| March 28th, 2020

Dear Friend,

Here in the peace of the Normandy countryside, we are “au confinement,” like the millions of our French compatriots. We share our fate with some of our family, including two little girls and their parents who are staying in the Farmhouse. We are the lucky ones, we know…it’s a good feeling to see the little ones leading a child’s carefree life despite current affairs. They fish in the moat, feed the hens, pick out notes on the old Pleyel piano…

It’s good to see the Farmhouse brought to life by a family once again, too. Of course, we never knew the Farmhouse in the old days. Rain, birds, and beasts had done their damage by the time we arrived. We fixed the roof and replaced the windows. Then we moved on with the vast project of the Chateau.

A few years ago, we were guests at a wedding reception in the Orangerie, for the daughter of our gardener, Michel. As a boy, Michel had worked in the gardens for the old Count Roger. At the same time, as was typical in those days, a farm-worker and his family were housed on the estate. The two women who had grown up in the Farmhouse were old friends of Michel and had come to the wedding.

The sisters were eager to see their old home again.

 We unlocked the door, its paint peeling and its panes cloaked in dust and cobwebs. There in the kitchen was the old sink, still attached to the stone wall with rusty iron brackets. The spit still hung in the huge fireplace. Water had worn away the mortar between the bricks of the chimneybreast. A crack zigzagged down it like a streak of lightning. Pieces of the stone corbels supporting the mantel lay on the floor. Most impressive, however, was the enormous beam supporting the upper story. It was split in the middle and hung down low. 

We backtracked out into the hall.

 Fresh green moss grew on the floor of the parlour.

 It seemed a little risky to climb the stairs, since some of the boards were rotten. But we did anyway. Upstairs, you could have somersaulted down the sloping floor to where the beam was cracked. Obviously, this had been a problem for a long time. Someone had fitted boards to make a neat partition and divide the big space into two rooms. Since then, the floor had sagged some more, leaving a space between the wall and the ceiling.

"I guess it's gotten a lot worse," I said. 

“Oh!...We used to wash our clothes in the springhouse,” said one sister, avoiding the direct question. The other nodded. The “Trente Glorieuses,” the 30 years of boom-time in France following the end of World War II, seem to have passed over the Farmhouse, as indeed the Chateau. The Farmhouse was a relic of an earlier time, preserved “dans son jus” as it must have been throughout the 19th century. There was the fragment of a “devise” on a wall – a riddle that someone wrote in pencil in the flowing script of yore: 

“Where are you going?” it starts to say, before blurring into illegibility.

On a board wall next to the ladder into the “grenier,” or attic, someone had kept count of sacks of grain or bales of hay, scratching marks and crosses into the wood. 

And the trace of a love affair was etched into the plaster. A heart with the initials MAB + JL. 

But dilapidated as the Farmhouse might have been in the old days, the Basse-Cour, the vast farmyard around which the stone barns and Farmhouse are arranged, was surely a lively, living place then. 

 There is still a well-head in front of the Farmhouse, where water was pumped for daily use. There was a “mare,” or small pond where ducks and geese once dabbled, now partially filled in and covered with an iron plate. 

There had been a kitchen garden full of cabbages and potatoes, bright with marguerites, as the French call ox-eye daisies. Calves in the shed and milk cows in the dairy. A workhorse once grazed under the old pear tree in the little pasture. Pigs snorted and rooted in the sty.

A team of farm-workers went to and fro, bringing in hay wagons in summer, running the threshing machine during the moisson, or grain harvest, sorting apples and turning the moulin à cidre, the cider press, in autumn, patching masonry, whitewashing cowsheds, filling potholes, mending machinery. The life of a farm in France until the watershed of the 1980s, ushered in by labor and tax reforms, was all about manual labor.

Now, as we looked around outside the Farmhouse, the Basse-Cour was silent. Except for a tractor coming in and out, or the cattle being walked though to a new pasture, life had stopped. The pump tilted on its stone base, its handle askew. The doors were off the dairy, and the pig sties stood empty. In place of kitchen gardens, there was a hayfield. 

It was time to make a change…and we look forward to telling you about it in our next letter.

With best wishes to all – and for a prompt “retour de jours meilleurs.”