Digging Deeper

It's easy to be charmed by the villages of rural France. If you visit, it's usually because you read about a wonderful market or an historic site there in an illustrated guidebook designed to attract tourists...and tourist dollars! Or perhaps you fell in love, sight unseen, after reading one of Peter Mayles' entertaining books about the characters and adventures of his beloved Provence. In either case, the village usually does not disappoint. All spiffed up for tourists, it provides you with an ATM, WC, and car park along with interesting shops full of local arts and crafts and lovely cafes where you can sample local cuisine while sitting on the outdoor terrace watching the world stroll by. Life is idyllic and sweet. You may begin to question, however, if life was always like this. What was your favorite village like before it was discovered by tourists? How did people make a living before and after WWII? Was this village occupied by German forces? Were its people always prosperous? Finding the answers to these questions requires digging deeper. If you lucky enough to be fluent in written French, there are sources for your research. If you're not (like me!), you have the search even harder. There are books out there, tho. This book, "Little Saint" written by Hannah Green weaves village life and history into Ms. Green's research of Sainte Foy, the venerated saint of the Abbey Church of Conques. I read it first at Laury's in September, and then bought my own copy to re-read once I got home. After spending so much time in Conques, the book took on a whole new meaning on my second read. It's beautifully written and full of the lives and loves of the Conquois. Here are a few more good reads if you're looking for the stories behind the guidebook hype....

"Village in the Vaucluse" by Laurence Wylie. Wylie spent a year doing sociologic research in a small, rural village that he called Peyrane. Twenty years later, he revealed that this village was actually Roussillon, a famous tourist village in Provence. His work covers life in the village by age groups: children (infancy, school and adolescence) adult work and recreation, and the aged.

"A Life of Her Own" is an autobiography by Emilie Carles, a French countrywoman born in 1900 in the Vallee de Claree high in the French alps. All her life she kept notebooks and diaries, finally putting them together in a book the year before her death in 1979. Translated into English in 1991, it's a fascinating story of a strong, outspoken, often radical French woman who almost single-handedly saved her beautiful valley from developers' bulldozers.

Michael Sanders went to the tiny village of Les Arques in the Lot to write a book about its restaurant. When he finished "From Here You Can't See Paris," he had actually written a book about the story of the village. Typical of so many tiny villages, Les Arques was on the verge of disappearing...its young people were leaving to find work elsewhere, its old people were dying off, its farmers were having a harder and harder time making a living. When its school closed, the village's fate seemed sealed until someone had the idea to re-open the school as a restaurant. Le Recreation breathed new life into the fading village and Michael Sanders was there to record the story.