A Place in Normandy (17 page)

“And you ask why England has remained an island!” Margaret proclaimed rhetorically. Her observations were often right on target, but they sometimes got her into trouble.

“I am now going to change into my warm clothes, which I am glad everyone warned me to bring,” Ben said. “And then let's do something. Hit the beaches or whatever. According to the map, we're only about a dozen miles from Sword Beach.”

“Get in the car and I'll show you around,” I said. “I'll point out the way to the D-day beaches, and you can go there on your own later.”

I drove my car, with Ben and the women in back and Teddy telescoped in beside me. Andalouse needed no persuasion to stay by the banked fire. I advised my passengers that they might have to walk when it came time for us to ascend the drive again.

Our road north toward Pont l'Evêque paralleled the railroad line along a short segment of the Vikings' river route through the Pays d'Auge, the valley of the Touques. From the backseat, Ruth informed us that this was the northwestern border of a carboniferous limestone deposit laid down in the secondary era in the region known broadly as Sedimentary Normandy—or, more euphoniously, since the Seine emptied through it, the Paris Basin. The exposed raised rock of Brittany was older, she said; granites and crystalline rocks made up the Armorican massif, whose northernmost protuberance, the Cotentin Peninsula, had been joined to southern England and Nova Scotia before those masses drifted off on their own—England because it insisted on serving avocado with prawns, and Nova Scotia perhaps to get as far as it could from England's diet. The Armorican massif, to the west of us, had formed a dike during the tertiary, when twice the Paris Basin had been flooded by shallow seas or lakes. The inhabitants of those waters had left chalk deposits hundreds of feet thick, above which were the flints generated by the decomposition of rock during the period of equatorial climate that preceded glaciation. Or so Ruth told us.

Perhaps Ruth should do the opening chapter of Thérèse's history of Mesnil, I thought. And Teddy could add a note concerning the area's ancient flora, the oldest surviving example of which was equisetum, or horsetail (a plant that looked as if it had been invented by Dr. Seuss), of which Teddy had already pointed out two species—one specializing in the field, and the other in marshy ground.

The hills rose on either side of the Touques Valley, all that was left of what had been a plateau of ancient ocean floor: islands of pasture, orchard, and woodland reaching as high as six hundred feet above what was now sea level, to which the myriad persistent rivers, streams, brooks,
douets,
and
becs
separating the peaks had washed their flinty beds.

“According to a friend of mine, Thérèse,” I told them, “greatness has passed before us on this road. Louis XVI himself, in June of 1786, with a large and expensive retinue, followed this road. You must imagine the local folk filling the ditches with shouts of
vive le roi,
and now and then a brave farm wife rushing forward to kiss the hem of his carriage. The trip was sudden, and there'd been a frantic rebuilding of bridges and reinforcing of roadbeds. Louis was returning from the inspection of some absurd and absurdly expensive sunken fortifications he was building at Cherbourg against the English navy. He was heading, via Pont l'Evêque, for Honfleur and his beheading seven years later. Thérèse says Louis was warned before his trip, by his advance man, that because the Pays d'Auge country was remote, and its commerce required little in the way of cartage, he'd find many roads unfinished.”

In fact they were still working on the stretch near Manneville.

We motored past fields and were still in fields when the town began. I drove my guests through Pont l'Evêque, dismissed by Louis XVI's scout as follows, “This little town has nothing remarkable.” I tried for a tour that would mingle the historical with the practical, while mentioning items (such as Guillaume Apollinaire's flat tire) that should interest any tourist. The town stands at a confluence of rivers through or among or across which the Bishop (
évêque
) of Lisieux, within whose diocese the region fell, was said to have built a toll bridge (or
pont
—whose proceeds went, of course, to the bishop benefactor), during the eleventh century. I found it difficult to believe that the Romans did not have their own bridges long before that, but perhaps they made use of ferries. They could have collected their own tolls on those just as well.

Pont l'Evêque's coat of arms boasts two gold oxen on a red field. One rumor claims that the town's name had humbler origins as Pont-à-la-Vache, or Cowsbridge, easy enough to upgrade in French to Pont l'Evêque, or Bishopsbridge. The name does not turn up in the written record until 1077, the year Hugh, Bishop of Lisieux by right of consanguinity with William the Conqueror's family, collapsed on the road not far from where Apollinaire had
his
flat, in Ouilly le Vicomte. A
ouille
was a wine barrel in old French; in those days they still struggled to grow the grape in Normandy.

Lisieux had once been a walled and fortified city, but as Thérèse had told me, it was hard to credit Pont l'Evêque with the same. It sat on a broad, flat, marshy plain riddled with rivers: the Touques, the Calonne (which emptied into the Touques just north of the town), and the Yvie. I showed my passengers how the smaller, less trafficked of the roads from Lisieux toward the coast met Pont l'Evêque's main street, fumbled to maintain its direction, lasted another block, and finished abruptly in back of the jail and the glass-recycling bin, in a parking lot next to a long-unused covered
lavoir
that the Syndicat d'Initiative kept up as a monument to happy bygone times when women knelt and scrubbed. The other road, I explained, continued north from Pont l'Evêque and branched off to meet the coast at Honfleur and Deauville; that was the route along which Guillaume Apollinaire had driven, the route that Henry V's brother Clarence had followed on his way to take Lisieux, the route that Lindbergh had later used as a map to guide him toward Paris from the coast, and that Louis XVI followed in the opposite direction, on his triumphal march.

