Our original plan was to spend a week in Paris and then drive down to the Dordogne to spend 3.5 weeks there. Driving is probably more expensive than taking the train if one purchases PREM tickets which probably would not be more than the cost of just the fuel, but we wanted to visit a friend near Bourges and we can always stretch out the trip a little to visit a recommended site that is a reasonable detour away. This is not what happened. Because of my wife’s broken ankle, we canceled 5 weeks of traveling, landed in Paris and drove directly to the Dordogne.
The day we arrived we went to the emergency room of the Centre Hospitalier of Périgueux where an X-ray was taken and the ankle placed in a cast for a minimum of 3 weeks; it turned out to be five weeks, the cast coming off the day out friends arrived--we had not told them about our medical problem.
Medical practice in France is different from practice in the States. My wife had previously been operated on the same foot with six weeks in a non-walking cast. There was the occasional checkup with the $150 ride to Kaiser (she could not go down the stairs on her own), but no medicines were prescribed nor special care indicated. In France, if the leg is immobilized in a cast, it is expected that the patient will receive a daily injection of a blood thinning drug to prevent phlebitis. This will be administered by a visiting nurse using a prescription purchased by the patient. So we got acquainted with the four nurses who service our area. Some don’t have the time to chitchat and would stay no more than 5 minutes, while others were more chatty--one even provided a woolen sock to go over the cast because we had no heat in the house and the early part of May was really cold, with snow falling for an hour on May 5 (http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623282383670/ ). When we spoke with our friends in France, they all found the injections to be a normal part of life with an immobilized leg, whereas our friends in the States who are connected to the health care system had never heard of it. But when we mentioned it to a nurse, he immediately recognized the drug even if it is used less frequently than in France.
After the third week we went for a checkup with the orthopedic MD who insisted that the cast stay another 2 weeks. Although his office is in the hospital, on Thursdays he is paid directly and not through the hospital’s financial office. I suspect that this is an arrangement done to give the doctor extra income above his staff salary. I also suspect that if one chooses to see the doctor on that day (when calling for the appointment one is warned that Thursday is this doctor’s private hours), the reimbursement is less than on other days (I understand that seeing a doctor other than your regular one for a non-emergency consultation is reimbursed at 50% rather than the 100% minus one euro).
We rented a wheelchair (16€ per week) which my wife had to use because she does not have upper body strength and she has plantar fasciitis on the heel of her “good” foot. Moreover, crutches could not be used for long distances such as going to the market, or a flower show, or a pottery exhibit--all of which we did.
All in all, the 5 weeks of medical care (ER, doctor, daily nurses, prescriptions, blood tests every five days) cost us about 800€, fully reimbursed by Kaiser minus its standard co-pay, although in one instance at a very disadvantageous rate.
I do not know if there are extra government payments to the service personnel. If I recall correctly, we paid about 7€ per nurse’s visit on non-holidays, more on Sunday & holidays. The nurses come in their own car. The impression I have is that three nurses have a practice in the town, which practice is to cover the rural countryside also. The fourth visiting nurse, who was English, was a substitute and was not paid directly; we paid the nurse she replaced for that day. Presumably a French resident would be reimbursed for these doctor prescribed services.
The assumption is that the medical costs are low because they are subsidized by the state. But while it is clear that the state reimburses incurred medical costs, it is not clear that the services are otherwise directly subsidized. We are struck by how inexpensive a plumber’s visit is, for example. It took three weeks of miscommunications for him to come and check a faucet which turned out to be OK, and the total bill, mailed to us in the States a month and a half later, came out to 30€. We had a slight leak in our SF sink drain and the cost was $150. Yet the cost of daily life is about the same in the two countries. If anything, utilities are higher in France. Groceries are about the same, fruits and vegetables higher, meats are about the equivalent in price, only charcuterie and cheeses are cheaper and better. Contract prices seem to be higher in France, such as paying 4000€ to cut down three trees, or paying 400€ to cut grass around the house (an estimated perimeter of 100 ft X 100 ft.). We had the roof redone this winter, and to just remove the gravel from the original roof costs 1800€, a job that I could do in a day if I were there. I discussed the issue with the firm’s representative and he claimed that it represents two displacements: off the roof and then away from the front of the garage, I told him that the second move was not necessary, as the garage door could not be opened anyway. The price does not include the 19.5% VAT which was subsequently reduced to 5.5% because the work has no effect on the envelope of a house that is more than 20 years old. Eventually the price of the gravel removal was reduced by 2% of the total bill, which was far less than expected; but they had me over a barrel: pay in a week with the 2% reduction or pay the full price. The U.S.-French disparity in medical costs and plumbing repairs is hard to explain, for while the doctors, nurses and plumbers are not paid as much as in the States, neither are they on poverty row.
This year our travels in the Dordogne were limited for the first 5 weeks because we depended on wheelchair accessibility. Our local market day was out because the main street is hilly. Thiviers was out because parking by the time we would arrive was too far, although on other days we could park in the center of town across from the internet café and get in with little difficulty. The local Carrefour Market [sic] (smaller than the standard Carrefour) and Leclerc did not present any difficulties, and we discovered that Périgueux was quite manageable, with a parking next to the pedestrian part of town.We asked about a disabled card but were told that it would take at least 3 months to obtain one; so I did not bother to apply for one. We did a few outings during the 5 weeks of immobility. Knowing that St. Jean de Cole is flat, we went to the floralies (http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623282383670/ it was a stormy day) which has become a plant sale aside from the exhibits on the ground floor of the castle (otherwise closed to the public). We paid the entry fee for only one person because the enabler of someone who is disabled does not pay. We also went to a pottery fair in a nearby town in the Corrèze, and to St. Robert, a plus beau village (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623313123155 ). It got us out of the house, but was limited compared to our normal excursions.
May and June were cold and rainy this year. I barely had the days to cut the grass and I spent a good deal of time tightening the bolts in our caisson ceiling. That did lessen the creaking in the house. Eventually we received books from the States, which prevented by wife from dying of boredom.
The hamlet where our house has one main street going on a ridge. It used to be a farming village, but now there are perhaps two full time farmers (one cuts the grass in my field on an even exchange--I don’t pay and he gets free hay) in the area and a handful of individuals who have a full-time non-agricultural job and take care of a few sheep on the side. There are country lanes going down to various farmhouses (and our house), but no side streets to speak of. The total population is about 90 inhabitants with no stores or café in the hamlet, although there is a grocery van that comes by twice a week, and a baker's van that delivers bread twice a week; but there are 8 or 9 swimming pools. For a while a young couple had set up a rotisserie on Sundays on the main square, selling also a few vegetables. They had received a small loan given to unemployed people by the government to create a small business. They were there for a few weeks one summer, and then disappeared. When we arrive I usually go pay my respects to the part-time mayor, especially this year as I needed a computer connection. In the past few years we’ve had the running joke that I bring the bad weather, and when I go see him to say good-by, I proclaim that I am taking the bad weather with me. The hamlet still does not have DSL, which will not be available until 2012 at the earliest because it seems to be at the end of the line. Dial-up does not work for web sites, but fortunately the mairie’s secretary is also the mairie’s secretary (two part-time jobs) in her home village a couple miles away where they do have DSL and she invited me to use it on a limited basis.
