Where the Wild Boars Used to Drink

by ANNE GREEN

1

THE other day I remembered a big wooden door supported by stone posts. It was painted green and opened with a rusty sigh. There are so many green doors in the world that this meant nothing to me until I next saw myself seated at a long kitchen table. I was crying and a hard, fine-featured old woman pushed a terrine towards me saying: “Perhaps you like my pork pate. But just the same, I’m going.”

These uninvited mental snapshots marked the beginning and end of a happy summer. In filling in the gaps I wonder whether life could have been so generous to me in 1934. Perhaps memory, that grand artistic liar, has wiped away unattractive shadows for the sake of presenting peace times in dazzling colors. If this is so, 1934 was a peacock among years.

That May there were great debates concerning the summer. Some of us wanted to travel, others wished to visit friends, I desired a country house. I don’t know why it is that strangers’ houses are so enticing. Perhaps it is because they give so much scope to dreams. For sitting in unfamiliar rooms, confronting a fresh view, leads to pleasant if inconclusive speculation regarding the habits of the owners, what had happened to them, how they wove the pattern of their days. And above all, what they saw and how they felt, for we are never sure that their perceptions and eyesight are ours. And time allowing, interesting things can be discovered about oneself.

Well, Le Grand Hureau, a small estate on the Loire near Saumur, was found. Just four hours from Paris, with good trains. My brother went down to see it and reported favorably; so all that remained was to pack silver and linen and go there for three months. But first I wanted to see the owners, even though Julian had described the house and scenery so beautifully. I wanted to know more about the bathrooms and if there were enough blankets, because even in such glorious days these matters meant much to a housekeeper.

The Crèvecoeurs lived near us in Pussy, Madame de Crèvecoeur questioned me politely regarding every private and public feature of my life while I answered prudently and listened to a monologue from her husband. The gist of it was that he liked Americans, that a town in America had been named for one of his ancestors. (Sure enough, I know now that he referred to St. Johnsbury in Vermont, which owes its name to Saint John de Crèvecoeur.) He said that Le Grand Hureau, built in 1720, was a hunting lodge and that in olden times it was a place where wild boars used to drink. He also talked of Roman busts, caves, and Canary wine.

“Tut-tut,” said his wife, “soyons pratiques.” While she looked for pencil and paper, I broke in with my questions. They were never answered, for she listened only to what was in her own mind: “Yes, a nice old place but so modest, so plain, I wish the china were better. Now, I repeat, let us be practical. I can remember but one soup tureen and two kitchen bowls. You must be sure to ask Angèle — she is the wife of Achard, the custodian — for the keys to the gill-trellised bookcase in the hall bedroom. And I don’t advise anyone sleeping in that black hole next the kitchen. It’s only fit for a butler. Have you a butler?” She drowned me in a sea of vain allusions and deprecation; and when she affirmed that we couldn’t possibly live in Le Grand Hureau until the freshly planted salads were up, I left in despair before she could finish telling about the dangerous currents in the river which made bathing impossible.

It was hot in Paris, so my sister and I at once went to Saumur, found a taxi, and drove for two miles along the road which so faithfully follows the river’s gentle curves. All along the way were clusters of clean white stone cottages, and flowers everywhere— springing from crannies in walls, sprouting in the dust close to the asphalt, in an extraordinary and self-sown profusion.

At the village of Dampierre the driver hesitated, then pushed up a short slope lined with ancient rustling trees. The man rang at a big green wooden door between stone posts. It swung open and there stood affable, untidy Angele, flanked as ever by it buff cow and a yellow mongrel. Our luggage deposited in the middle of the drive, we looked around us, gluttonously trying to take in everything at once.

We saw a delicate cream stone pavilion continued by long, low, ivy-covered wings. The maids ran in to see whether they liked the kitchen, but we lingered in the warm summer air. The house backed to a bluff and we were in a large square garden ending in a wrought-iron parapet very high above the road. Unless we peeped over the railing we couldn’t see anything but the river, all sand with flashes of water right to a low wooded island. Over the head of the island, so to speak, we saw that the other branch of the Loire was full and green, and beyond it a line of low cliffs stretched for many miles.

