A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  M. Joffroy kissed the pursed fingers of his right hand and flicked a blessing from them into the universe. His eyes danced. “Escargots de Bourgogne. Very rare in these parts,” he exclaimed. “People have eaten them all.”

  “They’re all over the property,” I told him. Only the day before, we had remarked on the exuberant population of salamanders, snails, and slugs—the fat orange ones that bask out in the open when it rains, taking in the moisture like topless bathers at Deauville absorbing sun.

  “And soon there will be more of them,” M. Joffroy said, his voice filled with approval at the couple’s endeavor. “You will have all the snails you want.”

  Preparing snails gathered in the wild, I happened to know from reading up on them once in the strangely titled (at least if one thought about it from the point of view of the snails) Joy of Cooking, required starving them for ten days in a covered basket in a cool place like my cave and then feeding them new lettuce leaves each day for two weeks—a process designed to detoxify them in case they had been in pasture on such poisons as the leaves of the foxglove (digitalis) that now blasted color into my dining room. Then they must be boiled for an extended period of time—days, maybe—and forked out of their shells, to have their innards cut out and then matched with their weight in minced garlic and three times their weight in butter before their emptied and enhanced black bodies were packed back into their shells to bake.

  “It’s one advantage of keeping the place so run down,” M. Joffroy admitted. “The escargots de Bourgogne have almost disappeared elsewhere. I suppose we could think of this, what you’re doing here”—his gesture included much of which I was ashamed—“as ecology.”

  We’ll suggest a snail farm to Julia, I thought. Since she doesn’t like the sound of fish. Christopher might go for it; he likes process—and snails, too, I remembered. The ancient Romans used to grow them on ranches, feeding them sweet bay leaves and wine. Christopher, who would eat anything that crawled, especially in the shallow parts of the sea, always called them “land snails” to distinguish them from the periwinkles he brought home in quantities from the mudflats of Deauville.

  As was the custom in the country, everyone at the table rose and shook hands before M. Joffroy and I settled down to business. Alerted both by me and by M. Le Planquay, M. Joffroy had come to survey the damage in the upstairs bathroom. I followed him up the grand staircase. The son of a farmer, born in a village six miles away, M. Joffroy was skilled at reconciling the habits of the countryside to the expectations of foreigners. His sense of humor triumphed over my indifferent French, and therefore we communicated rather well; he served as an invaluable aide whenever I needed to confer with craftsmen.

  At the top of the stairs, he peered around the corner into the bathroom and shuddered. “That’s dangerous,” he told me. “The floor is gone. A thing like that, it always makes me nervous. I think”—and here he acted the part of someone sitting on the toilet and beginning an unexpected long fall into a bottomless septic tank—“I think with your permission I will not go in.”

  We stood together at the top of the stairs while he deliberated.

  “You want a mason,” M. Joffroy said.

  In France, at least in the countryside, the forms of manual labor comprising the building and repair trades are clearly and carefully delineated, even though in my experience most workmen can do a bit of everything. During the great drought of 1976, when the hills turned almost orange, making Normandy look unexpectedly like Cézanne country, we upgraded M. Braye’s cottage by putting in water and a toilet (what did Aunt Janet use when she stayed in that house? I wondered), an installation that required the contributions of three separate and independent specialists: a plumber, a mason, and a terassier, or digger, whose job it was to make a hole for the fosse septique (septic tank) in earth that had hardened to cement. That summer we finally understood the advantage of our thick mud walls, which always kept the inside of the house cool and damp, even when the temperature outside soared over the hundred-degree mark for rainless days on end. The terassier, retired from the bureau of Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Roads) hacked away in the blazing sun day after day, relying only on his shovel and quantities of Negrita rum. Each day we saw less of him, until he was at last consumed by the perfect hole he had made in front of M. Braye’s yucca.

  As we passed through the dining room again, M. Joffroy looked at Ben’s and Teddy’s bulk with respectful wonder and shook his head. “Having no floor, it makes me very nervous,” he said. “And Madame Julia, your wife, is well?”

