A Place in Normandy (20 page)

“It's the plumbers,” I said. I knew that truck, which had now backed down the driveway and disappeared again. We listened to confused vehicular activity. I saw Andalouse start loping down the pasture toward the commotion, with Teddy ambling behind her.

“They're giving up?” Ruth asked.

View from the library window. Pencil drawing, 1930, by F. C. Frieseke.

The wet air shook with a determined growl as the plumbers' truck lurched backward uphill and into view, gravel and chopped green spraying outward at its wheels until it sagged to a halt at about the spot where it had been making itself at home before.

“Plumbers get it up halfway,” Margaret said.

“We'll make that line into a bumper sticker and try it in Brooklyn,” Ben promised.

We watched the plumber's
gars'
assistant open the truck and pull out some lengths of copper pipe, which he shouldered and carried at a trot through the rain up to the house, past and among the cows that had been slowly gathering in the drive and pasture below M. Braye's.

I told my guests, “You go on to market and enjoy yourselves. Get me a rabbit. I'll stay and play with the plumbers.”

TWENTY-THREE

Teddy had brought his boots from Amsterdam. “I always travel with them,” he said. Ben had managed to find some that more or less fit him at the Intermarché during the morning's expedition; I had mine, and the house supply provided for the women. The group having decided that the best response to the weather was denial, and the house in any case having become a playground for plumbers, we resolved to adjourn outdoors after lunch.

“We noticed trees downed here and there on the property,” Teddy said, “Andalouse and I, roaming this morning. If you'd like, we could cut some wood. Where do you get your wood supply?”

“From the same people who take care of the fences,” I told him. “I think it's part of the deal.”

“Then we'll cut some, just in case,” Teddy said. But he was overruled: the consensus was that we should walk in the woods and not plan to do any useful exercise.

“Hedonism's where it's at,” Margaret announced. “Hedonism
minceur.
” She had returned from market with turkey thighs cut crossways, and before lunch she and Ruth had made a flurry of cutting and peeling onions, carrots, celery, and other vegetables, casting them into a pot, and starting what Margaret claimed would become, after hours of slow simmering, a sort of turkey osso buco. That would struggle in the downstairs kitchen while we were out getting some hedonistic exercise in the weather.

The rain appeared to be thinning toward a hesitation, which fooled no one. We put on slickers with hoods and set off uphill, with Andalouse and Teddy in the lead, into the woods called, on old maps, the Bois du Loup Pendu, or Wood of the Hanged Wolf.

*   *   *

Frances and her mother, one afternoon long years ago, were looking for some cows that had last been seen wandering toward these woods. They climbed the steep stairs leading from one flourishing garden terrace to another and arrived at the overgrown parkland at the crest of the hill, which was bounded by the alley of lindens. Fred was painting on the second level, and it must have been going well, since they could hear him singing.

F. C. Frieseke,
The Fountain,
oil on canvas, 20
×
24 inches, 1923. Private collection.

Frances and her mother were through the park and well into the older wilderness of woodland, past the linden alley, before Frances thought to remark, “I don't remember that maze from before.”

“What maze?”

“The maze we just went through.”

Her mother said what mothers say to children who have seen something that isn't there, but she allowed Frances to convince her to backtrack and look where they had been, if only to demonstrate that there was nothing there. Nothing like a maze now, or indeed then—though years later, when for some reason they had occasion to look over the plans of the grounds designed by Mesnier while he was redoing the interior, they found that they called for a boxwood maze, of which nothing existed save for the ghost that my mother, holding a wand with which to herd the stray cows, had walked through that day, calling “Blanche, Pascale, Mireille, Désirée.”

*   *   *

As Thérèse would no doubt have enjoyed explaining to us, the enormous forest extending inland from the coast, of which this area was a part, had once belonged to the king of France and was held in fief to him by the Duke of Normandy, and then in fief to the duke by the Viscount of Auge, who was, in the eleventh century, a member of the Bertram family: barons of Bricquebec, with large holdings on this side of the Touques and fortified seats not only at Bricquebec but also about eight miles from Mesnil, at Fauguernon. The forest's wealth was fenced in for the benefit of its owners, and named after the River Touques. One of its cantons (or large divisions) was known as Loup Pendu, and our neck of the woods was still known under that name in the seventeenth century.

The last wolf known to have been killed in Normandy died in 1868, and since then they have been extinct in the province. However, in its place names, the region abounds in wolves: Canteleu and Canteloup are both variants of Chanteloup (Wolfsong), of which there are five examples in Calvados, in addition to three St. Loups (a Christian appropriation of an old pagan divinity), a Louvetot, and two Louvières (Place of Wolves). A look at a 1:25,000 map of our area turns up a Camplou, a Bonneville la Louvet, a Chemin de la Mare aux Loups (Track of Wolfmere or, maybe better, Wolfmere Drive), another Rue aux Loups, and Les Louteries. (Lieu Loutrel, for its part, refers not to the wolf but to the otters, or loutres, that used to be fished out of the streams with long barbed forks until they were eradicated.) In terms of wolf names, the charmingly christened Lieu d'Amour (Place of Love—there must be a story!) is no less surrounded by menacing predators than is La Taupe (The Mole), its neighbor.

