19. Tayac-les-Eyzies
One of the beautiful things about living in Courances is that Elizabeth has the most spectacular backdrop for French Affaires LLC imaginable. Also, a real plus is, no transatlantic flights from Dallas to Paris and back. So, she is in high cotton. Business is thriving. Our home is guest central. With the Pierres d’histoire lodgings literally across the street, the sky is the limit. She reaches for it, doing just exactly what she has been wanting to do all her life.
My church work is light by stated contract and shared agreement. We live in a different location (and that by design), twenty minutes from Saint Luke’s Fontainebleau (we meet on Sundays at the Catholic chapel at a school on the outskirts of town). I have my writing projects and PhD students to take care of. In time, Zoom will be the mode of delivery, seminars conducted from the mezzanine office in our outbuilding, now done over to a nice state. Complete with a spiral staircase—I didn’t like it at first—whose asset is that Marcel can’t take over seminars. He nestles in next to the wood furnace on the rez de chaussée, making odd dog contributions to the seminar from below me.
I continue to work on the French language, with Gilles, and my teacher Catherine in Fontainebleau. I would like something yet more intensive. I research language schools online. With French Affaires clients, I had done a couple one- and two-week stints in Aix-en-Provence. Three hours each morning.
Pre-covid, there were quite a few residential languages school humming along across France. A very highly regarded one in Moustiers-St-Marie in the hills above Aix has been recommended. This is the home of faience (Elizabeth has several pieces from here) and the famed Gorge de Verdon, with a gorgeous deep blue lake. The school occupies a former monastery, and the promotional materials look grand. I will visit it many years later, though after covid it had closed as a language school. Lots of weekend retreats, yoga classes, and so forth have replaced this once august language school.
In my time in Courances, I did a veritable “Tour de France” of language schools. The famed accent-free Tours. Two schools in Paris. Elizabeth and I spent a nice week in the Gard, renting a cottage in the village where André Gide grew up, and I went daily for individual lessons in the center of the excellent town of Uzès. February can be cold in France. It was. Marcel liked it all the same. Roaring fires.
A residential school in Roanne, west of Lyon, specializes in language and culinary matters. The three-star Trois Gros restaurant was located there until recently, a cultural landmark for holiday travelers of old, going down National 7, before the dawn of autoroutes. Gilles would regale me with stories of his family loading up the biggest Citroën station wagon made, luggage piled high on top, bombing down the speed-camera free highway in route to Brittany from the Savoie for the August holiday month. The other feature of this language school was that all the help—cleaning staff, cooks, administrators—were also required to speak French with us. True immersion, that.
One thing I would learn after overdoing the intensive modality one too many times is: “you can’t drink from a firehose.”
A nice school in Sancerre below us focused on Loire Valley wine. It was in the middle of a vineyard. I wouldn’t choose to return to the school in accent-free Tours. It has a funky university feel about it, at least where I stayed in a rented apartment, and the main street I walked to school was full of unleashed dogs. It was the capital of dog poop. I am sure there are fine areas of Tours and indeed I visited them. But that French accent on the streets has never caught on with me.
One of the most memorable schools I attended in France was in Tayac-les-Eyzies. You will likely recognize the name Eyzies as the famed center for prehistoric caves in this part of the Perigord region. Lascaux to the north is not visitable but a very fine facsimile cave has been mocked up to give you a sense of the colorful cave art that over time, and due to the exhaling of so many visitors, tends to fade. There are of course many other caves to visit, some of the smaller ones truly enchanting.
Elizabeth and I love the entire region, of course, and French Affaires trips go there often.
The “school” in Tayac is in fact the atelier of a single French teacher, who after a lifetime of teaching big classes, all over the world (her husband is from Australia), decided to do just the kind of teaching that suited her. She and her husband bought a house in Tayac, a village a bit smaller than Courances and more mediaeval in feel, with some smaller gite residences alongside for language guests. They have a nice pool. The idea is to live there, with her and her husband next door, and the nice classroom space within the same footprint.
Elizabeth and I know the area well and opted to take a week at our favorite hotel in Tremolat, le Vieux Logis. Estelle the owner is a close friend. They have, in addition to the rooms in her Relais et Chateau manor, some ground floor gites ringing the lovely green space behind the main building. The same high standard. And better for Marcel, now our constant traveling companion.
