The Theaus in France

December 2008

We arrived in Paris to temperatures of minus 8 degrees, picked up at the airport the car we bought on the internet (!) and drove straight to Amboise in the Loire Valley to stay with Ludo's sister, Virginie. Our first excursion there was to stock up on hats, gloves, scarves and coats for everyone. Sydney winter gear just doesn't work here. We were a little better equipped when we reached Paris just before Christmas. We stayed in Francois’ apartment in the 7th arrondisement, a block from the Eiffel Tower. Apartment is probably too big a word for such a small space, but it was very cosy, and great to have a space to ourselves (despite the five floors we had to climb.)


We did all the classic tourist things one does in Paris. We climbed the Eiffel Tower, walked up the Champs Elysee, went to the Science Museum, visited the Louvre (or rather a fraction of that enormous museum) and Notre Dame, took the BateauBus along the Seine and had hot chocolate on the Isle Saint Louis. Francois had also organised for us to go with him to the Opera Garnier, that incredibly beautiful Baroque building in the centre of Paris, to see the ballet Paquita. We sat in a box with an amazing view of the stage, the enormous central chandelier and the ornate ceiling, with its paintings by Chagall. That was an amazing experience for the children, and I couldn’t believe they sat quietly through the whole thing. Felix’s favourite experience was taking the Metro.

Where is Emile? Where is the BateauBus?

We nearly lost Emile one night in the Quartier Latin. Very scary. One minute we were all waiting to cross the road and the next minute we were on the other side – minus Emile. I nearly had heart failure. He would have no idea where to go alone! I raced back the way we came and found him wandering around, a little shaken. Every day we spent in Paris after that the children sported indelible mobile numbers on the back of their hands.

One of the best things we did, though, was to go to the Cirque d’Hiver, a very old (think over 150 years) circus in it’s own permanent building and with its own orchestra near La Republique. I’m not normally a big fan or circuses, but this was wonderful. The clowns were the funniest I’d ever seen and the acrobats were sensational. One of the clowns had been there for 55 years. It was the atmosphere, however, that made it so very special – the music and the lighting and the expectations of the parents, like Ludo, that had wonderful memories of the same circus from their own childhoods.

We left Paris after Christmas and headed to Normandy to stay with friends whose parents had an ancient house in the countryside with enormous fireplaces and stone floors. The quiet of the countryside was a welcome change from the noise and traffic of Paris. The most impressive thing we did here (apart from eating way too much crepes and foie gras, and drinking too much wonderful cider and wine) was to visit Mont Saint Michel, the fortified monastery begun 100 years ago on a tiny island surrounded by tidal flats.

After visiting the island, we put on our gum boots and started a walk through the mud flats. For the kids, this was the best part of the day (even though it started at the end of the day). The mud was very fine, very slippery and in places very sinkable. We didn’t want to head too far out because the tide can come in here at the speed of a galloping horse and catches many people unaware.

We hadn’t gone far at all though, before we were up to our knees in muddy water the equivalent of quicksand. The more you struggled to get out, the deeper your boots were embedded in the mud. If one of us went to the aid of another, they would also get stuck. The muddy water breached the top of our boots so our socks and jeans were soaked with freezing water. We were in hysterics at our mutual misfortune, those of us who weren’t crying. And then we started to get a bit worried, because night was falling, and it became harder and harder to see what was solid ground and what was treacherous. It was a cold, hard slog back to the car, and it was fully dark. Yikes.

January 2008

We finally arrived in Seix on January 5. It was cold, cold, cold and in the house itself, it was freezing, freezing, freezing. The house is in the village with a front door that is literally right on the road. There’s a steel hand doorknocker that I find a bit spooky and it makes a hollow heavy sound when dropped on the door. The decor in the house is scary too, but in a different way. The last time the place had any attention was in the 70’s – need I say any more. Wallpaper must have been big business in that époque because we have it everywhere. One of the first things we bought was a wall-paper steaming machine and it’s had a good workout. Most walls are covered in paper with geometric patterns in orange, brown and beige, but we do also have many attractive floral motifs happening. One of the first things you see as you walk in the hallway is a dead isard (a kind of mountain deer) mounted on the wall, feet and all. The girls hate it. I love it because it has a history attached. (It was hunted by Ludo’s mother’s maternal great-grandfather, who was the gendarme in the village all those years ago.)

The hallway is long and dark and has been nicknamed the fridge for obvious reasons (the ‘chambre d’ete’ is the freezer). It’s the repository of coats, hats, scarves and shoes. The shoes line up for several metres, there being six of us (and many stairs to climb if you forget something). To the left of the hallway are two doors that open onto the ‘salon’, sort of like a parlour, and the dining room/kitchen, which is where all the action is. These two rooms are the only ones we heat because heating here is outrageously expensive. (Our heating bill for January was E400 – about $700. I don’t know how people afford it.) At the end of the hallway is the foot of the wooden staircase that winds around three floors and two half floors, and beyond this is a door that leads onto a balcony overlooking the courtyard below.

