Les causses (part II)

Now I’ll confess that the place I was headed was in reality rather far away from La Rochelle, as far from there as from Paris, in spirit if not in geography.  I’ve written before of the causses, the limestone plateaus in France’s center-southwest. Cut by rivers – the Lot, the Dordogne, the Tarn, the Aveyron, and their tributaries – into green valleys and steep white gorges, with a roof of dry, rocky grassland dotted with scraggly oak and juniper.  On Saturday we arrived in Blanc, an almost-abandoned village up the Sanctus river valley from the town of Brusque in the Aveyron.  No need to locate it precisely: suffice it to know that it is a lot closer to the middle of nowhere than to Millau or Albi, the closest cities of any consequence. It is also geologically halfway between the Montagnes Noires of the Hérault and the true Aveyronnais limestone plateau.  More about Blanc later.  First, Wednesday, when we went for a walk in the causse, which has long had me dreaming.

Me and Mademoiselle, lost in the causse

In August, when we’d last been here near Figeac, in the Quercy, the grass on the causse was dry and brown. The bare landscape often reminds me of southern Idaho or eastern Oregon, except here the traces of humanity are more well-worn and written everywhere in stone: the dry stone fences that crisscross the hills, the abandoned stone terraces cut into the cliff-sides, the crumbling stone huts and stables at the corners of meadows, and the villages of modest houses gathered together into stony knots.  Older mineral traces are found in prehistoric stone dolmens and sculpted menhirs.

Still, despite all that human-wrought stone, I wouldn’t have guessed that the landscape was of human making, and yet it is: where sheep have stopped grazing, forest has taken over. Here, in a radius outside Millau, pasture and grassland remain because the land is the terroir of Roquefort cheese.  When you eat that iconic French ewes-milk blue, you preserve the causse.  It’s as simple and as unexpected as that.

It is May, and I brought my family to the Aveyron to see the causse in spring.  Limestone soil means orchids, and I’m a bit of a wild orchid fanatic (albeit one with far more enthusiasm than expertise).  I love finding orchids and puzzling over their varied shapes and colors that never seem to be described or illustrated coherently in my wildflower books.  I love them because they’re often terribly difficult to find, yet I discover them in the same places year after year.  They are rare and thus are sentinels of some idea of wilderness than I can’t otherwise reach.  But I can count on them. They show up in May and June, just when I’ve emerged from a long, urban winter, when they are symbols that all is still mostly right in the world.

An orchis singe, or "monkey orchid" (Note that all of my plant identifications are approximate)

Not all orchids are as rare as all that around here, I discovered.  Along the road there are constant bright patches of orchis mâle, which one guidebook assures me is the most common orchid in all of France.  On our first walks around Blanc, they were the only orchids I could find in bloom at all.  Thus my determination to go for a walk on the causse.

My husband found the itinerary, thanks to a pile of hiking books that he brought from home and some quick research on Google.  Our first stop was by the side of a calm country road, where my husband spotted a large patch of rare Pyrenean fritillaries from the car.  They aren’t orchids, but they even more unusual than any of the orchids we’d see.  Alongside we saw orchis singe and orchis pourpre.

Frittilaire des Pyrénées

We left the car in a tiny village, and the kids were soon bounding down a track through pastureland dotted with small trees.  They both love to hike: Le Petit can be counted on to cheerfully hike as much as 12 kilometers in a day, and Mademoiselle will walk as much as her legs and our patience will allow, while the rest of the time she rides reluctantly in a backpack carrier.  Le Petit loves “climbing” mountains and running along the trail.  Mademoiselle notices bugs of all kinds and stops to lean over them in amazement.  They both know how much Mommy loves flowers. Mademoiselle just learned to say “Or-kid!” and Le Petit loves to show off his math skills by counting them along the trail.  Neither of them care much beyond that now, but I love that they have the patience to come with me. 

Le Petit on the trail

The causse was in its robe de fête, with more wildflowers than I’ve seen anywhere in recent memory: anemone pulsatille and orchis pourpre and orchis mâle, wild tulips, violets and globulaire commune, to name only those I was reasonably sure I recognized.  At first, we ran up to each patch and counted and took pictures.  I even squeezed under a barbed-wire fence to get my first good look at some anemones. But soon the marvelous was too numerous even for us.  We found a good place to picnic where we could look over the causse amid the flowers, between the macro and the micro.

