A Place in Normandy Read Online Free Page A

out of the rocky tunnel of wet shade, and we were in the open, on an old cart track overgrown with grass and a low, blooming member of the daisy family that was or was not chamomile, depending on whom one asked. It would take several days of my using the driveway for the plants to wear down to something like a gravel surface. Since the weather was unnaturally dry, it was no problem: the leaves provided traction.

    The top of the drive, ca. 1930, M. Braye’s house on right.
    I passed between the arthritic apple orchards that we rented out as pasture and saw the house for the first time, two thirds of the way up the hill, its slate-covered southwest end all black, gapped, and dusted with lichen. Even with its shutters closed, it was a sight that never failed to delight me and fill me with the adolescent yearning that makes more sensible men of mature years run after starlets. The house I wanted stood as it always had and always should, a lady between her two half-timbered handmaids, outriding cottages, adrift in orchard pasture and haunted by woodland.
    Although there was less in the way of buildings now than there had once been, this was essentially the same scene that my grandparents had first looked over in 1919, when they came by horse cart from the other end of the long loop of driveway, fording the douet rather than crossing the bridge. That slope was easier on the horses. They entered the property through a gate between a pair of poplars pollarded by storms, which my grandfather and old M. Lafontaine, who owned the next field (and much else in the area) used to converse under, congratulating each other on the fact that their boundary marker was destined to outlive them. Those poplars embraced in their ancient coupling at the far end of the plateau cut by the roadway in the hill’s face, along which most of the farm’s buildings (many of them now long gone) had been clustered. The track passed directly through the busy courtyard in front of Mme. Vera’s chaumière, whose thatch ( chaume ) we had renewed in 1968. What had moved my grandparents, in 1919, to take on so much? Frederick Frieseke was a town boy from Owosso, Michigan, where his family made bricks. His ambition to control the physical world encompassed canvas and paint, books, trout, and billiards. Something of a dandy, he was neither a farmer nor a manager by temperament. My grandmother, by contrast, was familiar with farms on account of her family’s having had a place in Radnor, Pennsylvania (and through additional time spent in New Mexico, on horseback), and nobody who knew her could ever have accused her of not being a manager. I imagine the bargain they struck was that Fred would paint and fish and read, and Sadie would oversee the property, make sure the paintings were sold, and supervise the extensive gardens that she immediately began to lay out, of which now only hints of the boundaries remained.
    Frederick Frieseke had arrived in Paris in 1897, when he was twenty-three. Sarah O’Bryan, whom he would marry, came from Philadelphia to Paris at about the same time in the company of a sister and her parents, her father having chosen Paris for his retirement. Counted a painter of some significance during his own lifetime, my grandfather had been forgotten by the time my grandmother died, and it was only within the past twenty years that his reputation had been revived, as a member of the group referred to by current art historians as the American Impressionists. The study of art, and the career that followed, took Frieseke to Paris and kept him there, but it was another pursuit that led the Friesekes to settle in Normandy. The River Epte, in the environs of Giverny, where he, like many American painters had summered, was overfished, and Guillaume Pinchon, a fellow painter and fisherman, recommended as an alternative the Normandy rivers the Calonne, the Touques, and the Risle. Pinchon found a place for his own family in Les Authieux,