Marcel is a bird dog, and he will chase absolutely anything moving in the air. Butterflies captivate him, as their flight is so unpredictable. If he loses sight of them—though his nose predominates, his eyes are very good—he will switch to chasing their shadows on the ground until he gets his bearings and then will resume chasing with the real affair. Bees, flies, absolutely anything. I can see him racing around the green space, zig zagging with absolute precision, occasionally prancing with his front feet to get his balance, or to show off. Crowds would gather to watch him do his magic, not knowing entirely what he was doing since his prey was so hard to sight.
My mother was near the end of her life in hospice care when we were there. It was time for her to join her husband of seventy-years’ marriage. I would pray each morning and light a candle for her in the small parish church in Tayac, before heading up to the lane to my teacher. Though not fidele herself, she took charge of opening the church each morning, restocking the candles, emptying the little metal coin receptor, and seeing to its tidy state.
We met for 2-3 hours each morning. My French had gotten pretty good at this juncture of our time in France. Tayac was one of the last schools I visited. We would pretty much just talk or watch videos in her studio and then discuss them.
At our first session she asked what I wanted to do. Getting a sense of my level of French, she ventured, would I like to meet the oldest man in the village? French on the ground, as it were. Not knowing if this was an effort to not teach—she was one of the most professional and strict teachers I had experienced—I said politely, No. Maybe on the final day. I just wanted to stay put in her atelier and work on French.
It was a great week. Elizabeth and I visited favorite restaurants in the Perigord. Went up to the Gardens of Eyrignac to say hello to the owner, a big fan of Elizabeth. We hadn’t seen him since we moved to Courances, his favorite chateau in France.
Our close friend, the accomplished photographer, Eric Sander, and his wife Claire, had moved down from Paris to the countryside north of Le Bugue (Claire had grown up in Perigueux), their children now grown. He was outfitting a photography studio. They would put in a pool. It seemed magical to me, though I knew from discussions with Eric he worried about the adjustment. It looked like it was working out just fine. He is another big fan of Elizabeth. They have done several photography-themed trips together.
On Thursday of the week my mother passed away, in her late eighties. Elizabeth and I were eating lunch in the tiny village of Paunat. My brothers, there with her at the end, called and we thanked God her health struggles had come to an end. Her passing was quiet and peaceful. She was now with Tom, her beloved husband, and the Lord Jesus.
The final day of class arrived. It had been a very good week. I enjoyed working with Chantal. She had invited the local students she had in the area for a special afternoon session, but otherwise it was just the two of us. Elizabeth would invite her to join clients when she was next in the area. A new friend.
As we were wrapping up, a horse clopped by the window where we were working, the rider’s head even with her studio à l’étage. I asked if we could go out into the little lane to see him. It reminded me our own little lane and the kitchen window from which we would watch horses walk by. Of course, allons-y.
There was a little troop of ponies making their way down the lane, and when they passed, going to wherever they were going, an elderly man came into view, with a little dog at his feet, a cane in his free hand. Just across from us. The lane had the typical stone walls with a line of capping stones. I looked at Chantal and it was clear that this was the man she had wondered if I’d like to meet.
I crossed the lane with her to say hello. She greeted him and said I was her student this week. He nodded back. He seemed to be a bit blind, but his hearing was good. I’d guess late eighties, the same age as my mom.
I introduced myself and explained why I was there. He seemed interested. You are the elder statesman of Tayac, Chantal says. Can you tell me a memory of growing up here? My French is getting better, I thought, after a week of conversation with my new friend. You always feel spry on the final day of class.
He leaned on his stick and said, Yes. You see that wall there, behind you? When I was a young boy, I lived on this same lane. The Nazi’s had occupied the village. Their main headquarters was at Brive, north of here, where the main train station is. I could follow his French without trouble.
One day they brought a group of Maquis here (resistance fighters) who had been ratted out, and brought down from their hiding places in the hills. There where you are standing, they placed them by the wall and the senior officer drew his pistol, walked down the line, and shot each one in the forehead. I remember it as yesterday. They fell each one to the ground. The officer turned to me and said, place their coats over their eyes.
The next day they put us on a train and took us to Brive. Maybe fifty citizens of our village, not much larger than that. We walked off the train onto the platform and in the town square about the same number as our group, all men, were hanging by their necks. They had been hung and left there for viewing.
You see that? We don’t want to do this. I warn you. We will do it. Resistance will only lead to this. Be warned. We got back on the train and came home.
That is the memory from my growing up here.
There was nothing to say, of course. I shook his hand, thanked him, and walked away with Chantal.
I had learned more in those ten minutes than I had learned in all the language schools I attended in my time in France. That will be a memory I will never forget, and will hold until I reach his age, now not that far off.
To learn the French language is to learn France. Thank you, Chantal.