While Ed indulges in a chocolate walnut tart, I step inside a cheese heaven. Hundreds of artisan cheeses. The women who work here are dressed impeccably in white, like nurses presiding over newborns. One waves a branch of leaves so that no flies land on one of her charges. She looks mythic. Why was there no goddess of cheese?
To surprise Ed, I buy a round wooden box of epoisse, buttery, runny, tangy, and local. Its pert orange rind, the nurse/goddess tells me, comes from the marc it’s bathed in after it ages for a month. I select two little goat’s nubbins, too, both the size of my thumbprint. We find bread and return quickly to our shabby manse. Ed empties the rowboat and dries it with the house’s scruffy bath towels. We row upriver to a fenny area and spread a cloth on the middle seat. If the cheese is right, the bread is right, and the wine—this a Pouilly-Fuissé—is right, then a floating dinner with the boat resting on a glissade of light eases us happily into darkening twilight. We propose a few toasts. First I raise my glass to Colette.
As we hoist the rowboat out of the water, Ed says, “When are we going to Saint-Sauveur? We’re not far away.”
He knows that I’ve saved the trip to Colette’s childhood town, savoring the anticipation. Saint-Sauveur—the crucible. “I’m ready. Let’s go tomorrow.”
Standing in front of 8, rue de Colette (formerly rue de l’Hospice), with her inspired, passionate descriptions in mind, I confront a tall dun-colored house with white shutters. It looks neglected. A doctor’s name is above the doorbell, which I imagine ringing—would it be possible to see Colette’s room—but don’t. She wrote:
A large solemn house, rather forbidding, with its shrill bell and its carriage entrance with a huge bolt like an ancient dungeon, a house that smiled only on its garden side. The back, invisible to passers-by, was a sun trap, swathed in a mantle of wisteria and bignonia too heavy for the trellis of worn ironwork, which sagged in the middle like a hammock and provided shade for the little flagged terrace and the threshold of the sitting room.
Her perspective: the child hiding while her mother looked for her. “Where are the children?” Sido calls, never looking up into the branches of the walnut where gleamed the “pale, pointed face of a child who lay stretched like a tomcat along a big branch and who never uttered a word.” Colette interrupts her description long enough to ask herself, “Is it worthwhile, I wonder, seeking for adequate words to describe the rest?” She then continues in a lyric key:
I shall never be able to conjure up the splendor that adorns, in my memory, the ruddy festoons of an autumn vine borne down by its own weight and clinging despairingly to some branch of the fir trees. And the massive lilacs, whose compact flowers—blue in the shade and purple in the sunshine—withered so soon, stifled by their own exuberance. The lilacs long since dead will not be revived at my bidding, any more than the terrifying moonlight—silver, quicksilver, leaden-gray, with facets of dazzling amethyst or scintillating points of sapphire—all depending on a certain pane in the blue glass window of the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden.
The flash of memories accompanies her realization that “the secret is lost that opened to me a whole world.”
Time, sun-baked time, time that keeps on slipping, slipping, elusive time, time like the stone Romanesque eyes peering from behind a clump of leaves, the startled pagan looking toward a transformed future. Art historians refer to this recurrent motif of the face in the leaves as “the green man.”
My childhood was not edenic, far from it, but the concatenation of first experiences remains a vein of gold in memory. Going back, dipping into those impressions, gives me not nostalgia, no, no, no, but private renaissances. Swinging on the wooden supports of my mother’s canopied bed, climbing out the window to play in the moonlit garden, painting myself all over with house paint (my mother shrieking You’re going to die), riding on the back of a sea turtle making its way back to the waves, the sweet reek of pork roasting on a pit fire, my sashes tied in bows, my father whispering You can have anything you want, hiding in the hydrangeas, imagining my face as one of the pale blooms—the ten thousand images that compose a childhood, those imprints last forever. Wright Morris, of the Craft of Fiction class and the important novels, told me, “If you’ve had a childhood, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life.”
