If you've ever stayed at a French manor house or château, you must have been curious about the source of all that beautiful furniture.  In many cases, when you are a guest at a home that has been in the family for many years, you can assume the furnishings were passed down from generation to generation.  But, what about the person who is new to château ownership? If they are fortunate, some good pieces might 'come with the house', but where does the new owner find grand sleigh beds or traditional French chairs and tables to fill the rest of the rooms?

Julie Thirkettle moved to France from the UK a few years ago and discovered that furnishing a lovely home with good furniture from finds at a brocante (secondhand shop) or at trocs (exchanges) just wasn't very successful.  To quote her, "although the style was right, the furniture was often scratched or damaged, chairs needed reupholstering, and every piece had one thing in common – woodworm."  New furniture, she soon discovered, was of either of inferior quality while overpriced or of good quality but much too expensive to furnish an entire house.  What was she to do?

When she realized that she had discovered a void in the furniture market, she decided to do something to fill it while at the same time enabling herself to furnish her own manor house which will open in March as a bed and breakfast!  She opened Le Verger Handmade Furniture in Bourganeuf offering beautifully hand-carved mahogany furniture.   Every piece she sells is customized for the buyer and upholstery is done by a craftsman in England. 

Within the next few weeks, Le Verger, the bed and breakfast, will be ready to accept its first guests.   The house is located in the tranquil and verdant Creuse département and is set on 2.5 acres of land complete with swimming pool.  Julie will not only provide comfortable, beautifully appointed en suite guest rooms, but copious breakfasts and dinners of regional specialties.   Visit the au Château web site at that time to see photos, learn about the amenities and what there is to do and discover in the region, and obtain price information.  We know that it will be exceptionally well furnished!

To read Julie's story about her move to France and what Le Verger offers, do visit our web site's  Style de Vie page. 

To contact Julie with your questions or to learn more about Le Verger's furniture, you can send an email to her at info@leverger-france.com, and do visit her web site at www.leverger-france.com to view her online catalogue filled with full color photos of all the fine furniture Le Verger offers.

Petite Pleasures
                                                                                                                       by Maxine Rose Schur

The grandeur of Paris impresses as no other city in the world.  The great monuments, so bright and so very big, take your breath away, especially at night. In the evening the Eiffel Tower is not only lit up gold but every ten minutes it sparkles with small white lights as if with a million diamonds.  The Eiffel Tower at night is the most seductive of monuments.  And yet, I am seduced not only by the magnificence of Paris, but by its small, brief moments of beauty.  I call these Petite Pleasures and they are to be found everywhere.

Near my apartment in the Marais, for example, I feel as though I'm walking across a stage set.  The 17th century buildings huddle close in the narrow streets of paving stone. The black calligraphy of the iron balconies and the ancient stone walls are cast in theatrical light by the old street lamps. 

I live on the rue de Sevigné, named for that delightful and most prolific of correspondents, Madame de Sévigné, who recorded daily life in Paris under Louis XIV in nearly 1500* delightful letters to her daughter.  She lived at the end of my street in the exquisite 16th century mansion which is now the Musée Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of Paris.

Returning home at night, I emerge from the St-Paul métro and often choose to take a detour along the main artery of the Marais, the rue des Francs Bourgeois.  From here I can look into the courtyard of the museum and upon the statue of a bare-breasted angel holding aloft in each hand a crown of laurels. This powerful, elegant figure of Victory stands in soft golden light and gives a time-out-of time moment of grace to any passerby who pauses to glance into the silent and shadowed Renaissance courtyard.
 

Law and Order
                                                                                                                         by Christel Detsch

The Mediterranean coast is undeniably beautiful with its blue water, brilliant sun, soft breezes and handsome, tanned people in the street cafés.

The English discovered all of that in the 19th century, and the Americans followed in the first half of the 20th.  That's when great fortunes were made in the United States, and the nouveau riche of the New World could afford to soak up European culture at leisure.  It's a new century now, and the world has become more democratic: my dental hygienist has just been on a "Martin Luther Tour" through Germany, and the nouveau riche are nowhere to be found!   Tourists bring money, and money attracts thieves.

So, it's no wonder that everyone warns you about the 'voleurs' (thieves) who supposedly populate the whole Mediterranean coast.  My husband and I weren't much interested in what we perceived as exaggerated stories about robberies and stolen cars until we were directly affected.

While we were enjoying a lovely dinner across the street from our hotel in Nice, someone gained entry to our hotel room and stole a brand new telephone and my bank card.  They were considerate thieves and only took what directly suited their purpose, namely the bank card which they needed to return the telephone for money.  Otherwise, they left my wallet in tact which contained valuable documents:  my green card, driver's license, another bank card, scribble from my children when they were toddlers, a telephone card, insurance card, etc.

