THE DROWNING CLIENT

MISADVENTURES IN THE SEARCH FOR A FRENCH COUNTRY HOME


I - THE CIRCUS


It's not that my wife and I had grown jaded by Paris's stagy vistas centered on monuments and bridges. No, it's just that you get cabin fever in any big city, even the City of Lights. Also, perhaps being Americans with an itch for elbow-room made us restless after a decade among streets so narrow that the oldest edifices have bowed facades, which used to dissuade buggy drivers from coming too close and scraping their wheels. We had little to complain about, since we had an entire floor, whereas bigger families lived in half the space in the same building. But there we were, groping for the exit.


Every time a mill or dilapidated manor with a brook cropped up, we would check it out in our longing for the sky and water. Paris had become our boudoir. Its very mastery of trompe-l'oeil, topiary gardening, and civilized roof levels cloyed with pampering and mastery of artifice, and cried out for torrents - teeming with more than human variety. In abstract terms, we wanted to feel part of an ecology again, rather than an economy.


So we started looking.


First came the ultimate mill - a 19th century gothic monster straddling the River Epte separating Normandy from the Île-de-France. The river brimmed past dilapidated laundry sheds at the base of each garden in Dangu, a village so quaint it was still ruled by a Duke from his chateau on the bluff, and so "undiscovered" it was the haven of such celebrities as the Rolling Stones when they hit Paris for a concert; then the river beleaguered the sluice-gates, cascading through the center of a mill so vast that I told the caretaker it looked like each of the hangar-sized halls could have wintered a circus. He assured us that the roar quietened after awhile - at least in ones head - and that one only grew nervous when the noise stopped.


The roof was a tectonic continent of unpredictable slopes and eventual repairs - but there was so much potential! If only we demolished sheds encrusted around the edifice like a cargo of barnacles, water-spangled light would stream through grand arches down the flanks. All we needed was the inspiration - an indoor amusement park, a dinosaur museum? And, of course, even more than that: guts and money.


Beyond the mill, there were the outbuildings; a foreman's house with a succession of bedrooms, which served as their own corridor, and then a children's cottage and Tudor stables on an islet. It was certainly worth exploring, so we took a stroll with the caretaker to get a feel for the village and its history.


According to our informant, it had been both Grand Central Station and Checkpoint Charlie on the black market's underground railroad during WW II. Everyone benefited - although a couple of times a green German lieutenant had messed up a good thing, before learning his lesson. Why, our guide's grandfather had been among the local patriots who'd taught each of these commanders tolerance by waylaying an unwary German private on a stroll - and plunking him in a forgotten well on the plateau to starve to death.


I had a queasy feeling that such daring-do had as much to do with local attitudes towards interlopers as fighting occupiers, but stowed my qualm as we approached a freshly incinerated ruin.


"What happened here?" I inquired.


"Oh, that guy, he didn't come from around here and he built this inn without getting his neighbors' permission. So some people burnt him down. What a great fire that was!" gabbled our host enthusiastically.


I gulped when I realized he’d been there.


And here I had been wondering what might happen if we flooded houses and fields for miles upstream because we weren't home someday to regulate the sluice gates. Lawsuits? Damages? Hell, no, one could hope for arson and a deep think in a lost well!


Still, there is no keeping down an irrational urge, so, of course, we entered negotiations on the off chance that the owner, who was an elderly industrialist, wanted to cut loose his white elephant for a pittance. When we answered his summons to a penthouse overlooking the chic Bois de Boulogne, we were chagrined to find that he’d chilled champagne, laid out a feast, and assembled his clan. Then, after talking across an Atlantic of differences with decorum, we prepared to bow out, still hedging, when it occurred to me to wrap up a loose end. There were these elaborate 1,000 square foot, wrought-iron grills stacked among antiquated machines and cars in one of the hangars. They looked like they’d been part of a gigantic glass building like Kew Gardens. Could he please tell me what they were?


The mill owner was perplexed. Grills, what grills? Sure, we could imagine someone missing a few cars in those halls like socks cast into the corner of our bedroom, but, still, these things were too huge!


"Oh, dear," his wife exclaimed, when it clicked, "The circus left its menagerie!"