The inactivity made us much more aware of the class distinctions in the hamlet and surrounding area. The house painter came to see us, with 2 bottles of homemade cherry apéritif and cassis. Jean has had a hard life, and yet he feels himself lucky. His parents were peasants and he had to walk 5 km. to get to school. The teacher did not wake him up when he fell asleep at his school desk. His father died when he (Jean) was young which meant, for an unexplained reason, that he did not become a farmer--perhaps his father was a tenant farmer and there was no property to inherit. He eventually went to the building trades school that we pass every time we go to Périgueux. He went there the second year it opened and became a house painter.
While in the army he fell ill--he speaks of his lungs, so it may have been tuberculosis--and spent 18 months in the military hospital in Libourne. He considers himself lucky because his unit was sent to Algeria and he says that quite a few never recovered from the experience. After his military service he returned to he area and started his trade as a house painter. His glory year that he always remembers was when he varnished the inside of our house--it’s made of planking and plywood that was unfinished. He had never traveled outside the area except for his military service and a long trade weekend in Paris, and a new world apparently opened up for him when he worked on our house. First of all my parents were foreigners but of working-class background who were very open toward him, and this was true of their French friends who came to visit and who clearly were not stuck in the stratified society that still existed in the early 1970’s. My parents also had no objection that his wife worked with him and they brought their toddler along who played with our daughter. My mother said that it was an unusual arrangement done so because the wife was subject to depressions and that was how the husband could keep an eye on her. My mother always stayed in contact with them, paying a courtesy visit every time she went to the Dordogne, and we maintained the contact.
It is his son who cuts the grass around the house at a lower rate than what was quoted to us, and his grandson who cut down the three trees behind the house, also at less than the official rate.
Mme. Perret died in March, which allowed him to come and see us. She was very diabetic and could hardly walk. A few years go they had a staircase lift installed because she could no longer go up the stairs. She refused to appear in public in a wheelchair so that she no longer left the house. She could not stand long enough to cook, so he had to learn how to cook. For the last nine months she had to sleep downstairs in their living room. He had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the same room. If he tried to sleep upstairs in his own bed, she would scream until he came back down. The nurse suggested that he let her scream, and added that not many men would put up with what he did. His reaction is that he couldn’t stand the screaming but that they were married for better or for worse. He said that the nurse was a good nurse but he found her to be hard-hearted. His life had been hell. His wife taught him how to cook but became jealous of the fact that he was doing the cooking to the point of refusing at times to eat. He was the one who tested her every few hours for her sugar level and prepared her injections. He admitted that he had been a prisoner who was liberated by her death. While he did receive some government support of home care services--a niece cleaned the house but was paid by the government,--he could not afford daily help and had to do everything himself. He had to count his pennies, living on a very small pension, and paying for an outside medical consultation (14€ out of pocket) was not to be done frequently.
When his wife died, the local priest and neighbor came by. M. Perret made it very clear that a religious service was out of the question. There are 1000 castles in the Dordogne representing as many oppressors who were supported by the Church. He thanked the priest for coming as a neighbor but not as a representative of his religion. The priest accepted that. He is in his 80’s but can’t retire because he has no pension.
So M. Perret accepted our invitation to come for supper and came by uninvited on two separate occasions, partly out of friendship and to some extent out of loneliness.
Alain (we used to be on a monsieur-vous relationship which evolved into a first name, but still vous form of address) is the local gardener whose life revolves around his vegetable garden. He actually comes from the Corrèze, worked in Paris as a conductor for the RATP and retired in our (so to speak) village because his girl friend lives in public housing in the village down the hill. Somehow he settled in our village and started a garden on communal property. My mother was one of his first customers when other villagers disdained him. He liked to pass by every morning because my mother always purchased what he offered and always offered him a cup of coffee. We do not have the same standing. His garden has grown and he now has his regular customers, especially of his string beans. But he’ll sell us lettuce at .15€ a head; that and new potatoes are about the only things available when we are there. He does not sell his onions or the potatoes when they get bigger because he saves them as his winter vegetables. His fruit trees come from stock found in the forest with grafted shoots from producing garden trees. In essence he is self-sufficient. When he leaves the hamlet, it is on his bicycle. He visits his family in the Corrèze once a year, in part to check on his property which he sold en viager to his nephew. He does the one way 120 km. trip in one day, but he has decided that this would be the last trip; it was a little much for his 78 years.
One of his regular customers is Suzanne, who used to disdain him. She grew up in the village, but the family moved to Paris after W.W.II and she eventually became a secretary and married a business man. Her father never left his peasant roots, living in the summer in a metal shack not much larger than a shipping container. His wife refused to stay there and would stay at my parents’ house (once it was built) when she came down to the Dordogne. Suzanne is very proper, although softening around the edges. Once we were in the hamlet when a hunter’s meal was offered by the local hunting club (for a similar meal, go to http://www.fodors.com/com...rope/a-hunters-feast.cfm ). It took place in front of the abandoned school house under two magnificent trees. It was a midday meal, and my wife’s cousin wore his hat. Suzanne let him know that one does not wear a hat during a meal. She’s the one who looks after the house when we are not there. In return, her relatives use the house in our absence. There is no official payment, as I do not wish the relationship to evolve into a business one. But Suzanne has decided that her relative should help defray the upkeep of the house by paying her what she decides. She takes out her expenses and deposits the rest into my account. This does lead to some problems. One year we talked about trimming some trees and I expressed the desire to cut down a pine in front of the house. Its twin had fallen during the big storm in 2000/2001, fortunately not touching the house, and this one, after so many more years of growth, would definitely crash down on the house. It is 35 years old and reaching its age limit anyway. Suzanne likes the tree because it provides shade, so instead of cutting it down, she had it topped. It is now ugly but M. Perret’s grandson, having damaged the house when cutting down the oaks behind it, refuses to show his face in spite of multiple calls to cut down this one. Suzanne won’t have her person do it, and she knows how we feel about it.
This year, the people staying at the house felt that the freezer part of the refrigerator was inadequate, so they purchased a new refrigerator and Suzanne deposited only 100€ in my account. My experience is that meat placed in the tray right under the freezer would be frozen at the surface, and besides, this is an unnecessary investment for something that usually is used a bare 2 months. So there is the good and the bad. We could not have our field maintained if Suzanne had not arranged with Jacques to cut the hay to be used for his cattle--he is one of the few remaining active full-time farmers in the immediate area; and her husband winterizes the house at the end of the fall.
But for some Suzanne sticks her nose where she shouldn’t. My Berlin cousin has a piece of property on the other side of the village. Françoise, who lives next door to the property, expressed interest in using it. It was being used and maintained by a farmer who cut the hay and was supposed to keep the field clean. But after the 2000 storm he never bothered to remove the trees that had fallen into the field, and weeds were beginning to take over the area around these trees. It was up to me to tell him that we no longer needed his services. This required a little diplomacy and territorial definitions. We invited him to the house, so that we controlled the situation. I learned that he was just about to retire so that I could suggest a face saving reason to have someone else take care of the land. It worked without too much discussion, although he clearly was not happy about it.
