7. Rue du Petit Paris
Elizabeth and I moved to France full-time in late 2015. We married later in life, both of us single and for the first-time. The odds of that are hard to believe. I was mid-fifties, she ten years younger. On the other hand, we had led busy professional lives, were independent, had travelled a good deal, and that set us up to give thanks for finding each other. A true gift of God.
I had lived in Scotland for a decade, Professor at the University of St Andrews, having grown tired of life at Yale and New Haven, Connecticut. I had attended the University of Munich before deciding to do a PhD (followed by a tenured faculty position) at Yale. I had learned German at Goethe Institute and started formal graduate studies there. I have taught languages as part of my career. I had lived a third of my adult life abroad when I took Elizabeth out for drinks in Dallas. When she spoke French, my heart was moved. A life shared in Europe might await us.
At the time, I was teaching at the University of Toronto, a post that allowed me to work only with PhD students, and not to have to live full time in residence. I came back from Scotland and moved to Dallas, where I had a position as theologian in residence for the Episcopal Diocese, and on the staff at a large urban parish church. I met Elizabeth there. She grew up in Highland Park. We bought a house in Preston Hollow.
I am getting ahead of myself in that we courted for a year. After those first shared glasses of wine—and an Armagnac night-cap—it would be constant time together, and a trip to France planned. We flew to Paris and stayed at her favorite hotel and took the fast train (TGV) to Les Baux-de-Provence, a place we would return to almost annually. We celebrated Palm Sunday in Maussane-les-Alpilles, with local olive branches in our hands instead of palmss.
Elizabeth had been a French Professor and then entered corporate life, traveling internationally for Texas Instruments and then Dell. Her dream was to share France with Americans. When we met, she started French Affaires, LLC, a niche travel, culture and language business. Dallas is a superb place for intelligent traveling clients, and she was well-known in the city. A sought-after lecturer, teacher, purveyor of an infectious love of France. A French cookbook club, a Tour de France lecture series, complete with regional dishes and drinks corresponding to where the “Tour” was. The joy of France without the décalage horaire (jetlag).
I was thrilled that she was getting to live out her dream. And that I would get to share it.
Her business blossomed and came to full flower in those years (2008-2015). Six trips a year, to all regions, would come in due course. Normandy, Loire Valley, Dordogne, Côte d’Azur, Burgundy, Provence, Corsica and of course Paris, where she had spent so much of her younger life.
Living in France would make the travel and running the business much easier. I already had a flexible academic arrangement, allowing me to be resident for intensive term seminars in Toronto and in time, of course, the distance learning formats, when Covid invaded our lives. Much of PhD supervision is at the writing phase of students’ careers, once coursework, comprehensive exams, and a dissertation colloquium were completed. I had been teaching at Yale and St Andrews for going on 25 years, so these routines were familiar to me in my Toronto post.
I am also an ordained priest in the Episcopal/Anglican church, with church work over the years in Germany, Scotland, Canada and the United States. I saw a third time post advertised in the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe, in Fontainebleau, interviewed and was called.
During this time, we were already crisscrossing France for pleasure or for Elizabeth’s business. She was taking the Garden Club of Dallas group on a famous gardens tour, from Paris and down to the Loire Valley in 2015. I was in the area, and we had already begun to look at houses to rent for our much-anticipated France sojourn. Elizabeth knew the manager at the Chateau of Courances, one of the stops for the Garden Club trip. The chateau owned houses in Courances and in the nearby village of Fleury-en-Biere, where a sister chateau owned by the de Ganay family was located. The former rectory of the village church had come into the possession of the Marquis de Ganay, who had also been the mayor of this 300-person village an hour south of Paris.
Elizabeth had been shown around by Patrick Deedes, the man in charge of administration and promotional activities at the chateau. The house needed work, but had, as Elizabeth liked to say, “good bones.” One can only intuit so much from photos sent to us via the internet by Patrick, and I also wanted to take a look. The setting was hard to beat. The rectory and the church next door reminded me much of my life growing up, the son of a parish priest and then school chaplain and Headmaster. When the Angelus bells rang from the cloche, the bell tower hovering over the property below, I was transported to another time. The village life, the Chateau grounds, the small cemetery honoring allied airmen shot down in the Second World War, the forest trails that would become our dog’s stomping grounds, full of pheasants and chukkers for him to chase – it was something magical.
Above all, there was the garden area, church ramparts as one side of the cloture, the walled enclosure that would be our oasis, with a potager and massive ceramic pots, and new tree plantings undertaken by Elizabeth. The angelus sounded three times a day, as in the celebrated nineteenth-century painting by Francois Millet, of the Barbizon school, a village not 15 minutes away.
Of course, we said Yes, settled on a rental amount, and other details. A new kitchen would be installed, the house thoroughly prepared and painted, ancient tomette clay floor tiles replaced and buffed, chimneys cleaned, and a new office for me in one of the outbuildings (a new roof would be included and a wood stove and mezzanine for my desk).
We returned to Dallas and began the work of selling our house, putting things in storage, and readying items to be shipped by sea container to our new address. We popped our Mercedes sedan in last, as we figured we would need two cars.
In mid-December, as darkness fell, the moving van pulled away from our lovely home in Preston Hollow. We boarded a flight for France the following day. Our new life in France was beginning.