The staircase is a huge space that we can’t even attempt to heat. The seals around the doors and windows make whistling noises when it’s windy, and little dust piles move around in the resulting drafts! Sometimes it’s warmer outside than in. As we walk up the stairs there’s a miniscule bathroom with dark brown tiles (Livin’ in the 70’s) on the first landing, two bedrooms, one facing the street with tall French doors and one facing the river with very tall windows. The next landing has a miniscule room with a tiny bed that Emile has claimed as his own (no swinging cats in here). The second floor is more or less self-contained with a little kitchen, a decent bathroom, a living area that opens onto a balcony with amazing views to the river and mountains, and two small bedrooms whose floors slope in different directions. They also have French doors that open onto the road side and have an outlook directly onto the little castle of Seix. The girls have occupied this floor, but Mahalia has moved out temporarily because flies seem to be breeding in her room under the deep magenta wallpaper (see how useful that wallpaper stripper will be?)



Our house is the white one with the chimney, and this is Felix's room.

All of these rooms have beautiful armoires, marble topped side tables, carved chairs and mirrors and sleigh beds. Most of the beds you really can go for a ride in – some of them undulate and rock, others are boat-like in shape – they’re the most uncomfortable beds I’ve ever tried to sleep in. They’re either sprung so tightly they’re like a trampoline, or so unsprung the children are all but lost in the bedclothes. In moving one of the beds we had to turn it over. The mechanics underneath were incredible. Each spring was attached separately by coarse string tied several times per spring to the base and to the covering. Over the top of this ‘sommier’ are mattresses with no springs – they are filled with wool. I couldn’t believe it when Francoise told me she’d just had these mattresses remade. They are so uncomfortable! One of the first things that was relegated to the attic was our new woollen mattress. I bought a cheap foam one and had to make our bed up upside down because the floor slopes down to the head of the bed and the blood would rush to our heads at night.

From the ground floor are stairs that lead down to the courtyard, the table tennis room and the room where the firewood is kept. Theres a little garden there that used to have two enormous heavily bearing fig trees. They robbed the light from the kitchen so they’ve been dug up and moved to the garden down the road.

Outside the courtyard is yet another part of the house that is a big void. Landholders here pay taxes on the amount of floor space owned, so Ludo’s grandmother removed the floors! It’s used to store bikes and wood now. That’s it for the house. The garden that hosts the figs is a few blocks away. Not so handy but very common in villages like this where the houses are so close up together. The garden has massive stone walls on two sides and fences along the other two. In addition to the figs it has a peach tree, plum trees, a very old grape vine draped over a series of arches and a beautiful peony bush that blushes pale pink in April. Unfortunately it also has an abundance of stinging nettles that renders it impossible to play in come spring (but all the locals tell me nettles make excellent soup).

The kids are having a really hard time adjusting to our life here. School is really hard for them. Last time we were here it was only for three months and it seemed like a holiday, but for a year they are really part of the school community and are expected to apply themselves, by us and by the teachers. I think we underestimated how dislocating it would be. We thought that because their oral French is pretty good, the adjustment would be rapid, but being adept conversationally and coping with lessons and literature and mathematics in French is a much bigger ask than we imagined. Poor Mahalia is trying to learn Spanish in French! It’s bad enough trying to learn a second language in your mother tongue, but learning a third language in your second language is truly challenging. They are all, however, doing very well in English!

Felix has been fairly resilient, although he was a bit naughty at school during the first few weeks, testing the boundaries and expressing his disgruntlement I guess. He really misses his friend Ben from school in Sydney and talks about him frequently. He says all the time that he wants to go back to Sydney. He tells us constantly that the thing he doesn’t like about France is that it’s French. He does love playing soccer with the locals, and with the team in Saint Girons. I love hearing his little voice speak French. This only ever happens if he doesn't know I'm listening because he'd like me to think he's having such a hard time speaking French that he's mute when he leaves the house.



Emile is having a really hard time with school work and is frequently upset by homework, feeling that it’s impossible for him to ever have a grasp on the grammar. Poor Emile doesn't yet know the conjunctions in the present tense and in class they’re talking about passé simple and plus que parfait which I barely covered at the Masters level! It’s demanding. I can see him trying so hard. One thing Emile does love here is trekking in teh mountains - he's in his element out there. He also loves the bread!

Agnes was cruising along for a few weeks as is her way – she has such a sunny and optimistic personality, but she hit a wall in week three and was frequently teary at bedtime, wanting her friends from home. For all the children, at all their different ages, friends are what they miss most. This shouldn’t have been unexpected I guess, but I was a little surprised at the strength of this phenomenon, expecially at Felix’s age.

