There and back again

Wednesday. Up and out early, but running a bit later than I’d intended—so hustled over to the Cité Métro doubletime to head for Gare Montparnasse. After its labyrinth and buying the ticket to l”Aigle, the platform wasn’t yet posted for my train, so cooled my heels on a bench till it did show up (and here I have to note that the sight and sound of destination boards in train stations rolling over as they’re updated are a visceral symbol of travel; I hated to read, a while back, that they would be gradually phased out (King’s Cross in London, I think, among the first to go) in favor of thoroughly digital ones). Which posting sent me off again, hurrying to a platform in a distant substation (certainly if you measure by the number of moving sidewalks’ distance) of Montparnasse—the Gare Vaugirard, actually. Huffing and puffing yet again, I was eventually there along with everyone else,, waiting for the doors to open. The train was sparsely populated; but how lovely, that it’s a service to people who need transportation regardless.

As we rolled into Basse Normandie, I couldn’t help thinking how like where I live, where my Normandy ancestors wound up (the direct ones, anyway) it looks—not the grain elevators; not the chalk sublayer glimpsed on hillsides (prompting other thoughts about earth’s matching puzzle pieces and tectonic plates); but the fields, the woods, the little towns. When we arrived in l’Aigle after not quite an hour and a half, I knew I had over an hour’s wait for the bus to Tourouvre. One just waits, in a little shelter at the far side of the station parking lot, if the bus isn’t yet there. Which it wasn’t, of course (another driver was helpful in explaining where my bus would appear. Except that, much later, it didn’t appear in that spot; when it was fifteen minutes before departure, another kind man helped me discover it in another slot). It was a cool, brilliant day, with big forecast clouds rolling in from the west. (I didn’t get a photograph, but I have to record for posterity the house for sale directly across the street, its lower windows all shuttered, but with large dolls (large—like half life-sized, some of them) looking out of all the upstairs windows, one with hand raised to wave. Very—strange, if not creepy. And weirdly hilarious at the same time.)

The bus system for Orne, managed by the area council (are you listening, police juries? school boards? and this is not unique to France; I remember seeing rural bus service in Scotland that worked the same way) serves everyone: the public, random tourists, as well as schoolchildren as school buses. There were only four or five of us on board (two, actually, until our first stop), including a woman who had just missed her proper bus (as it started to rain). But then we stopped at a junior high school (collège) and a high school (lycée), as the rain came down harder, and the bus was filled with damp whispering, giggling passengers. Who were then gradually deposited at various stops in or near two or three other hamlets (communes, more than likely) and towns.

Tourouvre oozes charm. Old (though hard to gauge quite how old; I’m sure very little survives that’s as old as the actual church, Saint-Aubin, where many of the émigrés to Quebec were baptized; several wars rolled through the area in the almost 400 years since, among other things: there was a Nazi massacre of civilians here in 1944, for example, and the burning of part of the town; the main street is named 13 Août 1944, in fact), clean, pretty (well-kept flower beds and boxes dotted everywhere). There were several bistros, brasseries, and restaurants of one sort or another, though I’m getting ahead of myself; a bit worrying that not one was open by late afternoon, and what had been a Moroccan one was out of business and up for sale.

But back to chronological order: when the bus stopped for me, a little way out a residential sort of side road, I made sure to ask whether that was where I would catch the return bus to l’Aigle. The driver told me no, to catch it at “the church.” Okay.

I walked back to the main street and headed toward what seemed the center of town. Before very long, there was the combined museum (the Musée de l'Emigration française au Canada that I wanted, and the Musée des Commerces et des Marques, under the same roof)—a modern building for them, only five years old. And there were the first drops of rain. The museum wasn’t supposed to be open until 2:00 P.M., which it wasn’t quite yet (nor on Tuesday, more misinformation from its website), but as I took off my backpack to get out my umbrella, I noticed a man coming out of the main entrance. It was open (since 11:00 A.M.!), and I was no sooner inside than the rain poured down. Very good luck and timing.

