A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “Hedonism’s where it’s at,” Margaret announced. “Hedonism minceur.” She had returned from market with turkey thighs cut crossways, and before lunch she and Ruth had made a flurry of cutting and peeling onions, carrots, celery, and other vegetables, casting them into a pot, and starting what Margaret claimed would become, after hours of slow simmering, a sort of turkey osso buco. That would struggle in the downstairs kitchen while we were out getting some hedonistic exercise in the weather.

  The rain appeared to be thinning toward a hesitation, which fooled no one. We put on slickers with hoods and set off uphill, with Andalouse and Teddy in the lead, into the woods called, on old maps, the Bois du Loup Pendu, or Wood of the Hanged Wolf.

  * * *

  Frances and her mother, one afternoon long years ago, were looking for some cows that had last been seen wandering toward these woods. They climbed the steep stairs leading from one flourishing garden terrace to another and arrived at the overgrown parkland at the crest of the hill, which was bounded by the alley of lindens. Fred was painting on the second level, and it must have been going well, since they could hear him singing.

  F. C. Frieseke, The Fountain, oil on canvas, 20 × 24 inches, 1923. Private collection.

  Frances and her mother were through the park and well into the older wilderness of woodland, past the linden alley, before Frances thought to remark, “I don’t remember that maze from before.”

  “What maze?”

  “The maze we just went through.”

  Her mother said what mothers say to children who have seen something that isn’t there, but she allowed Frances to convince her to backtrack and look where they had been, if only to demonstrate that there was nothing there. Nothing like a maze now, or indeed then—though years later, when for some reason they had occasion to look over the plans of the grounds designed by Mesnier while he was redoing the interior, they found that they called for a boxwood maze, of which nothing existed save for the ghost that my mother, holding a wand with which to herd the stray cows, had walked through that day, calling “Blanche, Pascale, Mireille, Désirée.”

  * * *

  As Thérèse would no doubt have enjoyed explaining to us, the enormous forest extending inland from the coast, of which this area was a part, had once belonged to the king of France and was held in fief to him by the Duke of Normandy, and then in fief to the duke by the Viscount of Auge, who was, in the eleventh century, a member of the Bertram family: barons of Bricquebec, with large holdings on this side of the Touques and fortified seats not only at Bricquebec but also about eight miles from Mesnil, at Fauguernon. The forest’s wealth was fenced in for the benefit of its owners, and named after the River Touques. One of its cantons (or large divisions) was known as Loup Pendu, and our neck of the woods was still known under that name in the seventeenth century.

  The last wolf known to have been killed in Normandy died in 1868, and since then they have been extinct in the province. However, in its place names, the region abounds in wolves: Canteleu and Canteloup are both variants of Chanteloup (Wolfsong), of which there are five examples in Calvados, in addition to three St. Loups (a Christian appropriation of an old pagan divinity), a Louvetot, and two Louvières (Place of Wolves). A look at a 1:25,000 map of our area turns up a Camplou, a Bonneville la Louvet, a Chemin de la Mare aux Loups (Track of Wolfmere or, maybe better, Wolfmere Drive), another Rue aux Loups, and Les Louteries. (Lieu Loutrel, for its part, refers not to the wolf but to the otters, or loutres, that used to be fished out of the streams with long barbed forks until they were eradicated.) In terms of wolf names, the charmingly christened Lieu d’Amour (Place of Love—there must be a story!) is no less surrounded by menacing predators than is La Taupe (The Mole), its neighbor.

  If the wolves are gone, moles are still numerous in woods and fields, and occasionally on walks I have come upon dozens of their little dead bodies lying beside the path. Not so long ago, one of the forest-based livelihoods practiced in the region was that of taupier (moler), whose practitioners traveled through the countryside in large wooden casks or hogsheads on wheels—perhaps containing in their fragrant interiors Mme. le Taupier and the blind little ones—the whole contraption dragged by mules. The taupier’s métier was to trap and kill moles and, for all I know, skin them and sell their hides. (In the thirteen hundreds, the fee for trapping 130 mature moles was the same as that earned for hanging a person—about a week’s wages for a watchman. This fact goes some way toward explaining the relative merits of various portions of the rural economy; it is also the kind of information that likes to accumulate on my dining-room table and then move into the library when guests come, to build up on the floor next to my desk, on which I usually have my detailed map spread out to help me locate something.)