Mahalia’s maturity has amazed us. She hasn’t once complained about anything, and accepts everything and confronts problems as they arise and deals with them. She has a strong character that anchors all of us. When we were here last time Mahalia had three close friends that she kept in touch with over the three years. I thought when we returned she would just pick where they left off, but girls at 10 year old are different creatures to girls of 13 going on 14. Two of the three have well and truly discovered boys, alcohol and smoking (perhaps not in that order) which has left the other two out of the loop somewhat. For Mahalia, going from a privileged girl’s school to a co-ed village school has been quite a journey.

In addition to these various challenges, we’ve had no end of sickness since the day we set foot in the door. That very day I came down with an unpleasant gastroenteritis which I shared generously with the whole family. It went around a few times, joining forces with Pediculus humanus capitis (otherwise known as head lice), which also went around quite a few times. This was followed by a true flu, not just a heavy cold kind of flu, to which we all also succumbed. In the first 5 weeks of school we had all 4 children at school for just four days. There was always someone on the couch under a quilt.

Apart from being bedridden or tending the bedridden, our first month here also heavily featured making the house habitable. Remember that wallpaper stripper I spoke about? We stripped wallpaper, installed dishwashers and clothes dryers (the beautiful monogrammed, lace trimmed linen sheets in the linen press here take forever to dry at 0 degrees celcius), washed light fittings, cleaned out cupboards, repaired the walls when the plaster came away with the wallpaper, sanded doors and windows, installed powerpoints and shower heads you don’t have to hold in your hand – the full handyman thing. The word for handman in French is ‘bricoleur’, and our favourite shop here is Mr. Bricolage where we’re on first name terms with the staff. That was January, and we’ve only rescued the ground floor.

Our first visitors were my sister Eve, her husband Ben and baby Timmy coming over from Cambridge. It was great to see them after an interval of 18 months, and it was revelationary meeting my little nephew. They were stoic in putting up with the worst part of the stripping/sanding/

painting cycle, and the cold, especially Timmy who had nowhere to crawl. Soon after we had Ludo's Mum, Francoise, and her partner, Roger. We were a bit nervous about their visit because we had made so many changes to a house which held some 70 years of memories for her. She was happy, though, to see the house lighten up and to feel that it was lived in.

25 February

We’ve just returned from 5 days skiing at Baqueira in the Spanish Pyrenees. The Spanish side of the mountains is much more arid and harsh, the vegetation more dessicated and on many mountains there is no vegetation at all. It’s a rocky landscape softened now in winter by white, but infrequent, blankets of snow. It’s been a very mild winter which we are at once relieved and worried by – the mountains should be covered in snow now and the temperatures should be freezing. Instead during our 5 days of skiing the sun shone unceasingly and the temperatures were in the teens at midday.

We stayed in one of the Spanish Paradores. These are hotels made in buildings of historic interest – monasteries, hostels from the middle ages, old castles and also in modern buildings of architectural merit. Ours started life as a stopping house for pilgrims in the 17th century in the beautiful village of Arties at the heart of the Aran Valley. All the villages in the valley are beautiful with all structures new and old built from the local stone with slate roofs. The whole valley is geared up to serve the economy surrounding the ski resort of Baqueira which is huge. Here there has been no horrible development allowed that so frequently blights ski resorts the world over. Here there has been an amazing degree of control over the style of any building that has gone up to the point where I could barely tell the old from the new so well were they integrated. It was beautiful, but it also felt a bit like a Disney valley. It didn’t feel as though real life took place there.

Nevertheless, the skiing was fantastic. Only artificial snow, but good artificial snow! And spectacular views over the Spanish Pyrenees. The children made amazing progress from skiing 5 days straight in ideal conditions. We all skied together all the time, even Felix. If you can imagine a helmeted, goggled 6 year old doing the splits while heading downhill at 30-odd kmh you’ll have a good idea of his particular style. He had no fear. Agnes was the most stylish with a Mambo suit donated by a friend. She had little fear too, and is planting her poles with panache. Emile is the snowboard king. He was extremely frustrated for the first two days until it started to gel and he never looked back, literally. Mahalia is skiing with more and more style all the time. Early on in the trip Ludo thought skiing must be genetic because Mahalia and I made the same mistakes and skied in a similar way, but now she has surpassed any level of ability I have, which is as it should be. I love skiing when the sun’s out and the snow’s good, but I’m not a natural skier.

I can’t imagine how much energy is used making snow for a resort that has 100km of skiiable piste, but it must be a lot and it dosen’t seem to me like that would improve the global warming that necessitated making the snow in the first place. Neither would the heating of the outdoor pool at the hotel. It all seemed a bit upside down.

The local resort in Ariege is Guzet, 20 minutes from Seix. It is really suffering from a lack of the snow to the point where it’s been on the point of closing all winter. This has been disastrous for our village and for the whole valley, which relies on tourism and the weekend visitors from Toulouse.