Orphrys petite araignée ("little spider")

A wild tulip

Not sure what this one is, but Le Petit liked it best, because it was the only one "not pink or purple"

Anémone pulsatille

Now as I look at the photos we took I realize that each flower is its own world.

TGV

I’m on the TGV, le train à grande vitesse, on my way to La Rochelle from Paris.  It is almost eight-thirty on a Friday night in May, and an opal daylight still lights up the countryside.  I love the way high-speed trains transport me through a landscape; I feel like I’m floating, disconnected from the land but still close to it, which makes the sensation of speed all the more thrilling.  When I was little and dreamt of flying I was always skimming the ground, just barely high enough to jump fences or maybe hurdle over the buckeye tree in my backyard.  I could truly feel I was flying, the sensation was so palpable, which left me confused and elated when I woke up. Traveling in the TGV feels just like that.

This morning, on the other hand, I felt quite tied to the ground, dragging my suitcase from bus to commuter train and finally to the office.  I’m too old for this, or too out of practice, I thought.  My suitcase was stuffed and heavy, and I also carried a backpack with two laptops, my purse, and a shoulder bag with the random perishables I’d salvaged from our refrigerator for my lunch and dinner.  I left the house after checking five times at least that the stove was off and the windows were closed, my bed neatly made and most crumbs cleared from the kitchen counter.  I was alone, the kids and my husband had left for La Rochelle days before me. When I leave for more than twenty-four hours, my OCD acts up, and I become certain that either I or my apartment will disappear while I’m gone.

In the afternoon I left the office promptly.  RER, Métro, Gare Montparnasse.  Only in Paris – maybe in London? – do the public transportation powers-that-be inflict so many stairs on the traveler dragging a rolling suitcase.  I gave thanks for having working limbs and no toddler to mind. 

I love train stations, with their high glass-and-steel ceilings that bound the heavens with a roof of progress and a 19^th-century idea of modernity.  In major Paris train stations there’s a big old-fashioned sign hung from the ceiling with letters that clack loudly when they are updated.  As I watch the sign in Montparnasse, I appreciate that in this age of Twitter feeds something ‘real-time’ still takes a few seconds of well-regulated anticipation to update while I stand and watch.  ‘La Rochelle’ disappears, the cities above it whir and regroup, and then ‘La Rochelle’ reappears and coalesces into something legible and reassuring.  Train 8393: platform 4.

While I’m watching this I shout into my cell phone over the surrounding din.  My husband and mother-in-law had called to make sure that I would make my train.  Le Petit jumped into the conversation and told me about his afternoon the beach, the fossils he collected with his new rake, and the hole he dug into the center of the earth with his new shovel.  He was audibly reassured when I told him my train had been assigned a platform.

A quirk of French trains is that you have to cancel your ticket before you board by sticking it in a special machine at the train station; this indispensable step is called composter.  I do this, I find my car and my seat, I hoist my suitcase overhead, and sit down with my pile of magazines.  I’m in a daze as we leave the Paris suburbs, as we disappear in and out of tunnels.  I barely glance outside as we pass blocks of sad gray apartment buildings and warehouses.  I later note distractedly that we’ve left the city and are somewhere in the flat agricultural plains to the southeast of Paris, which at this time of year are green and mustard-yellow with young wheat and flowering colza. I don’t find this part of France picturesque.  My eyes drop back to the page I’m reading.

Gentle hills and trees started to roll by eventually, and I started to look out the window more attentively.  My idea of Paris – and my city-dweller’s apathy -- was starting to fade, when I saw a spring green field, a herd of cows, a copse of trees and behind them, a low stone building.  And I stopped and stared.

I’m not sure what it is that works its spell when you see a place, somewhere, and it works something inside you, and you recognize it. I saw those cows in that field and for some reason, I said to myself, this! And this was my France and this was my escape from everything which has been weighing on me these past months.  A revelation.  A get-out-of-jail-free-card. 

