The car journey became increasingly quiet as we passed fields of cows and scanned names of villages through the windscreen wipers to locate our house in the Normandy countryside. From pictures it looked as though the place would be a converted farm building, the description focused mainly on the swimming pool and walks by the river nearby. Watching the sky darken, we totted up how many jumpers and socks we had between us and worked out how best to retrieve coats from the bottom of the luggage. Hours later we happened upon a medieval village with remote outskirts that the sat nav hadn’t recognised, and drew up at the house with sighs of relief and tiredness.
The following morning the weather had cleared. We set off along the main street to explore on foot, crossing the bridge over the river, passing a bar where people sat on the terrace drinking coffee, sirop de menthe and diabolos, and the auberge des soeurs Moisy. On up a lane of artists’ studios and gardens, to the 11th century church featuring beautiful orange frescoes, beyond which was a meadow setting for a chapel. Fishermen lined the banks of the river, shaded by trees wrapping round as a wooded backdrop. We wended our way down, absorbing our surroundings. This was a place that attracted painters from the pre- Impressionist lovers of landscape. It became an artists commune.
According to the signs, la grande époque of the area was 1875-1925 when well-known painters such as Corot and Boudin were drawn to the Alpes Mancelles. Two painters of Gérôme studio were responsible for the popularity of the village. Mary Renard and Rene Veillon spent studious and festive summers together in the village. In the Renard household a week was set aside for preparing the equipment. Then easels, canvases, tubes of paint and parasols were packed along with the families and taken by horse and cart to take up rooms at the auberge de Moisy.
The table was decorated with perch, roach, trout, carp, salmon, eel, and pike, from the Sarthe river, not forgetting the crayfish. Guinea fowl, chickens and ducks served with seasonal vegetables from the potager and orchard fruits, were the delights of the house, plus the absinthe aperitif, the cider, pitchers of wine d’anjou and le flip digestif (calvados)… (Barbizon des Alpes mancelles, Editions BVR)
The auberge, with its blue-grey woodwork and yellowing walls scaled by vines, now displays art exhibitions and only opens for half the week. Whilst many of the houses appeared uninhabited, their gardens overgrown with vegetation, there were signs of life, of apple trees and roses. The village was built from roussard sandstone, the facades frequently offset by colourful shutters and hydrangeas, or Hortensias, growing beneath the windows in bursts of pink, blue and purple flowers. A vase of blooms drew the eye inside the restaurant, to a blackboard chalked with a menu that included desserts of mousse au chocolat, panna cotta coulis de myrtilles and riz au lait, traditional dishes as made by grandparents, when families lived under the same roof.
Hydrangeas remind me of the garden where I used to play in the coal shed outside the kitchen door, using a spoon as if cooking, and watched ants scurrying underneath. The eventual packing up and sale of the house that had not been foreseen left a sense of loss. The new owners named it the old bakery after the building in the garden, against which grew domes of white mop head flowers.
On day two we had to leave the picturesque setting to stock up on basic provisions at the nearest supermarket (noting the address left by our hosts of the best boulangerie for bread). Having negotiated a tricky bend between villages, we were hailed down by a man who explained that the road ahead was blocked by tractors bringing in the crops and that we would have to take a different, better route that he gave us. This seemed to be the order of the holiday, to follow diversions and discover unexpected panoramas and places. The village on the edge of which we were staying turned out to be classed as one of the prettiest places in France and we had stayed there accidentally, unaware of its history, or the lives of the people who had planted the gardens.