So Françoise took over the supervision of the land. She found someone to cut the hay and bale it for her in the old-fashioned rectangles rather than the big rolls. She had a gate cut in the fence between her property and my cousin’s so that once the hay was taken out she could put her two donkeys in the field. She also surrounded the unfenced portion of the property with an electrical fence so that the donkeys could not wander away. This arrangement worked until last year. Françoise felt that she could no longer take care of the donkeys and therefore no longer needed the field. But Suzanne forced the situation a little. Françoise had the habit of planting trees along the field’s property line adjoining the village pond. These trees are young and not very tall. Along that same property line were two bigger trees that were dead and leaning over the path leading to the pond. Suzanne took it upon herself to tell Françoise that the trees had to be cut down as they were a potential danger to persons walking on that path--which hardly anyone uses as the pond is directly accessible from the road. Françoise told her that the trees were on the communal side of the line and therefore not her concern. A few days later, Suzanne berated Françoise for not taking care of the trees, and did so publicly at the weekly market in town. That did it. Françoise would henceforth never socialize with “la Suzanne” (the article reduces her to another farm girl) because she had demeaned her in public. So it pushed Françoise into abandoning the field. She gave me the name of the part-time farmer who took care of it. I called him and offered him an even exchange: he cuts the hay for free and he gets to keep it. He was a little suspicious but accepted the deal. Looking into the future, he might be willing to cut our field when Jacques retires, which apparently is soon. The village had the trees cut eventually.
Françoise tends to be somewhat prickly. Her neighbor paints as a hobby and apparently is good enough to have a show in the public section of the local château. One of her paintings is of Françoise’s family home that she left when she was nine and now occupied by a sister-in-law with whom she has absolutely no contact. The painting represents no invasion of privacy, at least in the American sense, as it is simply a street view of the farmhouse. Françoise was pleased that her ancestral home was worth a picture, and she has a photo of the painting hanging in her living room, but she was annoyed that her neighbor had not asked permission to paint the house.
Suzanne and Françoise are of about the same age. They went to school together and left the village when they were still very young. Françoise left with her mother, fleeing an abusive father/husband, and spent the rest of her life until retirement in or near Metz in northern France. She probably started work young, had a bad marriage, and then a good one later in life. Her entire working life was spent in a café and I believe that she owned one when she retired.
Her second husband had been a gendarme for 20 years and then worked another job. When they both retired, Françoise sold her café and they built a 5 bedroom house in her home village. Having worked indoors all her life, she had taken to gardening and having animals with a vengeance. She has a green thumb, as everything seems to come up successfully. She kept chickens, rabbits, ducks, geese and a pair of peacocks in addition to her two donkeys. She eventually wrung the necks of the peacocks because they were too noisy and mean. She lost most of the other fowls to foxes and badgers, and gave up on animal care because of rheumatoid arthritis. But she won’t give up her gardening and she still has enough chickens to offer us more eggs than we can use. Her husband died of cancer and she has no one to help her. Her financial situation has also changed dramatically. Her husband had a good pension as a gendarme, but because he worked for private industry afterward, she does not get the pension of a gendarme’s widow but only part of his ordinary social security. Still, as she puts it, she has to pay taxes which is better than paying none because then she would be too poor to afford extras. She will never go to a nursing home because she would have to sell the house to pay for her keep and she wants to leave it to her children.
Our relation is limited to our dropping by to tell her that we have arrived and the arranging for a meal--one year at her house, the next at ours. Hers are gargantuan, lasting five or six hours, in spite of our strenuous protestation that it is too much. She has finally cut down her courses from 7 to 5. Her lighter meal consisted of smoked salmon on little squares of bread; finger hot dogs wrapped in pastry and baked; soup; hors d’œuvre of ham, radishes, eggplant and melon; a main dish of “wild” duck, green bean bundles wrapped in bacon, tiny potatoes and mushrooms; a cheese plate; salad; strawberries & then a homemade rhubarb tarte with an apple base because she did not have enough rhubarb. We got there at 5 to show her how to prepare the eggplant (she liked it so much the previous year at our house that I promised that I would show her how to do it), and left at midnight. It is said that no one wants to eat at her house because there is too much food.
Her house is enormous, with 5 bedrooms but a small kitchen; a basement which has an apartment with bathroom, kitchen and big room with a pullout sofa; a wine cellar, a canned goods cellar, a car space, a wood storage space, and a space where she breeds song birds for sale and keeps her freezer and extra refrigerator. She explains the size of the house by telling us that most of her life she lived in basement apartments and single rooms and she wanted space once she could afford it.
We offer a souper which means an hors-d’œuvre, soup, salad, maybe cheese, and a light dessert--usually a fruit concoction. Same number of courses but much lighter and in much smaller quantities. The hors-d’œuvre might be guacamole or my version of eggplant caviar served with crackers and accompanied by an apéritif. The people of the region know the commercial ones and the homemade ones: eau de noix, vin de noix, cerise - but are not familiar with some more exotic production made in the Dordogne. So these go over well with our guests in general. Jean makes and excellent cherry apéritif & cassis but counts his pennies and never buys commercial apéritifs; he is very appreciative of Cinzano. The eggplant dish went over so well that Françoise insisted on having the recipe. We agreed that the next year I would show her how do make it. So I did this year but it did not count as part of her meal. My wife claims that she was as fascinated by having a man cook in the house as she was interested in the dish.
M. and Mme. Darras are our immediate neighbors in the field below us. They had the house built in the last ten years in a traditional style, “poutres apparentes” etc. The house has a swimming pool built for the granddaughter; they never use it. The wife drives a BMW and is always properly made up and dressed. He apparently was a contractor in the north and they moved here because their son lives in the area. He purchased a horse for his granddaughter. She fell off and never got back on. He can’t because he hurt his back working on the house, but he purchased a second horse because the first one was lonely. Money is obviously not a problem. They may not be rich, but counting pennies is not their style. He looks like a lower class individual. His pipe is constantly in his mouth and half his teeth are missing. Since he is constantly puttering around--building all sorts of retaining walls with local stones, working on his terraced garden (it’s a jewel)--his clothing are of the working type; an absolute contrast to his wife. Both seem to be of that constricted petit-bourgeois class that sticks to what it knows. Yet when we spoke of our upcoming trip to Norway, he recalled a trip he and two other pilots took in three Cessnas, flying from northern France to Norway and up the Norwegian coast.
M. Darras is serviable to a fault. During the 2000 December storm two trees fell in our yard, almost hitting the house. The story I heard was that he took his chain saw and cut down the trees, others said that was people in the village who did it. M. Darras does not admit to doing it. But I went to see him to get a plumber’s name, and an hour later he came to fix the problem; he’ll also lend his tools willingly to a person (me) he sees for perhaps 30 minutes once a year. Reciprocating is difficult. One year we brought him back a tobacco pouch from Turkey--probably lousy tobacco, but it was the thought that counted as we both knew. Or we would bring him native seed from California. Nothing that would require reciprocating. He spent two days cutting Françoise’s grass. The houses are on the opposite side of the village, far enough that if Françoise comes to our house, she will drive. The Darras and Françoise socialize, and they come by occupation from the same class.
