The neighborhood

The man that sold us our house warned us not to trust the neighbor. The neighbor said don't trust the farmer. The farmer kept his own counsel. We set out to find out by ourselves.

There are five families in the neighborhood. We met Bertrand and Mathilda first, just after we bought Le Pouget and we liked them at once. They live across the road in a renovated stone barn. Bertrand is a former mason, a gregarious and charming man who reads Socrates, Joyce and the Huffington Post. His family is Italian, as is Mathilda’s, and they met in St Tropez. I can imagine them together then – brown-eyed beauty Mathilda and older, handsome and sophisticated Bertrand. They have two beautiful sons, one at a university in England; the other at a lycée in Bordeaux. The oldest, Gregoire, helped us in the house on his spring break. As we shoveled plaster and bricks, we talked about Descartes, Spinoza and Kant – both of us philosophy majors, although my study was decades ago. I listened and remembered and was happy that his favorite was the Dutch lens-grinder.

Down the drive are Marie-Christine and Jean-Pierre who are dairy farmers and own most of the land around us. They are friendly and respectful. First they waved from their tractor, then they stopped the tractor, dismounted and made polite introductions. Now they wave and beep each time they pass.

After Patrick left, we continued to demolish the inside of the house, and knocked down five more walls, opening it up to light and air. The piles of debris mounted. Jean-Pierre said he’d take the rubble to fill some holes on his farm, and delighted, we asked him to come back at the end of the week. Getting rid of the enormous piles had seemed a daunting task. Friday came and we’d only made a small dent carting the bricks and mortar outside. Jean-Pierre, a taciturn, shy man who speaks in a sing-song dialect we can hardly understand, realized our plight and worked with us all afternoon. Plaster, brick and wallpaper flying, he hauled off load after load in his tractor front-end loader. When we finished we opened a bottle of wine and toasted and smiled at each other as the sun was setting through our lovely new bank of west-facing windows.

The patois would later get me into trouble with Marie-Christine and Jean-Pierre’s son when I tried to communicate with him about their cows grazing near our barn. I misunderstood him, he misunderstood me. We don’t have a problem with his cows, he thought we did. Luckily, Marie-Christine is direct and stopped by to sort it out. As she said, it would not be good for either of us if we didn't like her cows. Next time I’ll say, “J'aime les vaches.”

The house next to Bertrand and Mathilda has two delightful children and a chain-smoking governess. They have parents I have yet to see or meet. The remaining neighbors are an elderly couple and some Parisians who spend part of the year here.

Down the road, which used to be the ancient pilgrim’s route to Compostelle, and less than a kilometer away, is St Avit-Sénieur, a tiny medieval village dominated by a huge 11th century abbey with an adjoining cloister. It was fortified in the 12th century by two enormous defensive towers in a time when no villages were safe from roving bands of mercenary soldiers. The sanctuary was large enough to protect all of the town's residents during an attack and the door strong enough to withstand an army. Now, a well-used pétanque court lies at the entrance to the cloister ruins -- promises of afternoons to come. On the ridge to the west is the fine military gothic church at Beaumont with four belfry towers: it is rumored that they were used to pour boiling oil on attackers. It is larger than St. Avit's abbey and even had an interior well to sustain its citizens during enemy sieges. Twenty kilometers to the north is another fortress church in Trémolat. In medieval times, the church was the second line of defense, after the town walls. To have so many in such close proximity testifies to the violence of the Périgord’s history.

A few years ago I researched my ancestry on my father's side and found that I was related to Eleanor of Aquitaine by three separate lines. I was delighted that Eleanor had probably passed by our farm when she visited the local churches and their important relics (Cadouin's abbey was believed to have had part of the shroud, proved to be a fake in 1935).

It was also a pleasant coincidence that John and I had visited St Avit several years before and stopped at the Relais de Compostelle for a glass of wine and spent a delightful hour talking with the proprietor, sitting on the terrace while the sun set over the valley. We went back to find her and she was still there and remembered us. She is Luce, a lovely, warm woman and the mother of the restaurant’s owner, Dominique. We became instant friends. She only comes on weekends to help her daughter and I don’t see her much, but it’s nice to know I have a friend nearby.