II - SWEET REVENGE


That did it. Barnum and Bailey, we aren't. So next time out, we decided to visit a more appropriate house - in this case, a boxy manor beside a stream roiling over water-meadows. The ancient nurse who had out-lived the multitude who had once crowded into the home was our saleswoman by default. As we took in the outbuildings and colonnades of poplars fanning from the house to the muddy torrent, she fidgeted at the door, as if she were making up her mind to let us in. Then, when our eyes had trouble adjusting to the darkness within, I asked if we could turn on a light or open shutters. Well, maybe one shutter, but hardly in every room! And as for light - she wasn't about to waste a kilodrop of electricity or fuel on an empty house. Anyway, the place was bright enough - what with 60 years of memories illuminating every footfall into the dungeons.


Despite being blind to the memories illuminating our path, we barely made out that the ceilings were high - except in the "servants'" quarters. As I pondered American family life around the kitchen table under a ceiling that nearly made me stoop, I noticed its spectral sheen. Curious, I reached up - and my palm plunged into a levitated puddle, drenching my arm and side in a cold stream. The place was soaked - all for want of a little heat to rid it of condensation. Out of good country thrift, she was letting her ¾-million-dollar asset grow stalactites before our eyes.


But maybe, just maybe, it wasn't too late. So we tried our mental best to cast open shutters and saturate 13 rooms with summer and imagined the slope up to the copse and private water tower out back channeled by rivulets and sprayed with blooms, and, seen in that light, we thought it might be worth a shot. Her untrained cocker spaniel jerked and twisted her towards the greenhouse, nearly breaking her hip at every tug (for want of anything more elastic than a wash line for a leash), and when she couldn't find the rock she normally hammered the rusty bolt open with, she whacked it with a window shard! My heart leapt as I lurched to grab the spurting stump of her arm. But, no, she was miraculously unscathed and led the way in blithely, having finally accepted us.


That gaping hole up in the facade, that was just where the abbot dug out the wild bees for his hives, she explained. And this was where the orange trees were bedded down for the winter, and that's the building where the Empress Eugenie's courtiers would retire to play billiards, and yes, here was the house's very own septic system which had allowed our hostess to thumb her nose at the mayor when he tried to force her to hook up to his sewers.


"Oh?" we asked. Quite! The bounder had authorized cronies to blight the environs with housing developments while re-zoning the ruling family's lots as agricultural land - the gumption of the man! - only to discover that his ghastly suburbs had overwhelmed the local sewage plant. Their effluents were even now brimming over the holding pond and washing right through the yard, she smirked. Even more satisfyingly, the town was being fined a fortune a day.  But what did she care? The house’s private water tower made her autonomous: the mayor could turn blue, and she still wouldn't contribute a farthing!


What fun.… We couldn't wait to take up the vendetta where she'd left off.


So what next?


III - THE DROWNING CLIENT


Well, some agents took it into their heads to show us another mill - this time an hour to the south, but it was supposed to be mouth watering! The agency was lost on one of the bleakly pompous streets of one of Paris's posher quarters, where hardly any buildings have shops at street-level. Our hosts, who might have been a couple of murmuring private dicks with slick spiels, chauffeured us out to the boondocks. As we cruised off the highway, down a commercial strip, and then over a canal into a leafy valley, they let us know they were just killing two birds with one stone, since they'd really driven out here to pass on a high offer to the owner. Charitably, they had decided to bring us along for the ride - but, fact was, either we coughed up the full price and then some today, or forget about it.


Despite their tactics, we began to soften up as ponds, weirs and spillways appeared through a screen of bulrushes and the mill slid into view, embowered by sycamores thick as baobabs. T'was looking good.


Our bodyguards had just been bragging about their exclusive when they spied two cars parked at the gate. Some agent was poaching! Sure enough, as we sauntered forward to catch their villainous competitor in the act, the interloper surrendered, coming around the corner sheepishly. "Are you the proprietors?" he pleaded. Our porcine agent dismissed this absurdity. "Then did the firemen send you?" the trespasser burst out. "My client's fallen in the river!"


As he turned on his heel and shambled back to the rescue, I started to give chase, but our humorless Laurel and Hardy restrained me: they'd handle this. They strutted ahead as I imagined the client slipping off a bank into one of the channels bisecting the garden. What if he was floundering around even now?


But as we entered the mill, there he was: a figure prone on the floor under a heap of coats with women huddled over him. Our guides shunted us upstairs, away from this unseemly spectacle. Upon ascending, a pair of swans sailed gracefully down the millpond towards our window and we began considering the seductive but disconcerting property, with its victim in god-knows-what condition beneath our feet.