The night clerk at the reception desk maintained that the incident did not happen because nobody had passed by his desk.  When I insisted that we go to the police, he advised against it because by then it was eleven o'clock and the streets weren't safe anymore.  A Russian gang might do us harm, he said, and besides, the police office would be closed anyway.  I didn't care, and I dragged my hesitant husband out onto the street in search of the police.

We found the police station without running into Russian gangs, but the man at the hotel had been right ~ it was closed.  Didn't the police work at night?  Maybe not.  After all, there is the thirty-five hour work week in France, which is greatly respected by everyone, including police officers.  The evening is reserved for eating and relaxing and, as everyone knows, at night the typical Frenchman is more interested in l'amour than work.  We reported the burglary to the police the next day and never heard about it again.

That doesn't mean, however, that there is no law and order in France.  On the contrary!  During the day the police and security men are in attendance and vigilant as we had the good fortune to find out firsthand on a previous visit. 

We had just arrived in Nice from the US and decided to stay overnight to get a good night's sleep and shake off some of the unavoidable jet lag before heading to our little town.  At the train station we deposited our luggage in a locker intending to retrieve it the next day.  It was a good, sensible plan and worked until we arrived at the train station in the morning.  A pretty young girl was leaning against the locker next to ours.  It turned out that she was an American traveling with a girlfriend through Europe.  She told us that the lockers didn't open and that nobody had been able to get their luggage or other belongings.  She didn't speak French and asked us if we could help her.  Even though our French isn't great, we thought we could easily assist these inexperienced girls.  Besides, we felt that we had some superior knowledge that they didn't have.  After all, we'd been here before and by now considered ourselves seasoned travelers in France! 

We weren't the only ones waiting for help with the intractable lockers.  There were several French couples as well.  Lo and behold, they managed to get a young man in a bright blue jacket who pulled out a sliding contraption from between the lockers, fumbled around among intricate locking devices, and their locker sprang open!  The young American girl watched the procedure in disbelief because she had been here a long time and had tried to communicate her desperation to that very same young man.  But, before we had sorted out what we should tell him in French so he would perform the same service for us, he vanished.  I decided to go to the information desk to make an official report while the young girl went off in search of the bright blue jacket!

When I returned, my husband had done the American thing which is unheard of in Europe:  he took matters into his own hands to creatively solve the problem in a self-reliant manner.  After all, that's what made America great, and my husband thinks it should work to some degree in Europe.  He managed to pull out that sliding contraption and was attempting to unlock the lock manually just as the bluecoat had done.  All of a sudden three policemen and three security men surrounded him and were talking to him in loud voices.  My husband doesn't like to be yelled at;  it makes him yell back.  While this was taking place, the two American girls pulled their baggage out of their locker which the young man had just unlocked for them (the pretty one had coaxed him there non-verbally ~ by the arm), shot us a sympathetic glance and walked away.

One of the policemen turned to me and told me in an excited voice that he wouldn't speak to my husband anymore.  As long as the latter was yelling, he would only speak to me.  My French really isn't very good, but strangely enough I could understand him perfectly.  I wonder if one's language ability increase if one is under duress...  By now I was getting frantic and worried that they would take my husband away and lock him up for breaking the locks and the law. 

Then another policeman turned to me and yelled, "Il l'a cassée".   I vigorously nodded my head.  Yes, I had just been to the 'kasse', German for cashier.   I was getting my languages confused and thought him to mean that I had just been to the information desk. 

He then turned to the others and shouted in a triumphant voice:  "Il l'a cassée.  Il l'a cassée."  Only then did I remember that 'casser' means to break. 

All is lost now, I thought, and I was close to tears as I raised my voice, "Non, non, il ne l'a pas cassée!" 

I am still proud of the fact that I was able to flawlessly negate a French sentence.  The French negation consists of two worlds 'ne...pas' and that requires some thinking.  In the meantime, the oldest security man had joined the fracas.  He fumbled with the sliding contraption and opened the locker while my husband continued to defend himself in beautiful, albeit, furious French.  As soon as we saw our luggage, we rushed to pull it out of the locker.  Suddenly, everyone seemed to lose interest in us.  The policemen turned away and began speaking with each other in normal voices.  The security men slid the contraption back into place and acted as if it weren't there.  Could we go?  I wanted to badly but didn't want to become a fugitive with three pieces of luggage in case the police were not done with my husband.

Helplessly, I looked at the group of uniformed men who were chattering in a friendly manner, and I caught the eye of one of them who had leisurely folded his arms over his chest listening to his companions who not doubt complained about the dumb Americans.  Unobtrusively, he motioned with his fingers to me to go quickly and quietly ~ apparently before his colleagues changed their minds.  And, we did.

What's the morale of this story?  Law and order exists in France.  Even if the police aren't there when you need them, they come in force when you don't.  It's a mystery how the French police deal with matters of life and death, but I do know how they deal with matters of night and day!

[Christel (an EU citizen) and her husband (a US citizen) live in the United States
but have a second home in the Provençal village of Entrevaux, 
where they spend many months of each year.]

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