French Provincial
I have never bought into the romanticism of autumn. For the most part I think it’s one big marketing ploy orchestrated on behalf of Starbucks™ so that they can sell more pumpkin-spiced lattes and other stupid beverages like “Iced Hot Apple Crisp Pumpkin Cream Autumn Specialty Mocha Frappuccino”. There’s a certain kind of person who leans into the sentimentality of it all, of the crunchy autumn leaves and such. Typically it’s the emos, ecofeminists, foragers and earthy types, tired overworked mothers who can’t wait to sack their kids off to school, enthusiastic overachievers who enjoy the back-to-school/work vibes, gastropub frequenters, millennials, die-hard Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fans, people who wear those chunky cable-knit scarves, cider enthusiasts, wealthy women and gay men who own lots of 100% cashmere, people who are overly into Halloween, Christian women in small towns in America and people who relish in using quaint, sentimental British words like “nippy” or “toasty”.
I have never been one of them. But suddenly this year everything is romantic – without meaning to quote the Brat Charli XCX song. This likely has something to do with the fact that I’m not in the UK, that I’m in the Southwest of France where autumn is like a British summer. The days are mild and evenings are golden. The sky does that trick of going all fuzzy over the horizon at sunset which it only manages to do in warmer weather. The leaves have only just started to turn vivid reds and yellow and I can go on long morning walks amongst lingering wildflowers after which I can buy fresh bread, a fresh baguette, for one singular euro. I’m living with an artist and woodworker who makes dollhouses, not with him with him since I live in a separate little house with a handful of other people who like me have come to work for him. I have my own bedroom that has a very specific provincial grandmother / Victorian child vibe to it; there are all these ditsy floral drapes and I sleep on a rickety cast iron bed with pink sheets (it’s all very coquette Lana Del Ray, Lolita-core).
The artist is an older man in his 70s who has made a decent living out of his dollhouses for 50-plus years. They’re beautifully detailed cabinet models based on various styles of classical European architecture and people buy them as art objects. On my first day he says to me: “I’m the best fucking dollhouse maker in the world.” Sometimes he goes on these rants about people trying to rip off his designs or sell forgeries of his dollhouses. There’s a stereotype about artists developing crazed paranoia over people copying their work, like John Lennon when he accused Mick Jagger of copying The Beatles. This is not quite the same. I don’t mean to paint him as some weirdo egomaniac, which he is not. He’s very nice and agreeable but clearly has the temperament of someone who has spent a lifetime utterly devoted to their craft - a wonderfully admirable thing, don’t get me wrong. He started off building boats and wanted to become a naval engineer but fell into dollhouses somewhere along the way. I’m pretty sure he could build anything out of wood (he also told me this himself), which is obviously super cool.
A crucial detail is that he’s American, an American who has lived in France for 30-odd years. When he picked me up from the airport one of the first things I thought to ask was what brought him to France. “A woman.” He replied and left it at that. “French?” I ask. “No. Swedish.” We have since become quite good friends, or so I like to think. He’s very interesting to talk to mostly because of his expansive repertoire of uncanny stories. Plus he’s got all these endearing quirks, like the fact that he essentially survives on a diet of salted, roasted cashews and has constantly got country rock music on full blast while he’s working in the studio – more often than not it's a compilation of The Best of Creedence Clearwater Revival. He grew up in California during the 60s and tells me this was the music he and his friends listened to while driving their “hot rods” back in the day. He’s very concerned about the upcoming U.S. election and as a result there’s been less music playing as of late, more of the Obamas’ speeches in support of the Harris campaign.
His studio lies within a historic 11th-century building that runs along the frontier wall of a tiny medieval village. Picture lots of narrow winding streets that one could easily go round and round in circles in. The studio/workshop itself is a beautiful old room with wood-panelled ceilings lined with frescos dating back to 1435; most of them have faded away but look closely and you can still make out a few, including the faint outline of a court jester masturbating. The artist man lives out of a little room adjoined to the side of the studio containing not much other than a single bed, a boxy prehistoric-looking computer, some dusty files and a collection of antique dollhouse furniture. Everything is covered in a not-so-fine blanket of sawdust which he eats, sleeps and breathes. Before this, he lived in an abandoned French château. There are lots of them in the surrounding area and we stopped to have a look at one on the drive back from the airport. A once grand, now crumbling, stately manor house, crusty white paint chipped off walls coated in black mould and freakish graffiti that said stuff like “S C U M”. Creaky shutters hung off their hinges and the ghosts of bankrupt French aristocrats past hung in the air. Although I’m usually an enjoyer of the weird and the eerie it was an unmistakably unsettling vibe.
We passed another château along our way – a more festive, non-derelict looking one – a veritable fairy princess castle off in the distance, pink with pointy-tipped spiralling turrets. I took many a mental note on that first journey from the airport, taking everything in as people often tend to do when arriving in a new place. Other stuff on my mental notepad: a big scrapyard filled with rusty yellow and blue tractors, a windy road through a vineyard lined with tall skinny cypress trees, this one solitary old wooden shed situated right in the middle of an arid and otherwise deserted field. The landscape is very interesting around here, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, that is. It’s an area historically big on industry and also renowned for its vineyards, for winemaking. Parts of it are populated by all these old-world factory buildings and skeletal electricity pylons that sit on barren stretches of land that seem to go on forever. This is only an optical illusion since a few kilometres of distance transports you into a total opposite kind of scenery with round sloping hills lined with silvery olive trees and leafy vineyards.