Hello, cow!

I don’t remember, but I think the cows stared fixedly at the train that raced by, as cows usually do.

I got out my laptop and began to write.

Poitiers.  First stop.  The train rolls into the station in the steep valley below the town, and on one side of the tracks there are houses built at the foot of the cliffs, with facades and abbreviated rooftops that jut out from caves hidden behind.  They look rather conventional for structures married to the natural; they share the dusty brown and grays of the stone behind them, but their windows are square and their tiles regular.  There’s a sign for a car garage and three air conditioning units stuck onto the rock. 

They still blow a whistle on the train platform right before the doors close, just like in films, and it doesn’t take much to imagine that a plume of steam also announces our departure. Outside of Poitiers there’s open country again, and just at the horizon I see a road lined with round, even trees.  In reality I can’t see the road, and only guess it is there from the line of trees, which are regularly spaced as they so often are in France.  The tree-lined country road figures prominently in my personal iconography of France.  I find them almost as reassuring as high-ceilinged train stations.

Now the landscape has flattened again, and in the time it has taken me to write this, daylight has all but disappeared.  We’re pulling into Niort, our second stop.  It is past nine-thirty.  I’ve less than an hour left before the train reaches La Rochelle, but I’m already so, so much farther away than I had imagined I’d be from where I left.

Update

For those waiting impatiently for an update on our life, here are some of the exciting bits:

We sold the apartment in 1.5 weeks.  At a slightly lower price than we expected, but not by much, to a lovely couple who have friends in the building and weren't perturbed by the view.

As much as selling the apartment has (so far) proven much less difficult than I expected, getting a bank loan for the new apartment is proving much harder.  Between the changing details and the rates and the paperwork that keeps expanding and the medical visits and the endlessness of it all, I don't know when it will be wrapped up.  Presumably -- let's be optimistic -- sometime before we close on June 28th.  There seems to be no question that we can get a loan, since we're good credit risks, even nowadays, but neither of the two banks we're dealing with can seem to get their act together.

I don't know whether I'm reassured or concerned that everyone I've talked to has had a similar experience.  At least no one I've talked to so far is currently living under a bridge.

The only thing worse than negotiating a loan with a banker is doing it in a foreign language.  Go ahead, ask me about my taux d'endettement.

And while we're talking debt load, let's mention stress load: the ambient stress in my household is turning it into a tinderbox, and it takes pretty much nothing for my husband and I to get into a stupid, loud, useless fight.  We always get it worked out fairly quickly, since we're not mad at each other, just worn out in general and worried.  I'm glad we love and trust each other so much, because right now, I can't imagine living with anything less.

Work is crazy -- good crazy, busy crazy -- for both of us.

Given all that, I haven't thought much about packing yet.

We will have to find a new child care arrangement since our shared nanny isn't going to follow us across the Parisian suburbs.  Exactly what kind of child care is up in the air since we don't know if Mademoiselle will be potty trained in time to start nursery school in September.

When I'll be going back to work full-time.

And by which time we have been in our new place three months.

Three weeks of which we'll be away on a long-awaited vacation.

Suffice it to say that our transatlantic move ten years ago seems like a logistical walk in park compared to this.

Now, for some updates about the kids:

Mademoiselle is remarkably articulate for a two-year-old.  She speaks in very complete sentences, extended monologues, really, about what she sees and does and reasons.  It is funny to hear two-year-old thoughts come out of her mouth in Big Kid narrative.  She gets overwhelmed by the most unexpected things, like a big vase of tulips that I put on the coffee table this weekend which made her run around in circles and jump up and down.

"Ohh, flowers, they're pretty, the flowers, and and and the bees, they like the flowers. [Carefully bending a tulip and looking inside.]  Oh, oh, there aren't any bees!  There aren't any bees! The flowers are pretty, but the bees, they're not nice, and they make honey, but I don't like honey, and and and..."  Or something like that, but in French, and it went on for several minutes while we watched and laughed.