Then came Patrick

We continued on the house and worked long, hard days, often leaving after sunset, too tired to do anything but find an open restaurant, dinner and a bottle of wine. Friends visited to check our progress and stayed to help, pitching in with the day’s project, however dirty or difficult.

One Sunday in early April, Jacques and Patrick and Ulla arrived in Jacques’ big blue van with their boys, Titouan and Elias. It was their first visit to Le Pouget and a proprietary one as they had introduced us to the Périgord. Ever since the New Year’s weekend three and a half years ago, they had encouraged our enthusiasm – and now they were here to see what they had started. It was cold and drizzling that morning, but soon after they arrived, the sun came out and our property was at its springtime best. The boys headed out to explore the barns and pigsties while we showed the adults our workmanship and talked about plans: a focus on the dramatic walk-in fireplace for the kitchen and living space, but it didn’t inspire us. Patrick, the architect, walked the house; we had it wrong, he said. The old kitchen was north facing and dark; good for winter nights. The other wing was where the light was; the two small bedrooms, a bath and the parlor would have to go. By knocking down four walks and removing the ceilings, we would have an expanse of southwest-facing windows with a beautiful view of gently rolling fields, a woods and the ridge that rose above the Couze River on the horizon. Opposite, a window and door faced east onto our courtyard for morning sun. His solution was brilliant. The house had been renovated in the 60s, horribly: low dark bead-board ceilings, fancy wallpaper, and fussy light fixtures. I knew it sighed with relief. A grateful paradigm shift.

We started that afternoon: two walls went down: dust, plaster and bricks. The walls were constructed with hollow bricks, not wood and lathe, so knocking them down was very dramatic – crashes, dust and rubble. Titouan and Elias loved it. They beat walls with their small hammers and pulverized plaster and bricks. The adults took their turns with the sledgehammer, wide swings and percussive responses. Eventually the old walls yielded to blows from young and old. All that was left was a big pile of rubble.

Dirty and dusty and happy, we climbed into Jacques’ van and took off for Cadouin and to the only restaurant open on Sunday evening. The boys finished their energy kicking stones in the covered market in front of the massive 12th century Cistercian abbey. A wonderful day with good friends and an exciting new direction for us.

For many years we had stayed with Patrick and Ulla in their Paris apartment with French doors running its length on the top floor of an 18th century hotel. From Patrick’s inspiration and 18^th century Paris, we redefined our steep-roofed Périgordian farm house, resolving to an architecture more familiar to me and the 1940s Frank Lloyd Wright-like house in Philadelphia in which I grew up. I found a comfort zone and solutions began to come easily. John was generously supportive and teased about the house we bought with all systems functioning.

Le Pouget

It’s the name of our hamlet of three houses or the “lieu-dit” in French. Le Pouget doesn’t mean anything, so it must be a family name. No one seems to know. It’s also our address: Le Pouget, St Avit-Sénieur, France. That’s it. No street or house number. We met the post woman, so she knows we go with the house. Her name is Bernadette and she thinks we have lots of courage. We bought a mailbox, not like US boxes -- it is big, green and square and locks with a key.

Before we returned to New York in December, we had the “first” signing to buy the house, rather like an intent to purchase with a sizeable down-payment. The second signing and actual purchase occurred after all the inspections (many more than in the US) and a two-month waiting period during which a neighboring farmer could buy our house for the agreed price if he felt he hadn't had a fair chance. That gave us pause. Not until after the final signing did we realize the legal system in France is set up to protect the buyer and the community. The seller is assumed to be the rich adversary, ready to cheat the buyer and short-change his or her neighbors. Remember Daumier cartoons?

A local farmer didn’t buy Le Pouget and we returned to the Périgord in March for three months – to claim our house and start the renovation. Claire and Francois welcomed us back to the Domaine de Beaucour.