I wonder if the garden once was larger or if her memory expanded the dimensions, out of love for every petal and twig.
The reality of her home must remain a cipher. The present facade reveals as much of Colette as a tombstone tells about the occupant below. I visited the house twenty years ago. I remember a young couple whizzing up on a Vespa. They paused, he revved the engine, and the girl waved to the upstairs window. “Bonjour, Colette,” she called as they spun off.
This time I have come to see the recently opened Musée Colette. Too bad they could not buy her family home. The museum, only a stroll away, is in a seventeenth-century château, a grander villa than her mother’s house. If Colette had come back to Saint-Sauveur in her later years, she might have bought this house. But I suddenly realize that after she married and moved to Paris, she could have, but never did, return to live here. She loved other parts of France, especially La Treille Muscate (The Musk Vine Arbor), her house in Saint-Tropez. She liked in her early adult life to “move house.” Intensely domestic, she was also restless. This oxymoron is one source of my identification with her. “Wherever you are, you’re thinking of somewhere else,” my first husband accused me. Sadly, he spoke the truth. Only later, when I lived in places I wanted to be, did the restlessness cool.
The house on rue de l’Hospice became the lost paradise, endlessly there in memory for replenishment, for revisiting, and perhaps even for reinventing. But not for actual return. This is one answer that solves the riddle of home. Icons from this house and garden are scattered across her books like handfuls of fairy dust: a copper knob that used to shine on her bedroom door, the drumroll played in the village on New Year’s morning, a warming pan she took to school, the nectar inside a flagon swathed in spiderwebs, a broken basket of spindle berries, a bouquet of meadow saffron, her hooded cape that casts her in a heraldic role—thousands of images as fresh as the slushy paths in autumn, where she sought the “yellow chanterelles that go so well with creamy sauces and casserole of veal.” Her childhood is almost as real to me as my own: a “skimpy little urchin, brave under my red hood, I would crack boiled chestnuts with my teeth as I slid along on my small pointed sabots.” Forty-five years in Paris, she claimed, did nothing to erase the provincial girl in quest of the country home she lost.
Is there a more personal museum in the world? This house is Colette. Slides of her eyes are projected on the stair landing wall, her haunting eyes from infancy to old age, flashing as you ascend and descend the steps. You come to a museum to look; in this one, Colette is looking at you. On the stair risers, the names of her books are carved in gold letters. Scattered in the marble floor, her many addresses are engraved. She must have been one of the most photographed people of her time. Photographs of her line one room. The frames’ mats are colored, giving the room an air of gaiety. Seeing the early photo of her sitting at the piano with her braid hanging to the floor and her creamy shoulders poised, you almost can hear the music. An alcove is filled with photos of her with animals. She always had pets, usually an ugly dog. I’m thrilled to see handwritten manuscripts with corrections and her address book written in brown ink. Her pot of pens and eyeglass case echo in the photo behind them, where she is reaching into the same pot.
Around the doors the stone is painted with blue vines, reminding me of her garden in Saint-Tropez. One leads to her writing room and bedroom, copied and furnished from her apartment at the Palais Royale. The designers have managed to make the rooms seem real, not at all house-of-wax. I get to gaze at her library steps, white china dogs made into lamps, feminine slipper chairs with needlepoint panels of flowers, mottled pomegranate and sunflower-yellow walls, and the narrow bed wedged under a window. W
hen she was bedridden with arthritis, this room is where she lived. Under a fur throw, with a neat wheeled desk built over the bed, she wrote, entertained her friends, and regarded her collections of butterflies, framed not in rigid rows but randomly as though in flight. She loved glass objects. Her glass bracelets and horse are saved, along with a rare collection of Cartesian diver bottles in many colors. I can see her lifting one of her paperweights with an imprisoned butterfly or flower as she stops midsentence to think. She often wrote on blue paper and even shaded her desk lamp with a sheet of it. Her blue light in the window of the Palais Royale apartment became famous. Those passing below at night would look up and know that Colette was writing. So much of her still lives in the intensely personal rooms lit with the colors of the South.