Le Petit is big enough to take responsibility for a lot, and to (almost) reliably use his fork at the table, but he daydreams and loses himself in things.  I'll find him sprawled on the floor with one shoe off and own shoe on, his jacket pulled off of one arm, absorbed in a book.  We've put in place bribery -- err, positive reinforcement -- to incite him to put his stuff away and wash his hands when he comes home without being asked five times in a row.

Sometimes I forget that he is still so little.

He loves the books I read to Mademoiselle, even the simple ones.  She loves the big kid books I read him.  They fight for room on my lap.

I try to remember to cuddle le Petit, to let him be little, to let him be himself.  I'm not sure I'm always good at this.

Spring has finally decided to come to Paris, after the longest winter I can remember.  There's gray sky and rain and more rain, and most days are still not exactly warm, but the daffodils and tulips are blooming all at once and they've turned the fountains back in the square near our apartment.

For years now, a bulb that accidentally got planted in same pot as the lopsided lemon tree on our balcony has put up dark, shiny leaves in the spring and nothing else.  For years I've thought about pulling it up, but instead left it.  This year it bloomed.  It turns out it's a white hyacinth.  With the cold weather, the flowers have been pristine now for at least two weeks.  When they notice it periodically through the sliding glass door, in between the packs of bottled water and our folded-up stroller, Mademoiselle and Le Petit are elated.

The view from here

This is the view from my apartment.  It isn't a view over Parisian zinc rooftops, and it certainly doesn't frame the Eiffel Tower.  At night you can, however, see the beam of the searchlight from the Eiffel Tower swing out from either side of the imposing concrete apartment building across the street.  That apartment building and mine are engaged in a sort of a hostile staring match across a garden, a low office building, and a quiet street. High-rise cranes sprout up briefly on the periphery of this view, and their lights wink at me at night.  I can see one church steeple and the dormered windows of Haussmanian buildings.  Our apartment is calm, remarkably so for an urban environment, and there's hardly any traffic noise. When it's quiet inside and the windows are open, I can hear trains passing over a far-off bridge on the Seine.  

When my husband first walked into our apartment back when we moved in in 2003, he thought, "Oh no, I cannot live with that view."  He took the apartment anyway -- we were renting; it was practical; what were the chances we'd stay long?  The price was right, the layout was nice, the location was almost perfect.  Almost ten years later, we bought it, and we're still here.  

I took this picture yesterday evening, at the end of a gray winter day, and with my BlackBerry telephone, so it is particularly ugly.  I took it and then noticed that even on the small telephone screen it looked far worse than reality, and that made me laugh.  We started showing the apartment to prospective buyers a little over a week ago, and most of the negative feedback we've gotten has been about the view.  I'm a little bit house-proud and sensitive, shall we say, so I was steeling myself for the deprecating comments I might overhear about the wear and tear, the small surface area, the unfortunate choice of kitchen floor tile.  Mostly none of that seems to phase anyone, or if it does, they don't mention it to the real estate agents.  But the view came back over and over and I laugh to myself since after all it is what struck us at first, too.  Now it is the one thing we almost never notice.

When you're in a space and that space is home, your perspective changes, you focus in.  It becomes a place you love in large part because the people you love happen to live there, too.  That doesn't keep you from hating some things about it, often irrationally.  I complained for years about the small size of our apartment before recently I began to (mostly) enjoy the organisational challenge of fitting in the things I love and letting go of the ones I don't, like life-sized game of Tetris.  I hate that there's no decent place to store the vacuum cleaner.  I love my kitchen, but hate the impossible-to-clean floor.  The whole became home and I learned to love it because of that, and then appreciate its qualities: the calm, the quiet, the strong morning light that streams in on clear days, the intelligent layout that keeps a family of four from tripping over each other.  In order to love it I had to change and grow into it, leaving behind very American ideas about what life and home and success were supposed to look like.  

I visited our new apartment first on my own, during a lunch break.  I took a bus across the suburbs from my office and hopped off on a busy boulevard on the outskirts of Versailles.  I went through the portal of the building to a calm inner garden, and from there to another entryway, up two floors, to a place that will soon be home.  I walked in with the realtor wearing my best poker face.  The owners were out of town, so the place was perfectly neat and clean, and more than that, it felt somehow like it was loved by those owners.  I don't know why, but I could just tell. 

