On Thursday mornings we almost always go to market. The only decision we must make is which one to go to. Our local town of Monflanquin has had a Thursday morning market since 1256. The one at Libos, some ten kilometres distant, is not quite so old but is much larger, the whole town centre being closed to traffic and some hundred stalls being ready for business before eight o’clock. It is a cornucopia of seasonal fruit and flowers, vegetables, gleaming fish straight from Bordeaux, piles of exotic mushrooms, hundreds of cheeses, every variety of honey, spices, nuts, and olives; paella cooking on the spot in a massive pan, sizzling doughnuts, cures for rheumatism and lethal knives labelled saigne lapin.
One morning I noticed an unusual sight. Past the homemade goats’ cheese and the lady who sells quails’ eggs, at the very end of the market, stood a large, swarthy woman, the table before her heaped with a jumble of old clothes. Local ladies eyed her sideways and hurried by. Farmers’ wives carrying boxes of chicks stared uncomprehendingly at the crumpled pile. I looked at her crudely drawn notice.
TOUT A 5 FRANCS
I have always had a passion for secondhand clothes. To me they are like theatrical costumes. Someone else chose them, wore them and then discarded them. Who? What were they like? At 50p a garment how could I resist? The stall holder smiled revealing several gold teeth and with a large brown hand she turned the clothes and I heard for the first time the expression ‘Fouillez Madame, fouillez.’ That was it. I was hooked.
To begin with they were not, of course, English clothes. There were unfamiliar styles and fabrics with French, Dutch, German and occasionally Italian labels. In minutes I had found an Indian red velour skirt the exact shade of a favourite jacket brought in a sale at ‘Bus Stop’ years before. It was fully lined with the zip going right up the waistband as with most French skirts. I could hardly wait to get it home. Would it fit? It did, perfectly.
I washed it and wore it a few days later. Claudette admired it. ‘Pas mauvais,’ I agreed, ‘pour cinq francs.’ She shook her head and laughingly corrected me. Would Ruth never get her numbers right?
‘Non. non. non!’ she cried ‘Cent francs.’
I persisted, ‘Cinq francs.’ I held up five fingers and her jaw dropped.
‘C’est vrai? Mais…òu?’ And that was how I learned what secondhand clothes are called in France; la friperie. What a wonderfully frivolous name!
Since that day the trade in secondhand clothing has grown rapidly. There are ever more stalls and la friperie has become a harmless addiction. Claudette sometimes comes with me to the largest which is held every other Tuesday in the exquisite town of Villeneuve-sur-Lot. As early as we can, like a couple of conspirators, we hurtle down the leafy lanes to market. The normal buying of provisions over, and the car loaded, we are then free to indulge our fantaisie. Free to hurry down past the war memorial where St George is permanently slaying the dragon, to the far end of the wide, flower-decked boulevard. There the coloured umbrellas ripple in the morning breeze and the twenty or so stalls are in full swing, many of them run by Algerians. Some entrepreneurs have vans going twice a week to Holland where the clothes, collected from all over Europe, are cleaned, baled and sold by weight. The turnover is rapid. The days when ladies looked askance at secondhand clothes are long since gone, and many French women are keen to clothe themselves and their families for a tenth of the normally high prices.
It is the system of pricing that helps make la friperie such fun. There is very little grading according to quality so that, for example, all the skirts on a stall will be marked 30 francs but they will range from a garish horror in multi-coloured crimplene to a fine, wool-georgette silk-lined model with a Swiss label. Some stall holders don’t even separate the garments. Everything is in a great heap and it is there that the best bargains can sometimes be found. I bought an elegant shirtwaister, unsure until I checked in a German dictionary that it was 75% raw silk. It washes like a dream and cost me a pound. All you need to learn are sizes and fabric names in French, Italian and German, and it helps to carry a tape measure in case the labels are missing.
With prices like these you can take a chance on the most outlandish garments, and if they don’t fit tear them up. They are cheaper than dusters and much more fun. All our visitors indulge and on our return from market, after we have unloaded the wonderful selection of seasonal delights that make shopping here such a joy, we always finish with a fashion parade from la friperie.