The museum is small, and consists largely of information panels accompanying reproductions of historical documents and paintings. But the information is well-researched, and the visuals are interesting. There’s an area with a long video presentation by a Native American and a “period” Frenchman, which I didn’t sit through; in the same room are other displays pertaining to Native Americans. There’s a room devoted to the whole new cultural vocabulary the French settlers had to acquire to survive in Canada, which really makes the transition they had to make hit home: almost every fish, plant, and geographical and climatic feature would have been something they had to learn, intimately, quickly. And there’s a map showing the land grants, the seigneuries, in and around Quebec, as of 1803. At the end of the course through the museum, there’s a “reading room” of sorts, where I did spend a little time, watching the sky grow black and another, even harder, downpour come and go, through the glass wall in front of me.

Finally leaving there, I walked on further into town, looking for “the church,” for one thing (the woman at the museum incredulous when I asked her what church he’d meant, as if it were obvious). The little neat old town center, a couple of detours down side streets for the hell of it, coming to cemeteries and, quickly, to the edge of town with beautiful country vistas beyond. The disconcerting lack of food. And, of course, Saint-Aubin; I went in and walked around the small old church, with its windows and plaques here and there dedicated to the mass exodus in the seventeenth century to Canada.

From a very nice small boulangerie/patisserie down the block from the church I finally bought a small quiche. That, the other croissant in my backpack, some chocolate, and the rest of the bottled water I’d bought in l’Aigle served as a very late lunch, eaten in a little glass-enclosed enclosure up against the church where the bus would come . . . in an hour or so. In the meantime it also became (obviously not unusually) a hangout for teenagers, three, then two giggly, flirty girls plus several guys all tough with the cigarettes and passing around a bottle (that one of them went away on his motorcycle and brought back). One much older man, mid-thirties? grilled me about what I was doing; his and all the very fast slangy talk went more than half past me. I think I left them with the impression I was English, in hindsight. Subdued, the girls spoke a little English to me once or twice, even asking me what time the bus was supposed to come as if it somehow concerned them, too. As evening came on it was getting decidedly colder.

The bus came, with the same driver. A genuinely Nice Guy, who clearly knows his area and the people personally. I immediately noticed a set of keys on the first seat, which I handed to him. After we’d made an obligatory circle around downtown, he pulled over and quickly found the young man who’d left them—this in addition to his having taken the woman in l’Aigle who’d missed her bus to connect with another of the same route at the lycée.

Keeping in mind all the while that the setting sun was gilding the landscape seductively, I’d still say Orne—Perche—is beautiful country. I did not, for the record, see a single Percheron—horse—this visit, though they are still bred and promoted.

Then there was the train to Alençon. In my car there were only me and a man who’d said “bon soir” to me as he came into the station where I was pacing around, bored. Then the train stopped, and somewhat flustered, he told me he hadn’t realized that train was headed for Argentan, said goodnight, wished me a pleasant trip, and got off. Now, this train had just rolled in at the time mine was supposed to and I’d gotten on; there’d been no announcement. So, all alone now, speeding through the night, I of course began fretting that I, too, was on the wrong train: nervously checking my watch for the time we were supposed to stop at Surdon (where I would change trains), as we seemed to continue picking up speed rather than slow down.

Well, long story short, we did stop—very briefly—and I was left to contemplate whether it might not have been better to continue to Argentan (except for the fact that I had a hotel reservation in Alençon). There may be a “there” there, at Surdon (though if you Google it and see the photo at Wikipedia, you’ll see exactly what I did, only by day). But on a night when the temperature was headed for the upper 30s, Fahrenheit, a dozen or so hapless travelers were left on a platform in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. I fished the sweater out of my backpack and put it on over the long-sleeved knit shirt, under the vest, under the (thank goodness I’d checked the Alençon forecast that morning before leaving Paris, at least) woolen coat. I added the cap and gloves. The little lighted glass shelter offered only the illusion of a degree or so more of warmth; I suppose I would have been grateful if it had been raining. As it was, I could see a few stars. I had to laugh at how utterly ludicrous the situation was.

It really was only fifteen minutes or so before the next train came. We rolled into Alençon sometime after 9:00 (or 21:00, as they say). I checked the lighted map outside the station to orient myself and set off hiking toward Place Charles de Gaulle, a major roundabout, and my hotel.

