him in day care. Of course he’ll cry, but crying is necessary. It will make him stronger.” I looked at her. I looked at Joe. We did spend a lot of time with him, and he was upset right now, which meant we spent even more time with him. He occasionally woke at night crying inconsolably, and during the day his face would suddenly fall as he asked, bewildered, “Where is my house with all my coats?” He didn’t like being the center of attention wherever we went. He didn’t like the French custom of kissing. He was happy at home with us or with the baby-sitter, and he liked going to Edith’s, but he became shy and worried whenever we went to a new place. All those friends back home who had said that as long as we were happy he’d be happy were, I realized, talking through their hats.