  Alert and suspicious, I refrained from saying.

  “I will find you a mason,” M. Joffroy said. “The place is rented for August? Then perhaps we should have the mason come right away if he is free, though in the summer…”

  He went out by the door into the garden, and I watched through the window as he stood and wished the snails success in their efforts to bring back the glorious population of that fabled era of tranquillity, then went around the house to his car.

  * * *

  “Julia didn’t seem at all discouraged by the state of the bathroom,” Margaret said. “In any case, she didn’t mention it last night on the phone.”

  “Ah, well,” I said. Trying an evasive tactic, I suggested, “It’s perfect weather to walk to town.”

  “You mean you didn’t tell her?” Margaret was not to be distracted.

  “I like a fait accompli,” I said. “Or if I don’t really like one, at least I prefer it to the alternative.”

  Teddy had already marched off into the woods carrying a saw. Ben’s feet, having risen in protest against the boots he had bought at the Intermarché, elected to keep him at his solitaire, accompanied by the tintinnabulation of the plumbers downstairs, while the rest of us strolled forth.

  Ben said to me as we left by way of the garden (where the coupling snails were still as heedless of their audience, Ruth claimed, as actors in some of the live shows in Amsterdam), “The point is not what it was but what it is, that’s my advice; and not what it is, but what it’s going to be. The future. The present is already gone.” He was talking either about gambling at solitaire playing by Vegas rules, or about my concentrating a major part of my life’s attention on a farm on the far side of the ocean from home—I wasn’t quite sure which.

  The effect suggested by the morning’s weather was not so much rain as a stingy underwater tour. We had planned to cut across the pastures and through Mme. Vera’s courtyard, but as we reached the driveway we heard a shot, a hoarse cry, and then another shot, and Mme. Vera rounded the back of the thatched garage carrying a rifle, with a red shawl thrown over her flowered dress, and a man’s hat on her head to keep the wave in her hair from being ruined by the rain.

  All three of us had jumped, first at the shots and then at the sight of Mme. Vera, armed and dangerous. She leaned her rifle under the thatch and attacked us with kisses, ignoring the disquiet of my guests.

  She told Margaret and Ruth, “C’est un gros renard [a big fox]. You heard him barking last night? Coming for my chickens—I missed him.”

  That was the cry we had heard after the first shot—Mme. Vera’s fury at missing her target. She pointed up the hill to the stooping branches of beech trees marking the edge of woods and pasture. “He’s gone now,” Mme. Vera said, acting the part of a successful fox hightailing it into cover. We had to stop so Margaret, who had spent some time with Mme. Vera in the past, could visit with her as she began feeding her chickens. No animal in history had ever been less interested in chickens than was Andalouse, who waded through them as they screamed and stuttered, refusing even to notice them or acknowledge that they were in her way.

  “Like Marie Antoinette among the common folk,” Ruth said, gesturing toward her oblivious bitch. “Before her last encounter with them in the Place de la Concorde.”

  Wafts and wefts and waifs of mist fled toward and past us through the rain and made everything greener. Mme. Vera began explaining to Margaret and
Ruth about the cows’ being struck recently by lightning, and about the attendant shortage of sugar.

  “And you were here during the war?” Ruth asked. “Right here, on the farm?” Mme. Vera spread her arms, speechless, indicating, What choice did I have?

  “It is so good to see smoke in your chimney,” Mme. Vera said as we turned downhill. She acted the part of smoke rising into rain, looking supple and transient.

  We waded across the next pasture, dodging glutinous bouses de vache (cow pies) reconstituted by the rain, and climbed a padlocked wooden gate to join the road at the compound, a group of two cottages and a converted pressoir, or cider press. One of these, loaned to my family by Tante Margot Lafontaine, was the cottage where we’d first stayed in 1968, when we started working on the house.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Once upon a time,” I told Margaret and Ruth, “Mesnil was inhabited by a group of sisters, all of my grandmother’s generation, and all as devoted to her as she was to them. And they in turn were succeeded by their daughters, all of my mother’s generation, and all of them equally devoted to each other. Yes, there were and are men here and there in the family, but it always seemed to be the females we encountered, and certainly the females who endured; and we always thought of them under their family name, Lafontaine, even when they’d been separated from that name for generations.