She would approve of the café downstairs. I wish she could join us for pâté, cheese, baguette, and a glass of wine.
What would make the musée a true earthly paradise would be a Colette garden planted from her memories of her mother’s, her own, and the garden she imagined when she no longer had one. If a garden is impossible, perhaps a meditative, labyrinthine walk could be constructed. Punctuating the way would be painted signs with quotes so powerful that the real garden could rise in the mind’s eye. Instead of leaning to sniff the bountiful roses, one could read:
The first stir of spring is such a solemn thing that the accession of the rose, coming after it, is celebrated with less fervor. Yet everything is permitted to the rose: splendor, conspiring scents, petals with flesh that tempts the nostrils, the lips, the teeth. But all has been said, everything has been born already in any year when once the rose has entered it; the first rose but heralds all the other roses that must follow . . . Riper than fruit, more sensuous than cheek or breast . . .
And:
Don’t ask me where I shall plant the white rose disheveled by a single gust of wind, the yellow rose which has a scent of fine cigars, the pink rose which has a scent of roses, the red rose which dies unceasingly from the pouring out of its odors and whose dry and weightless corpse still lavishes its balm upon the air. I shall not crucify my red rose against a wall; I shall not bind it to the edge of the water tank. It shall grow, if my good destiny allows it so, just beside the open bedroom, the room that will have only three walls instead of four, and stand open to the rising sun.
Even roses she didn’t like can bloom vividly on a sign:
Roses the color of nasturtiums, with a scent of peaches; starved-looking roses tinged with dirty mauve that smelled of crushed ants; orange roses that smelled of nothing at all; and finally a little horror of a rosebush with tiny yellowish flowers covered in hairs, badly set on their stalks, bushing out all over the place, and giving off an odor like a musk-filled menagerie, like a gymnasium frequented exclusively by young red-headed women, like artificial vanilla extract . . .
Back at our musty house on the greeny banks of the Yonne, we reconsider the hapless neglect in the light of Colette’s loved and radiant ambiance. No one lavishes care on this lovely house at the end of the village. “Can we just go now? It’s only three. We could be in a sweet little inn somewhere by dark. Is the map in the car?”
“I can be ready in fifteen minutes.”
We drive to Dijon, feast well, and leave the next day for a country relais near Avignon. The heat becomes serious.
Today I buy the herbs I want at a nursery, and some yellow lilies for our room. When we visit the antique market town of Île-sur-la-Sorgue, we are so hot I don’t care about looking at fine monogrammed napkins and silver serving pieces. We walk through, drinking bottle after bottle of water, buy nothing, and return to our golden stone mas under a massive oak for lunch and a swim.
The room has a fine escritoire, waxed for generations. Ed falls into a late siesta, and I shift the desk closer to the window for the pleasure of opening my notebook, writing a few words that have been floating in my brain, nidify, pith, efflorescence, tesserae. I keep glancing outside into the oak’s spreading branches. A perfect tree for green-eyed Colette to climb. On the trunk, patches of silvery gray lichen look like squiggly maps. A young waiter on break tips his chair back and raises his face to the sun. His smooth arms the color of butterscotch dapple with shadow. My lilies in a water pitcher look freshly gilded against the soft blue messaline draperies. Colette so loved the shades, contrasts, colors, and sensations of the world. A wasp hovers over two crescents of honeydew melon on a yellow plate.
From Garden to Garden
The British
Isles
Lower Swell—we are at home in a stone schoolhouse that has undergone conversion into a comfortable Cotswold home and enclosed garden. The tiny cluster of surrounding houses looks equally mellow and natural in green, green radiant fields where sheep look as if they are posing for “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and the word chlorophyll comes to mind.
