On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town. Susan Loomis
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if I had made a huge mistake? These were questions I was to become extremely familiar with over the next years, as I watched Michael struggle not only with the French vocabulary involved in building, but with unfamiliar materials, dimensions, customs and traditions.
I had truly forgotten what a mess the house was in. I’m not sure I ever really noticed. Even now, as I stumbled over chunks of stone, tiptoed around holes in the floor and realized that there wasn’t one single room that could really pass for habitable, I felt an excitement bubbling inside. It was a blank slate, ours to recreate.
And, today was today.
As we emerged from the last room, the one above the curious little ‘apartment’ that the owner kept, which was even shabbier than it had been the first time I had seen it, and made our way down the many sets of stairs, Michael’s blue eyes absolutely blazed with excitement. ‘I love it,’ he said.
I let out my breath. We walked hand in hand into the garden – it was overgrown and shabby, but the old apple and pear trees that graced it were unmistakably charming, and the church loomed over all.
While we stood there looking at the house with its boarded-up window on the ground floor, its lovely timbering and the bell tower, an elderly lady parked her bicycle by the front door and went off to do her shopping. A man slipped in the front gate and went to the corner of the yard to relieve himself in the drain. Pigeons cooed from under the eaves. We were caught up in the magic of owning such glorious real estate, of having a concrete project to work on. I was in a state of bliss to think that for the foreseeable future we would be in France, would come to understand its rituals and traditions, would no doubt make new friends and deepen the wonderful friendships we already had. And the thought of the food and the flavours that would be ours! I couldn’t wait for the adventure to begin.
We drove on to Le Vaudreuil, for we were to stay with Edith for our first few days, stopping at the village bakery to get fresh baguettes. As I walked into her house I was enveloped with the familiar aroma of lavender and fresh thyme that has always pervaded it, and I felt like I was home.
Entering Edith’s house for the first time after an absence always brings to mind Michael’s and my wedding in Le Vaudreuil. Bernard had given a short speech about the appropriateness of the wedding and how it continued the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon communion with France, so prevalent throughout the ages in Normandy. Then he recited the vows. Michael, whose French was just barely nascent, was dreamily attentive. When it was his turn to speak I had to nudge him, and he jumped right in with a resounding ‘Oui’. He says now that he was completely off in another world, and still isn’t sure what he agreed to!
We all adjourned to Edith and Bernard’s house for a lunch, which Michael and I had prepared the day before, of cream of watercress soup, cannelloni á la crème, salad and Camembert. Patricia and her husband Walter had brought the champagne, one of our friends supplied the flowers, another loaned me a silk petticoat, and Madame Dancerne, Edith and Bernard’s elderly neighbour from across the street, contributed her homemade cider and Calvados. Our wedding cake was a marjolaine, which I had made the morning before in Paris, and which was transported to the wedding on Patricia’s special silver marjolaine tray. It was a gorgeous misty day.
We hauled in our baggage and settled Joe to sleep on a couch in the living room, which doubles as Edith’s painting studio. Finished and half-finished portraits and still lifes in Edith’s characteristic vibrant colours where light creates the magic, as well as a collection of paintings by other artists, provide the decor, the pleasant scent of oil paints the ambience.
While Edith built a fire in the kitchen fireplace I made coffee, got butter and honey and cut the baguettes into lengths for tartines. Edith’s children were in school, Bernard was at work in his office across the street, the house was quiet. All was right with the world, I thought, as I dipped my butter-and-honey-slathered tartine into my bowl of stiff black coffee before eating it. We talked over our strategy for the next few days, then simply enjoyed this first taste of France. Michael relaxed in an easy chair and fell asleep, Edith filled me in on the local gossip.
That evening we had a celebratory dinner with Edith, Bernard and their four children, and the following day Michael went to the house to poke around and I took Joe to go look at the little house in Le Vaudreuil that I had rented over the phone from the mayor. We figured we’d need it for two to three months, the time it would take Michael to install enough electricity and plumbing to make the house in Louviers habitable.
Set on the back boundary of the mayor’s garden, it looked like a little timbered doll house. Its main room downstairs had a picture window looking out at the languidly flowing river Eure. The corner kitchen was adequate, the small bathroom functional, the two bedrooms upstairs charming. The only thing it needed was a telephone.
I spoke with Florence Labelle, the mayor’s wife and our landlady, to see about the phone. I had asked her if we could install it before we arrived, but she couldn’t see the necessity for that. ‘We’ll do all that when you get here.’ True to her word, she called the phone company directly. No doubt because she was the mayor’s wife they arrived later that day, but the news wasn’t good. They couldn’t install a phone in the back building because it wasn’t a legal residence. To Florence, this didn’t seem a problem. ‘You can use my phone when you need to,’ she said kindly, not realizing how vital a phone is to my work.
I panicked, just a little, explaining to Florence why I had to have a phone, how I had a great deal of research to do not just for the cookbook I was about to write, but for all the articles I had contracted to do. She had a private conference with the France Télécom representative, and the next thing I knew a date was set to install the wiring and hook up the phone. ‘So it will be all right?’ I asked. ‘It’s not illegal?’
She looked at me. ‘Bof!’ she said, pushing back her hair. ‘All we have to do is trim a few tree limbs and not mention anything.’
Michael returned from the house in Louviers with stars in his eyes. He’d spent the morning giving it a closer look. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said. ‘It’s incredible.’ For the rest of the afternoon he sat at a table in Edith’s house making drawings, chewing on his pencil, figuring.
Our third day in France we signed the papers which made us the legal owners of 1, rue Tatin, in Louviers. We did this in front of the notaire, a sort of lawyer who handles real-estate deals. A portly, officious young man, he greeted us in the waiting room and showed us down a long, wood-paneled hallway to his large, stuffy office. He abstractedly shuffled papers on his desk while we awaited the owner. Michael and I gazed around at the stuffed game birds high atop his bookcases that looked as if they’d been there a hundred years. So did the stacked books, for they were covered with a thin veneer of dust. I knew a lot about this notaire for he was Edith and Bernard’s, and his father had been notaire to the Devismes, Edith’s parents. Those stuffed birds, I knew, had always been the subject of much amusement in the Devisme family, standing there looking down on all proceedings with their dead, glass eyes.
The owner and her daughter finally arrived, to break the silence. We shook hands all around then sat formally while the notaire handed us each a copy of the mortgage contract. He called us to attention and proceeded to read it out loud in a slow, achingly formal manner. The office was stuffy, the sun was shining in, and the dusty game birds were staring at us. My thoughts wandered to all I had ever heard about notaires, who are incredibly powerful figures in France, a cross between lawyer and seigneur. They are particularly powerful when it comes to real estate, and connected to absolutely everything and everyone by thousands of tiny, thin threads. No one could ever tell me what they actually do, but I did know that they spent a lot of time and made a lot of money doing just this sort of thing, drawing up lengthy contracts then reading them aloud.
His drone became mere background noise. My eyes were crossing. I looked at Michael and his were almost shut. Suddenly, the notaire’s voice came alive.
‘You must pay special attention to this part,’ he said. We sat up. He began reading a passage about the church’s easement of our