  The forest’s old ways still showed on the map. Because of the availability of fuel, numerous places were named La Forge, for the forges in which bog iron was once worked into ingots. The people of the woods also made glass and gathered the bark of trees to sell; Ecorcheville, or Barkville, was not far away. Bark stripped from felled oaks was used for tanning leather, the procedure for which constituted a major source of the pollution that accompanied eleventh-century industry. Its acids fed into such rivers as the Ante below Falaise, where Duke Robert the Devil (known to his friends as Robert the Magnificent) found Arlette bathing and quickly promoted her in rank from daughter of Fulbert the Tanner (known to some as Fulbert the Embalmer) to mother of William the Bastard (known to his many friends as William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, and King of England).

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Setting out, we skirted the ruins of the garden’s terraces by way of the pasture in back of Mme. Vera’s and ducked under the strands of rusty barbed wire looping unconvincingly along the trunks of the large and ancient lindens and beeches that marked the boundary of the forest. Underfoot were the husks of beechnuts, browsed through by deer or boar over the previous fall and winter. The undergrowth was wet and yellow-green, confused by a jealous riot of competing sprigs and runners. It smelled like a change of world as sudden and absolute as the step across the line between pasture and town.

  Originally a forest denoted a place with a boundary that was meant to keep the people out and the wild animals in for the recreational hunting of the owning class. The people of the countryside were effectively trapped within the areas of cultivation, beyond whose boundaries they could trespass only within strict limitations and on peril of their lives if they were caught poaching protein. The larger forêt, like the smaller breuil (as in Le Breuil en Auge, which is situated next to a thicket of remnants still on the map under the name Le Bois du Roi), signified a preserve, “in the old and long tradition still honored by the Sierra Club,” as Ben remarked, climbing in boots that were already proving too small, “by which the fortunate sought to preserve the benefits of the wilderness for their own exercise and moral uplift, and to keep it safe from other people who might defile it by using its wealth to offset their hunger. And in France, I have to say, one gets the sense of an uncanny social order. For example, landing at Cherbourg and waiting for our car…”

  The garden stairs, 1995. Photo by author

  Our path was thick with wet fougères, or bracken—large, rank ferns already almost waist-high. The woods, only sporadically cleared—this part most recently by us, some twenty years before, to provide capital for the new roof—had a piebald look. Some of the pines we had planted in place of what we sold were still struggling aloft, but for the most part the native growth was deciduous: chestnut, horse chestnut, oak, linden, sycamore, and ash, with an occasional accent of dense green from a box or holly. Long-lasting, slow-growing, and evergreen, these last were often used as boundary markers for woodland lots. Now and again we saw a matched pair of gateposts lost in undergrowth, or caught glimpses of the shallow quarry or overgrown cart tracks.

  Ben continued, “We were standing there waiting, in that place where the passengers get off the boat, and we noticed the crowd parti
ng toward us as if it were these ferns with a wind blowing through them. Nobody seemed upset or even particularly preoccupied by whatever it was that was causing the movement; they all just went on chatting or scolding or reading their papers or jockeying for the best places in line. When our section of the crowd opened up, we saw a small parade: five uniformed police officers, two women and three men, one of them handcuffed to a well-dressed middle-aged man who was carrying a briefcase. Except for the crowd’s moving to make room, it was as if it were not even happening. The police and their captive marched through without looking to either side, though the shackled man smiled in a way that one might read as shamefaced, maybe nervous. After they passed, everyone fell back into the opening they had made and continued their business. We may have been the only people at the station who noticed.”