The garden lawn caught my eye. It had a scalloped curved baroque edge which was beveled so that the inside of rough grass suggested the bottom of a shallow lake. Perhaps it was there that the wild boars drank. But now, near the center, stood two big voluted Louis XV vases of white ceramic, very line, quite undamaged, placed there in defiance to reason but not to beauty.

Eleanor was talking to herself: “I wonder what makes this landscape so lovely. After all, it’s just a pale river and a tree-fringed horizon. Just a lot of pale beiges, greens, and faded blues. It must be the silvery light that manages to blend it all into a sort of masterpiece. And everything looks so happy.”

She was right; but fearing the worst inside the house, I dared not yield to the gay peace and lightness that pervaded the place. I wanted to face the drawbacks. I never found them, because once more in my life I had been misled by the French mania for self-depreciation, that mania which is extended even to country houses which must be rented.

The servants were laughing and talking, a good sign. We entered a marble hall with a fireplace so fine that it should have been asleep in a museum. To the left was a nice enough dining room, to the right a couple of drawing rooms paneled and painted grayish-white in the provincial manner. Both salons were furnished with nice eighteenth-cent ury things, not too comfortable, having been designed at a period when conversation was so good that no one wanted to loll. At the top of the classical staircase two bedrooms smelled a good deal like stables, and there were six more adequate apartments in the wing.

After a hurried dinner we discovered a long terrace almost concealed by a mall of clipped hornbeams. And sure enough a Roman bust leered over a stone bench at the end of the terrace. Close to the house the ground rose slowly to a flattish dull arrangement of flower beds, groups of gloomy firs, and more terraces. And it all abruptly ended at a large wroughtiron gate. Thrusting our heads through the bars, we distinguished vague vist as all the more attractive for the failing light and the fact that the gate was chained.

“ It looks,” said Eleanor, “like a long walk full of flowers and,” she eased her neck, “beyond it a plunging, rearing jumble of slopes and grass and vines. And oh! I see a little orchard. I wish I could get in to bag some fruit. There never is any in the country and I can’t do without it. Do you suppose I’m suffering from a mirage?”

“Yes,” I answered, “you are. Or the fruit is green. Peasants always sell everything to big towns and live on grass, as far as I know. Stop shaking the gate. This part of the place doesn’t belong to us. Let’s go in and play cards.”

The inside shutters of the drawing room had been closed; and as the ceilings were paneled as well as the walls, we were enclosed in a beautifully carved box. By the time that we had converted the smaller salon into a sports room by arranging a ping-pong table, chessboard, and cards, it was time to go to bed.

2

THE next morning I rose from an exceptionally downy bed and looked out of the window. Through some freak in perspective due to the bends in the road, the Château of Saumur rose close in the pearly light. It is a round, military affair with moats and grassy earthworks and appeared to me like an enormous cake, the kind to be admired and never ordered from pastry cooks.

The servants seemed singularly jolly — even the taciturn cook who, in a fit of humility, had spent the night in the black hole fit only for butlers. But it seemed that the custodians were most charming, that there was an uninterrupted chain of hamlets along the river, a cafe, a grocer, and a butcher in Dampierre itself. And many people would come by to offer us commodities — in fact, a most convenable place considering it was in the country.

I planted some sweet peas in an empty bed and hurried to join Eleanor, who had at last succeeded in shaking open the chained gate. We sneaked along a broad walk contained on the right by a neglected but brilliant herbaceous border, flanked at the left by rosebushes and espaliered vines bearing grassy green grapes. On the grape side was a low stone wall, and as I stopped to look at a silvery skin doubtless shed by some snake that warm morning, I could hear my sister: “Too bad we can’t do a little gardening. I’m very good at it. I—” Her voice trailed away as she darted forward and turned the corner of the walk where, on a higher level, she had spied a great cherry tree actively courted by birds. “Come back! You know we have no business here,”I called, but before I caught up with her there was a thud of hoofs and, pursuing Luneau the cow, Angele was upon us.

I looked silly and murmured something about being out of bounds. Angele looked amazed and not suddenly, but circuitously, the glorious truth emerged: the iron gates were closed because Luneau wandered, proof being that she had slipped in behind us. The whole place was ours as far as eye could reach, and more. But the gate must be closed, on account of Luneau and her appetite.

