The Secret Life of France (23 page)

‘After a shift, we all sit down together and have a few beers, piss about. The French guys are sort of shut out. They don’t get the jokes. They don’t see the point of the work either. For them the job is just a means to an end and that affects everyone around them.’

So Jack discovers the Protestant work ethic and the notion of team spirit. This is the child who never ran a three-legged race or an egg-and-spoon race or saw his dad
humiliate himself in a father’s race. Brought up in a nation immune to the idea that it is the taking part that matters, Jack is slowly but surely discovering that winning is actually one of life’s least interesting goals.

It is strange to me to watch my own children struggling, for the first time, with the very facets of their own culture that I found so infuriating when I first arrived twenty-three years ago. While they were growing up, I was blind to my own influence upon them. They seemed to me so wonderfully French that I would never have guessed that their Englishness would one day come and bite me on the bottom. Now that they’re getting ready to leave for England, I find myself buried so deeply in this culture that I doubt I can ever escape it. France has swallowed me up, but not my children.

My relationship with France began with my relationship with Laurent. When the marriage ended, I assumed that my link to France would lessen in intensity. I was no longer speaking French all hours of the day, dreaming in French, arguing in French, loving in French. I thought I was no longer bound to this place. My children were grown up, so I could now choose: England or France. And then I discovered that I didn’t want to leave. I know France now and in knowing her, I love her. Like the
long-suffering
spouse who realises, after all those years, that in spite of everything, there is no one in the world she would rather be with, I adore and despise this country in equal measure.

When this book was first published in 2009, the two most valid criticisms were offered by both English and French readers. The first was that Paris isn’t France and the second was that the bourgeoisie isn’t everybody. Both remarks reveal the limits of my own experience. In leaving Paris for the Cévennes where I have been for the past four years, I hope that I have broadened my horizons at least a little.

Few of my Parisian friends have ventured to the
far-flung
wilderness that is the Cévennes. Most prefer to see me when I come to Paris for work or to see Ella and Jack, but those who have paid me a visit bring back a simple verdict: ‘Elle est complètement folle’ (She has completely lost it).

We’re so secluded here that I’m always amazed – even if we’re expecting a visitor – when someone knocks on our front door.

‘Why?’ is the question that often greets me as they step over the threshold.

Not sure, is the answer to that.

Seven years after the end of my marriage to Laurent, I found myself for the second time around with two
children under five. I was now forty-three, however, and not twenty-three. Perhaps the aging process was luring me to the bosom of nature. Perhaps I did not feel I had the stamina to relive Paris’s dusty, joyless playgrounds or usher the poor blighters through the gates of yet another of her overcrowded, competitive schools. I was also aware that Joe, the English father of our two little boys, Joshua and Gabriel, had not really taken to the bourgeois
dinner-party
circuit I had inherited from my marriage to Laurent.

On the surface, this new life of mine bears no resemblance whatsoever to my life in Paris. There is here a deep love for and identification with the land. The French word
terroir
– a charmed word, used increasingly as a brand to appeal to Parisian tastes – can mean the local or the regional, but also ground, terrain, land, soil, earth. It has no equivalent in English. The word induces a dewyeyed yearning in most Parisians, many of whom like to picture rural life as it appears on TV advertisements here, sanitised and idealised, with rugged but handsome peasants in red neckerchiefs sharpening their pocket knives, or olive-skinned beauties serving at long trestle tables piled high with
les bonnes choses
. I’m always amazed by the gulf between Paris and the countryside, and by how little Paris knows, or cares to know, of peasant life.

A year after we had settled into our house, Laurent lent us a DVD of a documentary about rural life called
La Vie Moderne
(Modern Life, 2008). Some of this critically acclaimed trilogy is set in the Cévennes, not far from us. Laurent loved this film directed by Magnum photographer
Raymond Depardon, a farm boy who, like many of his generation, ran away in the sixties to seek a better life in the bosom of Paris’s left-wing intelligentsia. The film was selected at Cannes and for a while
le tout-Paris
rhapsodised about this haunting portrayal of the harsh realities facing
la France Profonde
. At last they had a window on what peasant life was
really
like.

When I saw it, I was appalled. Contrary to what I had read in both the English and French reviews, I found Depardon’s narrative strategy and interview techniques to be brutal and condescending. I felt no ‘richness of fellow feeling’
*
as he levelled his alienating, wide-angle lens at the men and women whose lives he had decided to scrutinise. No Paris-born director would have got away with this disdainful study of rural life, in which the
paysan
subjects all come across as mute, depressed or simple-minded. One interview in particular, which featured a farm labourer on a tractor, epitomised to me the cruelty of Depardon’s gaze. The young man had no wish to talk to the camera, yet it remained pitilessly trained on him for many long minutes. Too polite to move away, he squirmed like an insect pinioned by an entomologist.