  I showed my guests the linden alley, which led from woods to woods in a stretch only as long as the long side of the house, itself not visible from this height. The linden alley was a folly, meant merely for decoration since it was too narrow to accommodate a cart and, in any case, had never gone anywhere. It was planted as a place to walk in. From here, when the trees had lost their leaves, one could look down and see the face of the house that the Mesnier-Bréards had done in masonry: white tinted by lichen to a warm yellow, with insets of floral garlands under the upstairs windows. This day we argued about whether or not we could actually see the smoke from our dining room, which would be joined in that chimney by the smoke from the bedroom Ben and Margaret were using. Birds darted through the wet space under the lindens; beyond the alley, the unused quarry was already thick with blackberry brambles flowering in their rambunctious version of the rose. In that area, where we had done extensive clearing, doomed birches and alders sought to take over, but they were soft and temporary and would be shaded out with time, once the serious hardwoods could establish themselves.

  The front of the house from the third terrace, 1937. Photo Claude Giraud

  Our path through the woods was an old one, the equivalent in French terms of a British footpath. After giving onto the abandoned quarry at the top of the hill in back of the linden alley, it skirted the backsides of a sequence of farms on one side, keeping to woods on the other while never surrendering its quality of always seeming poised to offer insight into the forest primeval.

  The front of the house from the top of the hill, 1995. Photo by author

  We had brought sticks with us to beat our way through the bracken, and to break the backs of the blackberry canes that sought to take advantage of the path’s offered access to the sky by snaking across it at eye or ankle level. Andalouse the city dog kept to the path immediately ahead of us and neither looked nor sniffed to left or right. The haze of brilliant damp that struggled to magnify the secluded sun rendered the colors vivid and vibrant, and I would have thought the same to be true of the smells, which should have provoked desire in any dog. The woods harbored foxes, several varieties of weasel, badgers, deer, and wild boar in addition to smaller fare.

  It seemed to me that the songbirds were more plentiful each year; I did not recall having heard about any deer when we first came back, but these, too, had become progressively less timid recently. I suspected that the region was now producing fewer young men with the skill or patience to hunt these enemies of agriculture, and that the more people’s livelihoods depended on things they could do in town without getting dirty, the better it was for the deer.

  “That sounds just like a cuckoo,” Margaret said.

  The first time we traveled through Tuscany, Julia and I had noticed that the shapes of the landscape, and of individual trees or rocks within it, proved something that had never before occurred to us: such artists as the Sienese painters of the fifteenth century had been reporting, not inventing, an organization of landscape that we, foreigners both in time and in geography, had dismissed as the kind of fake for which the faddish term of the day was “magical.”

  Likewise, what does the American do about the cuckoo, on arriving in a land in which that bird’s voice is such a commonplace as, after a while, not even to be noticed? A person of Margaret’s age, if educated in a certain way, would be familiar with the repeated musical descending minor third in a hundred familiar warhorses of European origin, from Respighi back through Beethoven’s Fifth to a song by some composer in the Middle Ages whose name has long since fallen off his work. The cuckoo supplied the metaphor for a joke (about husbands’ losing the attention of their wives) that was making people yawn generations before Shakespeare. The familiar references in English literature, if piled on the unfamiliar ones, and those in turn on top of references drawn from other European languages, would make a tower higher than the embarrassed cuckoo could ascend attempting to escape them. The cuckoo sings only in May. Overfamiliar as a cultural footnote relentlessly repeated, the song, when it first occurred to her ear for real while we were trudging through the woods, was simply a revelation to Margaret: she exclaimed, surprised with pleasure, “God! It’s all true!?”

  It was the sort of delight that nothing could be done about afterward, however, because we were strangers in the bird’s country and to refer to it in a familiar way would have seemed like dropping, in conversation, the wrong nickname for a famous person we didn’t know.

  “Must be,” I told Margaret. I hadn’t heard it, though I’d been hearing it for days; that made it familiar, if not exactly mine: I could not use it in Cambridge.

  So we walked along the muddy path, beating back ferns and breathing in the complex forest odors that Andalouse disdained, and we were accompanied by the nagging of cuckoos and the blackbirds’ extraordinarily intelligent musical approximation of spirited if polite conversation between rival women, and only the crows sounded like home—in fact, like taxi drivers, Margaret said. She understood them as easily as if they had been growling in Brooklyn, “Get a move on, lady,” or “You call that a tip?”

