"I need a vacation"...battling Monsieur Xavier...and restoring la petite maison

| Friday, August 29, 2020

Dear Friend, 
 
Monsieur Xavier has been fighting me. I don’t understand why.  
"Vous n'allez jamais entrer dans la petite maison cette année,"  he practically shouted, banging down a pair of vice grips on the cluttered workshop table. He compressed his lips. He almost pouted.
 
Never? 
 
Never start work on restoring the little house, the charming "petite maison"… the old groom’s cottage in the stable block that cries out be a darling little "maison à deux," a perfect spot for our son Henry and a friend to spend a weekend or more in the country?

Comment ça?

Walls stripped of cracked plaster, revealing the transom beam and rough stone block and rubble construction. The bricks framing the door and the door itself date from a 19th-century renovation.

But I decided to postpone the battle to a more auspicious date. I needed to reconnoiter the terrain and reflect on my tactics. A gardien like Monsieur Xavier, capable of fixing broken beams in the barns, rebuilding stone chimneys, and analyzing our fuel consumption does not come along every day.
 
The "confinement" had weighed on us all, I understand that. Nerves were on edge. Must we wear masks? What kind? Does soap and water really work? Pff! The uncertainty of le virus is deeply annoying to Monsieur Xavier’s orderly mind.
 
Monsieur Xavier, although still in la force de l'âge, bien sûr! is not a young man. Constraints not of his own making are more than irksome. They rob him of his precious stock of dwindling time. 
 
Our gardien came to the Chateau after retiring from the French Customs House. He was a douanier, an agent in the navy blue-clad force that patrolled French borders. He arrested contrabandiers trying to slip out of France with national art treasures and gold, or in with beer and cigarettes. He collected import duties from law-abiding citizens, of which, he frowns sternly, there are few. That was before the European Union and the Common Market. The fluidity of frontier zones is something he neither approves nor cares to understand. And quand même, he says, with a raised eyebrow, charming as they are, one still cannot entirely trust the English, the Germans, and certainly not the Italians! Over the centuries, France waged war on these mischievous neighbors to create the rock-solid borders it enjoys today.
 
While he rather approves of the travel restrictions and quarantining between countries now, he questions its utility. And he and Madame Francine have discovered the pleasures of travel. Last year, they took their first trip abroad, although as a Customs Officer, Monsieur Xavier had been to England three times. Organized by the dynamic lady mayor of Courtomer and a couple of neighboring villages, a large group of Normans in their golden years boarded a rented bus and headed for Barcelona. The food, the sun, the Gaudi cathedral -- like a sandcastle made by children at the beach, the blue Mediterranean, the Catalans on the Ramblas…ah, quel monde! Je n’vous dis pas! Francine delighted in the company of her friends from Courtomer; Monsieur Xavier discovered like-minded neighbors with whom to exchange views of life and opinions on current affairs.

But that was before travel restrictions, of course.
 
Perhaps Monsieur Xavier has an atavistic fear that completing the renovation of the petite maison, the little house, will conclude his dimming horizon.  The Chinese have a saying that when a man stops building, he dies. Thus, we hear, Chinese houses are purposely left unfinished. 
 
In case this thought was weighing on Monsieur Xavier, I tried to cheer him up: Once we’ve finished the little house, we can restore the maison de l’Orangerie! 
 
The maison de l’Orangerie will be a noble and beautiful project. The house was called “La Fleuriste” in days past because it overlooks the walled flower gardens of the Orangerie. And the house is very old. Inside are huge sculpted beams that we think must have come from the first Chateau. Or were salvaged from the Chateau’s 12th-century church, partially demolished in the 1800s.
 
So much history, such a worthy enterprise!
 
But Monsieur Xavier only gazed stubbornly into the distance. He did not deign to reply.
 
Nevertheless, he was grudgingly back at work in the petite maison the week before he left for his vacances. He was clearing it out in case our mason, Monsieur Bruno, kept to his schedule. 
 
It was highly unlikely that Monsieur Bruno would be on the job, since he was supposed to start in late July and he has stopped returning phone calls. As Monsieur Xavier reminded me, no artisan, at least not a French one, works during August.
 
But Monsieur Xavier was not going to be blamed if our Monsieur Bruno arrived to find the place full of wood shavings and coils of electric wire.  Finally, he piled his tool bag in the fourgeon, loaded up Francine and her suitcases, and they set off for two weeks in the southwest of France.
 
Like all French employees, Monsieur Xavier receives four weeks of paid vacation each year, and is entitled to take two consecutive weeks in the summer. This year, to paraphrase the last words of the Terminator Part 2, we can all agree that he needs a vacation. Happily, he and Francine own a house in the Haute Vienne, four hours’ drive from Courtomer. They purchased it several years ago as their retirement home, and then let it languish, absorbed in their life at Courtomer.
 
