TIME TRAVEL IN OLD FRANCE

TAKING TIME OFF FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A white Christmas by the seaside. Our garden in December.

Since just before Christmas, we’ve been, for various reasons – one being a fire in our Paris apartment – living in the house on the Atlantic coast where we usually spend our summers. There isn’t a lot going on here off-season. Warm weather is spent mostly at the beach or in other summery pursuits but in winter there’s little to do but watch the grass grow – literally in our case, since we just had the lawns re-seeded, and a commentary of the increasing luxuriance lapping outside has become part of the morning coffee conversation.

One way I’ve kept occupied is in the Proustian pursuit of poking about the house. Over the century in which it has belonged to my wife’s family, its lofty bedrooms and cluttered storage spaces have accumulated a large and often eccentric collection of gadgets and objects, augmented in our time by souvenirs of raising our daughter and entertaining an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles.

Still taped the door of this room, now my study, is a piece of nonsense written thirty years ago when it Louise’s bedroom and she, at age five or six, subsisted largely on fruit. Future generations will puzzle over the notice that this is the domain of a Franco-Australian Fruit Bear, genus Ursus Cuddlibus Tuttifruitibus.

On my desk is a relative newcomer, a policeman’s peaked cap or kepi, picked up in a brocante a few weeks ago. It’s displayed, however, on an item discovered in a storeroom here; a rustic wooden hat-stand, unaccountably stained with ink. (How long since anyone wrote with actual ink?)

The basin and jug in the corner, now adapted to hold what used to be called a “dried arrangement”, date from the days before bathrooms, when the first task of the maid each morning would have been to tiptoe into the room with a jug of warm water for madame and monsieur to wash their hands and face before descending to breakfast. This would also have been an opportunity to remove the chamber pot from its discreet bedside fixture.

Other objets d’art on display include a competent amateur still life in oils, stuck, unframed, to the wall, and, below it, a rather more sophisticated art deco figure in black marble that is probably worth quite a bit and will one day find its way into the Paris apartment.

I’m less sure about what appears to be an abalone shell mounted in now-blackened silver as a sort of holder for….what? Hairpins? Collar studs? Or the incunabala of some other social activity now familiar only to social historians? In a place like this, it’s easy to feel, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, borne back into the past.