Picnic in Provence (2 page)

I knew Char had been a friend to Braque, Picasso, André Breton, at the crossroads of the intellectual life of Paris between the wars. During the Second World War, he was a leader in the French Résistance, receiving weapons drops from London and hiding arms, refugees, and young Frenchmen who refused the
service du travail obligatoire,
mandatory work service in Germany. In 1944, he went to Alger to help de Gaulle prepare for the liberation of the South of France. But as we sat down at the table, I quickly sensed that the public man was not the one Mireille wanted to share with us. “Char was like a father to me,” she said, showing us a letter written in his hand. His writing was even, slanted, with a slight flourish—an uptick at the bottom of each capital
L.
She opened his cracked wooden pencil box and touched the darkened metal nib of a quill. Although the events we were speaking of were only seventy years in the past, she handled these possessions like ancient relics.

In true Provençal style, we lingered through the afternoon: one coffee, then a second, one cognac, then another. Mireille told us stories of false papers, village collaborators, and Char helping her with her homework by the wood-burning stove. Her expression wandered between the softness of nostalgia and the grim pragmatism of the local
paysans
. “He made me memorize ‘Maréchal, Nous Voilà,’ the Vichy anthem, and told me to sing extra-loud in school so no one would suspect what we were doing,” she said.

“Do you have any other questions?” asked Mireille as we stretched over our empty espresso cups. Gwendal cleared his throat. “I read that even though Char refused to publish under the German occupation, he wrote all through the war. It is said that he buried his manuscripts in the cellar of the house where he lived and came back for them when the war was over.” In fact, after the liberation, Char dug up the notebooks and sent them to Gallimard, the famous Paris publisher, where they were noticed by the future Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Published in 1946 as
Feuillets d’Hypnos,
these poems remain Char’s masterpiece. “We’ve looked all over the village,” said Gwendal. “Where,” he asked, taking his roundabout French path to the point, “is this famous hole in the floor?”

“That’s easy to show you,” said Mireille. “We still own the house.”

The next morning, we found ourselves walking past the remains of the medieval château and into the heart of the
vieux village
. The houses in this part of the village were huddled close together, stacked one on top of another like building blocks; it was hard to know where one residence ended and another began. We took a sharp left at the place des Marronniers, with its fountain and giant chestnut trees, and walked a narrow flagstone street to La Maison Pons.

Mireille unlocked a wrought-iron gate and took us under a porch into an interior courtyard. There was a wooden carriage wheel the height of my shoulder balanced against the stone wall:
“Mon grand-père.”
Her paternal grandfather, she explained, had been a
carrossier
. We ducked through another doorway. Gwendal and I had to practically fold ourselves in half to avoid hitting our heads on the rough-hewn stones as we followed her down the steps into the wine cellar. Mireille cleared away some empty bottles and pointed to a low wooden shelf, about a foot from the earthen floor. “
Le voilà
. That’s where Char buried his manuscript,” she said. “Wrapped in an old parachute.”

Gwendal looked down.
This is the man I love,
I thought.
A man who can be so visibly moved by a dent in the dirt.

“We used to store pigs down here,” continued Mireille, returning suddenly to more practical details. “In those days we ate everything. We sealed the cutlets in a layer of fat, and when you wanted one, you would dig it out.” As we turned to leave, she stamped her foot on the packed-earth floor. “My uncle—he was Char’s driver during the war—before he died, he said there might still be guns buried under here. We never looked.”

Inside, the house was a maze, a series of small whitewashed rooms. Nothing was on the same level; to get from one room to another you had to take two steps up or two steps down. There were dark wooden beams and an open fireplace in the dining room that still smelled faintly of smoke. Up half a flight of stairs was the room where Char had slept. I looked out the window where he had had his writing table. I could see only a sliver of the street; just enough of it, I imagined, for the poet to distinguish the calves of a pretty girl from the jackboots of a German soldier. There were three more bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. The master bedroom, a former attic with a sloping roof, was flooded with morning light. “This is where we used to hang the hams,” said Mireille. It was clear that everywhere she looked, she saw two worlds, past and present. She was born in this house; so was her mother. I ran my hand across a beam. There was a date carved into the wood: 1753.

Before we left, we went out to the garden, a large two-level stone terrace overlooking the surrounding fields. Shoots of new mint congregated at the foot of an heirloom rosebush. It was almost May Day, and the lilies of the valley were in bloom. Mireille picked one and pressed it into my hand. The tiny individual flowers shook like bells in the morning breeze. “
C’est un porte bonheur;
it’s a good-luck charm,” she said, “for the baby.”

I didn’t know what to say. Though it was only about four months away, motherhood remained abstract for me. Most women carry babies in their wombs, but for now this pregnancy was mostly in my head. Gwendal already felt like a father. I certainly didn’t feel like anyone’s mom. Not yet. I pressed the flower to my belly, wondering if the baby could smell the springtime through my skin.

Up the steps, I looked into the mouth of the outdoor brick oven, the opening covered with ash and cobwebs. I squinted into the morning sun; I could just make out two horses, heads nodding in the grass of a nearby ridge.

I’m not someone who knows a whole lot about contentment; my default settings tend more toward striving and mild panic. But the warmth of this place was intoxicating: the high walls of the garden cocooned between the neighboring houses, the small spirals of fern growing undisturbed between the stones. “I know it was a dangerous, terrible time,” I said to Mireille, “but you can feel that your family was happy here.”

“We were.” Mireille smiled, briefly. “But I am sad now. I gave this house to my daughter, thinking she would come back to the village with her family. Instead, she wants to sell it.”

“Ah.”

People who know me will tell you: I almost never let reality get in the way of a good story. For most of my life, that’s made me a dreamer, a dilettante, even—in my own head—a failure. But every once in a while, we catch up to our dreams and make them real. The best decisions of my life have been made this way—a feeling, followed by a giant leap into the unknown. I never regret these choices, though I often make myself crazy with worry along the way. I think most of us wish we had more appetite for risk, not less.

Gwendal and I didn’t even exchange a glance. I know my husband. We were both thinking exactly the same thing.

We walked back along the gravel-strewn path that hugged the outskirts of Céreste. The houses were nestled on one side, the river and the open fields on the other. Mireille huffed slightly as she mounted the small hill toward home. Suddenly she stopped as if she had forgotten something very important. “The bed-and-breakfast doesn’t serve meals,” she said, crumpling her eyebrows together with concern. “Where have you been eating?”

“We bought some things at the market in Apt on Saturday,” I said. “We’ve been making picnics.”

“C’est bien,”
she said with a nod of approval. “Picnicking is good. That’s what we used to do.”

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO
say exactly what it was that moved us. Some heady combination of the history, the baby—not to mention those first strawberries. It took only a moment for the absurd to become the obvious. This is where we would live the next chapter of our lives. This is where we would become a family. Gwendal and I spent a sleepless night in front of an Excel spreadsheet and the next morning went back to ask if we could buy the house.