When Adam brought Cas, my daughter-in-love, for the first time she came back with six carrier bags crammed with clothes. He watched her pirouetting past him in a succession of garments, an olive-green jump suit, an outsize red and white striped shirt, a blue velour dressing gown with a hood, and a duster coat in black moiré taffeta. ‘The coat alone would have cost me a fortune in King’s Road Chelsea,’ she crowed. Adam grew paler by the minute. They were on a tight budget. Eventually, the parade finished, she picked up the clothes and headed for the washing machine, calling triumphantly over her shoulder. ‘Relax! Tout pour fifteen quid!’ The best bargain I have bought so far is an apparently unworn almond green cashmere sweater for a pound. But of course there’s always the next friperie.
That summer, when we first arrived, we were surprised to see, hanging on a wire at the entrance to our track a row of furry pelts. Too large to be moles, we wondered what they were. Not for long, our village was agog with the great plague of ragondins. As they were described they grew larger and fiercer. What could they be? Philippe fetched the dictionary; coypu. None of us had ever seen one. Were they dangerous? No, well at least they thought not. They were reluctant to spoil the drama entirely. Then what exactly was the problem?
Grandpa explained that the ragondins were destroying the ponds and lakes by making huge nesting holes in the banks which allowed the water to escape. Now we understood the general consternation. Water for both crops and animals is at a premium during the long hot summers. As in England, coypu had once been farmed for their fur, nutria, which had been popular. But to have perfect pelts they demanded a great deal of feeding and as the fur became increasingly out of fashion the farmers of Savoy simply released them. ‘Et maintenant ils viennent dans notre Sud-Ouest,’ everyone complained bitterly.
Each day new sightings were reported. At this farm and that another one had been shot, another had got away. They bred faster than rabbits, we were told. One morning we were down at the farm when Grandpa returned triumphant. ‘Venez voir,’ he shouted. There, laid out in the courtyard for all to see was a dead ragondin. Large as a well-fed cat, with two huge bright orange front teeth which protruded over its lower jaw, it was not an attractive sight. And such a thick strong rat-like tail! A small crowd gathered, neighbouring children arrived on bicycles and inevitably someone enquired whether or not it was edible. Grandpa shook his head. ‘Ce n’est qu’un gros rat,’ he said, picking it up by its tail and looking pleased with himself. The children shrieked and backed away.
The weather became hotter. The maize in le grand champ grew, it seemed, by inches every day. Raymond looked at it anxiously. ‘If the ragondin gets in there she’ll do a lot of damage,’ he muttered.
‘Do they eat maize?’ we asked. ‘Bien sûr!’ By this time they were rumoured to eat almost everything. One morning M. Girot, our other neighbour through whose farm we had so carelessly driven on the day we had found Bel-Air, stopped his tractor outside the house. Apart from Raymond, he and his sons are the only people who ever drive past.
‘Bonjour.’
‘Bonjour.’
‘Ça va?’ ‘Ça va.’
‘Vous avez vu?’
‘Quoi?’
‘Le ragondin!’
There was one in our pond he declared. Had he seen it? No, but he’d seen the tracks. We went to look. Sure enough, his farmer’s eyes had noticed the round tunnels through the long thick grass. ‘There and there, look!’ he said. It was undeniable. What to do? ‘Il faut le tuer,’ he said simply and got back onto his tractor.
The pond
is about a hundred yards from the house. That evening as we sat watching from the garden a large ripple disturbed the water. Through binoculars we saw her clearly. Why her I do not know. The great teeth were still curious and repulsive but in the water she was graceful and a joy to watch. As she dived to pull up the weeds with those specially designed teeth the strong thick tail lashed up to balance her. Not as sleek as an otter she nevertheless had her own appeal and we were loth to destroy her. We took to creeping along to the pond and sometimes we got close enough to see her slide into the water from the far bank.
