of government. When we first arrived, the mayor was a woman known for her conservative and rather bungling ways. Shordy after we arrived elections resulted in an administration which leans increasingly far left and has a permanent overdraft in its bank accounts, primarily because one of its mandates is to provide the citizenry with regular music and theatre performances which it offers free of charge.
The river Eure runs through Louviers, and it is in the process of being rediscovered. The current mayor and his administration want to resurrect its banks, which are mosdy wild and overgrown, making it a focal point of the town. A kayak club is already based on it at one end of town, and there are a few riverside paths that are pleasant to walk along, though they eventually peter out into wild growth.
The streets of Louviers, which are generally very busy during the day and empty quickly after 8 p.m. when shops close, vary from wide – the main boulevards -to extremely narrow, winding and cobbled. There are ancient, leaning plaster and beamed houses which look right out of a fairy tale. Many are three stories high and just the width of a single room. Most of the older houses in Louviers have lots of windows that can be easily looked into – I admit, one of my favourite activities is peeking inside an open window and glancing at furnishings and style – but these are tighdy closed with shutters at the first sign of nightfall.
There are, happily, sidewalks throughout most of Louviers, though occasionally one is obliged to walk single file and on tiptoe to avoid being squashed by a speeding car – speed limit signs are placed for decoration rather than for observance, it seems. Parking places have been inserted wherever there is room for a car and many people park on the sidewalk, or angle themselves into impossibly tight spots.
We drove into Louviers, wound our way through a maze of streets and stopped in front of one of the tiny, room-wide houses. Outside it was charmingly derelict. Inside it was a complete wreck, and smelled like the Bowery. Piles of clothing and rags in a corner showed that it was a way-station for homeless travelers. We sped out of there.
The second house was another story. It was across from the lavish Romanesque/Gothic church right in the town centre, which is so large and imposing that everyone refers to it as a cathedral though it isn’t, since it is not the principal church of the diocese. The house had been a convent for 300 years, and before that it was purportedly owned by an artist. For the past twenty-five years it had been the property of a Parisienne who had purchased it to live in, and to transform the ground floor into an antiques shop. It was dry and didn’t smell at all. Its old walls were timbered, its clay tile roof sported a tiny bell tower, the windows were paned with old, wavy glass. Inside, it was all blue and gray. And a wreck. The downstairs looked like an archeological dig – big holes, mounds of rubble, a mess. The walls were in terrible shape, their pale blue paint streaked with grime. Dust covered everything. But the house was filled with a palpable, warm presence.
We followed the realtor and his stiff gray pompadour up the beautiful staircase which curved gently around a corner, and emerged onto a landing awash in clear, soft 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
