FRENCH LESSONS
If you want to run away from “normal” life, the French countryside is an excellent place to go, writes LUCY CORRY.
The French countryside is an excellent place to escape from “normal” life, writes Lucy Corry.
Condensation pools around my glass as the ice melts into a generous slosh of pastis. Two fans whirr noisily, barely stirring the humid early-evening air. The atmosphere is tense, my fellow card players maintaining their best poker faces with professional aplomb. In an instant, everything explodes. “Uno!” my daughter shouts triumphantly. “I win again!” She clinks her glass against mine. “Santé, Maman!”
Tell people you’re off to live in the south of France and they probably don’t imagine torrid games of Uno as the major source of pre-dinner entertainment.
Their idea of la vie française probably involves copious amounts of wine, languid evenings on café terraces, haute cuisine and a certain “je ne sais quoi”. All these things certainly exist, but you see them through slightly different rose-tinted lenses when you decamp to rural France with a 10-year-old in tow.
In April 2019, with my husband Glen, our daughter Eve and the bare minimum of luggage, we waved goodbye to our settled life in Wellington, New Zealand, and headed off on a six-month European adventure. We’d thought about running away to France for several years, but always chickened out because work, school or various other reasons got in the way. Gradually, our excuses weakened. Our daughter was in her last year of primary school, I was making the switch to pursuing full-time freelance work and my husband was ready for a break from a demanding role in news journalism. In mid-January, as he sat on the bus to work, he sent me a text: “That airline sale ends today. If we’re going to do this, we’d better do it now!” So we took a deep breath, booked tickets, and drew up an A3-sized list of Things To Do. Some of our friends and family were shocked, some were envious and some told us we were making a terrible mistake. “What about your career?” asked my boss. “What about my granddaughter?” wailed my mother-in-law. “When can we come and stay?” asked our best friends.
After a week house-sitting for friends in London, a week visiting family in England and a few days shivering in The Hague (cheaper than Amsterdam, but just as fun), we arrive in France. It’s spring and the countryside is blooming. We’ve taken the precaution of booking a place to stay for the first two months, reckoning that we’d need somewhere to draw breath after a hectic couple of years. Our base camp is a converted stone barn on the outskirts of Eymet, a once-fortified village dating back to medieval times. About 125 kilometres east of Bordeaux, it has a school, a picture-perfect square with half-timbered houses and a weekly market held every Thursday since 1270. It’s about as far from the Parisian ideal of France as you can get, and that suits us perfectly. We are surrounded by fields of wheat, sunflowers, plum trees and grapevines, tumbledown barns and ruined châteaux. It’s a bit like living in a novel by Marcel Pagnol, sans the heartbreak.
Our propriétaires (landlords), Isabelle and Thierry, welcome us warmly to life on their 50-hectare farm, where they raise gorgeous Blonde d’Aquitaine beef cattle, grow crops and generally work all hours of the day and night. Isabelle, who has lived in this area all her life and knows everyone, helps us enrol
Eve at school (and reassures us that we’ll be okay after the first tearful drop-off. She’s right.).
Eymet is small, but we’re never bored. Every day feels full of potential adventure and the surrounding region – the “Périgord Pourpre”, named for the purple grapes that thrive here, is full of places to discover.
The pretty city of Toulouse is about two hours’ drive away, Agen less than an hour. Issigeac, a town so perfectly medieval that it’s regularly used as a film set, is just down the road and we soon fall in love with its bustling Sunday market. Glen makes multiple trips to and from Bordeaux, picking up friends who come to stay from New Zealand. Living somewhere small makes it easy to feel part of the community. We find a favourite boulangerie (after rigorous testing) and figure out who has the best fruit and vegetables at the market in Eymet. We learn to go early, like the French, rather than turn up for elevenses like the many retired English people who make up about 25 per cent of the population. The supermarkets are less charming, but equally fascinating to an Antipodean. I spend hours wandering up and down aisles looking for various
ingredients (hot tip: in a rural French supermarket, risotto rice will be in the “international” section, along with eye-wateringly expensive soy sauce and English tea) while Glen diligently applies himself to charming the famously surly checkout operators and investigating the wine section. Our neighbours tell us we should visit a cave (winery) nearby instead of buying supermarket wine, but we never get around to it. In hindsight, this is probably a good thing – they buy 20 litres for 20 euros.