We decided that we needed to thank the Darras for their help. He killed the weeds on our property line that were starting to seriously encroach into the field. We invited them for apéritif, offering some of the more exotic drinks produced in the Sarlat area (and available at the Sunday market in St. Geniès http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623164797649/ ). We also had some of our dips with crackers. He came in, looked at the 24 foot expanse supported by interlocking 1 x 12 planking and just kept on repeating “il fallait y penser.” He was quite at ease, but his wife sat stiffly on the edge of her chair, not quite sure what to make of our dips. It took his encouragement for her to try anything.
Jeannette is somewhat strange. She inherited her aunt’s house at the entrance of the village. Her aunt was the moral light of the village in the eyes of some because she took in 2 Jewish children during the war. Jeannette never married, although she has had boyfriends who took care of repair work on the house. Her education must be limited because she was a nurse’s aide in a retirement home in Poitiers. She does not drive and I have seen her on occasion riding her bicycle on the 4 km. climb between the next town and the village. She admits to depression (we hardly know her) and is obviously lonely. This year she retired, keeping her housing in Poitiers because staying in the village during the winter would be too depressing. Her retirement income must be very little, but somehow she manages. She can’t have inherited much more than the house because her aunt was in a nursing home. While medical treatment is well covered in France, long term care is covered only after the patient is impoverished and even then the children are expected to contribute to the upkeep of their parents; the State will decide the appropriate amount based on income. Housing seems to be exempt since the niece was able to inherit the house and I know of other cases where the homestead was inherited from parents who were impoverished by their stay in a nursing home. Jeannette and Alain are on par economically and socially, but I suspect that Alain has more contacts in the village.
I really know very few people in the village, although they all know who I am and where we live--la maison des américains. Other foreigners live in this hamlet; there is an English lady who lives in the former presbytery which is now subsidized housing after it was rehabilitated as training for construction workers. Nobody can explain how she qualified for subsidized housing. A Dutch couple purchased the house of one of the notables of the village--Madame was the mayor for many years--and turned into a B&B frequented mainly by a Dutch clientele. It took Monique, Suzanne’s older sister, 10 years to get a permit to build her house because Madame felt that it would ruin her view of the village--and it was only once the real reason for the non-issue of the permit was discovered that Monique and her husband could argue successfully for the construction permit. It is now forbidden to build on that side of the village to preserve the view of the village.
My wife’s cast came off the day we had guests arriving from England. The grass in the field had not be mowed. Ralph was not very interested in it, as he came mainly to humor his companion; he would prefer to limit his travels to a 50 mile radius of his university town, elongated into an ellipse so that he could occasionally go to London and spend some time at the sea shore. Evelyn likes to travel and likes plants. She walked into our field and declared it not a field but a meadow which, according to her, must have taken generations of conditioning to reach its present state--she discovered three kinds of wild orchids growing in the grass. So now we know how we will advertise our house to the English when we want to sell it: meadow with house.
We took them to the standard sights of the Dordogne (Sarlat, Domme, La Roque-Gageac), to Rouffignac which we prefer to other caves for its different geologic formation and its location far from the standard tourist roads--the drawings, although monochrome or sometimes etched into the rock, are also very impressive. One afternoon we decided to visit the parc in Hautefort (http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623164797649/ ). It turned out to be an expensive visit, as one has to pay a single price for the grounds and the visit of the castle which did not interest us. But we recouped the cost by buying two sets of cordial glasses at ridiculously low prices in a local brocante. But they especially enjoyed a repas des chasseurs in a nearby village. As has been the case in other events like this one, we were the only outsiders, so that one did get a sense of community life. Evelyn had grown up in a small English village, and the meal brought back all sorts of memories. To raise money for the hunting club, there was an auction of a smoked ham. The organizers of the meal wrapped the ham with string and those who wanted to bid paid one euro for each guess of the length of the string. The one who came closest to the length won the ham--it was 5+ meters long.
We had two sets of visitors this past summer, and I do no remember exactly how we allocated the visits. We obviously take take them to the local markets, but it may be to Thiviers, or the one in the next town, or Périgueux. On our own we went to the St. Cyprien market on our way to Le Vieux Logis in Trémolat (http://www.vieux-logis.co...aurant-gastronomique.php )for a Sunday afternoon meal--well worth the splurge; I recall particularly a foie gras crème brulée offered to bridge the wait between two courses. The St. Cyrpien market is mixed instead of separating goods, clothes, etc. from food stands. It is a large market where French appears to be a minority language among the clientele. We had very good smoked eel from a Dutch smoked fish and marinated herring stand. The butcher at one end of the market is excellent, and he has a store (Boucherie de l’Abbaye des Augustins) at the edge of Beynac. His stand actually looked better than the store itself.
The Thiviers market separates dry goods and food stands. There is a good yogurt maker and a good goat cheese stand, the latter run by a Dutch woman who married a French farmer. I remember when she found it easier to speak to us in English than in French to the rest of the clientele. Now I think that her French is more fluent. One of the fruit and vegetable stands selling higher quality and more exotic items is also at one end of the St. Cyprien market.
For non-local cheeses, we still prefer the cheese vendor outside the covered market in Périgueux who also has a store on the rue Limogeanne. He is trying to carry raw milk cheeses exclusively, but it is not easy; for example, only one producer of époisse still makes it with raw milk.
With Kate and Jane we visited the jardin de Cadiot, which is impressive for the work it represents, but did not appeal to me as a garden--there was a certain tape à l’œil missing (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623164797649 ). We also went to the Limeuil garden which is worth a visit if only for the view over the junction of the Vézère and the Dordogne rivers (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623164797649 ). Kate is a shopper. Whenever she and my wife go on some outing in the Bay Area, they invariably stop at one or two second hand shops found via the GPS in Kate’s car; and going to used clothing outlets was not the original intent of the outing. So we decided to take them to a local vide grenier. We had never been. It’s a country flea market, in this case set in a field and woods of a local château. It’s fun to browse. My wife picked up 8 coffee mugs for 4 euros. They actually are English porcelain cups with saucers, but had the cylindrical shape of mugs and she refused the saucers. Kate found something to stuff into her suitcase and went home happy. I picked up a rain jacket for 5 euros, and I was really tempted by some nicely bound volumes of forgotten literature--Erckmann-Chatrian anyone?
When we left the Dordogne we chose not to go to Paris. Time was too brief between our last visitors and our departure from CDG. So we drove to Auxerre where we had not been since 1992. It’s a nice town--http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157622755059630; but we continued on to stay in Sens where we had stayed in a lousy Hôtel de la gare in 1992. This time we stayed in the center of town in what appears to be the only decent hotel, across from the hôtel de ville. Sens has a wonderful market on Saturday--http://www.flickr.com/pho...72157622755059630. We purchased an époisse, a raw milk camembert and a goat cheese, specifying that they could be ripe only after 36 hours of travel at ambient temperature; and could we have it sous vide? She did not have her machine, but come back in half an hour, by which time she got the charcutier to place them sous vide. The total cost was 15€; she must have made a mistake. From Sens we drove to Provins--too pristine or maybe tourist oriented for me--to waste time because we were to see some friends near-by for lunch and we did not want to arrive too early. We had a relaxing afternoon in their garden, and then drove to St. Witz, which is about 10 km. north of CDG, where we spent the night. The locale is not particularly charming, with the hotels fenced in a requiring a code to get in the parking lot after 9 p.m. but the price was right (Hotel Akena, 42€). We ate at the Buffalo Grill (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623316531799 ) across the street; it’s better than expected. We returned the car at CDG with no problem, dropping the keys in the slot because the desk was not open at 6 a.m.
