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 property. ‘You are sure you understand this part?’ he asked. I hadn’t really been listening so I asked him to repeat it. It had to do with the right of the priest and his domestics to walk through our property to get to his house, which was behind ours. The notaire stared at us. ‘I just want you to understand that this is a condition of buying this house,’ he said. ‘You cannot change this. It is immutable.’ He said it gravely, pushing us to understand the implications of it.
I looked at the owner. ‘Oh,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s not a problem, no one ever walks through.’ Reassured, Michael and I told the notaire we understood and wanted to go through with the purchase. We would have many occasions in the future to think back to that moment, and wonder if the notaire was trying to protect or warn us.
Finally he finished reading the contract. We all initialed each page of each copy, then signed it in several different places. Above each signature we had to write lu et approuvé – read and approved – and a whole paragraph of other words, all of which were intended to slow us down, I assumed, in case we suddenly got cold feet and didn’t want to buy the house, since it took forever. I was charmed – it seemed so old fashioned and gracious to be writing things by hand on a cold, formal mortgage.
We finally finished and the house was ours. We shook hands all around again, agreed to let the owner store her furniture in the house until she could get it removed, and took our keys. The notaire said he was at our disposal if we needed him, then we shook hands again and walked out into the chilly sunlight. We stopped at a café for a celebratory café express, then hurried to the house.
We stood for a while in the garden, just looking. The sun shed a lovely, golden glow on the house. I breathed deeply for the first time since we’d agreed to buy it. Michael loved it, I loved it, life was fine.
A young man who worked at the aumônerie, or parish hall, whose property abuts ours, came up. ‘Are you the new owners?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, expecting a welcome.
‘Well,’ he said dourly. ‘If you decide to sell the house the church wants to buy it. They had hoped to buy it. They didn’t realize it was sold.’ Then he walked away.
Nice greeting. Michael and I looked at each other, and promptly forgot him as we went inside the house to explore some more.
We walked through every inch of it, stepping over the rubble and around the holes, talking about which room would be ours, which would be Joe’s. We stopped in one room to admire the eight-sided terracotta tiles, or tommettes, on the floor, and we stroked the wood beams in the walls. We opened a skinny hallway cupboard and found old books and jars. My heart started beating faster. Maybe we’d find treasures in this house.
After the first floor we walked up another short staircase to a landing from which two other staircases departed – one around the corner to the left, and one immediately to the right. After exploring the two rooms on the landing, which were in truly lamentable shape – the walls and ceilings were covered with graffiti, rubble was spread on the floor from a fireplace that had been ripped out, everything was filthy – we went up the skinny stairway to the right. What greeted us was, if possible, even worse. We’d seen it all before, of course, but now that it was ours we really saw it. There were two rooms that were complete shells, the ceilings rotted out so we could see the roof. The windows were either broken or hanging ajar, lath showed through the walls, and a fine black soot covered everything. Amidst all of this what struck me was an odd little window in the wall between the rooms. We tried to figure out what it was for. It wasn’t large enough to pass a plate through – I had guessed one room was a kitchen, the other a dining room. Then I thought maybe it was for confessions, but that didn’t really make
