| Friday, April 24th, 2020

                
Dear Friend, 

Monsieur Xavier and I, making the rounds of projects yet to be finished or even started, paused to admire the busy goings-on of the young family in the maison de la ferme, the Farmhouse. Eugènie and little Clo are drawing at the table outside the front door, while their mother organizes their lessons for the morning.
 
“Moi, plus tard je vivrai la campagne, j'aurai des poules, un enfant et je ne travaillerai pas! " says Eugènie to her younger sister, emphatically. 
"Me, I’m going to live in the country, I’m going to have chickens, one baby, and I’m not going to work!"
«Oui, moi aussi!" assents Clo.

It has taken the arrival of our little cousins and their parents, at the onset of “le confinement” over a month ago, to finally loosen the jealous hold that the Farmhouse had taken on the heart of Monsieur Xavier. 
Perhaps it is easy to understand his feelings. Monsieur Xavier came to us after a career as an officer for French Customs, the Douane. He and his colleagues examined trucks crossing the English Channel at Dover and Calais and occasionally busted drug traffickers and once discovered jewelry hidden in a car boot. But he was never cut out to serve under a bureaucratic hierarchy. 
 
“Les fonctionnaires sont comme les livres d'une bibliothèque. Ce sont les plus hauts placés qui servent le moins,” he told me, quoting a former president of France. 
 «Bureaucrats are like books in a library. They put the useless ones at the top.”

He is a self-made man, who set out to become a pastry chef at age 14, then was sent back to school when France changed its educational system in the 1960s. He graduated in plumbing and electricity during the greatest economic boom France has ever known, the “Trente Glorieuses,” or 30 years following World War II.  
 
“If I could earn more money across the street, I’d quit my job and start there the next day,” he recalled with relish. France had almost full employment back then. The economic boom ended in 1975, but France’s experiment with nationalization and a vastly expanded public sector was only beginning. Monsieur Xavier, though his formal studies had been limited, sat for the Customs House examination and passed it. 
 
Retiring from the Douane and coming to work at the Chateau opened a new chapter in Monsieur Xavier’s life. It was meant to be a respite – mowing the lawn, fixing a few fuses, wielding a plunger – but for Monsieur Xavier, the challenges were too tempting to resist. As problems arose, he rose to solve them. And no bureaucracy got in his way. He read up on internet wiring and soon had the wifi functioning properly. He dug up the drains around the Chateau and ran new pipes to them. He took apart the immense charpente – wooden framing – of a barn roof and repaired it.

 So when we turned to the Farmhouse, Monsieur Xavier was ready. 
 
It was an ambitious undertaking from the start, testing his ingenuity and building skills, his command of matériel and men. It involved big, load-bearing structural repairs. It drew upon the arts of masonry and plumbing, electricity and carpentry. 
 
We intended to bring the Farmhouse up to modern standards of comfort and convenience, but we insisted on protecting the patina endowed by time and use. We hoped to capture the essence of its origins in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, when meals were cooked in the kitchen fireplace and baths were taken in a metal tub filled using pitchers of hot water – but we wanted to be warm and cozy, turn on a hot-water tap, and run a washer and dryer. Watch television. Whip up a gâteau au chocolat in an electric oven. Live the modern life, in short.

Like Eugènie, we wanted to live in the country with children and chickens – but we didn’t want to wash our clothes in the springhouse as the former residents of the Farmhouse had done 30 years before!
 
This was Monsieur Xavier’s challenge as well as ours…and our adventures along the way are covered in following installments of this Letter from Courtomer.

With warm regards, and
A bientôt, aux jours meilleurs !