Today is February 25th and it’s 19 degrees celcius outside. That’s crazy for what should be the coldest month of winter. The trees are confused. They’re all starting to bud and blossom, triggered by the warmth they think is spring. If the cold returns – with snow – in March, these blossoms will more than likely fall off the tree, meaning no fruit in the summer. There has been no rain (let alone snow) since we arrived at the beginning of January. Every day has been watched over by a clear blue sky. Meanwhile, it’s 18 degrees in Canberra and flooding along the NSW coast!

This morning the boys went up to the Compot (like a little village square where the kids congregate) to play football. I love to see them wander off together. Despite the 5 year disparity in their ages, football is something they both love and can do together. As soon as someone and their ball arrives at the Compot others gravitate there too, so inevitably a fully-fledged game evolves……..

February 27

What an experience this evening! Apart from the habitual amazement at the 30 degree panorama of snow capped mountains when I take the kids to horseriding lessons, I had another quintessential mountain experience taking Mahalia to her friend Julie’s house (see picture) above Couflens (above is the most appropriate term). Couflens is several kilometres up the valley from Seix, almost at the end. The sides of the valley rise steeply from the Salat, which travels sinuously amongst pine trees and massive boulders.

The turn-off to Julie’s hamlet, La Souleille, is so sharp that we couldn’t make the turn and had to find a spot to turn around and approach from the other direction. Then the challenge began. I thought the road to horse-riding was hairy scary. This road was narrower than a Sydney driveway. I didn’t know what we’d do if we met a car coming down the mountain! In addition, Mahalia wasn’t sure how to get there (it had been 3 years since she was last there). We started up the winding road with a sheer rise on one side and a sheer drop on the other in failing light, praying we would be the only traffic. Occasionally we’d pass a house or a stone grange with the corner of the building literally touching the bitumen of our narrow road – we thus progressed at 10 kmh. We came to a junction with several boites aux lettres. Mahalia recognised it, but couldn’t remember which way to go. OK. We chose the right turn and wound our way under a dark tunnel of fir trees up a steep incline until we saw a few cars parked facing downhill. Oh good, we must be able to turn around at the top. But no. They had somehow driven up there backwards!! So we arrived at the end of the road, demarcated by a wood pile, which was the only thing separating us from the bottom of the cliff below. I thought it wise to stop the car and park it in the middle of the road – there was nowhere else to go. “We have to walk now” said Mahalia. How far would that be, I wondered? So we headed up a narrow track cut into the side of the mountain, past a few uninhabited houses, until we reached two houses close together with their lights on. They were mountain houses built of stone with slate roofs, facing south (the only decent aspect in the northern hemisphere) over the mountains towards the Port d’Aula and Spain.

It was magnificent. The wisps of mist in the valley, the clouds sitting on the peaks, the dark, brooding fir trees, the wooden beams and welcoming fire inside, the rock of the mountain that comprises one of the lounge-room walls. It’s such a different world to our bright skies and shiny newness. It feels like such a privilege to experience just a part of it.

It’s hard to express how different Julie’s life is from Mahalia’s. When it snows here they sometimes have to dig their way out of the front door, and must make their way down several hundreds metres to where they can park the car (and then work out how to get the car down the hairy scary road to the decent road at the bottom of the valley, which itself could be perilous with ice.) They move in and out of this house and up and down the mountain every day. Julie’s father is a beekeeper and his hives are placed in three locations: near his house, above our village, and at Azas, a tiny hamlet near Seix. He’s converted the tiny grange next to their house into a miellerie.

One of the exciting things about being here is of course all about the food. Good French food is a cliché that in Paris and the big provincial cities hardly deserves its reputation now. Many restaurants now buy in their dishes and heat them up and serve them. Not so much goes on in the kitchen except arranging the food on the plate. Since I first started coming to France 20 years ago I’ve noticed the standards slipping. Mass production hasn’t bypassed France. But in the country towns and villages it’s possible to find fabulous local cuisine, sometimes using local ingredients.

Yesterday was a watershed day in our family’s gastronomic life. I came across Mr. Germain at the edge of the village who has a cow and chickens and sells milk and eggs (organic of course) to all who come by at 8.30am or 7.30pm. Yippee! The same day Agnes’ friend Aurore’s father (Laurent), who is a chef, offered to sell us veges and fruit from his garden by the river. We have peaches, plums, figs and raisons from our own garden at the end of summer, and with Julie’s honey we’ll be eating well. Not far from Julie’s house, across the ridge, is a goat farm that sells goat cheese, and in our village a mountain cheese called Rogallais is sold. The butcher in Oust sources his meat within a 30km radius. Eating all this local food means we don’t have to buy packaged stuff that comes at great fuel cost from all corners of the world. How lucky are we!