  “Suzette, roughly my mother’s age, danced with her in a fairy costume in the garden when they were six and ten. She’s the weaver who organized the rug in the salon, and who used to live year-round on the hill on the other side of the valley, in a chaumière that I’ll show you on our way back. She’s moved to the Loiret now and complains that the white cows that look into her windows there are strangers. She once made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to promote friendship between Muslim, Jew, and Christian, walking all the way from Mesnil with her suitcase in a wheelbarrow, each night negotiating a place to sleep in whatever house she came to, where she would deliver her message of peace. She was one of about a dozen in that family. Julia is a genius at this and could tell you all their names, and many of their stories—whom they married, where, and when, and the names of their children.

  Frances with Suzette performing in the garden, ca. 1925.

  “The remade pressoir belongs to Suzette’s sister Charlotte, who loves the memory of my grandmother’s biscuits and comes every summer from the south with her children, some married and with their own children. The Lafontaines bought as many houses as they could in the commune, and kept them in the family.”

  This group of three buildings, all vacant at the moment, had been inhabited when we first arrived in 1968; in the one on the right were two friends of the Lafontaine family, Mme. Rohe, a widow who was a painter, and Mlle. Gabry, a retired nurse who, like Mme. Rohe, had been captured, tortured, and incarcerated by the Germans during the war for their part in an underground radio operation in Paris. Eventually they had escaped from the prison where they were being held, and had made their way to freedom. I had never heard the whole story, and never from their own mouths, but they were now both dead. Their chaumière, of the half-timbered construction shared by all three buildings, was surrounded by flowers.

  During that summer of 1968, we had been overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome given us by these old friends, and friends of friends, of my mother’s family, whose intimate attachment resumed as if there had been no break at all. It was, though, a bewildering lot of people. They spilled out across the countryside and met us unexpectedly at the market—and we wanted desperately to remember which was which. Julia’s mother, writing home to a friend after a party at the house shared by Mme. Rohe and Mlle. Gabry, described one afternoon that year:

  August 18, night

  I think I told you there was an open house Saturday afternoon. This is the first day I wore slacks. Not having time to come back to my hotel and change I ended wearing a dress of Frances’. The party was about 75 people including Xopher [Christopher, then two]. House is next to Tante Margot’s where they [i.e., the Kilmers, when we first arrived] lived and adorable. Two ladies who have fixed it up. They were both in slacks! Anything you wanted to drink including scotch. Glasses had piece of tape with a number—an idea worth trying at home. There must have been 20 varieties of food passed, from tidbits like cheese, olives, sausages, to four kinds of sandwiches, teeny croissants, I couldn’t tell you how many kinds of tarts and cakes.

  Hopeless to figure out people but there was a nucleus I knew. Two who spoke English well. One married to an American Colonel who is visiting her mother. Other is maybe going to be my prize for Christy Cleland [another story]. Thérèse Chevalier who teaches at Oxford but this year will be doing something in Lille two days a week and will have an apt. in Paris. She is simply a dear and so are her father and mother. He is Maurice Chevalier even to his joie de vivre.

  Xopher had a field day. I think he will be a playboy. Said he liked the party because all the ladies kissed him.

  The real Kilmer touch to me is that yesterday they had a piano delivered but we haul chairs up and down stairs for meals. Very late souper last night of soup, salad, cheese, fruit and bread pudding with framboise, and almost 11:00 before I got back.

  Charlotte’s place, the redone pressoir, was on our left. Having been speculating, on the other side of the Atlantic, about our own pressoir, I studied it with a keen eye but could see no way to make our ruin (which was much larger) anything like it. Charlotte’s was charming and comfortable and not in the least industrial-looking. Farthest from the road, in the center of the group of buildings, was the cottage of Tante Margot Lafontaine, a célibataire (spinster) of my grandparents’ generation, which had accommodated the whole batch of us when we first arrived—Julia and I along with Christopher, my parents, five of my much younger siblings, and a nephew-cousin-grandchild.