Our schoolhouse seems especially welcoming—three sofas to sink into, long windows where pink mallow branches sway, a table to seat twelve, if we knew so many to invite, and a fireplace. I could settle in for months. I imagine slanting rain on winter evenings, imagine reading the local writers, from Laurie Lee to Shakespeare. Right now in July we open all the windows, page through garden books, and spread our area maps on the coffee table for the pleasure of saying names aloud: Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Water, Upper Slaughter, Chipping Campden—all places we will see—and names of places farther afield—Hextable, Wootten-under-Edge, Chorleywood, Plumpton Green, Leigh-on-Sea, Frogmore, Midsomer Norton, Flackwell Heath. These could be settings for novels in which an intended note under the door slides under the rug instead and lies undetected until too late, far too late. The cheerful kitchen makes me want to whip up a batch of buttermilk biscuits. Maybe it’s the sunlight pouring through the door, maybe it’s the blue-checked curtains at the window and under the sink, maybe it’s the yellow bowl of plums on the counter, or that the four burners on the stove are called hobs here. I like hobs.
We must feel at home because we taught for so many years. I wonder which way the desks faced and where the chalkboard hung. Two staircases branch off, going up to dormer bedrooms. Perhaps two teachers lived here, retiring to their separate quarters at night. From upstairs, the small windows look out at the golden village on one side and onto a walled garden on the other. Beyond, the open countryside lures me to walk in every direction. A road sign cautions to watch for badgers. Travelling in the Cotswolds is the polar opposite to adventure travel. The sheep will part to let us cross their bucolic meadows. Downstairs the garden awaits with drowsy charms. An intimate, informal space about twice the size of the house, the garden blooms haphazardly; the scraggly beds could stand a visit from those patron saints of English gardens, Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyl, to tidy up and add some flowers and bushes with rhythm and texture. I have planted thyme and basil near the kitchen door. A primitive urge, I think, that instinct to put something with roots into the ground, even though I am transient here. “The garden could be so heavenly—and we could transform it in a week.”
“Resist. Just enjoy the spontaneous qualities.”
“Actually, it’s pretty this way, a jumble, a blur of color.”
We have come to visit the great English gardens—to feel, as Edith Wharton said, “the secret vibrations of their beauty”—and my list is long.
We started a week ago in Bath. Bah-th, we said, walking down streets where Jane Austen’s skirts once grazed the stones. Our hotel outside town was a former priory with a formal but livable garden of small ponds and boxwood knots, and a good kitchen garden, too, that supplied their restaurant. Immediately, I liked living there. This is jolly England, I thought, the English major’s England. The England of my great-great-grandfather’s people, although I don’t know if they lived like serfs or lords. The drawing room, just so, was lined with portraits and paintings and crowded with the classic English-style mix of striped and flowered and velvet furniture and Oriental rugs. We felt like guests at a country house where som
eone is perhaps poisoned, the inspector droll, and all the weekend guests suspects. The large room opened onto the garden terrace. The staff settled us on a sofa and brought champagne while we ordered dinner. When we were shown to the table, course after course appeared, ending with a trolley of Cheshire and Stilton cheeses. Our bedroom was serene and large, furnished in sage and coral with duvets and down and a view of the knot garden and fountain. I realized that the formal terrace gardens were designed not only for strolling but for the pleasure of viewing them from the house.
That first night after dinner we drove into Bath late and saw it empty except for jammed pubs and a few doorways where not-so-innocent teenagers lurked. We’d thought we were tired after the flight from Italy and after the rental car’s flat tire in the rain on a lane where we were turning around, having taken a wrong turn. But the curves of Bath’s streets, lighted shop windows, and the looming church kept us walking until midnight.
In the morning we walked to the Royal Crescent, then through dignified streets lined with town houses. What noble spaces for living. In the park I stopped to photograph the small raised circular beds of double pink begonias edged with thyme. Among the begonias a few lavender and dusty millers had been plunked down here and there to good effect—they undid the studied look of a park bed. Wallace Stevens liked to insert one “ugly” word, a rough-textured word, into each poem, seamless beauty being boring. The silk-textured petals and the jaunty little pale-leafed thyme—such a simple and inspired choice.
A Year in the World Page 22