I cannot describe Le Grand Hureau clearly, for there is no way of explaining a place which looked as though many generations had made the best of a gigantic landslide by enclosing the whole thing in a very high wall along the road and then proceeding to turn it into a useful and ornamental estate. It took us weeks to understand something of the plan.

Anyway, in orderly confusion, we found tip-tilted fields, orchards, vineyards, and on flat levels terraces for all manner of mankind. The meditative kind used the mall; the invalids had one with seats burrowed from rock and framed by parasols of creepers. And there was a most piratical one fenced in at the top of the hill, in a cluster of trees where the view was very beautiful. When first we saw it a half-wild black cat sprang at me, grappled to my shoulder with claws of steel, and remained there purring for a while. The terrace was her lookout and home. Later in the day she returned our call with two of her demoiselles, small gray kittens scandalously unlike herself, which she dropped on the drawingroom carpet. A saucer of milk cemented a lasting friendship.

To return to the cherry tree, when Julian arrived later to pander to Eleanor’s cravings, he found nothing for her but a few unattractive cherries despised by the birds. Seeing her disappointment, we turned left into a rough field dotted with apple trees. There smoke curled from an upright piece of masonry in the center of the grass. This was strange and we could hear a muffled mutter below us, in the solid earth. By advancing cautiously to the far end where the ground dropped away and the field became a mere fringe of grasses and clods, and by peering over the edge, we could see people far below hanging out linen and feeding chickens in what looked like a courtyard. It was a great mystery not too easily solved, but we eventually found out that a family had built a conventional facade to their cottage, scooped the rest of it out of the rock, and used an old quarry as a yard. So, from the road, nothing unusual could be seen.

We returned via a dizzy slope full of grass for the Achard rabbits and there it was that our linen, which was taken to the river for a beating of stones, was deposited to dry. Or rather, I should say, the remains of our linen, for our things were not of stout flax which resists pounding. Now, using the cherry tree as a landmark, we mounted some steps and found ourselves in a vast jumble of rocks. And yawning black in the distance was a cleft in the cliff from which the rocks had come. Creepers with delicately interlaced leaves had spread over the cleft and playground so that through this trellis, in an eerie light, we could see trees growing on the ridge above.

There was a great silence as though something were about to begin, but nothing that concerned modern beings. Perhaps — we turned and saw another Homan bust staring on a stone pedestal — it concerned this ancient person. Perhaps he was the first owner of the place and his likeness remained much as a photograph clings crazily to the only upright wall of a bombed house. Perhaps— We advanced cautiously to the cave and wisely decided not to penetrate its inky darkness. To dissipate the stillness, Julian clapped his hands and three little brown owls, close together like a brooch, shot from the cave, straight across our vision, and no amount of clapping ever brought them back. The spell snapped and we never recaptured the feeling of ancient mystery.

Knowing full well that any fruit on the place belonged to the Achards and could be bought from them, we hurried Eleanor past some promising greengages and climbed straight up to the top of the bluff, where we went from Charybdis to Scylla. For on a nice patch of ground, nestling close to the warm chimney stacks of the house, was a huge fig tree, full of prodigious white figs — alas, very ripe. So all we could do was to turn our backs on our sister and keep an eye on the view and the possible appearance of the Achards, who would not understand that a grown woman would prefer to steal figs instead of paying for them and peeling them at table with a silver knife.

Where we stood we saw the whole of the big river, once so deep and so busy. It was easy to imagine it covered with barges. Light barges with musicians at one end, brocade hangings against the sun, and heaps of cushions for traveling courtiers. During the heyday of the Loire, the Renaissance, everybody traveled by water, for roads were few and marauding soldiers plentiful. And on the river floated great heavy boats laden with blocks of white Angevin stone creeping slowly to England. The guide told us that most of London — the great fine houses at least—had been built of these creamy stones.

3

BUT I am anticipating. First, with the help of Julian, Robert, and the guests we set. the place in order. Or rather, a little amateurish gardening made everything bloom and prosper. Anjou must have the most fertile soil in the world. Within ten days the Crèvecoeur salads were edible, in five days my sweet peas shot forth. All the roses opened and the herbaceous border provided more flowers than we could use.