The surroundings were Arcadian, the floors vast – the only trouble was the ceilings, which were so low that our hair would have brushed it had there been static electricity. I felt sandwiched.


But, of course, we had to decide then and there. Well, not quite, since the firemen still hadn't appeared, and we hadn't seen the ground floor. But after enough time for several dying soliquoys, a fire truck drove up, and firemen set up a field hospital, as the two real estate parties dodged each other. Finally the saviors picked up their charge and carted him away as he attempted a joke, and we were allowed to peruse the ground floor at our leisure.


At the mill's heart was a dark chamber housing a colossal waterwheel. The poacher had invited his client to step in to admire the tall wheel in its deep trench and the admirer had naturally taken a step back from a wanly lit slice of paving to take in the spectacle - and vanished! Only then had the poacher fumbled for a light switch and revealed a second - and third! - trench parallel to the first, with torrents washing their depths and pouring into submerged exits. Just down to the whitewater was over my head, and the sides were sheer. Traps out of nightmares! I could hardly imagine what adrenaline rush and human chain had been required to get the hapless client out of the abysmal suction with broken ribs and legs. Furthermore, I had little doubt that the women had pulled off the miracle without much help from the feckless agent. No, the poacher was lucky the French are not a litigious people. Otherwise, he'd have signed away his family's assets in perpetuity on the spot. Here, though, there'd be a minor settlement, and the national health plan would take care of the rest. Oh, for the advantages of such a system!


As it turned out, the mill was just too far, and too dark. And we were getting fickle. We determined that the house of our dreams would have to be well nigh perfect.

  

IV - BEAUTY AND THE BEAST


And then we found it! One Sunday we took an hourly commuter train out to the last station where a valley forked at a white headland into verdant side valleys. At the cliff's foot a Romanesque bell tower rose from a medieval village laced by streams. A short stroll not only took us past traditional shops, but even a bee-catcher's premises. Then the road hopped two currents, slipped under an overpass, accompanied a stream running fresh over undulating draperies of cress, passed a watermill, and led to the last house in town. Beyond was a bike path and open countryside.


We stepped out on a footbridge amid old poplars shading the banks - and the mallards and mud hens and two trout and a pike suspended at our feet simply ignored us. The edifice behind the garden wall had the rambling rooflines, stone dormers and chimneys of a fairy-tale abode - and was further staggered and complicated by eccentricity as Mad Ludwig's castle.


The older couple, who had inherited it, had been gardening and met us in colorful work-clothes. They led us through an arched portal, which looked like it had been reworked playfully after being taken from an aristocratic chapel, and into a two-storey high vestibule whose staircase had the curve of a vase. But there eccentricity took over. Above the door was a special window for swallows and three of their nests clung to the ceiling. Beneath them, three umbrellas had been suspended upside-down to catch their droppings. The ingenuity of the contraptions tickled our fancies.


Then the living room: its floor tiles had been painted in situ and led through a wide arch to a bigger chamber with a walk-in stone fireplace. The woman explained that her father had been an associate of Le Corbusier, one of France's most famous architects - only her father had renovated chateaux and devoted himself to impressing his vision on this expanded farm house. The master bedroom's walls and ceiling were frescoed with gay variations on traditional palatial motifs except for the Matisse dove flying in the central ceiling panel. And all along, French doors topped off by windows led into cloistered water gardens - not one, but three of them! - each as elegant and unpredictable as the last.


In the first, a "spring" had gushed from an embowered pool upon a sibyllic ledge down through fountains into pool after pool before a shady arcade. In the next, a gurgling font covered with lichen had brimmed into a granite basin, which had somehow fed an array of delicate jets dancing over a narrow pool reflecting a Mondrian fresco.


Everywhere the eye landed, stone basins, fountains, tables and pedestals that the architect had fallen in love with in Brittany had been incorporated into a private Eden. There was even a tower for writing one’s memoirs, with a window overlooking a tapering lawn leading between bountiful trees to an obelisk. Tucked in the greenery to one side was a two-story tall aviary shaped like a gem, and, off the other, a second perspective led to a "Japanese" garden.


But its bonsais had grown into ragged pines for lack of maintenance. The aviary was a web of rust, the fountains cracked and dry, and the greenhouse was but a frame over a litter of shards. Our hosts urged us through the undergrowth of the "English" part of the garden to see the children's theater, which went with the bigger one for adults, but it was so disheveled that we had to take their words for it. Back in the house, wiring hung from holes and the bathrooms contained the cracked footprints of bidets and johns. The house had been invaded by squatters who had fed addictions by selling things, which I had never known one could sell. In one upstairs bedroom, they’d even punched a hole through the roof for a campfire.


