Strange Times In France

My wife and I arrived at her home village, our first visit after our marriage.  That was in July of 1979.  I had visited France several times.  But for the first time, with her, this was one of love.  And of discovering an alien world I had thought impossible.  A sunny southern French world sinister with its dark corners.

We returned the rental car and proceeded by country bus up and down winding rural lanes into a magnificent mosaic of rich farm land and ancient small towns.  The heat, the hard sunshine, the strange land of Occitanie—it took me by surprise.  I had never met her parents.  Held no notion of where my beloved  had come from, this strange woman who had found me in Kansas.

With her by my side I was bound for St. Paul Cap de Joux.  A quite small village, of something more than a thousand souls.   The village ways spread in a small tangle about a large church with a high tower.  

Her family home had been built on the church square.  It was a two story massive home, the largest it came to pass in St. Paul.  Beside this was her father’s farm supply and implement store.  To the other side rose a huge warehouse, also her father’s.  In sum what my wife’s family owned add up to a significant percentage of village surface area. 

Her father in particular, was a village personality known afar in the surrounding farmland because he was also most importantly the all important grain merchant.

Her mother was a quiet lady, impeccable, unique.  Like my wife the product of upscale and 19th century-strict Catholic Girls boarding schools.  Although distantly kind she possessed a uniquely caustic disposition.  Rural French bourgeois keeping herself to herself.  Raised to do nothing, for ornament only.  A woman of lovely eyes that looked deeply and with an uncomfortable scrutiny.

It was in Madame were the local mysteries were locked.

The house was art deco.  It boasted large windows, huge hallways, ornate plaster ceilings 12 feet high, a marble fireplace in every room, and the first running water and indoor plumbing in St. Paul Cap de Joux.

The house was handsome, and proud.  It had been designed and built by Madame’s first husband  who I then learned had been shot on a hunting party by  a man he was cuckolding.  The ‘accidental’ wound turned to gangrene and the fellow died in agony in his bed, in the very house he had conjured up for the admiration of the village.

Behind the house was a large garden and orchard.  My mother in law’s roses decorated the front, ornately gated off but with the heavy front door left open for visitors.  

I was welcomed politely if with cool reserve.  My wife’s mother and father had never imagined an American, let alone a Protestant!, as the husband of their marriage’s only child.  

After a welcoming glass of wine with her parents my wife grabbed me in her excitement at being home and forced marched me off to tour the village.  It was a walk through the past, made stranger to me with the smell, the visions, the cacophony of New York only hours gone.

It was a world it seemed of timeless innocence.  Of a deep and soulful peace.

Even with stops to introduce me to old friends, and including obligatory glasses of aperitif, this took us no more than an hour.  

We returned merrily a house that had changed.  My wife’s mood told me so.   Even I could sense a difference.  Madame seemed even more brittle than before.  She whispered discretely to my wife who in turn told me, breaking the poetry of the day that in my head had been the cooing of a white dove:

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares         75

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

While we were out for a Yeatsian Epithalamion some one of ill intent silently, covertly entered my wife’s childhood home and left a turtle dove, neck wrung, eyes 

Read in many tongues that was a curse be upon you.  The rest of that first day passed subdued with me groping in my ignorance.

Next morning I awoke naked in the room, the bed, where my wife was born.  I found a short old man in a shabby brown suit going around each wall, stopping in each corner, sprinkling holy water beads in hand, mumbling prayers.  He was exorcising the room to the order of Madame.   “He’s not a priest” explained my wife.  “He is the witch doctor.”

So this was ancient ritual, part pagan, part Christian.  Some of it surely too ancient to know.

Since then I’ve seen more of the same here.  Prayers, beads, whispered secret words.  The village is a group of neighborhoods and when my wife was young each had a nearby good wife to run to with a cut or burn for healing.  Same for a muscle pull or tooth ache.

Just now 40 years after my first visit here I’ve learned that the old way thrives.  A month ago I came down with shingles and was advised by more than a dozen people to contact the old woman in St. Paul who would drive it away with one mumbled whisper into my ear.

I refused to do so.  I told myself to believe in science instead.  But after a month of pain I have a doubt.  What lingers here in the villages, fields, copses, so close to the Upper Paleolithic where early dwellers left their masterpieces on the cave walls?

An enlightened man I find myself living bemused in an eerie sunshine world. The good life of the Midi in France where witches and witch doctors still roam.