Vicky didn’t want us to pay her any rent. ‘Just tidy up the garden for me,’ she said. And she even had an old car down there we could use. Her neighbour and friend, Michel, used it most of the time, but he would pick us up from the train in nearby Fumel and drive us to Lacapelle-Biron and then the car would be ours.
‘And you can write down there,’ she said, ‘it’s quiet and there’s plenty of room.’
We left mid-morning on a Saturday from Montparnasse, a gigantic station under the only high-rise building in Paris. The station was crowded and chaotic but we eventually found the right platform and settled down on the TGV high-speed train. It rocketed to the south-west in less than five hours, but we had to change to a two-carriage local train at Agen so it was early evening by the time we arrived in Fumel and stumbled off with our bags. I had been wondering how we would find Michel, but as soon as I saw him standing on the platform, I recognised him – he was the same shape and size and build as my father, a short, stocky peasant. Vicky had warned me I wouldn’t understand his broad south-west accent, but I felt so immediately at home with him that I couldn’t help exclaiming, ‘Vous me rappelez de mon père. Il était fermier aussi.’ You remind me of my father. He was a farmer also.
He nodded and smiled politely. He was only about ten years older than I was.
Michel drove us through the countryside speaking slow and careful French in answer to our questions. I know I gazed out the window trying to take everything in, but recall only a generalised pretty scene – dense forests, dappled light on the roads, small fields, streams, villages. I do remember my first sight of Lacapelle-Biron as we drove down the hill towards it, a medieval village tucked into the landscape as if it had been there forever. It feels as if my mind took a picture of the village, as if I knew I’d find a connection to this place.
We stopped at a farmhouse just outside the village, set down a short slope from the road.
‘Vicky’s farm,’ Michel said. He gave us the key, said au revoir and drove off with his wife, who had been waiting there with her car. We stood there in the midst of the countryside, a French farmhouse to ourselves, a car, and, we found when we went inside, a bottle of wine and a round of cheese.
‘La vie est belle, uh?’ Anthony said. We’d seen a young girl about ten years old exclaim La vie est belle, uh? on a news interview one night. It was an item about the summer holidays just after we’d arrived, and we adopted her knowing comment whenever things seemed too good to be true. Life is beautiful, eh?
We woke next morning and looked out the window and saw there was a field with a sprinkling of green, bordered by a stream with a forested hill on the other side. The stream, the Lède, wound its way between the field and forest, and crossed the road a short way up the Gavaudun valley. In the coming weeks we found it turning up here and there, wandering over the countryside, often with a few graceful fishermen standing on its banks. A field, a forest and a stream. I grew up with paddocks and a dry creek that only ever ran with muddy water for a couple of hours after it rained.
‘I’m in a book,’ I said.
I went downstairs and out to the garden, which ran down to the stream on one side and the field on the other. From here I could see there were distinct new blades pushing through the ploughed earth of the field. Dew glinted on wheat or oats – it was too soon to tell which it was – in the cool morning, like thousands of diamonds shooting red and emerald and blue fire in tiny glittering sparks. And then I was a child walking up the lane through our wheat paddock to catch a ride to school with the teacher – he lived further up the road and gave us a lift in the back of his ute each morning – walking past rows of fresh green wheat blades, each one spangled with dew shooting fire as I walked. And then it was another season and I was a teenager and the wheat had grown as high as my waist and changed colour to a blue-green like water under a summer sky. The wind moved over it and the wheat waved like the sea hundreds of miles away, deep and restless. Shifting green and blue. I could dive into it, swim, feel it slide over my body. Aqua light and shadow. And then the need to seize the wheat-sea with a net of words, to hold on to it and dive in whenever I wished. Wind rippling the seed-heads of the sea.
Eighty years earlier, a couple of hours’ drive from Lacapelle-Biron, teenage de Beauvoir felt her soul reach out in the quiet evening dew. Felt the desire to hold beauty. Every summer she visited her aunt and uncle and cousins in the country at Meyrignac, near Limoges.
‘Lying in the grass, I gazed up at the moon; it was shining down on an Umbrian landscape [she was reading a life of St Francis of Assisi] radiant with the first dews of night: I felt breathless with the soft beauty of the moment. I should have liked to snatch it as it fled and fix it forever on paper with immortal words …’
I wondered if the desire to seize beauty is the first impulse, even before the impulse to attribute it to unseen powers. The old, old longing, against the unstoppable nature of being, to haul the moment out of time, to ‘snatch it as it fled and fix it forever on paper’. Simone lay on the grass in the moonlight and felt beauty flood her soul, and then, immediately, came the desire to seize fluid time, to pluck at and fix a moment like a butterfly on a pin.
Rousseau asserted that the only time he had been happy was when he was immersed in nature and that he was never seriously ill when he lived in the country. He said: ‘When you see me at the point of death, carry me into the shade of an oak and I promise you I shall recover.’ It was his central belief, that nature was inherently good and civilisation destructive: ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author; everything degenerates in the hands of Man’, but it’s clear that it wasn’t just an idea; he was more content, more at peace, when surrounded by forests and lakes and mountains.