  Julia, writing home earlier that summer in a stage of the campaign that would bring her mother to join us at arm’s length, had described our living conditions within the broader context of Mesnil as we waited to get into the house, and then just after we moved in. The pleasures and dismays that are her reward for possessing acute powers of observation have stayed with her and, if anything, increased over the intervening years.

  The Lafontaines own the whole area. There are about 100 of them. When Mama [Frances] was growing up there was just the main house, big with outhouses etc., but rather ugly, being Victorian. I have just seen it, not been inside. Mama says it is beautiful. Anyway, the family had ten children or so and have continued.

  Actually Margot Lafontaine is single. Quite a few of the women around here are; Mama says it is because of the war taking so many men. All the people we meet have been affected directly by the war, the least being that their houses were occupied and everything destroyed. Mme. Sourice had three sons killed. Mme. Gesnier lost her only child, a son (her husband already dead). It’s not that they are morbid or sad anymore; it’s that I have never encountered this before and nothing is free from it. Also the people’s acceptance (it has been over twenty years) is puzzling, or at least it doesn’t make it easier for me to take in.

  Again, Margot Lafontaine—I have not met her. She is sixty, a nurse, and lives in Paris. Her house is very lovely but rather small for eleven people. It is an old farmhouse, quite modest originally, and is being fixed up in a rustic manner quite slowly or … from year to year. It has six rooms, two of which we don’t use as bedrooms (the dining-sitting room and the kitchen). All the rooms are small for a large family. Anyway there is electricity. The running water cannot be used for drinking, just washing etc. There is a spring nearby. No hot water—has to be heated on gas burners.

  We spent four nights there. Everyone but us has had a bit of turista but all are fine now.

  Mama’s house needs a lot of work. [We were putting ceilings into at least half the rooms.] The kitchen, which was never civilized—being just for servants to work in and on the bottom floor, with dumbwaiters etc.… anyway it was a farmhouse with lo
w ceilings and all, but a gentleman farmer—not like Margot Lafontaine’s place—it is quite large with huge rooms, and done by the Friesekes in an elegant manner. This looks a little sad and silly in the form of wallpaper hanging in strips from the wall, of cupids of course, and a lid here and there of dear china. The terraced garden is very rich with cows and sheep.

  Nick and I are now in our bedroom (Mama’s room when she was a little girl). By firelight, candlelight and gas lantern light it looks fine, but … tomorrow as the sun rises I will once again see the dirt and feel the dirt. It is late. Somehow none of this is what it is like here—it is more of an outline.

  In the same mail (demonstrating that their daughter had married an incorrigible optimist who showed more promise in advertising than he did in real estate), I had put my own letter to Julia’s parents:

  July 22, 1968

  This is a lovely country; it rains all day and the sun shines all day and geese walk up and down the lawn [sic]. Christopher wears his birthday raincoat all the time, as well as some French boots we got him. Someone goes shopping every day. There is so much needed for the house, as well as for the survival of its customers. Since there is as yet no electricity (they are putting it in now and then, when reminded) we have no fridge; so shopping has to be done almost this morning for this evening. But we are in process of arranging for gas stove, hot water, chauffage central; we’ve got glass in the windows; and we’ve painted the kitchen; the toilets work when you pour water into them, which we get from the pump out back. We’ve got beds. We are moving right along.

  The last roll of film, if it comes out, should give you a good idea of the outside of the house and the grounds. The little peasant-looking houses are on either side of the main house and are both inhabited. The road, or lane, goes down to the main road by means of a steep hill and there is a fairly constant stream of animal traffic: goats, chickens, sheep, cows, ducks, turkeys.… The ruins of the cider press are halfway down the hill in front of the house, as you look over the valley; the ruins of the stable to the left.