The work started well. In the first few days we opened up the walk-in kitchen fireplace that was built over in heavy cabinetry and uncovered a beautiful limestone fireplace, six feet wide and four feet tall. We tore out a spiral staircase that was dangerously weakened by bugs, vastly increasing the space in the kitchen. The demolition was proving difficult with the only tools we had found in the barn – a ball hammer and crow bar; it was time to invest in real tools. Armed with a French dictionary, we drove to the quincaillerie or hardware store in Beaumont, our closest “big” town. Owned by the Bariat family for more than six generations, it is an old-fashioned hardware store that sells everything from teapots to ladders, horse saddles and shotguns and traditional wicker furniture. The front of the store advertised the variety: MENAGE (houseware), CHASSE (hunting), baskets hung on a grill, a wheel barrow was parked by the door. Nothing seemed to be in a logical order, rug beaters next to weather vanes, nails shared a shelf with canning goods. But there is nothing you can’t find, eventually. We needed work gloves, a claw hammer, shovels (I could find the French names in my Larousse pocket dictionary), but I also needed a garden sprayer to remove wallpaper. My dictionary didn’t have garden sprayer or sprayer, so we pantomimed sprayer, then garden sprayer. M Bariat followed us patiently and understood, even the segue to removing wallpaper. By this time, several members of the family had gathered around us, offering suggestions for other methods and equipment. Smiling and exchanging congratulatory handshakes, we returned to Le Pouget better equipped to continue our work.

The house is full of its past owners: goose fat smells in the kitchen; dog scratches on doors; an under-the-stairs closet decorated to the nines in flowered contact paper and matching ruffled material; hand-written labels on shelves for "foie carnard," "pâté cochon" and "les petites patates de Georgette"; a collection of newspaper articles about Princess Diana; and dozens of old wine bottles hidden near the cellar entrance.

Being here is agreeing with me. One evening after a long day of work, we were driving back to our gite in the sunset and we passed a field of sheep with some new-born lambs, black with white tails, following their mothers in the bright green grass. It is so very beautiful here. And after the sun sets, owls hoot -- soft, long notes in the night air.

Chercher la maison

Our weeklong class for artists in September went off well. After this, our fourth trip, we were even more seduced by the Périgord’s grey-green valleys; softly eroded yellow limestone cliffs; wide sinuous rivers; gently rolling farmland; and its slow pace of life.

The following year, in the late fall, we returned for six weeks to test this love affair – and tentatively, to look for property. We stayed at the gite that we had discovered on our second trip, in a bright yellow-painted, light-filled pigeonnier, one of the houses at the Domaine de Beaucour, owned and operated by our friends, Claire and Francois. They had moved to the Périgord from Holland ten years ago when they bought and renovated their elegant maison de mâitre, and converted a grange/barn and a pigeonnier into gites.

Beautiful, blonde, Dutch Claire had plenty of expertise to share about buying and renovating French property.

Working with two real estate agents, we saw two to three properties a day for three weeks in a steady rain. We fell passionately in love a number of times, backed off, alarmed by our fearlessness, and went on to look at more hopelessly beautiful ruins.

We had long conversations with Claire.

The most serious interest was an ancient farm on a hillside on the outskirts of a small village. The house was built on bedrock and stood high above the other buildings: it had an outside kitchen with a window-fitted stone sink and a freestanding beehive bread oven. It was surrounded by small pigsties and goat sheds built into the house walls. Below, there was an enormous barn, minus half its roof, a woodworking shop with a lathe; and under the house, a large cave with wine barrels big enough for adults to hide in. Long vertical arrow slots in the foundation dated the house to the 11th or 12th century. Oh how we loved it. The house had three elegant rooms, fireplaces with crests on the chimneys, high ceilings, but no water or plumbing, no bathroom, no central heat, no glazed windows. As we walked around the buildings, we stepped on fragrant mint. I imagined the women who planted it, of course, centuries ago.

Very long conversation with Claire.

