On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town. Susan Loomis
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light. As he babbled about the attributes of the house I looked out the window and caught my breath – the church was near enough to touch. I was transfixed. We proceeded through the house and Edith kept whispering to me, ‘C’est fabuleuse, cette maison. Ellle a besoin de la peinture et un peu d’éléctricité – c’est tout’ – ‘It’s fabulous – all it needs is a few coats of paint and some electricity.’
The house must have been a perfect convent for it rambled on and on, up and around short stairways, in and out of rooms, yet it wasn’t vast. It was very human – the rooms were quite small, the staircases short, the floors old wood, worn in many places.
The rooms were in varying states of decay. Some had graffiti scrawled on the walls and ceilings – ‘The owner allowed squatters to come, she is very open,’ said the realtor. ‘She is very spéciale.’ Spéciale is a word that means many things, from strange to difficult. I was beginning to get a notion about the owner.
On the second floor was a long, furnished room. A coal stove sat at one end, its pipe jerry-rigged out through a window. A single bed sat against a wall, with a large chunk of plaster in the middle of the bedspread, obviously just fallen there. At the opposite end was a small kitchenette with garish orange and yellow flowers painted on the wall. A lovely old buffet filled with dishes sat along another wall.
The realtor explained that this is where the owner, a single mother of grown children, lived when she came to stay. As I looked at the room, which had lovely proportions, I was amazed she hadn’t asphyxiated herself with the rigged-up stove pipe. Apparently the woman was an antiques dealer who, unable, for whatever reason (the realtor hinted at a family tragedy), to fix up the house and install her antiques shop downstairs, had instead stripped it of everything valuable, from fireplaces to the crystal ball that had once graced the stairway ramp. She seemed to have become somewhat folle- crazy – according to the realtor, leaving the doors unlocked, living in these makeshift conditions, letting the house tumble down around her.
Our final stop was the cave underneath the house, a fascinating vaulted dungeon filled with bottles, cobwebs, and who could see what else. I wanted to inspect it further but the realtor shooed us out with his wavery flashlight.
We emerged into the sunshine. I was captivated. I didn’t say much on the way back to Le Vaudreuil, shook the realtor’s hand when we got there and walked away with Edith. She was vibrating. ‘What a house,’ she said. ‘You have to buy it. Michael could fix it up in no time. All it needs is paint, some work here and there, a little rearranging.’ I listened with half an ear, discouraged beyond measure, seeing our romantic sojourn in France spent in one of the new bungalows I now knew were the preferred rentals in the area. I had loved roaming through the old house, but it just wasn’t possible.
Edith, who is passionate and highly strung by nature, wouldn’t stop talking about it. She remembered as a child growing up in Louviers passing by the house and seeing, inside a window right on the street, an elderly nun in her bed. ‘We always looked in on her. It is a sweet memory,’ she said. Her chatter about the house went on all day. When Bernard came home she told him about it. I had been thinking about it too – the quality of light inside it was unforgettable, as was that pleasant, warm feeling within its walls.
Bernard fixed me with his gaze. ‘What do you think of the house, Suzanne?’ he asked seriously. I faltered. I thought it was beautiful, but it was a mess. And we didn’t have any money to buy it anyway. I told him so. He wanted to go look at it, so I made an appointment for the next day.
I allowed myself to dream, just a little. Imagine not just renting, but owning in France. Imagine such a beautiful house. The location was perfect – smack in the centre of town, in proximity to shops and schools and everything. I didn’t know Louviers at all, but it was a big enough town that nearly everything was available.
As I thought about the house and the town I remembered spending an afternoon there on my own many years ago when I had been visiting Edith and Bernard. I remembered walking around the ancient cloisters in the centre of town – not far from the house, I supposed. I remembered the finely manicured public garden which looked like a tiny version of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The more I thought about it, the more memories surfaced. There was a wonderful store there filled with herbs and potions and organic foods of all sorts. The city hall and the museum were in a lovely old brick building surrounding a garden with a fanciful concrete-made-to-look-like-wood pergola in the centre. From what I had seen today, Louviers bustled, traffic sped through it, the sidewalks were busy with people.
Louviers comprises 20,000 inhabitants, making it the largest town within about thirty miles. It is the commercial centre for farmers in the immediate area, who go there for banking and their affaires, or business. It has a rollicking Saturday farmers’ market, another smaller farmers’ market on Wednesday, and its own collection of boutiques and food shops. There are dozens of banks, real-estate offices, insurance companies, travel agencies and a small, gracious hospital. Besides the ‘cathedral’, there is another Catholic church tucked into a neighbourhood less than a half-mile away. Cafés line the streets, and restaurants and pizzerias are dotted throughout the main part of town. There is a small, country supermarket in the centre of town, and two huge modern supermarkets on its periphery. One can live very easily in Louviers without needing to go anywhere else.
I called Michael that night to give him a report. I told him about the house, downplaying Bernard and Edith’s interest in it, simply describing it to him. He said nothing. Then he said, ‘Go look at it again, get more information.’
I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘But we don’t have any money,’ I countered. ‘We can’t buy a house.’
‘Go get more information,’ was all he would say.
I am hopeless when it comes to money. My department is dreams. I rely on Michael to see the truth, so when he said get more information I figured that maybe it was, somehow, possible.
The next day Bernard saw the house and loved it. He thought it was an affaire- a deal. He said that if we decided to buy it he’d loan us the down payment if we needed it, and co-sign the loan. Bernard is a very successful entrepreneur who started a quality-control company almost two decades ago, well before anyone else in France had the idea. The company has done nothing but grow so that now it does business in most countries of the world. Bernard sold it not long ago, making him a very wealthy man. He is still the director, however, and spends most of his time traveling to distant points on the globe. When Bernard says something is ‘interesting’ it pays to listen. I suddenly started to get very, very excited.
I called Christian Devisme, a friend, talented architect and Edith’s brother, and asked him to come inspect the house and give me his professional opinion. He and his partner arrived and spent at least an hour poking, prodding and literally inspecting like detectives. They finished in the back garden, where I joined them, and we all gazed at the exterior wall, which was so full of holes it looked like lace. I asked Christian what he thought.
He slowly cleared his throat, shook his head then looked at me sideways. ‘Il ne faut pas sous-estimer le travail,’ he said gravely. ‘You must not underestimate the work.’ That sent a chill through me.
Then he swivelled to look at the little brick building behind the house, which belonged to the church. ‘You should try to buy that too,’ he said. ‘It would add a lot of value to the property.’
‘So you think we should buy the house?’ I asked.
‘If I were younger I might think about buying it,’ replied Christian, who was then forty-five. ‘At this point in my life it’s too much work but it’s a beautiful house.’
I understood Christian’s point. He and his wife Nadine had bought an old farmhouse nearly twenty years before when they had three tots, and had lived in a tent in front of it for a year while they made it habitable. It is not an experience he would want to repeat and he is convinced he accomplished it only because he was young. Yet he obviously thought this house in Louviers was full of potential.
‘Its walls and roof