I was trying to look indifferent as I visited, but it turned out I was indifferent: I inspected the rooms coolly, talked in generalities about buildings from the era, discussed the price, all without a trace of emotion.  The apartment appealed to me from the beginning but in a detached way.  I made a mental list of its qualities and it made sense.  Now I almost feel guilty, as if I'd acted like a jerk on a first date.  It's been over a month since I visited and I spend my time virtually moving-in in my head, rearranging furniture, dreaming of new things to buy some day: planning the romance.  

I am wondering which, if any, of the poker-faced visitors we have right now will choose our place.  I hope they end up loving it, and it hope it takes them less time than it took me.  In the meantime, I'm thinking a lot about the emotional and illogical side of home, about which part is imagined and which part is real, which part is fixed and which part you carry with you when you move on.

Pending translation

This week marks the beginning of the my tenth year working for an American company in France and now, for almost the first time, I'm finding my status as a native English speaker is coming in handy.

The French division of my company was born of a friendly takeover by a large American firm, and for years we've had a "petit village gaulois" à la Asterix kind of vibe.  At work I've spoken in French, argued in French, written many detailed technical documents in French -- albeit with an inimitable style, according to my boss -- and learned quite a few domain-specific business terms exclusively in French.  I've hard-coded my share of cryptic application error messages in French, too.  In email, my French grammar is supposedly better than that of many of my native-born colleagues, a fact of which I'm inordinately proud.

Enter large multinational project.  Designed in the UK.  Developed in India.  Customized and deployed across the globe, in countries as diverse as Brazil and China.  As well as France, my new home.  Clearly there's no cultural complexity here, right?

My colleagues all understand some English and deciphering written text for them is no problem, but when they have to speak or, worse, understand some of the more obscure British accents over a poor conference call line, they're clearly uncomfortable.  Some are frankly lost.  When basic comprehension is so painful, the will to collaborate wanes, and pretty soon everyone on both sides is hiding behind walls of But They Just Don't Understand Over There that are so much easier to construct when there's a language/cultural barrier.  

Plus, I've been told, there are just some, err, issues between the French and the British. Ententes cordiales are not automatic.

So I get pulled in for a small part of this multinational project, and then for a larger piece when they realize that I can cover a lot of ground quickly when I'm serving as a technical and cultural translator.  Aside from the business terms that I only know in French and where I look like an idiot as I scramble for a translation, this is going smoothly.  I love it.  I feel useful.  And though it may simply be an accident of my personal and professional trajectory, for the first time I'm bringing something to the table to no one else can bring.

After pinch-hitting as a translator on a conference call a couple of weeks ago, I came home from work in an unusually good mood.  I picked up Le Petit at After Care and on our walk back tried to share some of my enthusiasm with him.  (I'm always looking for ways to motivate him to speak more English, but thus far nothing works nearly as well as sesamestreet.org.)  I launched into a cute "Mommy helped her colleagues and she's really proud" speech which Le Petit interrupted.

"I could do that, too, maman," he announced.

"I bet you could," I concurred proudly, "Because you speak English and French."

"...And if it were me, I'd explain to them the difference between American English and British English, too!"  he went on.

This puzzled me.  "Oh?"

"Yes.  I'd explain that in England they say 'trousers' and in America... in America, they say 'pants'!"

He's mastering cultural differences already, you see.  

I don't know if I'm going to make a big difference on this project ultimately, but there is something at about the whole thing that is exhilarating at the moment.  For the first time, too, I understand why the linguistic stakes here in France are so high, and why Le Petit's nursery school starts English instruction at age four.  Being bilingual isn't simply a skill that's nice to have, it is critical.  This is not only something I never learned in the US, but something it took me almost a decade of living overseas to fully understand.  

Threshold

Notre Dame de Paris got a new set bells this year.  Le Petit went to see them on Tuesday with his grandparents: for the moment they're down at human-level, not up in the ether of the belltower.  He touched them, he told me, and they made noise.

I'm sitting on the couch and watching a television program about Notre Dame, its new bells, its 850 jubilee celebration this year. 850 years and now they're busy installing the same system of locks on the doors, and transforming them into fire doors.  