But we couldn’t live on these. The mayor’s wife called, to our surprise. She was English, prodigiously shabby and kind, a real farmer’s wife who took me to market every Saturday at 6.00 A.M. By dint of picking up the lame, the halt, and all their bundles as we went, when we reached Saumur the old car bulged like a Christmas stocking. The infirm on the running-board made things lively by exchanging Shakespearian pleasantries with friends who rode to market in plank carts, standing upright in a wine cask.

Here I must relate that we naturally returned the lady’s call and found ourselves in a real English drawing room with tiger skins on the floor, elephant tusks on the walls, Indian silver knickknacks everywhere, and a peerage. One of the last times that I have had to cope with what the French call a “mad laugh” was then as I compared the mayor’s wife, standing in her realm with an apron full of nettles to feed baby ducklings, with her photograph in a silver frame by the copy of Burke. In the photograph, she carried flowers, not nettles, she wore a satin dress and train, and in her hair were three ostrich tips. Yet the kindly, jolly face was the same even though the contrast was so striking.

Her husband came in. As a stranger—that is, an Alsatian — he was less likely than the native Angevins to take things for granted and as not worthy of explanations. He conceded that we lived in a curious place full of surprises. He talked about the cave. Did we know about the apparently solid cliffs? Of course we did. All along the right bank of the Loire, wherever possible and from time immemorial, people had hollowed dwellings from the soft stone. AH of us knew that. Some of the houses were big apartments to which one mounted by means of ladders and then closed all apertures with big drugget curtains which distance made beautiful as medieval tapestries. The more sophisticated turned the rock into real houses with chimneys and doors and staircases and even shutters which gave the rugged rock a strange appearance.

Well, he said, that wasn’t at all what he meant. To begin with, we were on the left bank, where there were few of these dwellings. Here houses just snuggled to the cliffs for warmth. Didn’t we know that the inside of the cliff had been hollowed out centuries before and used as a means of communication right to the sea? Unfortunately, we thought, his explanations ended there, for a man came in for some copper sulphate, and the mayor, being a wanegrower, turned to vintages. He was glad we liked the wine—pity it was too delicate to travel. He explained that the grapes were picked late in November when the rains had rotted them; this gave effervescence but little body. The Crèvecoeur wine was delicious — we should buy some from Achard. It was time to go as the talk wandered and we bought from this nice gentleman (for a nominal sum) two cartloads of vine roots and logs to burn in the evenings.

In my disorderly memory it seems to me that we had already sampled all the local wines and found them not in the least light except to the palate. They were, in fact, insidious, but what an asset to make meals gay and paint the world in agreeable and hopeful colors. I wish we had some of that Anjou wine now, but not the cask which I foolishly bought from Achard. It was acid, not at all conducive to conversation, and what’s more, I had to bottle it myself. There was no labor to be had, each man working for himself at harvest time. I performed this operation in the narrow alley behind the house, which separated it from the towering cliff.

In the cliff were two doors. One was that of our cellar, the other that of the Crèvecoeurs’. Our cellar was just a shallow black hole, but the other — Well, as I sat there with my bottles, the obliging Achard, after passing the time of day, opened the Crèvecoeur cellar and I, turning, jumped up and followed him in. It was enormous, like Fingal’s Cave, all fretted into beetling rocks, but that wouldn’t have taken me from my job. Inside the first apartment lay all the litter of country houses—ancient toys, baby pens, hair trunks, and also barrels. Achard led in a horse and harnessed it to an elegant if moth-eaten victoria as he talked pleasantly. He told me all I wanted to know before leading the equipage away. I felt it indeed a dream to live in a place where peasants used victorias. But it was even more dreamlike to see Achard and Angèle driving off to market in one, under a blue umbrella, and at their feet all the greengages which Eleanor had not bagged.

The next day we kept a tryst with a man in the next village who knew the secret of the cliffs. But it appeared that the system inside was so vast and so complicated that even he, who had always lived here, only knew his way for a few miles. After that the secret was carried on by someone in another village “who knew,” and so on for about a hundred miles to the sea.

While he was unlocking the door in the rock behind his dizzily perched cottage, the guide told us terrible tales of people who had lost their lives in the subterranean passages. Recently a man had been found in a bypath. Dead? Of course — all that remained of this traveler who had lost his way was a few tattered rags and a chain with eighteenthcentury medals around the skeleton neck. This grisly story in mind, we stepped in, following the guide’s torch closely.