If the wolves are gone, moles are still numerous in woods and fields, and occasionally on walks I have come upon dozens of their little dead bodies lying beside the path. Not so long ago, one of the forest-based livelihoods practiced in the region was that of
taupier
(moler), whose practitioners traveled through the countryside in large wooden casks or hogsheads on wheels—perhaps containing in their fragrant interiors Mme. le Taupier and the blind little ones—the whole contraption dragged by mules. The
taupier
's
métier
was to trap and kill moles and, for all I know, skin them and sell their hides. (In the thirteen hundreds, the fee for trapping 130 mature moles was the same as that earned for hanging a person—about a week's wages for a watchman. This fact goes some way toward explaining the relative merits of various portions of the rural economy; it is also the kind of information that likes to accumulate on my dining-room table and then move into the library when guests come, to build up on the floor next to my desk, on which I usually have my detailed map spread out to help me locate something.)

The forest's old ways still showed on the map. Because of the availability of fuel, numerous places were named La Forge, for the forges in which bog iron was once worked into ingots. The people of the woods also made glass and gathered the bark of trees to sell; Ecorcheville, or Barkville, was not far away. Bark stripped from felled oaks was used for tanning leather, the procedure for which constituted a major source of the pollution that accompanied eleventh-century industry. Its acids fed into such rivers as the Ante below Falaise, where Duke Robert the Devil (known to his friends as Robert the Magnificent) found Arlette bathing and quickly promoted her in rank from daughter of Fulbert the Tanner (known to some as Fulbert the Embalmer) to mother of William the Bastard (known to
his
many friends as William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, and King of England).

TWENTY-FOUR

Setting out, we skirted the ruins of the garden's terraces by way of the pasture in back of Mme. Vera's and ducked under the strands of rusty barbed wire looping unconvincingly along the trunks of the large and ancient lindens and beeches that marked the boundary of the forest. Underfoot were the husks of beechnuts, browsed through by deer or boar over the previous fall and winter. The undergrowth was wet and yellow-green, confused by a jealous riot of competing sprigs and runners. It smelled like a change of world as sudden and absolute as the step across the line between pasture and town.

Originally a forest denoted a place with a boundary that was meant to keep the people out and the wild animals
in
for the recreational hunting of the owning class. The people of the countryside were effectively trapped within the areas of cultivation, beyond whose boundaries they could trespass only within strict limitations and on peril of their lives if they were caught poaching protein. The larger
forêt,
like the smaller
breuil
(as in Le Breuil en Auge, which is situated next to a thicket of remnants still on the map under the name Le Bois du Roi), signified a preserve, “in the old and long tradition still honored by the Sierra Club,” as Ben remarked, climbing in boots that were already proving too small, “by which the fortunate sought to preserve the benefits of the wilderness for their own exercise and moral uplift, and to keep it safe from other people who might defile it by using its wealth to offset their hunger. And in France, I have to say, one gets the sense of an uncanny social order. For example, landing at Cherbourg and waiting for our car…”

The garden stairs, 1995. Photo by author

Our path was thick with wet
fougères,
or bracken—large, rank ferns already almost waist-high. The woods, only sporadically cleared—this part most recently by us, some twenty years before, to provide capital for the new roof—had a piebald look. Some of the pines we had planted in place of what we sold were still struggling aloft, but for the most part the native growth was deciduous: chestnut, horse chestnut, oak, linden, sycamore, and ash, with an occasional accent of dense green from a box or holly. Long-lasting, slow-growing, and evergreen, these last were often used as boundary markers for woodland lots. Now and again we saw a matched pair of gateposts lost in undergrowth, or caught glimpses of the shallow quarry or overgrown cart tracks.

Ben continued, “We were standing there waiting, in that place where the passengers get off the boat, and we noticed the crowd parting toward us as if it were these ferns with a wind blowing through them. Nobody seemed upset or even particularly preoccupied by whatever it was that was causing the movement; they all just went on chatting or scolding or reading their papers or jockeying for the best places in line. When our section of the crowd opened up, we saw a small parade: five uniformed police officers, two women and three men, one of them handcuffed to a well-dressed middle-aged man who was carrying a briefcase. Except for the crowd's moving to make room, it was as if it were not even happening. The police and their captive marched through without looking to either side, though the shackled man smiled in a way that one might read as shamefaced, maybe nervous. After they passed, everyone fell back into the opening they had made and continued their business. We may have been the only people at the station who noticed.”