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day.  My husband and I are not celebrating it for the first time since we've known each other.  At least not tomorrow.  Maybe this weekend?  Except this weekend we've planned to patch plaster and repaint the bathroom ceiling.  Tomorrow I'm dropping by the hardware store on my way home from work.  

"For Valentine's Day, I got you an apartment," my husband joked earlier, and I laughed because yeah, that's almost true.  We found an apartment in Versailles.  Our offer was accepted last week.  We're hoping to sign the paperwork that accompanies the offer next week, and start the codified process that marks real estate transactions in France.  That's why we're working on fixing up our place to sell: organizing, repainting, replacing the caulk the bathroom, carting off books to used bookstores and clothes and kitchen gadgets to donation centers.  I've been keeping my anxiety at bay by keeping busy.  I'm not sure our apartment has ever looked this neat or clean. 

Walking around our urban suburb today, my day off, I thought about the time we've spent here.  Le Petit was with me, and he ran through the park where we'd spent so many afternoons when he was tiny.  Time has gone by fast, and I realized not long ago that I've lived in this home longer than I've lived at any other address in my life.  We'll likely move in July, a month before we'd celebrate ten years here.  So it makes some sense that a new chapter is beginning now, I guess; that I'm a bit frightened, of course; that I'm astonished at the passage of time.

My husband wants to go to Notre Dame this weekend.  I do, too. To see the bells.  And to put it all in perspective.

Chez moi, chez eux, chez nous

Rectilinear buildings were what I expected and rectilinear buildings awaited me.  I met the real estate agent below the first building of la résidence, as these postwar apartment complexes are grandly named; two rows of neatly-kept buildings on the wooded hillside.  They looked imposing from the parking lot, but most were only three or four storeys, and the paved path between them was nicely landscaped.  It had just been shoveled, too, since light snow had fallen the night before.

Could I live here?  I wondered to myself, like a do every time, and I pictured myself walking the kids down this path to school in the morning or making snowmen with them in the courtyard.  I find house hunting exhausting, and not just because I'm apparently no damn good at it.  The exhaustion comes from trying to project myself into every possible place and what-if.  I can't visit an apartment but try and virtually fit my furniture inside, turning bookshelves (we have an awful lot of them) around in my head and it all gets to be too much rather quickly.  I can get invested in a place from just a few pictures in the listing. I'll literally start flagging pages in my dogeared IKEA catalog in preparation for remodeling the kitchen, and then... well, then I'll see it in person, or learn something about it I didn't expect, and all my enthusiasm will deflate.  I can't seem to maintain any sort of emotional equilibrium through the process.  My husband can't either, so we discuss endlessly and bicker intermittently and never come to a decision.

My husband, who had already visited the place, warned me that the owner was a charmer who would do his best to sell me the place.  I'd roped my father-in-law into coming with me to ask all the right questions as a disinterested party, to present me the pros and cons afterward, and also to drive since I'm now a wimp about driving in snow.

The living room was as agreeable as the building was nondescript.  There was a view out over the wooded park of small chateau, and the trees were beautiful and lacy, lined with snow.  They were showing off for a potential buyer, I was convinced, along with the birds and the squirrels.  A huge change from the view out our current windows to the gray 1950s building across the street.  The place felt small, though, smaller than the actual surface area led me to expect, and the price was far too high.  The owner kept tediously enumerating the positive details: the brand-new kitchen, the closet space, the family-friendliness of the complex.  I had a good look around the place at least twice before we asked to see the basement storage unit and the parking garage.

"How many floors in this building?" my father-in-law asked as we squeezed into the tiny elevator.  I was puzzled by what seemed like a hurried response from the owner, meant, it appeared, to cut off any further questions.

"Two. There are only two."

I thought about this briefly, and it didn't make sense.  French buildings are numbered from floor 0, the rez-de-chaussée. An American third floor is therefore called le deuxième étage, or second floor.  The unit we looked at was on the second floor; therefore, there must be two floors below it, not one.  I didn't worry about it much, though.  I didn't even wonder much at the doormat I noticed sitting incongruously in front of what I assumed to be a basement storage unit.