The day we arrived we went to the emergency room of the Centre Hospitalier of Périgueux where an X-ray was taken and the ankle placed in a cast for a minimum of 3 weeks; it turned out to be five weeks, the cast coming off the day out friends arrived--we had not told them about our medical problem.
Medical practice in France is different from practice in the States. My wife had previously been operated on the same foot with six weeks in a non-walking cast. There was the occasional checkup with the $150 ride to Kaiser (she could not go down the stairs on her own), but no medicines were prescribed nor special care indicated. In France, if the leg is immobilized in a cast, it is expected that the patient will receive a daily injection of a blood thinning drug to prevent phlebitis. This will be administered by a visiting nurse using a prescription purchased by the patient. So we got acquainted with the four nurses who service our area. Some don’t have the time to chitchat and would stay no more than 5 minutes, while others were more chatty--one even provided a woolen sock to go over the cast because we had no heat in the house and the early part of May was really cold, with snow falling for an hour on May 5 (http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623282383670/ ). When we spoke with our friends in France, they all found the injections to be a normal part of life with an immobilized leg, whereas our friends in the States who are connected to the health care system had never heard of it. But when we mentioned it to a nurse, he immediately recognized the drug even if it is used less frequently than in France.
After the third week we went for a checkup with the orthopedic MD who insisted that the cast stay another 2 weeks. Although his office is in the hospital, on Thursdays he is paid directly and not through the hospital’s financial office. I suspect that this is an arrangement done to give the doctor extra income above his staff salary. I also suspect that if one chooses to see the doctor on that day (when calling for the appointment one is warned that Thursday is this doctor’s private hours), the reimbursement is less than on other days (I understand that seeing a doctor other than your regular one for a non-emergency consultation is reimbursed at 50% rather than the 100% minus one euro).
We rented a wheelchair (16€ per week) which my wife had to use because she does not have upper body strength and she has plantar fasciitis on the heel of her “good” foot. Moreover, crutches could not be used for long distances such as going to the market, or a flower show, or a pottery exhibit--all of which we did.
All in all, the 5 weeks of medical care (ER, doctor, daily nurses, prescriptions, blood tests every five days) cost us about 800€, fully reimbursed by Kaiser minus its standard co-pay, although in one instance at a very disadvantageous rate.
I do not know if there are extra government payments to the service personnel. If I recall correctly, we paid about 7€ per nurse’s visit on non-holidays, more on Sunday & holidays. The nurses come in their own car. The impression I have is that three nurses have a practice in the town, which practice is to cover the rural countryside also. The fourth visiting nurse, who was English, was a substitute and was not paid directly; we paid the nurse she replaced for that day. Presumably a French resident would be reimbursed for these doctor prescribed services.
The assumption is that the medical costs are low because they are subsidized by the state. But while it is clear that the state reimburses incurred medical costs, it is not clear that the services are otherwise directly subsidized. We are struck by how inexpensive a plumber’s visit is, for example. It took three weeks of miscommunications for him to come and check a faucet which turned out to be OK, and the total bill, mailed to us in the States a month and a half later, came out to 30€. We had a slight leak in our SF sink drain and the cost was $150. Yet the cost of daily life is about the same in the two countries. If anything, utilities are higher in France. Groceries are about the same, fruits and vegetables higher, meats are about the equivalent in price, only charcuterie and cheeses are cheaper and better. Contract prices seem to be higher in France, such as paying 4000€ to cut down three trees, or paying 400€ to cut grass around the house (an estimated perimeter of 100 ft X 100 ft.). We had the roof redone this winter, and to just remove the gravel from the original roof costs 1800€, a job that I could do in a day if I were there. I discussed the issue with the firm’s representative and he claimed that it represents two displacements: off the roof and then away from the front of the garage, I told him that the second move was not necessary, as the garage door could not be opened anyway. The price does not include the 19.5% VAT which was subsequently reduced to 5.5% because the work has no effect on the envelope of a house that is more than 20 years old. Eventually the price of the gravel removal was reduced by 2% of the total bill, which was far less than expected; but they had me over a barrel: pay in a week with the 2% reduction or pay the full price. The U.S.-French disparity in medical costs and plumbing repairs is hard to explain, for while the doctors, nurses and plumbers are not paid as much as in the States, neither are they on poverty row.
This year our travels in the Dordogne were limited for the first 5 weeks because we depended on wheelchair accessibility. Our local market day was out because the main street is hilly. Thiviers was out because parking by the time we would arrive was too far, although on other days we could park in the center of town across from the internet café and get in with little difficulty. The local Carrefour Market [sic] (smaller than the standard Carrefour) and Leclerc did not present any difficulties, and we discovered that Périgueux was quite manageable, with a parking next to the pedestrian part of town.We asked about a disabled card but were told that it would take at least 3 months to obtain one; so I did not bother to apply for one. We did a few outings during the 5 weeks of immobility. Knowing that St. Jean de Cole is flat, we went to the floralies (http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623282383670/ it was a stormy day) which has become a plant sale aside from the exhibits on the ground floor of the castle (otherwise closed to the public). We paid the entry fee for only one person because the enabler of someone who is disabled does not pay. We also went to a pottery fair in a nearby town in the Corrèze, and to St. Robert, a plus beau village (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623313123155 ). It got us out of the house, but was limited compared to our normal excursions.
May and June were cold and rainy this year. I barely had the days to cut the grass and I spent a good deal of time tightening the bolts in our caisson ceiling. That did lessen the creaking in the house. Eventually we received books from the States, which prevented by wife from dying of boredom.
The hamlet where our house has one main street going on a ridge. It used to be a farming village, but now there are perhaps two full time farmers (one cuts the grass in my field on an even exchange--I don’t pay and he gets free hay) in the area and a handful of individuals who have a full-time non-agricultural job and take care of a few sheep on the side. There are country lanes going down to various farmhouses (and our house), but no side streets to speak of. The total population is about 90 inhabitants with no stores or café in the hamlet, although there is a grocery van that comes by twice a week, and a baker's van that delivers bread twice a week; but there are 8 or 9 swimming pools. For a while a young couple had set up a rotisserie on Sundays on the main square, selling also a few vegetables. They had received a small loan given to unemployed people by the government to create a small business. They were there for a few weeks one summer, and then disappeared. When we arrive I usually go pay my respects to the part-time mayor, especially this year as I needed a computer connection. In the past few years we’ve had the running joke that I bring the bad weather, and when I go see him to say good-by, I proclaim that I am taking the bad weather with me. The hamlet still does not have DSL, which will not be available until 2012 at the earliest because it seems to be at the end of the line. Dial-up does not work for web sites, but fortunately the mairie’s secretary is also the mairie’s secretary (two part-time jobs) in her home village a couple miles away where they do have DSL and she invited me to use it on a limited basis.