The hotel restaurant was closed, along with most everything else, but the nice young man did direct me to a place a block or so away. This bar/restaurant specialized in—well, fondues, raclettes, that sort of thing. They did have pizza, which I ordered, though soup would have been very nice. There was an impressive list of rum shooters on the wall beside me, but I was already so wasted I didn’t think I should risk more than the glass of wine.

Amazingly, it turned out to be one of the body-tries-to-catch-up sort of nights. Maybe this was partly due to the fact that at 8:00 A.M. it was still quite dark out, from a combination of latitude, season, and lingering clouds, I guess. And a cold morning it was, too.

I can add “lost in Alençon” to my repertoire, now—only in trying to find the Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, in my defense. On the way there I did stumble across the Basilique de Notre-Dame, by virtue of first stumbling across (okay; truthfully, I threw plans to the wind and followed all the people converging with market baskets and little pull-along carts) a most wonderful open-air market. It was large and very busy. It was beautiful. In two separate locations I saw men standing continuously opening scallops, shucking them the same way one does oysters. There were all the gorgeous fruits and vegetables, the cheeses, little strawberry plants and flowers for planting, pumpkins, heaps of wet shiny mussels. On another level, closer to the basilica, there were clothing vendors.

At great length, after a ridiculous amount of walking, I did find the museum. The lacework really is incredible; there are examples dating to the seventeenth century. How many poor women went blind accomplishing this intricacy? At the other extreme, there are several updated couturier versions from as recently as 2005. The “Beaux Arts” part is mostly more interesting for its historic recording than extreme artistic value, I would say (though to be fair, I did give that part only a cursory walk-through). The whole thing is housed in a magnificent surviving cour carrée, said to be a former Jesuit school. There are other, similar buildings in the old town; the whole cobbled area is very nice.

The afternoon I spent in the Archives Départementales de l'Orne. These are in every way impressive: professional, obviously well-funded, housed in a modern building. Let alone that they contain records for the region going back to the eleventh century. I’d already determined online that there were no parish nor civil records there for any surnames I was interested in, though, leaving “only” recorded minutes of council meetings. Unindexed. Day by day, document by document, from 1545 to 1634 . . . I’ve done this before. I could do it again. But it would be the work of weeks, not hours. Hours weren’t even enough to create the Rosetta Stone in my head, to begin to be able to decipher more than a fraction of the archaic French written in idiosyncratic script. On top of all that, I was forcefully reminded, yet again, just how long ago the Juchereaux, et al, had left this region (as in, oh, when I had to specify I was interested only in records up to 1634). Yes, some of them had not remained in the New World; they had, in succeeding generations, returned to France, prospered there in the military or some other profession. Etc. But those would be very, very distant relatives, indeed. Mine, my direct ones, had left even Canada so long ago that they were a hundred years gone by the time that landholding map at the Tourouvre museum had been drawn (other siblings’ descendants were there, but not our line). I dutifully combed through a smidgen of a couple of folders (two- and three-inch thick folders) in a couple of large boxes. I consulted another couple of obscure secondary sources, long out-of-print books in French. And then I went and caught an hour earlier train than I’d originally planned.

For the first time (for me), it was a TGV back to Paris after LeMans. Unlike the other trains, this was packed, with assigned seating. Many of the passengers wore suits, or were otherwise well-dressed. When we were passing through a railroad cut or forest, without long-distance vistas to appear slow-moving, there was the sensation that we were going to just keep accelerating and accelerating until we levitated, we were going so fast. I’ll call it worth it, even though it struck me finally that I’d been neglecting to claim my discounted fares for age the whole time, what with there always having been something else preoccupying me.

And so back to Montparnasse, back to l’Île de la Cité, incredulous that I’d left less than forty-eight hours earlier, the backpack straps becoming excruciating (as I’d gradually added a book here, a newspaper there, the vest and shirt when the day had warmed up . . . on top of the laptop, the genealogy folder, the essentials). Maybe renting a car will be the way to go another time.