As we walked back to his car, my father-in-law and I discussed the merits of the place.  To my father-in-law, the only major drawback was how far it was from Paris, from the train station, and from the schools, but none of that was a surprise.  I wasn't ready to buy, but I wasn't ready to write it off yet, either.  Wait and see.

That afternoon my husband and I drove back to the same town and visited another apartment for sale in a different complex.  The price was much more reasonable, but instead of being nestled in greenery, the apartment was in a sad grouping of towers in the middle of the town center.  It seemed older, which made sense: it was built in the 1960s, while the one we'd both visited earlier was built in the mid-seventies.  It had strange details, like an elevator that opened directly into the unit.  With hardly any discussion we both knew it was a no.

Still we stood in the entryway of the building for some time after our visit discussing things with the real estate agent.  Since she was with a difference agency than the one that had shown us the first place,  I figured I might get some interesting information from her.  The town is small, the first apartment had been on the market at a number of agencies for a certain time already, and almost all the town's apartment complexes are so huge any agent in town is sure to know all their quirks.

"Oh, we have that one, too, and it's far too expensive," she told us, and we nodded in agreement to encourage her. "He'll never sell it at that price.  But he tells me it's worth it, his apartment, and he's in no hurry, so.  But he's not the first one in that résidence to try and sell high.  They all end up having to lower their prices, and..."

She looked as us confidentially and then lowered her voice.

"I shouldn't tell you this, but..."  She paused with a slight smile.  Do your job, madame, I thought to myself, and give us the dirt.

"The problem is the chambres de bonnes," she told us knowingly.  Chambres de bonnes are the maids' quarters that up until that instant I'd only associated with old Haussmanian apartments.  In 19th century buildings they are typically small rooms under the roof and sometimes they are still sold as add-ons to large bourgeois apartments.  Interior sanitation and plumbing, once it arrived, was generally shared -- as was often the case even in more spacious living quarters in the heart of Paris until I'd guess the 1970s at least.  This was the first either of us had ever heard of chambres de bonnes in a modern building, however.

Sensing our incomprehension, the agent continued her explanation.  The individual rooms, she explained, had shared bathroom facilities.  People who worked in town (working menial jobs, one assumed: cleaning other people's houses, working in checkout lines, tending gardens) rented them, claiming to be alone, but sometimes they moved in with their families.  It's no secret that Paris is riddled with substandard housing: decrepit hotels, tiny rooms with nonexistent sanitation or inadequate heating, ageing housing projects in depressed suburbs.  This was probably not exactly the same.  Still.  Up until now, I'd always imagined the problem far away from me, not in my potential backyard.

I've noticed that when people want to say something racist or xenophobic but due to some bizarre scruple they don't want to state it directly, they talk about food.  So it was with the real estate agent: as she told it, one of the biggest problems was the cooking smells.  Food from Africa, she implied, not food from here.  The problem to her was insecurity, difference, foreignness.

I realized pretty quickly that I had a problem with the situation, too, that there was no way I'd move into that apartment.  I was disturbed by the fact that I'd be just upstairs from people who were being exploited, who were living with their families in a space that was meant for one, while I was living with my family in a giant apartment and (knowing me) still finding it too small. I didn't want to run across my neighbors knowing at once that we had so much in common -- for they are most likely immigrants, as am I; teaching their kids about both their new home and back home, as am I; proudly speaking two languages, as am I -- and yet are so far apart in privilege and resources.  I would be uncomfortable, to say the least.  I would feel embarrassed and worthy of their resentment.  And yes, such a situation would feel insecure.  I would not have the slightest idea how to bridge that gap.

What difference does it make, I ask myself, if the people who are living in substandard housing live downstairs or across the street or across the city from me?  It shouldn't make any difference at all.  But clearly it's out of sight, out of mind for me.  My conscience shouldn't be so easily placated.  I shouldn't want to live in my little bubble.

I hesitated before writing this, not sure if I should be so honest about how this made me feel.  I never thought I'd stumble over something this complicated in my frivolous house hunt.  That I can hold onto that naivete just proves my privilege, I guess.