“Bon voyage!” I called out, as I waved them off. And remembered a phrase I’d just read:
 
« On ne voyage pas pour changer de lieu, mais d’idées.» 
 
We travel not for a change of place, but of ideas.

The quote above comes from an old book in the library of the Chateau. I pulled it out one evening when it seemed like a nice idea to lie on the chaise longue with the window open to the soft air and summer twilight. It was a young man’s account of a trip through the valleys of the Pyrenees in the summer of 1854.
 
The Pyrenees mountains are the natural boundary between Spain and France, high, rugged, and remote. It was then a wild and rude landscape inhabited by hardy mountain people, many of whom did not speak French, much less read or write. But the author of Voyage aux Pyrenees was enchanted by everything he saw: the red and black costumes of the women, their elaborate head-dresses and embroidered sashes, the scarlet bonnets of little children, the sharp and eerie bagpipe music, which captured, he wrote, the shrill cry of a hunting hawk and the whistling wind in narrow mountain valleys. He climbed steep paths dotted with lavender and wildflowers, bathed in pure springs and burbling streams, and basked in the brilliance of sun and sky. He visited ruined castles and ancient abbeys. 

Taine's immensely popular Voyage aux Pyrenees introduced 19th-readers to the wild beauty and charm of a region of France lost in time. An illustration of "Le pic de Gers," by Gustave Doré, the renowned French artist, for the second edition.

“Je ne suis ici que pour faire visite au XIIe siècle,” he wrote, ecstatically. «I’m only here to visit the 12th century…” The book was an international best-seller. Hippolyte Taine, the young writer, went on to become one of the most vigorous thinkers and critics of the late 19th-century.
 
And, yes indeed, travel opens new horizons! After a two-week break in the warm southern sun, Monsieur Xavier came home refreshed. He had run new electricity in their house. He had defeated the pretensions of the mayor of the little town, who wanted him to replace the windows with historically accurate reproductions. 
 
The town is one of France’s prettiest villages, and has a historic easement that prevents new building or departures from the original building style and materials. But, alas for the mayor, he made the mistake of taking Monsieur Xavier to court and threatening to “frappe la maison de péril” or condemn it as unsafe for habitation. 
 
“Ça, non!” recounted Xavier, with indignation. “I countersued for le fait d'outrepasser le pouvoir (overreaching of official authority). With damages,” he added, smugly.
 
The mayor beat an immediate retreat, allowing Monsieur Xavier to repair the 1950s windows – for they were perfectly good! he reported.
 
And best of all, he had engaged in a battle royal with the gitans living next door and routed them roundly. 
 
The gitans, or gypsies, were lodged at town expense in the neighboring house. They had been pilfering his building supplies, or so he suspected. That was bad enough, but when the house was broken into and the new furnace disappeared, his ire was roused to great heights. Access to the courtyard, where the gypsies worked on a suspicious number of ever-changing vehicles, often nocturnally, was through his property. The eye of the douanier was sharpened. His “pif” – slang for “nose,” instinct and flair – was on high alert.
 
“So! Monsieur Xavier exclaimed with satisfaction, “I put a gate up on my property and chained it shut. When they came to cut the bolt to get to their courtyard, I was there to prevent then. They insulted me. They brandished an iron bar at my head.”
 
Having provoked his neighbors into menacing acts, Monsieur Xavier called the mayor.
 
“Alors, the maire came running, wringing his hands,” recounted Monsieur Xavier, pity laced with friendly contempt. “He wanted to be everyone’s friend. He thought he could work it out. But I’m not letting them use my driveway to truck their stolen goods in and out! And my furnace!”
 
 And then, the irascible gypsies made the mistake of flourishing the bar at the mayor.
 

“That finished it,” commented Monsieur Xavier with relish. After the ensuing eviction, the vehicle in the courtyard was indeed identified as stolen. All the copper had been stripped out of the new heat pump, installed at town expense. The premises were littered with other evidence of dubious activities. 
 “The mayor thanked me,” concluded Monsieur Xavier. “And he apologized for our misunderstanding.”
 “Now, about the petite maison...”

 I waited in anticipation. 

“I should be able to start repairing the old windows next week.”
 Well, I thought to myself, thinking of another memorable phrase from Hippolyte Taine’s works, 
« Le moyen de s’ennuyer est de savoir où l’on va et par où l’on passe. » 

The way to bore yourself is to know where you are going and how to get there!

A très bientôt,