The next Sunday we were to entertain toute la famille for lunch. I was busy preparing a menu, searching for extra dishes to amuse and intrigue them. This time it was Scotch eggs, which they had never seen before, and slices of pear stuffed with Roquefort and sprinkled with poppy seeds. I had intended to try this the previous holiday but had discovered that edible poppy seeds were unheard of here. I remember the smart grocer in Villeneuve looking astonished at such a request and suggesting that I might find them in the Agrilot where they do indeed sell seeds, but for planting, not cooking.
It was another very hot day. The family arrived, as usual, dead on twelve-thirty. Claudette brought a huge bowl of strawberries which she had just picked and Raymond a bottle of his own dessert wine to drink with them. Grandpa however, when he appeared, chugging up the track with Grandma in their 2CV, brought a shotgun and handed it to Mike. ‘C’est pour le ragondin,’ he roared. Mike took the gun and did not answer. ‘Otherwise I shall set traps,’ said the old man, taking his usual place at the head of the table.
The thought of that beautiful, sleek body helpless and bleeding in a trap was out of the question as well he knew, and about three-thirty, when we had finished eating, Mike took the gun. He and Raymond went to sit on a grassy bank near the pond. In a post prandial stupor it was difficult to concentrate on the dark water. Patterned by fierce sunlight filtering through overhanging branches, it was alive with dragonflies and water boatmen. A movement caught Mike’s eye and, turning, he saw le ragondin running down the field towards the pond. He nudged Raymond who had by now actually dozed off. ‘Elle est là.’ he whispered.
Raymond shook himself awake. ‘Tire, tire,’ he hissed urgently. Aiming slightly ahead of the running animal, Mike fired. To his astonishment she stopped, rolled over, quivered and was still. Mike’s sadness was eased by having killed her outright with one shot. His reputation as a marksman was high in the village but our ragondin was no more.
There was an abundance of greengages that summer. Claudette, Fernande, Grandma and I sat in the shade under the hangar cutting up fruit for jam until our thumbs were sore. Fernande and Claudette went to pick pears and Grandma to cut lettuces for supper and I was left to watch the jam. The frothy mixture seethed gently in a great copper pan on a large iron trivet. The outsize gas ring flickered and flared. When, from time to time, I stirred the jam with a metre-long black wooden baton, which had apparently belonged to Grandpa’s mother, it bubbled fiercely. Everything was so extra large that I felt like a character in the giant’s kitchen in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Satisfied that it was not burning, I lay the baton across the pan and lazily watched a narrow band of sweet scum like an encrusted bracelet, dry a few inches from the end. As the scented steam rose, the cooing of the turtle-dove in her cage merged with the gentle bubbling of the jam. Two flies crawled across the table. The dog looked up, stretched his front legs, yawned and went back to sleep.
I wondered whether Anaïs had sat like this up at Bel-Air stirring the jam. Perhaps she had left Alaïs to mind it while she went to cut the lettuces. From the rente viagère contract that Raymond had shown me I now knew that she had been born in 1871 in a village some ten miles away but that her husband Justin, the eldest of three sons, was born at Bel-Air in 1866. When the youngest boy was barely five years old their mother had died leaving their father, one Sieur Pierre Costes, to bring up the three children. He was described as an ‘ancien tisserand’, and I wondered if those crude and worm-eaten tools for the teasing out of wool that we had found in the attic, had once belonged to him.
In the hat-box, the contents of which were becoming ever more fascinating, were some fragile letters in an elegant, spidery hand, addressed to M. Costes and dated February and May 1876. They suggest that his wife may have already been in poor health. The first letter is in reply to M. Costes’s request for a consultation by letter from la somnambulla – an old word for a clairvoyant. This, it is explained, is not possible because she does not give written advice for fear of being brought before a tribunal. The writer, a cousin living in Bordeaux, suggests that M. Costes should write again, enclosing a lock of hair which he will take personally to her. In the second letter he writes in detail of the visit and lists the prescribed treatment.
1) One tablet of blancard each morning and two at night.