It was not at all as I expected. The air was cool, quite fresh and dry. The stone of the cliff (which is soft to quarry and hardens in the air) had been hacked into rough walls and a high ceiling. In fact, as we progressed down what the man called “a highway large enough for a cart of hay and two horses,” we realized that we were in a subterranean network of communication, as though a whole town had been mapped out, without the buildings. The highway was carpeted with powdery dry dark-brown humus; it was like walking on velvet. From this curving road branched smaller alleys and at intervals rounded, rude pockets of rock, like cells. And it appeared, as we crept along in the intense silence and paused as the guide flashed his torch, that other alleys branched from the secondary lanes and that there were even crossroads and junctions.

It was only too easy to see that without thorough knowledge anyone could get lost in this deathlike place where no echoes of cries could reach the living — a town without inhabitants, signposts, directions. But in the cubicles hollowed out here and there, we saw shiny iridescent objects on the ground. “Oh,” said the guide, “those are oyster shells. Yes, it’s a habit in our villages to have suppers here on Saturdays in December. ” Was it for Christmas? Maybe, he didn’t know, it was an old custom, it had always been so. A learned member of our party guessed that the custom of feasting in a nice warm cave was a relic of Roman days, when the Saturnalias were held around December 17. This is more than probable.

The man went on to talk about how the quarried stone had been sent to England; the passages had been much used dans le temps (which could mean any time of trouble in the last two thousand years), when people wanted to conceal themselves, their cattle and goods, from the soldiery.

We never went back to this formidable, silent place. It was frightening to see its great antiquity, the stone white as when it was first tunneled, right under the vineyards, a gigantic secret split up among dozens of amiable, matter-of-fact peasants — a secret which these people were quite ready to discuss but yet would never have mentioned even though we lived in Anjou for years. The people were like that; very friendly, yet volunteering nothing. (I wonder whether, in present times, this mental attitude has not been of great service to them.)

4

IT WAS pleasant to be in the free gentle air again, to climb to the top of the cliff through our garden and, opening a back door, to find ourselves in the vineyards which spread over a prosperous rolling countryside with just enough hamlets to make pauses entertaining. Every village could provide a delicious meal (with many apologies for its simplicity) at the drop of a hat, and as a matter of course a couple of bottles of white wine were always set on the table. There was so much to do that if there were any dull moments I have forgotten them. Food and entertainment being plentiful, the guests were pure pleasure.

We were in the center of an ancient sight-seeing region, excursions were a matter of choice, and some of the best “sights” were within walking distance. Up the road was Saumur and its famous cavalry school with horses of alarming intelligence. That is, they appeared so at their great three-day performance in July. Saumur is a long, long street continuing the Renaissance Loire bridge. Branching from this busy, pretty avenue were very clean, sunny alleys where medieval cottages belched forth ancient smells of wine and pig, where old ladies slept on stiff chairs, with a cat on weary knees and a bit of knitting held loosely in a hand gnarled like a bit of old wood.

Along the street were two fine churches, curious modistes, marvelous pastry cooks, and a good Espagnol. Every provincial town has an Espagnol who keeps a shop of semi-tropical delicacies such as grapefruit, sweet onions, peppers. And for the benefit of foreigners cobs of corn, for true French people refuse to eat it. If the Espagnol happens to be a Frenchman he is still called the Espagnol because his wares are foreign. A Spaniard he remains, and that’s tradition. Just by closing my eyes I can see the handsome cafés worthy of a chic garrison town. And there are the bicycles parked in rows outside and old ladies in black hurrying to vespers, jostling boys and girls meeting “by accident” on the bridge, and the evening papers rushed wet and flaccid from the station.

On the short drive home, you passed a convent where Madame de Montespan lived sometimes in a very reasonably baroque building. Everything was a marvel of cleanliness and politeness and pretty French until there was a momentary averting of heads at the sight of our villainous butcher snoring under his red and white awning, surrounded by strange cuts of meats which ressembled nothing so much as his ruddy self.