Pont l'Evêque, having suffered its most recent truly serious battering in the religious wars of 1590 and having remained architecturally tranquil for the next 350 years, was practically obliterated during the liberation of 1944. Most of what was to be seen in Pont l'Evêque was therefore modern, apart from some sixteenth- or seventeenth-century remains. When the smoke cleared after the battle of Pont l'Evêque in August 1944, the thirteenth-century limestone church of Saint Michel was still standing, though it had lost its spire and all its glass. At the western end of the town (closest to Caen, the birthplace of Charlotte Corday), where some half-timbered sixteenth-century buildings had escaped the bombing, we got out of the car to wander. Swallows nesting in their crevices darted among the old houses and snatched insects from the streams and small canals they overhung. I pointed out one of the practical functions of the picturesque Renaissance style in which the second story juts out beyond the first: here, as elsewhere, these remnants of the
style ancien
had privy holes cut in the floor over the water.

Its being Sunday afternoon, and after lunch, and raining, Pont l'Evêque sagged in replete stupor. Shops that had flourished for trade that morning now looked abandoned and belligerently for sale. That would change the next day, I explained: Monday was market day.

I showed them Pont l'Evêque's hospital, the pharmacy, a shop where one could find a newspaper and another where one could not, two
quincailleries
(for hardware and bottled gas), a
droguerie
(for dry goods such as toilet paper, brooms, paint, steel wool, brushes of all sorts, turpentine to fill any bottle the customer supplied, mirrors, and toothbrushes), four bakeries, three charcuteries (for prepared meats or such cold dishes as celeriac or deviled eggs or crushed ham forced to look like a partridge, as well as cuts of meat whose country of origin was the pig), a shop for furniture, a shop for saddles, a shop for cloth, one for calvados, one for boots and shoes, another for clothes, three butchers, and two all-purpose grocery stores. Everything was closed up tight.

Ben, a generous and impulsive shopper when it came to supplying a friend's table, made impatient noises from the backseat. “Everything's closed! What about cheese?” he asked. “Aren't they supposed to have cheese?”

There was no shop for cheese alone, but I showed them a charcuterie where the next day, if they conferred with Madame, she would select for them a Pont l'Evêque (the cheese for which the town had been famous since the thirteenth century, though it used to be called Augelette) that would be ready to eat either then and there or on some future day of their choice. They could follow her progress and her muttering commentary as she tested each one with her thumb.

“If your will is perfection as well as conversation, that is the way to shop, as you know. I know that,” Ben affirmed. “You say market day is tomorrow? We'll come in tomorrow and buy everything. Cheese and whatever else you want, we'll buy it, and maybe some other things as well.”

TWENTY

Moved either by generosity or by the vacation spirit of adventure, Margaret and Ben and company were eager to go shopping next day, Monday—market day in Pont l'Evêque.

“The wine we had last night, was that something you particularly enjoy? or—well, we'll see what else they have,” Ben said. He'd taken heed of everybody's warnings before heading to Europe and had supplied himself for the visit with large red flannel sleepwear, in which he was adding color to the breakfast table. He and Margaret and Teddy had been discussing whether or not they wanted to drive to the other side of Caen to find a village boasting a street called Place Donnelly, named after a friend of theirs who had brought one of Churchill's so-called amphibious tanks through the town (this one had floated, rather than sinking, like the first he commanded) during the liberation in 1944. But everyone was concluding that the best way to spend a rainy day in Normandy, aside from participating in market day, was in the solitude of the farm.

“It's seductive just sitting around this big house,” Ruth said, “and figuring out what you should do with it.”

The previous afternoon—because I myself hoped to sidestep this bit of local color this time, if I could—I had made a point of showing them the covered market in and outside of which organized gangs of competing farmers, shopkeepers, and traveling chair caners, clothes- and boot-sellers, florists, and merchants in trinkets once a week set up shop. The marketplace was off the main street, next to a small park edging one of the rivers, the Yvie, where men played
boules
unless it was raining very hard or there was something better to do. I had explained how when the circus was in town, the camels and llamas and elephants were staked out in this area under the poplar trees, to spend the day chewing and waiting for the evening's performance. All morning on market day the town would be bustling, and I generally tried to avoid coming in at all because even the quickest errands would take forever.

“It could be quite a mob,” I warned. “But then again tomorrow, to make up for it, most everything will be closed.”

Fortunately for me, the proposed excursion represented part of what my friends had come here for, and we sat around the table drinking coffee and making a list and watching the rain, listening to it drip from weak points in the gutters. Above us, the doves talked comfortably of doomed love.

Teddy and Ruth were turning out to be perfect guests because they were perfectly sympathetic: their house in Amsterdam, they said, was also falling down. “But with an old house, it takes a long, long time,” Teddy consoled me. “Much longer than you have.”

“I'm going to take a shower,” Ruth called from upstairs. “Does somebody want to stand in that horrible closet underneath to catch me when I fall through?”

Friend looking out upstairs window, 1994. Photo S. Holstrom

“It worked for me,” Teddy yelled up. “Just don't put both feet in the same place at the same time.”

My guests were more eager for food adventures than their host, who kept worrying about the plumbing and wondering what bribe he might offer to prevent Margaret from telling his wife (and their absentee hostess), Julia, everything. Perhaps food would be the best approach? Could I confuse them by taking them to a restaurant in Deauville where they must study the menu and ask questions of the smirking waiter, such as “What is
verjus?
” My classical education, with detours down medieval alleys, had left me with a fleeting impression that in the fifteenth century, after the juice was pressed from the grape to, foam into the beakers of the rich (having been transformed in God's good time into wine), the skins were soaked in water and the mess allowed to fester into a drink thought suitable for peasants; somewhere between indifferent vinegar and dreadful wine, this was, I seemed to recall, called
verjus.
But if this was so, why would the tuxedoed waiter brag that the master chef, wearing his crown of Michelin stars, had been cooking his fish in it?