The inactivity made us much more aware of the class distinctions in the hamlet and surrounding area. The house painter came to see us, with 2 bottles of homemade cherry apéritif and cassis. Jean has had a hard life, and yet he feels himself lucky. His parents were peasants and he had to walk 5 km. to get to school. The teacher did not wake him up when he fell asleep at his school desk. His father died when he (Jean) was young which meant, for an unexplained reason, that he did not become a farmer--perhaps his father was a tenant farmer and there was no property to inherit. He eventually went to the building trades school that we pass every time we go to Périgueux. He went there the second year it opened and became a house painter.
While in the army he fell ill--he speaks of his lungs, so it may have been tuberculosis--and spent 18 months in the military hospital in Libourne. He considers himself lucky because his unit was sent to Algeria and he says that quite a few never recovered from the experience. After his military service he returned to he area and started his trade as a house painter. His glory year that he always remembers was when he varnished the inside of our house--it’s made of planking and plywood that was unfinished. He had never traveled outside the area except for his military service and a long trade weekend in Paris, and a new world apparently opened up for him when he worked on our house. First of all my parents were foreigners but of working-class background who were very open toward him, and this was true of their French friends who came to visit and who clearly were not stuck in the stratified society that still existed in the early 1970’s. My parents also had no objection that his wife worked with him and they brought their toddler along who played with our daughter. My mother said that it was an unusual arrangement done so because the wife was subject to depressions and that was how the husband could keep an eye on her. My mother always stayed in contact with them, paying a courtesy visit every time she went to the Dordogne, and we maintained the contact.
It is his son who cuts the grass around the house at a lower rate than what was quoted to us, and his grandson who cut down the three trees behind the house, also at less than the official rate.
Mme. Perret died in March, which allowed him to come and see us. She was very diabetic and could hardly walk. A few years go they had a staircase lift installed because she could no longer go up the stairs. She refused to appear in public in a wheelchair so that she no longer left the house. She could not stand long enough to cook, so he had to learn how to cook. For the last nine months she had to sleep downstairs in their living room. He had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the same room. If he tried to sleep upstairs in his own bed, she would scream until he came back down. The nurse suggested that he let her scream, and added that not many men would put up with what he did. His reaction is that he couldn’t stand the screaming but that they were married for better or for worse. He said that the nurse was a good nurse but he found her to be hard-hearted. His life had been hell. His wife taught him how to cook but became jealous of the fact that he was doing the cooking to the point of refusing at times to eat. He was the one who tested her every few hours for her sugar level and prepared her injections. He admitted that he had been a prisoner who was liberated by her death. While he did receive some government support of home care services--a niece cleaned the house but was paid by the government,--he could not afford daily help and had to do everything himself. He had to count his pennies, living on a very small pension, and paying for an outside medical consultation (14€ out of pocket) was not to be done frequently.
When his wife died, the local priest and neighbor came by. M. Perret made it very clear that a religious service was out of the question. There are 1000 castles in the Dordogne representing as many oppressors who were supported by the Church. He thanked the priest for coming as a neighbor but not as a representative of his religion. The priest accepted that. He is in his 80’s but can’t retire because he has no pension.
So M. Perret accepted our invitation to come for supper and came by uninvited on two separate occasions, partly out of friendship and to some extent out of loneliness.
Alain (we used to be on a monsieur-vous relationship which evolved into a first name, but still vous form of address) is the local gardener whose life revolves around his vegetable garden. He actually comes from the Corrèze, worked in Paris as a conductor for the RATP and retired in our (so to speak) village because his girl friend lives in public housing in the village down the hill. Somehow he settled in our village and started a garden on communal property. My mother was one of his first customers when other villagers disdained him. He liked to pass by every morning because my mother always purchased what he offered and always offered him a cup of coffee. We do not have the same standing. His garden has grown and he now has his regular customers, especially of his string beans. But he’ll sell us lettuce at .15€ a head; that and new potatoes are about the only things available when we are there. He does not sell his onions or the potatoes when they get bigger because he saves them as his winter vegetables. His fruit trees come from stock found in the forest with grafted shoots from producing garden trees. In essence he is self-sufficient. When he leaves the hamlet, it is on his bicycle. He visits his family in the Corrèze once a year, in part to check on his property which he sold en viager to his nephew. He does the one way 120 km. trip in one day, but he has decided that this would be the last trip; it was a little much for his 78 years.
One of his regular customers is Suzanne, who used to disdain him. She grew up in the village, but the family moved to Paris after W.W.II and she eventually became a secretary and married a business man. Her father never left his peasant roots, living in the summer in a metal shack not much larger than a shipping container. His wife refused to stay there and would stay at my parents’ house (once it was built) when she came down to the Dordogne. Suzanne is very proper, although softening around the edges. Once we were in the hamlet when a hunter’s meal was offered by the local hunting club (for a similar meal, go to http://www.fodors.com/com...rope/a-hunters-feast.cfm ). It took place in front of the abandoned school house under two magnificent trees. It was a midday meal, and my wife’s cousin wore his hat. Suzanne let him know that one does not wear a hat during a meal. She’s the one who looks after the house when we are not there. In return, her relatives use the house in our absence. There is no official payment, as I do not wish the relationship to evolve into a business one. But Suzanne has decided that her relative should help defray the upkeep of the house by paying her what she decides. She takes out her expenses and deposits the rest into my account. This does lead to some problems. One year we talked about trimming some trees and I expressed the desire to cut down a pine in front of the house. Its twin had fallen during the big storm in 2000/2001, fortunately not touching the house, and this one, after so many more years of growth, would definitely crash down on the house. It is 35 years old and reaching its age limit anyway. Suzanne likes the tree because it provides shade, so instead of cutting it down, she had it topped. It is now ugly but M. Perret’s grandson, having damaged the house when cutting down the oaks behind it, refuses to show his face in spite of multiple calls to cut down this one. Suzanne won’t have her person do it, and she knows how we feel about it.
This year, the people staying at the house felt that the freezer part of the refrigerator was inadequate, so they purchased a new refrigerator and Suzanne deposited only 100€ in my account. My experience is that meat placed in the tray right under the freezer would be frozen at the surface, and besides, this is an unnecessary investment for something that usually is used a bare 2 months. So there is the good and the bad. We could not have our field maintained if Suzanne had not arranged with Jacques to cut the hay to be used for his cattle--he is one of the few remaining active full-time farmers in the immediate area; and her husband winterizes the house at the end of the fall.
But for some Suzanne sticks her nose where she shouldn’t. My Berlin cousin has a piece of property on the other side of the village. Françoise, who lives next door to the property, expressed interest in using it. It was being used and maintained by a farmer who cut the hay and was supposed to keep the field clean. But after the 2000 storm he never bothered to remove the trees that had fallen into the field, and weeds were beginning to take over the area around these trees. It was up to me to tell him that we no longer needed his services. This required a little diplomacy and territorial definitions. We invited him to the house, so that we controlled the situation. I learned that he was just about to retire so that I could suggest a face saving reason to have someone else take care of the land. It worked without too much discussion, although he clearly was not happy about it.