How is it, I asked myself, that only a few kilometres down the road from the lives and locations in this film, my farming neighbours are expansive, funny and broadminded? Perhaps Depardon has simply learnt over the years to give his adopted class what it wants: proof of its own superiority.

I do not feel that the gulf is as wide as both sides believe. As a foreigner I can’t help seeing in this austere and little-known corner of France, even among people who eke out a living from the land, many of the traits that I love about my Parisian friends: a passion for ideas, a belief in politics, a partiality to abstract discourse and a marked lack of interest in money as a goal in life. I found the same belief in the collectivist ideal put more readily into practice here in this isolated community, through the thriving collective lives of both the
commune
and of the local school, where Joshua and Gabriel are learning, in their own somewhat contrary fashion, to be soldiers of the Republic.

People here are attached to their history and to the outsider status that goes with it. The well-wishing grandson of a previous owner of this house dropped by shortly after we had moved in with documents and tales relating to its past. He gave us a much faded and folded letter addressed to a Monsieur André who had once lived here. It was dated according to the revolutionary calendar, ‘le 13 Fructidor, An 2,’ which would have been the late summer of 1794, a month after the fall of Robespierre and his
Terreur
(Reign of Terror), with its mass denunciations, its popular tribunals, its revolutionary committees and all the attendant horrors of the totalitarian state. The local mayor, trusting in our predecessor’s
civisme
, was requesting his presence for jury duty.

The old man then went on to tell us about his beloved grandfather, Abel, who cherished our house, spent every day of his retirement walking its terraces, and planted
many of its finest chestnut trees. He was, for his sins, married to a woman who preferred living in the valley to the high ground where this house is set. She managed to play for time and Abel died at the end of the Second World War still struggling to salvage the place from ruin. During the war Abel had employed a Jewish man from Poland whose family was being hidden by a friend in a nearby hamlet. The man had worked with him restoring some of the dry stone walls that sustain our terraces, which down here are called
faïsses
or
bancels
. I often picture the refugee walking this precipitous landscape with its carefully tended chestnut orchards and its rushing streams, and wonder how he felt here among these reserved people with their quiet generosity, and what became of him and his family after the war. I’m told they left and never returned.

The Occupation feels close to many of my neighbours and it seems to have moved closer to us too. On the wall of our sitting room, written in red paint by the Italian migrant workers who stopped here in Abel’s house in their flight from Mussolini, are the words:

The words are written on a patch of flaking lime render but there’s no question, for either of us, of re-plastering that wall. The message reads as a kind of sampler from a vanished past, a warning against the modern world and its insatiable appetites.

Unsure, still, of our motives, Joe and I arrived in the Cévennes with our sleeping boys on a snowy night in January 2008. There, standing with torches by the side of the steep track, were Bertrand and Marie, the couple who had shown us round the seventeenth-century farmhouse that we were hoping to restore. They greeted us warmly and opened up their rental
gite
for us, apologising for the damp, which would soon lift because, they said, in these parts it always does.

That night, the stars above that deserted mountaintop felt like a kind of miracle, and Joe and I fell asleep with the boys between us, primed and ready for anything this natural idyll could throw at us.

The next morning we all woke up fully clothed against the cold with our breath condensing on the windowpanes. Opening the shutters, we experienced ‘the wall of cloud’ for the first time. When this happens the world outside disappears for several days behind a thick, white mist and you find yourself behaving like a character in a Tarkovsky film, trapped in an eternal present, shuffling back and forth between the log pile and the stove. That first week Joe and I also realised that we were a thirty-minute drive to the nearest supermarket and that we owned a house that we couldn’t afford to renovate.

The house, when we went to inspect it, did not look sound. It seemed to cling precariously to the mountainside and little or no cement lay between the stones. The highest façade, the one that overlooked the steep drop to the valley, was bulging from its lime render like a fat
man’s stomach from his shirt. Even though the walls were over a metre thick and made of shale – granite that has been compressed over millennia to make a dark, friable stone that sparkles when it is wet – Joe sucked air. In a sensible country we would have been forced to have a survey but the local
notaire
who administered our sale merely consulted a map to make sure that we weren’t in a seismic zone or one prone to landslides and left the rest to fate. Contaminated, perhaps, by this country’s structural optimism, by the time Joe and I had scrambled round the steeply sloping terrace to the front and looked up at the bulging façade of this house, we’d already bought it.

