A Place in Normandy Read online

  People come running out as I skim low over their houses—blue-jeaned peasants, white-aproned wives, children scrambling between them, all bareheaded and looking as though they’d jumped up from the supper table to search for the noise above their roofs.

  —Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

  On May 21, 1927, at about nine-thirty in the evening, Charles Lindbergh, thirty hours out of New York, after turning southwest at Deauville on the last leg of his flight to Paris, gazed down out of his plane’s cockpit. Playing in the pasture below her house in Mesnil, my mother, Frances Frieseke, looked up briefly before continuing her game, which, since she was all of thirteen years old, was as important to her as anything Lindbergh was doing. Now, more than three generations later, my train from Paris followed, but in reverse, the last stretch of Lindbergh’s route. At first we crossed, frequently, the stately blue meanders of the Seine. Seeing the barges pondering along the river reminded me of a plan hatched by my godson Gabriel, with whose family I had stayed the previous night: he proposed plotting a beeline from Paris to Le Havre, at the Seine’s mouth, and using kayaks to traverse the sewer systems of the towns lying in the river’s embracing loops, a scheme that would cut the length of the trip by two thirds. Gabriel has inherited something of his father’s approach to complex problems, itself modeled on Alexander’s solution to the Gordian knot: it was his father who, at the age of eleven, showed Art Buchwald how to do the Louvre in five minutes.

  The organization of the countryside out the train window was the same as it had been for hundreds of years—just as Lindbergh had seen it in the gloaming from his plane, and as Julia and I had first gazed on it in 1968, both surprised and delighted to find colors and patterns of landscape that we had seen described in paintings dating from as far back as the fifteenth century. In the flatlands the fields were broad and separated by pollarded hedges. This was wheat-growing country, only recently planted with American corn, or maize. Occasionally I spotted the startling scarlet flash of a pioneer poppy, or yellow fields of mustardlike rape (colza, raised for canola oil); and sometimes the brilliant low blue flickering pondscape of a field of flax.

  The train wanted two hours to reach Pont l’Evêque from Paris. Failing a strike or some other act of God, French trains are efficient, comfortable, and precisely on time. I could rely on the fact that a train scheduled to arrive at Evreux at 10:17 would indeed arrive at 10:17. Passengers were informed by loudspeaker that the train would stop for one minute; at 10:18 we would depart as promised.

  After Evreux, when the hills started, so did the orchards, in which were frequently pastured the black-and-white native Norman cows. Suzette, a friend of Julia’s and mine, an old playmate of my mother’s, and a member of our extended almost family in France, had recently moved from Mesnil to the Loiret and now lamented about the white long-horned cattle that looked into the windows of her rented presbytery. “They are strangers,” she said. “I am lonesome for the Norman cows as if they were my sisters.”

  Whenever I was in Cambridge, I myself always felt lonesome for the scale of the French landscape, which now offered me a reassuring physical comfort as the train raced through it. This being the end of May, spring was well over. The apple orchards had surrendered their blossoms and settled down to reap the consequences of their profligate display. Only a few fruit trees stood out here and there, still in bloom. The farmhouses were surrounded by fences that protected their flowers and kitchen gardens from the cattle. I saw roses, though in less profusion than in Paris; Paris had been awash in roses. The countryside paid more attention to what might be eaten.

  The land we were heading into was steep and wet and, once deprived of its woods, good for no large-scale agriculture or husbandry other than apple trees, cows, and hay. Although Normandy is slowly changing along with most other parts of the world where farming is in serious decline, many Norman towns and villages are still lapped at their edges by fields and orchards. The landscape out my window remained as it had been (minus the devastations of war) when the allied troops moved through it toward Paris in the late summer following D day, the allied Normandy action that made the name of the province a household word.

  My train reached Pont l’Evêque shortly before noon. I had planned my arrival for midday, but not too late—that is, before that phenomenon of provincial paralysis called le déjeuner (lunch) began to slam the shutters on all commercial activity. I wanted to shop for essentials before finding out what had happened to the house in my absence. The place in Normandy alone might be responsible for the survival of the future perfect tense in the conditional mood, since I knew from long experience that when I arrived, something might always have gone wrong. The previous year, for example, I had arranged that while I was away, an impossible little bathtub was to be removed from the second-floor salle d’eau (bathroom). Resembling the front end of an old VW sedan turned upside down, the tub had to be entered from the narrow end, a feat best attempted by persons with long legs. Once in, however, one had nowhere to put those legs, except around the ears. I had left directions for this fixture to be replaced by a shower.

