A new house in France that’s a bit like home

While on Saturday, January 23rd, two feet of snow was falling on Schuylkill County and most county residents were staying inside, on other side of the Atlantic, I was out and about in the damp and cold, hours before dawn broke over France.

It was a big day for me. In fact, I’ve had a lot of big days recently and I’ve chosen this Sunday to let readers in on some news: in October, I bought myself a country home.

Some of you may have read Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, a book which has spawned an entire industry about ex-pats wrestling with the locals in villages all over France, trying to fit in, trying to find a good plumber, trying to penetrate the minds of the inscrutable French.

I don’t qualify as an ex-pat. I’ve been here too long (I’ll be celebrating my 30th anniversary of French life in a year), I work for the French government (can you get more “inside” than that?), and I’ve become one of them, as I now have both French and American nationalities (my first impulse remains to say I’m American though after all these years, my identity floats somewhere over the Atlantic, torn between two continents).

Nor are the French a mystery to me: I live with them, I work with them. Why, some of my dearest friends in the world are French! And so far so good when it comes to finding a plumber, which brings me back to the subject of my house.

It all started last summer. Paris was caught in a heat wave, and my small apartment was hot and oppressive. If I opened all the windows, it was like living in the middle of a freeway. If I closed them, it was too stuffy to breathe. My nearby park, Buttes Chaumont, beckoned but I was chained to my computer, working under a deadline to finish several translations for a company marketing funeral services.

I worked with the blinds down and the curtains drawn to keep out the sun and heat. The atmosphere was dark and dreary, the air, hard to breathe—a little big like being buried alive.

To escape from preneed contracts and funeral fashions, at the end of each work day, I got into the habit of exploring real estate listings on line, dreaming about homes deep in the French countryside or along the sea. I insist on the word “dreaming” because, as I dreamed, I had no intention to buy.

Then it happened. While I was “visiting la Côte opale,” a long stretch of beach in northern France extending to the Belgium border, a pop-up appeared on my screen. It had nothing to do with the North Sea or the English Channel, the
area of my "visit." It was inland and in a completely different part of the country, a corner of France I did not know.

I read the listing, I looked at the photo gallery, I looked at the price. I also noticed a message saying the owner would be at the house, generally uninhabited, till the end of the week. On a whim, I called the number on the screen.

Two days later I was in a train heading west towards the lowest point of Basse Normandie, lower Normandy. First we crossed the suburbs of Paris, then we arrived in the city of Chartres, whose beautiful cathedral dominated the skyline as we crossed the Beauce, a vast plateau, for centuries the breadbasket of France.

I am a Pottsville girl. I do not feel at home on the plain. I need mountains, valleys, rolling hills and hollows, Pennsylvania, in other words. I was dismayed by what I was seeing from my seat. If the house was in one of these villages plopped down in the middle of the plain, there was no chance I would go for it.

The train kept chugging towards its destination (it was a local, stopping at every town and village, not a high speed TGV) when suddenly everything changed: rolling hills, forests, valleys, summer fields of green, villages nestled in hollows, something that looked like home to me.

I got off the train at the village of Condé sur Huisne (now try to pronounce that one!), with a population of 1,343, a village church on the main square, a post office, two bakeries, a pharmacy, a café, a small supermarket, and two restaurants. I walked from the train to the house, right off the main square. The front door was open. I walked inside. I was charmed.

When I got back on the train in the late afternoon, I had already been to the notary’s office with the owner and her daughter. The papers for the sale were drawn up. The next step would be for me to sign a “promise to buy” and return it to the notary with a binder. That was in late July. By the end of October, the home was mine.

You may be asking, so what is it like, this new house of yours?

To begin, let’s say it has a lot of potential, a way of saying it needs a lot of work. The house was built around 1850. The walls are thick, some are crumbling, and the red-tile roof must be replaced. In the living room, which has a big fireplace, the floor is covered with beautiful terra-cotta tiles of the kind traditional to the region, and these are originals. There’s one small problem, though. Beneath them, the beams are rotting and, if I don’t have them replaced, the floor will collapse. And that’s just the beginning…

But I repeat, this house has potential. Everyone who has visited tells me so. Out back there’s about 3,000 ft² of garden, and that garden has a cherry, a hazelnut and a boxwood tree over one hundred years old. Next door, there are open fields where horses graze, in the distance, wooded hills, and at the edge of the village, a river called the Huisne.

Yesterday, a contractor who has done work for me in Paris met me at the house. That’s why I was out before dawn, to catch the first train of the day. I’m hoping he will transform the inside of my house, as he has transformed my apartment in Paris. Work on the roof begins next week. A local contractor will be doing the job. Perhaps by summer, I’ll have a home.

Dear readers, I think you’ll be hearing more about this. Today, I show you some photos of “before” work begins. I’ll keep you posted as things progress, and as we discover together a beautiful region of France called “le Perche.”