LITMIR.BIZ

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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 sense – there was no screen in the window to hide the priest from the parishioner. To this day we haven’t figured it out, and as yet no one has been able to tell us.

      What Michael first noticed was the brand-new waste pipe that had been installed in the landing. ‘That will make putting in a bathroom easy,’ he said with a laugh.

      In all there were fifteen rooms in the house, though the two dilapidated ones were not in the architect’s drawings that the owner had given us. Evidently if the rooms didn’t appear on the architect’s drawings then they wouldn’t be included in the tax assessment.

      What with all the rooms and all the closets in the rooms and on the landings there were, it seemed, hundreds of doors in the house. They were gorgeous and some of them, as the owner had explained to us, were very old and valuable. I remember her pointing to one and saying it dated back to 1750. Many had tiny metal plaques with the letters ND on them, which I was sure stood for Notre Dame – Our Lady. All had large, old-fashioned keys in the locks, and I knew that one of my first jobs would be to label them. I could just see Joe, who was almost three, having a field day taking out the keys and mixing them up.

      Michael was eager to get to work. Before he could, however, the place needed to be cleaned out, for there was a great deal of junk and rubble in it. ‘The realtor offered to bring a dump truck over and clean out the house,’ I said. ‘I think we should have him do it.’

      Michael looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘There’s got to be something of value here or he would never have offered,’ he said. ‘That statue, for instance.’ We rushed around to the back of the house where we’d seen a plaster statue of an angel holding a child by the hand. She was still there. We hastily moved her inside. Then we walked down the stone steps into the cave, and turned on a powerful flashlight. The dusty bottles we’d noticed were all there. We brought several upstairs into the light. Each was a different hue, from celadon green to a wispy blue, and all were hand blown. ‘These are what he wanted,’ Michael said. ‘These bottles will put Joe through college.’

      The following day we moved ourselves into the tiny house in Le Vaudreuil. It was ideal; Florence and her husband Edouard and their two children – Marine, a girl of about eight, and Quentin, twelve – the perfect landlords. Florence insisted that Joe use the swing set and sand box in her garden, as well as the toy room that took up an entire floor in her house and which Marine used only very occasionally. She seemed delighted to have us living in her back garden. The only cloud was her dog, Diva. A golden Labrador, she was as vicious as a pit bull. Florence kept her in the house, but if ever she forgot and left her outside, the minute we showed ourselves in the garden she hurled herself in our direction, hackles up, teeth bared. She was terrifying, and the only ones who could control her were Florence and Edouard.

      The dog aside, those first months were idyllic. Michael went to Louviers each day to work on the house. I stayed in Le Vaudreuil and worked on my book. We had arranged for our favourite babysitter from Maine to join us for several months and she amused Joe, taking him on walks and bicycle rides. Michael was in a stage of discovery about the house that left him excited, full of plans. I reveled in the beginning stages of my book, living in Le Vaudreuil, seeing Edith all the time, being part of village fabric on a daily basis.

      Le Vaudreuil is a charming, well-to-do village of 5000 people whose government is generally centrist. The river Eure runs through it, and its main street ends in a small square with a café on each side, a pharmacy and a boulangerie, a tiny épicene with basic supplies and fresh vegetables, and two small restaurants offering simple country fare, from steack frites to various preparations ‘à la crème’, in true Norman fashion. Tiny streets lined with quaint stone houses wind away from the square, and there is a church at either end of town, with parishioners staunchly devoted to one or the other.

      Before Joseph was born, when I visited Edith and Bernard in Le Vaudreuil, friends and villagers who greeted me looked at my stomach before looking in my eyes. ‘Not pregnant yet?’ they would ask. To them it was unthinkable that a married woman would wait so long to have a child. I got used to it. Like most Americans, Michael and I worked around the clock. We wanted children and felt we had time, though I did occasionally fear I would be like the woman in the cartoon who, at about age forty, put her hand to her forehead in great surprise and said, ‘Oh my God! I forgot to have children.’ I used to look at my French friends, most of whom had at least three children and were my age or a few years older, and marvel at them. Through them I realized what a different culture we lived in. To them, having children was what

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