Despite her father's rich creation, we would practically have to start from scratch. But we had renovated homes ourselves before, and camped out in their shells while we did so. The daunting part was taking over from such an idiosyncratic personality and moving into his over-powering creation. But we soon began to see the rich possibilities for making it our own. Yes, his daughter informed us, the land included the bank of the stream so we could bring a branch within the walls. Yes, yes, yes.


Basically, everything was looking good. When I went into the attic, among the architect's scrolled blueprints, I expected the worst as I jabbed roof timbers with a penknife, but they turned out to be solid. Why, the landlords even informed us that the railroads over the nearby overpass had grown rusty from disuse.


When we did our due diligence, things just got better. The valley beyond the house was protected and there was even a bucolic bilingual school a bike ride away.  Despite high taxes, we decided to bite the hook, and even convened a meeting with the couple's avuncular lawyer during which he wouldn't let us foist our downpayment on them till we had sold our apartment.


Then we finally had our offer, everything was basically a done deal - and a strange thing happened. I picked up a paper I hardly ever read, read a local supplement I had never read, and happened upon a map and article about our very own railroad overpass! It was to become the main bullet track to the coast. My wife, Nancy, suddenly remembered a roar so loud she and the landlady had had to stop conversing in the garden. Where had I been? In the insulated attic.


I called the station chief in the town nearest the house. "How many trains," I inquired, "pass through your station each day?" "About 8," he answered. I can live with that, I thought, but something needled me to rephrase my question: "I mean, how many trains pass through your station without stopping?"


"About 100, mostly freight trains at night," he amended himself. And here we had been about to sell our apartment under a 24-hour deadline! Still, we bundled up and caught the last train out, to sit in the garden by moonlight and listen.


When we got out there it was midnight and freezing. The streets were webbed with a sheen of frost needles; a solitary car inched along, puffing breath. Yet when we huddled together on the footbridge, the stream still ran so purely that its bed was as verdant as in mid-summer. Upstream the mallards were even squabbling at one AM. We felt as if we were locked out of our own home. A full moon haloed by a rainbow shone among the tracery of the poplars, illuminating all the pools and stonework with the glamour of a spell as we sneaked through the crystal gardens to the arcade.


And then we heard it: at first there was just an approaching insinuation, reverberating ever louder each time it passed a cliff perhaps, then rumbling like a gathering avalanche, and shrieking as the cyclone caught up the house, wrenched it off its foundations and spun us roaring into the sky. Not only were these trainmares raised above the sleeping town, but the village lay between resounding cliffs! Finally the stampede tore up onto the promontory and quickly whimpered into silence.


Nancy and I grimaced at each other, and held our knees, timing the wait till the next one. And the next one. Every four and a half minutes on average.  Visually, we were in paradise, but in auditory hell. And we had to take two more hours of it till we could catch the first train home. Furthermore, no matter how I stamped and wrapped myself, my toes burnt with ice crystals breaking the skin. By the time we thought the commuter train might at least be parked at the station, I had wrapped my feet in plastic bags and was practically limping. But finally - thank god! - the train came, full of light and warmth - and the homeless. We fit right in as we snoozed through an animated debate on the best way to die. Then we finally arrived in Paris, but hesitated at the door surrounded by an unfamiliar freight station.


"Do you want to go to the Place St. Michel?" inquired one of the homeless boys.


"Yes, doesn't this train go there?"


"No, but it's no problem. Just stay on board and it'll go back out and then, on its next run, it'll go right to the center. It's no use freezing and we'd be glad to have you," he encouraged us charitably. We made some excuse, and got off anyway, too ashamed to admit that a heated apartment awaited us and that we'd just hail a cab. The day before we'd slumped on another train after an all-day hike with backpacks full of fossils and a preppie mother had pulled her daughter farther down the car and then ordered her to stop staring. "It's not their fault if they're homeless!" she'd scolded.


After a fruitless year of searching for a new home, it only seemed fitting that we had been taken for the homeless by the rich and poor at the climax of our quest. Perhaps, after all, it was time to stay put in Paris.




Duncan CALDWELL

© 1995 Duncan Caldwell, All rights reserved.

caldwellnd(at)aol.com