  When I got to the house that year, I found that the tub indeed had been removed from the bathroom, but rather than having vanished entirely, as I had wished, it now sat forlornly in a bedroom, a cast iron memorial to temps perdu. Where I had expected a shower cabinet, there was instead a low, square china basin set onto the floor, in the place where the tub had been, with bare plaster walls next to it on two sides, and the passage door with its glass pane (which connected to a closet also entered from the billiard room) forming the third side. The project required further elaboration. As Julia might have pointed out, the best directions are not always those administered from afar. As to the offending tub, it remained in the bedroom until one afternoon when I was entertaining a prospective client over tea in the garden, during which collation it was carried away by a small parade of jocular apprentice plumbers.

  I was prepared for cold and wet, but when I arrived in Pont l’Evêque, I found that the day was hot and offered a mild, dry wind—unusual for Normandy, especially this early in the season. Fresh from the train, I left my bags with the chef de gare, promising to pick them up once I had my car, and walked through the town.

  School would be in session for another two months, and the summer’s tourism had not yet begun to swell the population, which in winter was between three and four thousand souls. A sort of expanded version of a small French country town, Pont l’Evêque is arrayed principally along a main street that points between Rouen and Caen, with outriding elements springing up along two perpendicular cross streets both descended from Roman roads, one on each side of the River Touques. Under its bunting of flags—all the European Union countries’ banners, stretched repeatedly across the main street, as if this were a used-car lot—a few men were fishing from the town’s bridges.

  My walk through Pont l’Evêque was really more of a skulk, since I did not want the Citroën garagiste to see me patronizing the rival Renault dealer (the French word for rival is collègue), where, if he had received my fax, M. Fruchon had already arranged to let me have the smallest, cheapest, reddest, and most battered rental available. My parents still kept a car in Normandy, but I wanted no part of driving it. An ancient spherical Citroën familiale purchased used in 1968, it evoked hoots of appreciation whenever it was seen floundering between the hedgerows. The Citroën had problems with both brakes and power, especially while driving (and/or suddenly coasting) downhill, when the ignition cable would occasionally part company with the battery. In spite of its habits, Julia and my mother, up till our last joint stay, ten years before, had never hesitated to drive the car—perhaps because its behavior coincided so well with their worldviews. I myself was scared to death of driving it, probably for the same reason. (My father had no opinion; he did not drive at all, on account of a solemn oath my mother had made to his mother in 1937.)

  I had to be quick. Small groups of clean children were al
ready being herded across the streets of the town on their way home for lunch; had I been twenty minutes later, M. Fruchon, too, would have left for his midday meal, and his office would have remained smug for the next hour while I cooled my heels. But I was not twenty minutes later, because I had been riding a French train.

  I signed for my car and committed another act of treachery against the old hearth gods by disregarding the purists’ approved manner of shopping, which requires fifteen stops, and negotiations with thirty people, to secure eleven items at the small, specialized shops in town. Instead I bought what I needed all in one lump, at the Intermarché in the zone industrielle tacked on to the Rouen end of Pont l’Evêque. The Intermarché is a large hangar in which one can buy almost anything, using a metal cart rented with a ten-franc piece. I sailed with confidence along the aisles, past fish and fruits and canned goods, hardware and bottles, dodging out-of-breath housewives in need of a last ingredient, and feeling like Art Buchwald in the Louvre. I had my shopping done in the fifteen minutes available before they locked their doors, on which leftover placards from the D-day fiftieth-anniversary celebration proclaimed Welcome Our Liberators.

  THREE

  The Pays d’Auge is best known for its fat green pastureland, apples, cattle, and cheese, as well as its hamlets and its isolated farms. “Mesnil? I know it,” a taxi driver told me once. “A place almost completely enfoncé [sunken away] dans la nature.”