The plan was to stay in Bertrand and Marie’s
gite
until the warm weather came, by which time Joe would have made the house sufficiently habitable. Brothers Georges and Charles, our neighbours and the local builders, whose humour is a fresh mountain stream of innuendo, took great pleasure in mocking Joe for his ambition to restore a house all by himself and with no experience whatsoever. I soon learnt that the
Cévenol
, who deplores interference of any kind, will not offer his or her help, but will wait eagerly for you to ask for it. This would prove difficult for Joe, who was brought up to believe that to ask is to impose. After three and a half years of watching Joe mix cement in a bucket I finally called Georges’s wife Mathilde and asked her if they had a spare cement mixer to lend. When Georges and Charles brought it round the following week on their truck they confessed that they had
wondered about Joe’s methods but had not dared offer a machine for fear of offending.

The first time I visited this house I was not with Joe, who was away on a photography job, but alone with our eight-month-old son, Gabriel. It was a warm October day and he was strapped to my chest, facing outwards, his bowed legs dangling in an absurd red and purple striped jumpsuit inherited from his eldest brother Jack, who had worn it to great effect twenty years before. I’m convinced it was Gabriel – or his jumpsuit – who won us this house. I say won because we, and all the other potential buyers, were rigorously interviewed by Bertrand. The actual owner of the house was in a hurry to sell, but not to anybody. She wanted her surrogate son Bertrand to choose his new neighbours, so she asked for a sum that was below the market price and waited to see who would show up. I have since learnt that there were several buyers, all foreign except for a young couple from Paris who did not suit at all.

‘They wanted it,’ Bertrand said with his broad smile. ‘And yet nothing was right for them,’ an observation that seemed to me a perfect summation of modern consumerism.

As for Bertrand, he wished the buyers to fall in love with the place. He wanted them to fall for the house, the sweet chestnut woods that came with it and the long view down the valley to the summer pastures in the distance. But he was looking for a certain kind of love: not the avid, covetous kind often felt for second homes but the deep,
slow-burning kind that new lives are made of. This was discernible from the way he behaved as he showed me round, and it was with a certain feeling of guilt that I set about conveying the idea that we were not speculators but settlers. Even five years on I’m not sure that this is the truth. Am I not, simply by virtue of my culture, a speculator in deep cover?

Whether I’m guilty or not, it was Gabriel who clinched it. The woman who owned the house was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s and at one point we were all standing on one of the steep, wooded terraces when she noticed with some distress that her shoelace was undone. Gabriel was out of his sling, so I handed him to her and knelt down to tie up her shoelace. When I stood up, she was looking into Gabriel’s face and smiling at him; a smile so beautiful that it made me wonder if he had awoken some precious memory – of another baby from her past, perhaps – or simply swept away, with his clear gaze, all the fretfulness of forgetting.

When term began in January, Joshua started at the local school and Gabriel at the village crèche, both paid for by the state. I found it hard to resist Joshua’s petite and ageless teacher Sylvie with her schoolroom full of caged birds and rabbits in which she had been teaching for the past thirty-five years. Tucked away in this valley with her ten pupils, Health and Safety remained a figment from the future. Along with the children of the
Néos
Cévenols
(new settlers like us) and the
Cévenols de souche
(the name given to those whose families have been here
for more than a few generations) Joshua was learning about things like the seasons, planting vegetables, climate change and hunting wild boar. It was only a matter of time, however, before I realised that I was going to have to relive at least some of the trauma of my earlier encounters with the republican dream made manifest in
l’Education Nationale
:

‘Lucy,’ Sylvie warned me one afternoon outside school, ‘I’m concerned that Joshua (
aged three
) is showing no collective spirit.’

Plus ca change
…

Les Néos
, as the young, New Age settlers who tend to wash up in this valley are called, are for the most part warmly welcomed by the locals. It is mostly their children who keep the school open and their
RSA
†
welfare cheques go in large part towards sustaining the village with its organic shop, two cafés, its butcher and
épicerie
. There is at the same time, a slow-burning conflict that on occasion rears its head between
les anciens
who live off the land and those who, so it is perceived, live off the state. One thing the
Cévenol de souche
cannot abide is the sight of the
Néo
buying ready-chopped wood for the winter. The Protestant ethic insists that if you must order your wood
in, you do so in trunks and you chop it yourself. I know that if I’m accepted here it’s mostly thanks to Joe and the many hours of manual labour that he has put into this house.