Richebourg, Île–de–France. December 1990. 1 degree below zero C. Hailstones rattle like gravel against double layers of glass. Beyond, in a gray murk of near–horizontal freezing rain, ancient trees, trunks sodden and black, lurk like gallows.
Had the weather been this bad in Bethlehem, Jesus would have imitated the ancient gods and waited until spring to be born.
SIX MONTHS LATER, I TRIED TO RECAPTURE A SENSE OF THAT DAY: the glare; the grain’s dry, vegetal smell; the sting of the sun through my thin jacket. It was hopeless. However warm the memory, the chill of December quenched it.
For almost a week storms had battered the sixteenth–century house in Richebourg, one hundred kilometers from Paris, where we were spending the holidays.
The house, my mother–in–law’s country home, was an unexpected dividend of marrying into an old French family. Hand–hewn chestnut beams, already old when Bonaparte became emperor, supported this onetime farmhouse that in its indestructibility could have served as a metaphor for France’s landowners, the backbone of the nation.
The church and the aristocracy, known as the First and Second Estates, barely survived the revolution of 1789, but if that bloody conflict had a winner, it was the Third Estate: the landowners, farmers, and people in business
As unrest bubbled in January 1789, Abbé Sieyès, the most perceptive and charismatic of spokesmen for the disenfranchised, warned of the cost should this segment of the population, the nation’s most numerous, be further ignored. “What is the Third Estate?” he demanded rhetorically. “Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.” Within five years the king and his family were dead, along with most of the privileged classes.
Since then, the influence of primary producers has grown. To a degree greater in France than in any other country, rural life, its products and manifestations, and the effects of nature and the seasons influence thought, language, literature, religion, art, and politics.
Warm and dry behind a meter of stone as the storm raged, I couldn’t help feeling smug. Somewhere out there our neighbors were celebrating France’s best–loved feast, but they might as well have been on the moon.
The table was cleared of the debris from the lunch for twenty that my wife, Marie–Dominique, our daughter, Louise, and I had, in what had become a tradition, prepared and served. (Foie gras, guinea fowl capon, gratin dauphinois, haricots verts, pavlova maison.) In this hierarchical society I was technically the chef, a duty I’d accepted almost as soon as I arrived in France—my passport into a family of painters, academics, and authors, none of whom could boil water without a recipe.
Meal over, older guests had reconvened at the other end of the house to gossip with my aunt–in–law Françoise, who, as the village mayor, stood guard over decades of scandal. A creak from overhead signaled where a couple of younger cousins had sneaked off for some stolen sex in one of the tiny bedrooms wedged under the eaves, where the beds, carpentered from local timber early in the nineteenth century and topped with sheets of linen and quilts stuffed with goose feathers, were drenched in generations of erotic history.
But what had become of our friend Paul, the sole Englishman at the table? The lunch had been his introduction to the French holiday. He’d appeared to take it in his stride, chatting with his neighbors on either side and accepting without obvious disappointment the absence of a Christmas pudding.
I hadn’t seen him since he helped clear away the dishes. If he had any sense, he was probably, like me, getting ready for a postprandial snooze.
Settling deeper into the chair, I eased off my shoes and closed my eyes . . .
Paul appeared in the doorway. Rubbing his hands together, he peered through the window into the sleet and freezing mist.
“Looks like it’s clearing up,” he said. “Fancy a stroll?”