And then, after a long pause, the cook opened the green door and we were home for dinner. Afterwards we walked in the gardens which seemed so vast and dignified in the moonlight. The yellow mongrel yelped at the kitchen window waiting for the cook to fry crusts of bread in grease for him; the naughty cow lumbered by with Angele whacking its fat flanks; Achard touched his cap on his way back from the vineyards. He carried a little sickle, and strands of raffia, to say nothing of marks on his pink nose where pebbles had been embedded, gave away the fact that he had been snoring on his face all the afternoon.

We were none too many to keep Eleanor away from the greengages. She lit matches after shaking the trees and, pouncing down on the old resinous fruit, would stuff it down her throat until she made herself ill and we were quite glad.

In the evening we lit big fires in the Louis XV hearth and settled down to spend a few hours in the classical manner. That is, we began by playing foolish games. One is “situations,” played by passing bits of paper from hand to hand until a complete story has been written down. The language used was French, but as most of us were foreigner, the risque turn given these papers by the real French was absent, unfortunately. In bona fide Gallic circles one’s grandmother invariably turns up in bed with Napoleon or Achard and their conversation there is extremely spirited. But with us, as Eleanor remarked, “considering there were four writers present, the dialogue was marvelously flat.” However, games led the way to conversation, and the guests told amazing things about their countries — things that are so unreal that they can only be true; things so curious that they would be just silly in a novel.

The only anecdote that I can recollect now is one told by Anthony Butts about his great-aunt’s attempt at suicide. She had had an unhappy love affair and determined to put an end to herself. So she drove to the middle of a bridge over the Firth of Forth (not the present bridge), stopped the carriage, and leaped over the parapet. Here a high wind met her crinoline and bore her gently to some inaccessible mudflats; the whalebone structure under her skirt fixed her firmly in the mud, and there she stayed.

The coachman quickly ran for help, but nothing could be done until late in the day when the tide raised the level of the river and she could be disengaged from a dreadful predicament. For although no one could reach her, a large assembly of pleasure craft cruised around the poor woman all day, making a sort of picnic of the event. In the evening she was floated from her bed of slime, and I remember inquiring if she lived happily ever after. The answer was that she had lived to be very old, so she must have had her good moments.

Sometimes we played cards or ping-pong. Eleanor was insatiable for both. True, one day as I sat facing her I disappeared unexpectedly under the table because the front legs of my ancient armchair crumbled to powder under the esoteric influence of termites. And bending to recover a ball under a settee, fortunately stiff and uninviting, I saw that one of the legs rested on the inlaid floor in a pile of fine dust.

5

PEOPLE on their way south stopped in for lunch at Le Grand Hureau, and those within driving distance visited us. And we, many strong, returned the calls by spending the whole day. None of the neighboring proprietes had caves so fine as ours. Rochecotte, the Castellano place, is full of attractions such as woods, Talleyrand’s confessional, great lawns of ivy instead of grass, but miserable caves. Monet, belonging to the d’Andigné family, is grand, with parterres of box and colored pebbles à la française, half a mile of rhododendrons, an outdoor theater of clipped laurel and fine lawn, but no caves at all. I remember that some disused Renaissance stables were opened at Monet for our inspection, and we saw a strange, sad sight. In the old rooms, heated red hot by the sun, lay hundreds of pale-yellow butterflies which had evidently had strength enough to hatch, struggle from chrysalis, and then lie down in rows along the floor, on old furniture. The folded wings covered everything, like a delicate primrose fabric, and it was impossible to enter without destroying a fantastic death chamber.

The Comtesse de Blacas showed us her Château d’Ussé, where Perrault wrote The Sleeping Beauty — and no wonder, considering the dreamy quality of the house built under a bluff with the park high above it, on a level with the tall chimney stacks.

Sometimes, being appeasers, we walked in the open country to find blackberries for the insatiable Eleanor. But on days when she consented to have her mind improved, we could saunter a little way down the road to a small manor house where Dumas’s Lady of Monsoreau lived in beautifully proportioned Renaissance rooms with encased windows from which she could lean and watch out for plots, excitement, and river traffic. There was no road then, but if what Dumas wrote is true she had plenty of intrigues on her hands. We visited her premises in the company of an old priest with two naughty little boys bedeviling him. Finally the mild old man, ashamed of his charges, said firmly: “Put on your coats and behave. We’re about to visit a place that is — ahem — a little historical.”He didn’t quite trust Dumas.