2) A tisane made from the roots of wild strawberry and linseed to be taken half an hour after the tablets.
3) A demi-enema every day for fifteen days.
A diet of good meat stock, made from undercooked mutton or beef, and vintage wine to drink – ‘because she has need of blood’. On the 22nd of May he writes again asking his cousin for a progress report. He warns him against using any other treatment and says he will warn him when another lock of hair is needed, the present one sufficing for a second consultation. He ends his most concerned letter, ‘Recevez les salutations de celui qui reste votre ami pour la vie.’ If the remedy was for Justin’s mother it does not seem to have helped for she died three years later.
Anaïs was eighteen when, in 1889, she and Justin were married. Old Sieur Pierre Costes then made over the property to the young couple but retained the life interest and the revenue, Justin working the land. The farm was much smaller and with many debts outstanding and so Anaïs continued in service. I have been told that at one time she worked in a large house which is just visible on the brow of the hill. Did she look down and wish that Bel-Air was really hers, I wonder. Alaïs was born three years later. Did she take him with her to work or leave him for the old man to look after, and how old was he when he caught polio? No one can tell me.
Although handicapped, Alaïs was able to work. In her account book for 1910 his mother proudly records her eighteen-year-old son giving her 50 francs. She seems to have spent it all on him buying three shirts, a jacket and trousers and a pair of brodequins, a kind of lace-up boot. Old Sieur Pierre Costes lived on until 1912 when Justin paid 800 francs to each of his brothers and at last, he and Anaïs were master and mistress of Bel-Air. It was then that they had the little house enlarged, building on the differently roofed section with its two bedrooms below and extended attic above. They must have made many plans together, long-term plans as farmers must do, but within two years the horror of the Great War would overturn them all. Alaïs, handicapped though he was, would be drafted into the reserve and, the cruellest irony of all, Justin, spared the battle would, in 1918, die of a heart attack.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On Sundays, if we are not eating chez Bertrand or they with us, we like to go some ten kilometres away to the village of Lacapelle Biron. On the borders of Lot-et-Garonne, it was created almost by accident by a long forgotten Marquis of the nearby château of Biron. Suffering from both asthma and gout, this unfortunate nobleman could not bear the noisy market which was held each Monday beneath his walls. ‘Send them somewhere else,’ he wheezed and so, taking their name with them, the traders of Biron moved down the hill and across the fields to the ancient hamlet of Lacapelle. The two names joined together, the village flourished and Monday is still market day.
It is essential to book at the Restaurant Palissy which is named after Bernard Palissy, renaissance potter, scientist and philosopher. Born of humble parents in the next village of St Avit, he spent years researching his glazes, becoming so impoverished that he was reduced to burning his furniture and floorboards to fire his kiln. For Catherine de Medici he built a grotto in her Tuileries G
ardens, decorating it with enamelled lizards, toads and serpents. He travelled widely and wrote on a wide range of subjects but always begged his students not to listen to those scientists who sat all day propounding theories. Always a craftsman he wrote ‘with all the theory in the world you can make nothing, not even a shoe. Practice must engender theory.’ He became a Huguenot and eventually Royal patronage could protect him no longer. He was imprisoned in the Bastille where, at the age of eighty-one, he died. There is a statue of him in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, a gentle, scholarly figure holding one of his famous dishes, a tiny creature curled up inside.
Outside the restaurant which bears his name the tables are always crowded with customers taking their aperitifs. ‘We have laid a hundred and seventy places today,’ announces M. Allo, the head waiter, as he greets us. Teeth flashing, M. Allo plays his role as though Feydeau himself had written it, glorying in every detail. Perhaps it is because he is really the local postman and only has two performances at the weekend. Otherwise he must tear across the countryside in his yellow van. Today all that is forgotten. Resplendent in a dazzling white, starched jacket, head to one side, he whirls and weaves between the tables at ever increasing speed. ‘J’arrive. J’arrive!’ he calls, sweat already trickling down his florid face. He loves every moment.
A House in the Sunflowers Page 13