There’s a film I love set in this part of France – Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985) starring Sandrine Bonnaire. It takes place during the depths of winter and explores the desolate side of things. Varda said she wanted “to film what freedom and dirt meant” through her portrait of a vagrant young girl who we first encounter lying frozen, dead in a ditch right at the beginning of the film. The spectator is taken back through time, retracing the protagonist Mona’s steps during the weeks leading up to her death. The camera mimics her vagabonding, traipsing along beside her before flitting away to pan across a muddy field, settling on a mass of gnarled tree stumps or an abandoned piece of agricultural machinery. A hybrid blend of documentary and fiction attempts to shed light on those who live on the margins of society, observing Mona and the people she encounters (farmers, builders, elderly villagers etc.) in relation to the environment and landscape they exist within. The sentiment of the film is an important one since it addresses how winter is an especially difficult, and oftentimes fatal, time for people already facing struggles such as financial hardship, loneliness and austerity. It’s naturalistic cinema at its finest, a key example of “cinécriture” – a term coined by Varda to describe her approach to filmmaking can be loosely translated as “filmic writing”.
The village I’m staying in is like a little enclave that’s been lost to time. I won’t go as far as to say that it still feels like the Middle Ages, it’s more like the 80s. It’s like something lifted from an out-of-date French textbook. There’s a la boulangerie, la pharmacie, la mairie plus a miniature grocery store that looks like it’s part of a theatre set because it only sells one of everything along with a country western-themed bar/restaurant. We stopped by last Friday night to watch a duo of rock n’ roll oldies perform covers of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in thick French accents. Wednesday is market day in the village centre and these little old ladies sell pots of their homemade fig, plum and apricot jams. The place is quaint to the extent that we leave all the doors unlocked and the artist man leaves his car keys in the ignition of his truck. Church bells ring on the hour but more peculiar is the village PA system which blares out the echoey sound of a woman’s voice at random points in the day. I’m told it dates back to the occupation which would explain the spooky and kind of Orwellian vibe to it. The other day the news that the local school was having a bake sale was broadcast across the village and the fact that “there will be madeleines” rang out far and wide. This was very funny to me.
The population of cats here probably rivals that of humans. There’s one at every street corner and when I'm walking around I encounter more of them than I do other human people. On my first night, I was sitting on a bench outside smoking a cigarette and there were about six of them positioned in different corners of the square poised calmly, staring at me with yellow oval eyes. They must be there to ward off the rats and the mice since the old medieval buildings would otherwise be the perfect setting for a rodent fiesta. We’ve certainly got at least one mouse in the house. I hear tiny scuttering footsteps running around the walls while I’m lying in bed at night. If I were feeling more homicidal, I might consider letting one of the cats in to issue bloody murder, except I’m not. Somehow the scuttering mice add to the ambience. I wonder if the village has always had such a pronounced cat population. Cats were generally disapproved of in the Middle Ages since the medieval Church vilified them as agents of darkness, of the devil, due to their historical association with paganism (other pre and non-Christian cultures). People still kept them around to kill off rodents, but they weren’t considered to be pets. Pope Gregory IX famously issued a papal bull declaring that cats bore the spirit of Satan and there’s talk of people in medieval France having conducted mass cat burnings off the back of this. People aren't sure if this was true however since this kind of thing was often exaggerated to support the historical idea of “the Dark Ages” – a reductive and outdated view of medieval times as a dark, depraved and cultureless time that can largely be attributed to Renaissance propaganda.
This area is rich in medieval lore. It was the land of the troubadour poets and a site of great religious fervour where they recruited loads of fanatics for the Crusades (unfortunately I can’t get any more specific than that). I told my tutor that I would use this time as an opportunity to brush up on my medieval history since I study medieval French literature as part of my degree, by as you can tell my efforts have so far been minimal. On the other hand, I suspect I’ve been struck by the area’s spirit of religious fervour. I spent ages writing about Catholicism in an unhinged way (see previous Substack post) and have been reading Simone Weil which is making me go a bit insane, as is often said to be the effect of her writing. For those of you who aren’t familiar, she was an early-ish 19th-century French philosopher, mystic, and political activist, a very cool woman and an incredibly prolific writer, especially considering she only lived until 34. In the end she saw too much god and ended up starving herself to death.
Right now would be the perfect time to read something stereotypical like Proust, maybe that would be more romantic. Except in reality I don’t think I have the right constitution to read Proust. I’m not a serious enough person yet; I hope that one day I just might be. Plus I’m pretty content that things are romantic enough as it is – the other day I cradled a baby goat and picked and ate a bunch of clementines off a tree. Right now everything is romantic.
right now everything is romantic!
Très bien, Lydia! X