At a little distance was the Abbey of Fontevrault, almost too well restored, with English Angevin kings sleeping in red and blue sarcophagi with their ladies and little dogs by them. It was a lovely place, but the inhabitants of the town were prouder of a great gaunt prison and talked about it constantly.

By climbing to a green above Candes you could see the meeting of the Loire and Cher and a great soft landscape of rivers and lakes and land blending into a green and blue tapestry, like an embroidered cover thrown over the naked earth. At Candes was a cream-colored church, fine even in a region where beautiful churches abound. Saint Martin used to be buried in the church of Candes, and all went well until a party of men from Tours came and stole the body from its tomb and deposited it in their town, and now the saint is improperly called Martin of Tours. The sexton who told us this trembled with indignation, although the affray had taken place in the Middle Ages.

That is because in this region, at once so old in civilization and so youthfully fertile, time steps back and history spreads contemporaneously over all memories. This is true even ofChinon, where nothing remains of the castle but its enormous ruins. Nothing except two things, perhaps to show the traces of a great spirit. One is a big Gothic mantelpiece standing intact amidst the rubble, all that is left of a vast hall. By that fireplace Joan of Arc saw the King of France for the first time. He had hidden there in a group of courtiers to test her powers, but she knew him at once. And also intact is the smallest chapel in the world, just big enough for a person to spend the night in prayer, as she did before setting out to save her country. And her task successfully performed, for her pains she was delivered to the enemy by the first collaborationists and burned.

One day we explored the island in front of Le Grand Hureau. First we bathed in puddles of clear Loire water, then sat on the sands to eat a childish goûter of bread and butter coated with powdered chocolate. Afterwards, all we had to do was to step across a stretch of sand and climb the low bank. There were a few deserted houses near-by, and here and there a few cottages where people seemed to live reasonably by enormous prairies where cattle grazed. But it was such low ground it surely was flooded in winter; these were just summer visitors like ourselves. An unexceptional place, we thought, until suddenly through a patch of brambles we stepped into a most ancient spot, so old that it was comforting to see that it had not been handed down intact since the age of dinosaurs, for this grove of big gnarled willows had been planted in a perfect circle by a man, long ago, near a slimy pool full of water lilies. Some of the willows had fallen and seemed fossilized. Overhead the setting sun slanted in dimly through the trees and the hush was almost unbearable. It was the sleep of slowly rotting vegetation, the peace of nature abandoned by man, who ceases to meddle where he cannot profit.

6

I DREAD to write that the summer was ending. Everything had been so facile, so gay. The big tilted mirror over the bathtub still reflected the happy landscape outside. Eleanor, for want of better things, took to seeing ghosts in purple silk dressing-gowns vanishing down the passage, although this was only Anthony skipping to his room. A superstitious member of the party had already attempted to ruin things by laying the cards and declaring that she saw us surrounded by clouds of mourning; anything might happen to one or all of us at any time. We waited calmly enough, but Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated the next day; and if we had realized that his end was the finish of our happiness, we should have felt even more distress.

Still it was the happiest of summers in the world we used to know. July finished, August passed like a dream. The roses bloomed riotously, grapes replaced other fruits. Then it rained gently and the landscape turned into a sheet of silver. Young Crèvecoeur came down from Paris. We invited him to dinner. He took one sip of our wine (his wine) and sent for Achard. “Two fillettes of the Canary,” he ordered. And then we tasted the real, delicious Crèvecoeur wine, grown right there from vines imported from the Canaries. I, too late, understood his father’s words, the mayor’s advice, and I still have it in for Achard.

One day we rang at our green door and the cook kept us there a long, long time. We expostulated and she at once “gave us her eight days,” as the French say. I begged her to stay; there are no cooks to be had in the country, everybody knows that. Catherine remained firm; she didn’t like the country. But didn’t she like us, with whom she had lived for five years? Evidently not. I reminded her of the past, of her days in the hospital, of the fact that we were fond of her. She shook her handsome, hard old head. I broke down and cried from disappointment. Whereupon she pushed a terrine across the kitchen table and remarked: “Perhaps you like my pork pâté. But just the same, I’m going.”

So we had to go too. And in Paris I found a new cook, and in due course she presented us with two children.