So Françoise took over the supervision of the land. She found someone to cut the hay and bale it for her in the old-fashioned rectangles rather than the big rolls. She had a gate cut in the fence between her property and my cousin’s so that once the hay was taken out she could put her two donkeys in the field. She also surrounded the unfenced portion of the property with an electrical fence so that the donkeys could not wander away. This arrangement worked until last year. Françoise felt that she could no longer take care of the donkeys and therefore no longer needed the field. But Suzanne forced the situation a little. Françoise had the habit of planting trees along the field’s property line adjoining the village pond. These trees are young and not very tall. Along that same property line were two bigger trees that were dead and leaning over the path leading to the pond. Suzanne took it upon herself to tell Françoise that the trees had to be cut down as they were a potential danger to persons walking on that path--which hardly anyone uses as the pond is directly accessible from the road. Françoise told her that the trees were on the communal side of the line and therefore not her concern. A few days later, Suzanne berated Françoise for not taking care of the trees, and did so publicly at the weekly market in town. That did it. Françoise would henceforth never socialize with “la Suzanne” (the article reduces her to another farm girl) because she had demeaned her in public. So it pushed Françoise into abandoning the field. She gave me the name of the part-time farmer who took care of it. I called him and offered him an even exchange: he cuts the hay for free and he gets to keep it. He was a little suspicious but accepted the deal. Looking into the future, he might be willing to cut our field when Jacques retires, which apparently is soon. The village had the trees cut eventually.
Françoise tends to be somewhat prickly. Her neighbor paints as a hobby and apparently is good enough to have a show in the public section of the local château. One of her paintings is of Françoise’s family home that she left when she was nine and now occupied by a sister-in-law with whom she has absolutely no contact. The painting represents no invasion of privacy, at least in the American sense, as it is simply a street view of the farmhouse. Françoise was pleased that her ancestral home was worth a picture, and she has a photo of the painting hanging in her living room, but she was annoyed that her neighbor had not asked permission to paint the house.
Suzanne and Françoise are of about the same age. They went to school together and left the village when they were still very young. Françoise left with her mother, fleeing an abusive father/husband, and spent the rest of her life until retirement in or near Metz in northern France. She probably started work young, had a bad marriage, and then a good one later in life. Her entire working life was spent in a café and I believe that she owned one when she retired.
Her second husband had been a gendarme for 20 years and then worked another job. When they both retired, Françoise sold her café and they built a 5 bedroom house in her home village. Having worked indoors all her life, she had taken to gardening and having animals with a vengeance. She has a green thumb, as everything seems to come up successfully. She kept chickens, rabbits, ducks, geese and a pair of peacocks in addition to her two donkeys. She eventually wrung the necks of the peacocks because they were too noisy and mean. She lost most of the other fowls to foxes and badgers, and gave up on animal care because of rheumatoid arthritis. But she won’t give up her gardening and she still has enough chickens to offer us more eggs than we can use. Her husband died of cancer and she has no one to help her. Her financial situation has also changed dramatically. Her husband had a good pension as a gendarme, but because he worked for private industry afterward, she does not get the pension of a gendarme’s widow but only part of his ordinary social security. Still, as she puts it, she has to pay taxes which is better than paying none because then she would be too poor to afford extras. She will never go to a nursing home because she would have to sell the house to pay for her keep and she wants to leave it to her children.
Our relation is limited to our dropping by to tell her that we have arrived and the arranging for a meal--one year at her house, the next at ours. Hers are gargantuan, lasting five or six hours, in spite of our strenuous protestation that it is too much. She has finally cut down her courses from 7 to 5. Her lighter meal consisted of smoked salmon on little squares of bread; finger hot dogs wrapped in pastry and baked; soup; hors d’œuvre of ham, radishes, eggplant and melon; a main dish of “wild” duck, green bean bundles wrapped in bacon, tiny potatoes and mushrooms; a cheese plate; salad; strawberries & then a homemade rhubarb tarte with an apple base because she did not have enough rhubarb. We got there at 5 to show her how to prepare the eggplant (she liked it so much the previous year at our house that I promised that I would show her how to do it), and left at midnight. It is said that no one wants to eat at her house because there is too much food.
Her house is enormous, with 5 bedrooms but a small kitchen; a basement which has an apartment with bathroom, kitchen and big room with a pullout sofa; a wine cellar, a canned goods cellar, a car space, a wood storage space, and a space where she breeds song birds for sale and keeps her freezer and extra refrigerator. She explains the size of the house by telling us that most of her life she lived in basement apartments and single rooms and she wanted space once she could afford it.
We offer a souper which means an hors-d’œuvre, soup, salad, maybe cheese, and a light dessert--usually a fruit concoction. Same number of courses but much lighter and in much smaller quantities. The hors-d’œuvre might be guacamole or my version of eggplant caviar served with crackers and accompanied by an apéritif. The people of the region know the commercial ones and the homemade ones: eau de noix, vin de noix, cerise - but are not familiar with some more exotic production made in the Dordogne. So these go over well with our guests in general. Jean makes and excellent cherry apéritif & cassis but counts his pennies and never buys commercial apéritifs; he is very appreciative of Cinzano. The eggplant dish went over so well that Françoise insisted on having the recipe. We agreed that the next year I would show her how do make it. So I did this year but it did not count as part of her meal. My wife claims that she was as fascinated by having a man cook in the house as she was interested in the dish.
M. and Mme. Darras are our immediate neighbors in the field below us. They had the house built in the last ten years in a traditional style, “poutres apparentes” etc. The house has a swimming pool built for the granddaughter; they never use it. The wife drives a BMW and is always properly made up and dressed. He apparently was a contractor in the north and they moved here because their son lives in the area. He purchased a horse for his granddaughter. She fell off and never got back on. He can’t because he hurt his back working on the house, but he purchased a second horse because the first one was lonely. Money is obviously not a problem. They may not be rich, but counting pennies is not their style. He looks like a lower class individual. His pipe is constantly in his mouth and half his teeth are missing. Since he is constantly puttering around--building all sorts of retaining walls with local stones, working on his terraced garden (it’s a jewel)--his clothing are of the working type; an absolute contrast to his wife. Both seem to be of that constricted petit-bourgeois class that sticks to what it knows. Yet when we spoke of our upcoming trip to Norway, he recalled a trip he and two other pilots took in three Cessnas, flying from northern France to Norway and up the Norwegian coast.
M. Darras is serviable to a fault. During the 2000 December storm two trees fell in our yard, almost hitting the house. The story I heard was that he took his chain saw and cut down the trees, others said that was people in the village who did it. M. Darras does not admit to doing it. But I went to see him to get a plumber’s name, and an hour later he came to fix the problem; he’ll also lend his tools willingly to a person (me) he sees for perhaps 30 minutes once a year. Reciprocating is difficult. One year we brought him back a tobacco pouch from Turkey--probably lousy tobacco, but it was the thought that counted as we both knew. Or we would bring him native seed from California. Nothing that would require reciprocating. He spent two days cutting Françoise’s grass. The houses are on the opposite side of the village, far enough that if Françoise comes to our house, she will drive. The Darras and Françoise socialize, and they come by occupation from the same class.
We decided that we needed to thank the Darras for their help. He killed the weeds on our property line that were starting to seriously encroach into the field. We invited them for apéritif, offering some of the more exotic drinks produced in the Sarlat area (and available at the Sunday market in St. Geniès http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623164797649/ ). We also had some of our dips with crackers. He came in, looked at the 24 foot expanse supported by interlocking 1 x 12 planking and just kept on repeating “il fallait y penser.” He was quite at ease, but his wife sat stiffly on the edge of her chair, not quite sure what to make of our dips. It took his encouragement for her to try anything.