  Between Pont l’Evêque and Mesnil, the land was indeed fat and green, though the day itself was unusually warm and dry. I opened the Renault’s window as I drove to let the warm wind blow in lungfuls of deep grassy air. The hills rose abruptly on either side of the Touques Valley in soft, weathered humps. Almost nobody else was on the road, and all those I did encounter were in a hurry to get home to lunch. The countryside was defined by ancient hedgerows, between which the smaller roads and trails used by the Celts before the Romans came were worn down to a level five feet lower than that of the adjoining fields. The pastures on the hills, despite the day’s warmth and unaccustomed sunshine, were wet and luscious; the cows grazed placidly in their orchards. This mixed use, a hallmark of the Norman style, keeps the grass under the apple trees from going to waste while the apples mature. Cider above and milk below.

  I passed through the center of the commune of Mesnil, population 100: the church and graveyard, the café, and the vicarage, abandoned by the church (which no longer had a pastor) and now inhabited by English civilians. Mesnil’s château was invisible at the end of its long, wide alley of carefully pruned trees, behind a well-kempt park. Apart from the church, Mesnil itself was no more than a corner spread of little houses in brick, flint, and half-timber, some thatched, some roofed in slate, most of them built right against the street. Turning at the café, I was held up by a roadful of cows, changing pasture at a pace that would not excite anyone’s milk. Behind them ambled a broad woman in working blue who encouraged them by calling out their names and waving a wand of hazel still tipped with leaves. The smell of the herd embraced me. I shifted down and followed the cows until their road veered into the Bouquerels’ field.

  The town of Mesnil, 1988. Photo Walter Chapin

  Then it was downhill along the narrow road, five feet wide at best, worn pink between the hedgerows. It kept to the broad trough cut by the douet, next to the marshy banks hidden behind pollarded trees and thickets of brambles. Before long I came to a particularly overgrown hedge that ran along the foot of the hillside on which the farm was situated. Behind these hedges, out of sight, was what was left of the farm. I slowed and pulled in at the drive, climbed out of the car to open the gate, and stood transfixed by the rich shock of the smell of cuttings tossed over the gate into the drive from the grass trimmed for our nearest neighbors, the de Longprés, Parisians whose grouping of half-timbered cottages was shuttered. Having houses on both sides, the de Longprés control the road at the foot of my hill and could, if they wanted, stretch a chain across it and collect tolls from travelers—perhaps as many as three a day. Their properties blossomed for all that the owners were not in residence, and their gardens were in trim and coyly disciplined. I stood at the bottom of the driveway, the steep orchard behind me, on the far side of the road, rising to the woods that crowned the hill opposite the farm. I heard the douet chattering along under the bridge—that was all right—and smelled cows I could not see, looked in my mailbox (new last year and, I congratulated myself, still existing) and pulled from it a damp flier for an electronics shop in Lisieux. I noticed how thick and tall the nettles and brambles already were behind the gate and along the driveway as it started uphill. I glanced toward the spot where the shade of the tall trees meeting over it formed a cool bank. The house I wanted was still out of sight.

  Even the foot of the driveway offered the comfortable fit of an old shoe. The hot air stirred and made me dizzy with rich scents. I smelled familiar mud and turned left to face the marshy stretch of pasture between the douet and the road, across which lay some of the poplars that were supposed to line the stream. This was Julia’s favorite part of the farm, since it was level and she was from the Midwest. She sometimes said she would like to build a house there, in what she called, out of nostalgia for Illinois, “the flat.” Everything in view was either dead or overgrown or a mixture of the two, since even downed poplars that anyone would have been obliged to acknowledge had died now thrust up green branches and refused to give in. The genius of the Norman climate normally does not allow, except in dense shade, a square inch of empty dirt. Something grew everywhere. The hair and draperies of the sirens were so unkempt that I could almost hear Julia saying, Oh, God, it’s such a mess—meaning, It’s so beautiful. If teenagers are going to be so absurdly lovely, why do they have to do this to their bedrooms?