We continued on – a house on a hill with a breath-taking view, no amenities not even a passable road. We considered buying a barn with a wine press for 65,000, but by the time we calculated the 1,000-euro per square meter rehab costs, we were way out of our budget. We did relish that possibility because the owners were book-lovers, intelligent and articulate and lived next door in a sustainable renovated barn. They told us that a herd of sheep passed by each morning and returned at sundown. I loved the idea of waking to their bleating.

Claire said “no.”

Finally we found a small farm in our price range, 200,000 euros or $250,000 at the then-exchange rate. The house was workable and all the systems functioned. If we tore down some walls, we could make a big open kitchen, dining and living space with a walk-in fireplace. The barn was even better. It was big enough for two studios for John – one for summer with a 20-foot ceiling, and a calf shed that could be converted into a heated winter studio. There was ample space for guest rooms for our daughters and friends.

The farm was owned by the mayor of the nearby town of Cadouin and his family had lived there for eight generations. We made an offer within four hours and it was accepted.

Claire saw it and said, “ah, yes.”

The beginning: Jacques’ Castle

My first trip to France with John was not long after we met and he asked me to go to Paris for New Year’s, an invitation he didn’t need to repeat. I loved Paris; I was 16 years old, an exchange student, when it became my favorite city for life. New Year’s Eve in Paris, mais oui – city of lights, a golden, glittering Eiffel Tower and champagne on the blue-lit Champs élysée. We arrived the day after Christmas in the middle of a snowstorm and stayed with Patrick and Ulla in the Sentier quarter. That night, after a rich French dinner and good red wine, we climbed to their rooftop terrace to watch the steep roofs cover with snow and they told us about their New Year’s plans to go to Jacques’ castle in the Périgord. A few days later we were on a train with them and their two little boys, heading south to the Périgord.

Jacques’ castle was the quintessential medieval French chateau: built for defense in the 13^th century, it had two turret towers on either side of a crenellated gatehouse where centuries ago a drawbridge crossed a moat; stonewalls safeguarded a large courtyard, a manor house and service buildings. Over the New Year’s weekend, nine of us occupied the original keep, close to the kitchen and enormous fireplace that was our continuous source of heat and where we prepared and ate our meals. We consumed vast quantities of Périgordian food; most memorable were potatoes browned in goose fat, served with garlic and parsley. In the evening in front of a fire in the dining room, we sampled Jacques’ cave of local digestifs and Armagnac. The castle has been in his family from the beginning, handed down in matrilineal succession – many coats of arms hanging on the terracotta-colored dining room walls. In parts of the castle I found decades-old still-lifes: a book opened to a dust-covered page, maybe 50 years ago, on an ornate side table in the second floor grand hall; a wrack hung with fencing masks, several stacked cap and ball rifles and a rusty hanging scale, probably for measuring shot. The abundance of space and material history contrasted with the sparse Brooklyn loft John and I shared in our new life together. We were enchanted.

We explored the wooded countryside and visited well-preserved Périgordian bastides, 13th century towns developed by both French and English kings, first for agricultural commerce and later military defense – medieval Levittowns. They were laid out in a symmetrical grid with a central arcaded market, now filled with the inevitable tourist boutiques and real estate offices for the tourism boom. It was off-season, so we had much of the Périgord to ourselves.

After the holidays, John and I rented a car and drove east to Cahors, limestone cliffs and a wilder paysage. Smitten with southwestern France, we returned to the Périgord in May and again in October and visited the prehistoric cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles and Rouffignac. The exquisite, but enigmatic paintings, 25,000-15,000 years old, hold their own with paintings in the Louvre, Uffizi and the Met. Their astonishing beauty inspired John, an abstract painter. Not many artists he knew in New York had seen this art, so he started planning a painting class in the Périgord, integrating the cave art. He had taught classes in Italy, in Umbria and Matera, but never in France. When we got back to the US, we put out feelers, and soon the class was scheduled for the following fall and completely booked. Another chance to return to the Périgord.