We thought we were city people, but French farm life (admittedly, without the hard work of actually farming) suits us incredibly well. We grow strangely fond of being woken by donkeys braying and Eve names the goats that wait patiently for our food scraps. There’s something very luxurious about living in a place where there’s not much to do – and having all day to do it. We eat, we go for walks, we read, we join new friends for apéritif – it’s every part as relaxing as it sounds. Of course, what two adults find relaxing doesn’t always fit with the needs of a sociable pretween. Sending Eve to school turns out to be a genius move, because it helps us all make friends and establish a network. Through school, for example, we meet Chrystèle, a French teacher and Juliette Binoche lookalike, who teaches us lots of useful slang and imparts valuable intel about the best set-price lunches to be had in the surrounding area.
The first one, in a small village deep in wine country near Bergerac, sets the bar high. We are served a giant tureen of tourain blanchi (garlic soup), a plate of charcuterie with salad and avocado vinaigrette, blanquette de veau (veal ragoût) and crème brûlée, for the princely sum of 13 euros each. We sit next to François and Georges, two arborists who are as curious about these two layabout Kiwis as we are about them. Are they going back to work after lunch, I ask, concerned about the effects of a litre-carafe of vin rouge on people who wield chainsaws. Oh no, they roar, not today. François, who resembles a thin Father Christmas, teaches us how to say “je suis repu” (I’m sated) or – less politely – “je me suis gavé” (I’m stuffed). The latter expression comes from “gavage” – the force-feeding used in foie gras production. After a four-course French lunch, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the poor geese. We are in awe of all the blue overallwearing workmen who we lunch with on other occasions. After four hearty courses and wine we usually have to walk around the countryside for an hour or two to stay awake, but they go back to their various trades, apparently unaffected. Our lunchtime adventures also include lining up at the school canteen, where six euros buys a four-course lunch – including cheese and dessert – in the company of
150 primary-school children. School lunches are sacrosanct in France and, despite complaints that the food is not always as nutritionally sound as it could be, there are untold benefits to dining together. None of us miss the school lunch box, least of all Eve.
When the school term ends in early July, we hit the road for two months, zig-zagging down the Atlantic Coast and to Spain, then across to the Mediterranean coast and – briefly – Istanbul. The latter is exhilarating and exhausting in equal parts; it’s almost a relief to arrive back in France and feel at “home”. We decompress with a three-week stay in La Ciotat, a rapidly gentrifying seaside town between Marseille and Toulon. Here, the markets are full of melons, stone fruit, eggplant and tomatoes; the air scented with pine needles, fig leaves and – because it’s France – cigarettes. We all fall in love with La Ciotat and its dramatic scenery, but then it’s time to get back to Eymet for la rentrée (back to school) and our last six weeks in France.
After the punishing heat of summer, autumn in Eymet is mild, with misty mornings burning off to bright, sunny days. It’s also a forager’s dream. We pick kilograms of blackberries and figs, and discover vin bourru, the partially fermented grape juice traditionally made locally at the start of the vendange (harvest). The terrifying supermarket ladies start to smile at us. We get hooked on a TV show search for France’s best bakery. Eve stands up in class and recites all five verses of a French poem without a single mistake. I start dreaming in French. Glen befriends a stray cat. Then, all too soon, we are doing “the last” of everything. The last trip to the market; the last walk around the catchment lake; the last Sunday “marché gourmande” under the trees at Soumensac, where one of Eve’s classmates makes perfect crêpes and her parents serve fried-goat’s cheese salads. And Eve’s last day at school, where I weep at the school gate when the principal hugs me goodbye. Our friends – a ragtag multi-national group that now includes gorgeous Chrystèle – throw us a dinner party that starts late and finishes even later in proper French style. We drink local wine and Armagnac and dance to the internationally understood language of Beyoncé. The next day, we all cry as we drive away from Isabelle and Thierry’s farm. “Come back,” they say. “You’ll always be welcome chez nous.”
“What about all those things we never got around to doing?” I sniff, as we drive to Bordeaux airport. “And we’re leaving too soon for the walnuts.”
“Never mind, Mum,” comes a sad voice from the back seat. “There’s always next time.”
There’s something very luxurious about living in a place where there’s not much to do – and having all day to do it.