  I drove my car in and closed the gate behind me. The drive rose at an angle that varied between ten and fifteen degrees after crossing the beckoning douet. (Douet is the Norman variant of the French doigt, or “finger.”) The ascent began in a splurge of crushed mint under the car’s tires. Offering something like a kilometer of uphill going that started in the primordial damp under the alley of lindens and chestnuts, the drive was sometimes more a streambed than a proper road. As my Renault undertook the steepest and most rutted part of the climb, I tried to calculate the number of truckloads of gravel that, if all this were to become my fault, I would need to order to fill the crevasses. The car struggled out of the rocky tunnel of wet shade, and we were in the open, on an old cart track overgrown with grass and a low, blooming member of the daisy family that was or was not chamomile, depending on whom one asked. It would take several days of my using the driveway for the plants to wear down to something like a gravel surface. Since the weather was unnaturally dry, it was no problem: the leaves provided traction.

  The top of the drive, ca. 1930, M. Braye’s house on right.

  I passed between the arthritic apple orchards that we rented out as pasture and saw the house for the first time, two thirds of the way up the hill, its slate-covered southwest end all black, gapped, and dusted with lichen. Even with its shutters closed, it was a sight that never failed to delight me and fill me with the adolescent yearning that makes more sensible men of mature years run after starlets. The house I wanted stood as it always had and always should, a lady between her two half-timbered handmaids, outriding cottages, adrift in orchard pasture and haunted by woodland.

  Although there was less in the way of buildings now than there had once been, this was essentially the same scene that my grandparents had first looked over in 1919, when they came by horse cart from the other end of the long loop of driveway, fording the douet rather than crossing the bridge. That slope was easier on the horses. They entered the property through a gate between a pair of poplars pollarded by storms, which my grandfather and old M. Lafontaine, who owned the next field (and much else in the area) used to converse under, congratulating each other on the fact that their boundary marker was destined to outlive them. Th
ose poplars embraced in their ancient coupling at the far end of the plateau cut by the roadway in the hill’s face, along which most of the farm’s buildings (many of them now long gone) had been clustered. The track passed directly through the busy courtyard in front of Mme. Vera’s chaumière, whose thatch (chaume) we had renewed in 1968. What had moved my grandparents, in 1919, to take on so much? Frederick Frieseke was a town boy from Owosso, Michigan, where his family made bricks. His ambition to control the physical world encompassed canvas and paint, books, trout, and billiards. Something of a dandy, he was neither a farmer nor a manager by temperament. My grandmother, by contrast, was familiar with farms on account of her family’s having had a place in Radnor, Pennsylvania (and through additional time spent in New Mexico, on horseback), and nobody who knew her could ever have accused her of not being a manager. I imagine the bargain they struck was that Fred would paint and fish and read, and Sadie would oversee the property, make sure the paintings were sold, and supervise the extensive gardens that she immediately began to lay out, of which now only hints of the boundaries remained.

  Frederick Frieseke had arrived in Paris in 1897, when he was twenty-three. Sarah O’Bryan, whom he would marry, came from Philadelphia to Paris at about the same time in the company of a sister and her parents, her father having chosen Paris for his retirement. Counted a painter of some significance during his own lifetime, my grandfather had been forgotten by the time my grandmother died, and it was only within the past twenty years that his reputation had been revived, as a member of the group referred to by current art historians as the American Impressionists. The study of art, and the career that followed, took Frieseke to Paris and kept him there, but it was another pursuit that led the Friesekes to settle in Normandy. The River Epte, in the environs of Giverny, where he, like many American painters had summered, was overfished, and Guillaume Pinchon, a fellow painter and fisherman, recommended as an alternative the Normandy rivers the Calonne, the Touques, and the Risle. Pinchon found a place for his own family in Les Authieux, near Pont l’Evêque, at the end of 1918, after the end of the First World War. Not far away, in Mesnil, the Friesekes, following his lead, purchased a dilapidated farm in 1919 and began to make it theirs, gradually adding such modern frivolities as plumbing and a kitchen. Later, after the stock-market crash, and when they had reached a certain age, they would give up their Paris apartment, and the place in Normandy would become their sole residence. Frieseke had started to enjoy some critical success in the world before the war, and his pictures had begun to sell. In 1919, he was forty-five, and his only daughter five years old; the family of three was apparently in an expanding mode that must have been enhanced by the euphoria of the war’s end. It was not that they were going back to the land, exactly, since they had every intention of keeping the Paris apartment on the Rue du Cherche Midi for the months from November through March. And besides, the actual farming of the property would continue to be done by a local family that rented the acreage and lived nearby.