  I was keeping an eye on Ruth, hoping to see her stoop and pick up a flint on one of whose raggedy faceted sides she would show us evidence of Cro-Magnon human workmanship, perhaps pronouncing it “not of museum quality” before tossing it into the brambles.

  The remains of this ancient forest—of which not a single stick was ancient, the woods having been farmed and exploited for a thousand years—occupied the whole crest of the hill, spreading over several hundred acres. This part of Europe had been pretty much forested out, and a good hardwood trunk—such as an oak—was still of such value that after felling a tree, a lumberjack was required to stamp an inventory number into the fresh cut, so that each trunk could be registered and accounted for.

  Because of its scarcity, much that in the States is commonly made of wood (such as popsicle sticks, fence posts, and toothpicks) appears in France in the same shapes but made of plastic or cement. And as for things manufactured from wood pulp, such as paper plates and napkins, when American friends coming over to visit asked us what they should bring (perhaps meaning what outfits?), we used to tell them, “Bring paper plates and napkins.” In France we could not afford them.

  Wood was used sparingly in building here on account of expense—another reason I had slowed down when I was building bookshelves. Our friend Suzette, when she came to visit Julia and me in Cambridge, believed herself to be on the American frontier: “All those trees everywhere in the streets and gardens!” she’d exclaimed. “And the dwellings!”—she gestured toward the clapboard houses on our street—“Everyone lives in a log cabin!”

  We reached the spot where the path widened to become a cart track and we no longer had to go in single file, far enough apart to avoid being lashed by recoiling branches. I started noticing that the farm buildings we were passing, from which an inquiring dog emerged now and again, were no longer the comfortable, run-down affairs I had been used to. More and more they were being spruced up, leaving our tumbledown wreck looking very much the outsider. Even the cows appeared more prosperous and better educated than those on my side of the hill. (Perh
aps they aspired to the première qualité; they walked more daintily and lay with more conviction and less abandon, seeming to be vegetarians by choice, unlike the cattle that haunted my fields.)

  From the road along the crest of the hill we could look out through orchard and across the valley of the douet and see the village of Mesnil, mostly redbrick from this vantage point, and dominated by the church tower. Mist bulged in ragged racing scraps between us and the town, with pods of rain battering it down now and then to allow us a vista.

  Ruth hung back to talk to me, her red coat pattering with earnest rain. “I’ll tell you what to do,” she said. “And what you should tell Julia. I’ve given it a lot of thought. That place of yours is perfect for a B and B. Teddy can give you advice since he knows construction; he’s done so much with our place in Amsterdam. Of course he says your wiring is all shot, and you don’t want to take many chances with that since it’s all two-twenty, but after you fix that, and maybe get some real beds—not to imply that what we’re in isn’t comfortable, Teddy and I, but if you want people to pay real money for a nice experience, it can’t just be a mattress on the floor that makes you bump your head on the sink whenever you get up. And that room off the driveway that you call the cave, where there’s the biggest leak—that’s pretty much wasted, right? You could put a bedroom in there, though you’d have to put in a floor first, but it has water already—I know, a sauna!”

  “How much will you take to make sure Ruth never runs into Julia?” I asked Margaret. I’d been gently, over the last day, trying to coax Margaret into my camp.

  “No, really,” Ruth said. “And about the bathrooms…”

  I’d had more or less the same conversation with my friend Madeleine in Paris on my way out here. I had offered Madeleine and her family the use of the house whenever they liked, since it was more convenient for them than for me, but Madeleine knew country houses. By the time you arrived for the weekend and cleaned everything enough to be able to stay there, she said, it was time to start cleaning in preparation for leaving; the men never helped; and you had to take clean sheets from the city and bring them back dirty to wash once you got home (something she always does when they come to visit us in Normandy, I should add; this is standard French etiquette when visiting friends with second houses in the country).