Late in his life he lived for a while on an island in a lake. ‘On getting up I never failed, if it was fine, to run out to the terrace and breathe in the fresh and healthy morning air, and to let my eyes skim along the horizon of that beautiful lake whose shores and whose skirt of mountains delighted my gaze.’ He couldn’t understand how anyone immersed in the natural world could not have faith in God: ‘How is it that their souls are not raised in ecstasy a hundred times a day to the Author of the wonders that strike their eyes?’
But it wasn’t just a delightful wandering about, floating in beauty. He studied botany and was dedicated to the idea that observing detail revealed wonder: ‘Others, when they look at all these treasures of nature, feel only a stupid and monotonous admiration. They see nothing in detail because they do not even know what they ought to look at; and they fail equally to see the whole. Because they have no idea of the chain of relations and combinations, which is so marvellous it overwhelms the observer’s mind.’
Simone de Beauvoir, who, I suspect, would have no patience with Rousseau in most situations, might have liked him in the country. When she stayed at Meyrignac:
The chief of my pleasures was to rise early in the morning and observe the wakening of nature; with a book in my hand, I would steal out of the sleeping house and quietly unlatch the garden gate: it was impossible to sit down on the grass, which would all be white with hoar-frost; I would walk along the drive, beside the meadow planted with specially chosen trees that my grandpa called the landscape garden; I would read a little from time to time, enjoying the feeling of the sharp air softening against my cheeks; the thin crust of rime would be melting on the ground; the purple beech, the blue cedars, and the silvery poplars would be sparkling with the primal freshness of the first morning in Eden: and I was the only one awake to the beauty of the earth and the glory of God …
Like Rousseau’s, her romantic love of nature had a strong spiritual meaning: ‘Here I could see blades of grass and clouds that were still the same as when He snatched them from primal Chaos, and that still bore His mark. The harder I pressed myself against the earth, the closer I got to Him, and every country walk was an act of adoration.’
; There is a quality in her feeling that’s even more than a response to beauty. It’s the same feeling that came in my childhood when I stood on Baron Rock behind our farm, surrounded by its ancient volcanic rock and twisting gums, and as a young woman in the Blue Mountains immersed in the hot dreaming bush – blue gums, banskia, grevillea – pulsing with imminent revelation. And sometimes even in the cultivated nature of a city. It happened not long ago on a recent return to Paris one afternoon as I walked into the Jardin des Plantes. Just inside the gate was a Wollemi pine, the ancient tree discovered in a lost valley in Australia, and I stopped to pay a brief homage, but didn’t feel anything in particular except perhaps a sort of pride. Then I walked through an avenue of chestnuts planted in rows, their branches and leaves clipped into the usual absurd cubes, towards an expanse of rectangular garden beds – and then, without warning, it came. I felt it arrive like waves rolling across the garden beds and up the avenue, a vast and joyful peace, warm and replete. For minutes I was filled with joy and felt I must have been shining. Even when it left it pervaded the whole rest of the afternoon with an afterglow of tranquil happiness. Meaning is given to that glorious feeling, most often awe of the Almighty, but couldn’t it be fine, as yet undetectable, waves of energy from trees and plants, from the natural world? It sounds fantastical and I don’t have any evidence, but I have felt it and cannot call it God anymore.
*
There were bikes in the back shed at the farmhouse, so after eating toasted baguette with jam at the table in the back garden, we decided to explore. I was here to write, but I needed to locate myself in the landscape first. The immediate area of Vicky’s place and two other houses nearby was known as Courances. It was at the beginning of the Gavaudun valley, which we found later was a picture-book valley: tiny wheat fields, dappled oak and birch forests, the Lède stream wending its way beside the road, delicate sharp-eared deer in the evening, a ruined chateau on a cliff. The village of Lacapelle-Biron was about a kilometre in the other direction so we headed that way first. We pedalled up a slight incline, the soft whirr of the bikes and the cool May morning air and faint scents of grass reminding me of riding to school in the early morning.
As we entered the village we saw a car parked outside a dilapidated stone house, an old black Citroën, looking as if it had driven out of a French war film. Opposite was a shop selling wine and local walnuts and prunes and general goods. Vicky had told us it was run by an elderly woman called Madame Hebiard and that we ought to introduce ourselves to her as ‘les amis de Madame Cole’. Just ahead in the centre of the village was a war memorial, a large slab of rock inscribed with the names of the dead, held up by many stony arms coming out of the soil. Later, when I got to know Madame Hebiard, she told me that during the Second World War, the Germans had rounded up all the men in the village and shot some of them in a field and sent the rest to Dachau and that most of them, including her father, never came back.
A couple of years ago I went to a service at the memorial and saw and listened to the children and grandchildren of the men who disappeared that day, most of them now old themselves. I listened carefully and understood the loss and what was owed in a way that I never had on Anzac Day in my hometown, even though the names of my own great uncles who had died were inscribed on the war memorial there. In my town war had seemed too long ago and too far away.