Jeannette is somewhat strange. She inherited her aunt’s house at the entrance of the village. Her aunt was the moral light of the village in the eyes of some because she took in 2 Jewish children during the war. Jeannette never married, although she has had boyfriends who took care of repair work on the house. Her education must be limited because she was a nurse’s aide in a retirement home in Poitiers. She does not drive and I have seen her on occasion riding her bicycle on the 4 km. climb between the next town and the village. She admits to depression (we hardly know her) and is obviously lonely. This year she retired, keeping her housing in Poitiers because staying in the village during the winter would be too depressing. Her retirement income must be very little, but somehow she manages. She can’t have inherited much more than the house because her aunt was in a nursing home. While medical treatment is well covered in France, long term care is covered only after the patient is impoverished and even then the children are expected to contribute to the upkeep of their parents; the State will decide the appropriate amount based on income. Housing seems to be exempt since the niece was able to inherit the house and I know of other cases where the homestead was inherited from parents who were impoverished by their stay in a nursing home. Jeannette and Alain are on par economically and socially, but I suspect that Alain has more contacts in the village.
I really know very few people in the village, although they all know who I am and where we live--la maison des américains. Other foreigners live in this hamlet; there is an English lady who lives in the former presbytery which is now subsidized housing after it was rehabilitated as training for construction workers. Nobody can explain how she qualified for subsidized housing. A Dutch couple purchased the house of one of the notables of the village--Madame was the mayor for many years--and turned into a B&B frequented mainly by a Dutch clientele. It took Monique, Suzanne’s older sister, 10 years to get a permit to build her house because Madame felt that it would ruin her view of the village--and it was only once the real reason for the non-issue of the permit was discovered that Monique and her husband could argue successfully for the construction permit. It is now forbidden to build on that side of the village to preserve the view of the village.
My wife’s cast came off the day we had guests arriving from England. The grass in the field had not be mowed. Ralph was not very interested in it, as he came mainly to humor his companion; he would prefer to limit his travels to a 50 mile radius of his university town, elongated into an ellipse so that he could occasionally go to London and spend some time at the sea shore. Evelyn likes to travel and likes plants. She walked into our field and declared it not a field but a meadow which, according to her, must have taken generations of conditioning to reach its present state--she discovered three kinds of wild orchids growing in the grass. So now we know how we will advertise our house to the English when we want to sell it: meadow with house.
We took them to the standard sights of the Dordogne (Sarlat, Domme, La Roque-Gageac), to Rouffignac which we prefer to other caves for its different geologic formation and its location far from the standard tourist roads--the drawings, although monochrome or sometimes etched into the rock, are also very impressive. One afternoon we decided to visit the parc in Hautefort (http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157623164797649/ ). It turned out to be an expensive visit, as one has to pay a single price for the grounds and the visit of the castle which did not interest us. But we recouped the cost by buying two sets of cordial glasses at ridiculously low prices in a local brocante. But they especially enjoyed a repas des chasseurs in a nearby village. As has been the case in other events like this one, we were the only outsiders, so that one did get a sense of community life. Evelyn had grown up in a small English village, and the meal brought back all sorts of memories. To raise money for the hunting club, there was an auction of a smoked ham. The organizers of the meal wrapped the ham with string and those who wanted to bid paid one euro for each guess of the length of the string. The one who came closest to the length won the ham--it was 5+ meters long.
We had two sets of visitors this past summer, and I do no remember exactly how we allocated the visits. We obviously take take them to the local markets, but it may be to Thiviers, or the one in the next town, or Périgueux. On our own we went to the St. Cyprien market on our way to Le Vieux Logis in Trémolat (http://www.vieux-logis.co...aurant-gastronomique.php )for a Sunday afternoon meal--well worth the splurge; I recall particularly a foie gras crème brulée offered to bridge the wait between two courses. The St. Cyrpien market is mixed instead of separating goods, clothes, etc. from food stands. It is a large market where French appears to be a minority language among the clientele. We had very good smoked eel from a Dutch smoked fish and marinated herring stand. The butcher at one end of the market is excellent, and he has a store (Boucherie de l’Abbaye des Augustins) at the edge of Beynac. His stand actually looked better than the store itself.
The Thiviers market separates dry goods and food stands. There is a good yogurt maker and a good goat cheese stand, the latter run by a Dutch woman who married a French farmer. I remember when she found it easier to speak to us in English than in French to the rest of the clientele. Now I think that her French is more fluent. One of the fruit and vegetable stands selling higher quality and more exotic items is also at one end of the St. Cyprien market.
For non-local cheeses, we still prefer the cheese vendor outside the covered market in Périgueux who also has a store on the rue Limogeanne. He is trying to carry raw milk cheeses exclusively, but it is not easy; for example, only one producer of époisse still makes it with raw milk.
With Kate and Jane we visited the jardin de Cadiot, which is impressive for the work it represents, but did not appeal to me as a garden--there was a certain tape à l’œil missing (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623164797649 ). We also went to the Limeuil garden which is worth a visit if only for the view over the junction of the Vézère and the Dordogne rivers (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623164797649 ). Kate is a shopper. Whenever she and my wife go on some outing in the Bay Area, they invariably stop at one or two second hand shops found via the GPS in Kate’s car; and going to used clothing outlets was not the original intent of the outing. So we decided to take them to a local vide grenier. We had never been. It’s a country flea market, in this case set in a field and woods of a local château. It’s fun to browse. My wife picked up 8 coffee mugs for 4 euros. They actually are English porcelain cups with saucers, but had the cylindrical shape of mugs and she refused the saucers. Kate found something to stuff into her suitcase and went home happy. I picked up a rain jacket for 5 euros, and I was really tempted by some nicely bound volumes of forgotten literature--Erckmann-Chatrian anyone?
When we left the Dordogne we chose not to go to Paris. Time was too brief between our last visitors and our departure from CDG. So we drove to Auxerre where we had not been since 1992. It’s a nice town--http://www.flickr.com/pho...n/set-72157622755059630; but we continued on to stay in Sens where we had stayed in a lousy Hôtel de la gare in 1992. This time we stayed in the center of town in what appears to be the only decent hotel, across from the hôtel de ville. Sens has a wonderful market on Saturday--http://www.flickr.com/pho...72157622755059630. We purchased an époisse, a raw milk camembert and a goat cheese, specifying that they could be ripe only after 36 hours of travel at ambient temperature; and could we have it sous vide? She did not have her machine, but come back in half an hour, by which time she got the charcutier to place them sous vide. The total cost was 15€; she must have made a mistake. From Sens we drove to Provins--too pristine or maybe tourist oriented for me--to waste time because we were to see some friends near-by for lunch and we did not want to arrive too early. We had a relaxing afternoon in their garden, and then drove to St. Witz, which is about 10 km. north of CDG, where we spent the night. The locale is not particularly charming, with the hotels fenced in a requiring a code to get in the parking lot after 9 p.m. but the price was right (Hotel Akena, 42€). We ate at the Buffalo Grill (http://www.flickr.com/pho...in/set-72157623316531799 ) across the street; it’s better than expected. We returned the car at CDG with no problem, dropping the keys in the slot because the desk was not open at 6 a.m.