It was recent history here. Lacapelle-Biron had been in this small fold of the hills since at least the twelfth century, watching wars for centuries. It had been here when the English rampaged back and forth during the Hundred Years War and when the Catholics murdered Huguenots in the name of God in the sixteenth century. It had been here when Montaigne was writing in the tower of his chateau at Bergerac an afternoon’s horse and carriage ride away. Its stone houses watched quietly, did not draw attention.
All around the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne, there are many bastides, walled towns, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries either by the invading English, or to protect against them, with market squares and beautiful arcades on hill-tops, but Lacapelle-Biron is just a huddle of houses and a few shops. It is pretty, as stone villages are, but it is no different from thousands of other French villages. Its main tourist attraction is Chateau de Biron four or five kilometres on the other side, but tourists stop there rather than the village, so Lacapelle-Biron remains quiet. We found two cafés, a boulangerie, a boucherie and pharmacie and a small supermarket and petrol bowsers, all except the cafés with notices stating they would be shut in the middle of the day. It was a small, ordinary village. The few people we saw nodded and said, ‘Bonjour.’
Riding to the village became part of the rhythm of our days. I wrote in the mornings and then we took turns to ride to the boulangerie to buy a baguette just before lunch. In the afternoons we drove to one of the bastides or headed out on foot, following the maze of walking paths through the forests and fields. The footpaths were part of the great network of trails all over France, the Grande and the Petite Randonées, the Grande marked with red and white stripes and the Petite with yellow. There was one twelve-kilometre circular path that began directly opposite the farmhouse, or at least we could join it there.
The first time we walked it was late in the evening, during the golden twilight. We had a map but the path was clear enough. It plunged straight up a hill into a small oak wood and then came out on a ridge through a wheat field from where we could see the lie of the land. Across the valley were more wooded hillsides and ahead was Lacapelle-Biron. The path skirted along the edge of the village then veered back into the trees – oaks, chestnuts, birch, locusts. We stopped every now and then to check for the yellow way-markers that appeared on posts, trees, the side of a Telecom box. At one point we came to the ruins of a stone cottage, its roof fallen in, a gnarled oak twisting its roots over the lintel like a tightrope walker over my head. Skinny oaks grew inside the four walls open to the sky. In a short distance, the path came out into a ploughed field, and I suddenly felt the expansion of open fields and a longer perspective.
‘Out of the woods,’ Anthony said aloud. I suddenly understood what that meant in my body, the physical release of being out of the woods. The language that I had known all my life had lived outside of my skin and I hadn’t even noticed.
Ahead on the next hill was the Chateau de Biron, its round towers and chapel and battlements outlined against the sky in the twilight. From the twelfth century it had been the seat of a powerful family, the Gontaut-Birons, but most of it was built in the sixteenth century.
‘Fairytale,’ I thought. It was impossible to think any other word.
‘Fairytale’ was in my mind for most of the walk – it was the only context I had for castles and keeps and forests. On the map, Vallon du Loup, the Vale of the Wolf, was marked to the east. I thought about wolves and how quickly I might be able to climb an oak tree. When we crossed the road in front of the chateau we entered another wood, which was dark oak on one side and a delicate tracery of beech on the other. Milky green lichen grew down one side of every tree and I remembered reading that’s how people knew which direction they were going in a wood; moss and lichen grow on the north side of trees. In small clearings corn grew or a stone house appeared. White clematis tangled over broken walls along a path worn nearly two metres below fields from a thousand years of walking.
And then we came out at St Avit, a medieval village about a kilometre on the other side of the farmhouse. We peered in the open door of the twelfth-century church and saw swallows and robins swooping inside in the dimness. Outside on its stone roof, plants and grasses grew as if the stones were still back on the hillside 800 years ago. Old roses climbed and fell from stone fences, bees staggered home to hives, a meadow with grasses and poppies wafted sweet smells. Across from the church a cemetery sank into the side of the hill, new and old graves crowding together. The long-ago past dreamed in the air. Our sons would have loved this place, I thought, especially Patrick, wh
o had read medieval fantasy novels right through his teenage years.
From St Avit the path followed an ancient stone wall all the way back to the darkened farmhouse. I felt that my feet had connected not only to the earth, but to all the people who had trodden the path down through the centuries. Farmers like my father, and blacksmiths, beekeepers, women gathering mushrooms, shepherds, lovers holding hands where no-one could see them, children taking bread and cheese to their fathers in the fields, my footsteps on their footsteps, making my faint mark on the earth. I was beginning to know this land close-up at a walking pace, which I’ve come to believe is the only way to know the land.
*
In one of those unlikely coincidences that pattern life, several years later when Patrick had finished his degree and was working in Paris teaching English, he met a girl at a party whose family came from Lacapelle-Biron. The girl, Céline, thought it quite incredible – and perhaps a chat-up line – that he knew of and had visited her tiny village (fewer than 500 inhabitants) to see his Australian parents at the Englishwoman, Madame Cole’s, house. When Céline took him to the village to meet her parents and grandparents, he walked around the streets and pointed out the boulangerie and the wifi café and the road to Gavaudun. Céline now lives with Patrick in Australia and when I go back to Lacapelle-Biron these days, I think of her ancestors walking along the paths in the oak forests and along the streams, and wonder at the intricate ways we are bound together.
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