French Village HomeIt was love at first sight when writer Polly Devlin saw a house on the ramparts of a village in the Languedoc which seemed to have views over half of France - but now she is selling up
FOR EIGHT years I have lived on and off in a high, healthy small 16th century house in a beautiful village in the Département of the Tarn in Languedoc in southern France. The half-timbered houses (called colombages in French) so lean in on each other that their roofs nearly touch above the small twisting streets which coils upwards like something out of the Book of Kells to the peak of the village, crowned by a windmill and a monumental Calvary.
From up there it seems you can see half of France - to the south right over to the Pyrenees and north up to Albi with its great red bizarre cathedral, the biggest brick building on earth. Lautrec, in the fiefdom of the counts of Toulouse-Lautrec (the famous painter was born in Albi where a museum houses his collected works), is a village perché, one of the loveliest of the many fortified habitations in the region built as lookouts for enemy marauders from Spain, England or even a predatory adjacent duke.
Officially listed as one of the most beautiful villages in France, Lautrec is the centre of the pink garlic industry. Pink garlic is delicious and once you have eaten it you want no other. The garlic festival in the first week of August is something to behold. The village is transformed into a garlic palace with vast mounds of garlic cloves fashioned into fantasies - space shapes, nativity scenes, huge windmills, fountains spurting garlic, prancing horses. Every visitor, and there are thousands, gets a cup of garlic soup and there is medieval-like feasting and music in the evening. It is the only time that Lautrec is noisy - the rest of the time it is steeped in tranquillity.
Lautrec has a pharmacy, two doctors, a dentist, three hairdressers, a windmill, a café, two restaurants, a small supermarket, a general stores, a boulangerie, a really good butcher, a post office, a pottery, two gift shops, three B&Bs, a clog-making atelier, an art gallery, a school, a crèche, a daycare centre, a gendarmerie, a church, an old people's home, a Roman lavoir and a market on Fridays.
About an hour-and-a-half away is turreted Carcassone (Ryanair), to the east is Toulouse (an hour away with a big airport) and nearby is Castres, with its Goya paintings and wonderful market. But in Lautrec you feel in the back of beautiful beyond. Yet for centuries this area of the Languedoc was part of the pays de cocagne which signified a place of fabulous riches. Its wealth was founded on a plant called the "pastello" (isatis tinctoria) which yields pastel, the wonderful indigo blue dye (known as woad in Britain) used by cloth producers all over Europe. In the 15th and 16th centuries, cocagnes or mulched pastel leaf-balls were worth more than gold.
When less expensively produced indigo began arriving from the new world, the trade fell away and the region decayed. The signs are still there in the châteaux and large houses dotted about the region. Many of these have been restored by people like me from the colder north of Europe, hence such nicknames as Tinsel Tarn and Kensingtarn, coined by sophisticated wags of which there are many tucked away in the region.
I have never been happier than when I was there in the high quiet place where the air comes from the Pyrenees and the Montagne Noire so you are always refreshed. People go on about how rude the French are - but you never meet anyone in the streets here but they greet you with friendliness and say bonjour and they are achingly eager to help with my stumbling French.
I bought the house nearly 10 years ago on impulse. If I think about something I can't do it, so I let instinct take over and devil take the hindmost. So far I have got away with it and this is how it happened in Lautrec.
I went with my friend Suzanne to look at the exterior of a house which she had pulled out of buying almost at the last moment. It was in a small quiet street attached to a sort of tower on one side and a few other ramshackle houses on the other and had feathery beamed colombage walls, a medieval door, and pale blue shutters, and the instant I saw it I fell in love. By chance the owner, a small fiery looking person, was standing outside and frightened of the noisy French confrontation that might take place, I hid behind an adjacent lamppost. Suzanne, brave as anything, said: "I'm sorry, Madame, that at the last minute I couldn't buy your house but circumstances intervened." She didn't mention that she had fallen in love and eloped with another house. "N'inquietez- vous pas," the owner said, "you are a woman of rare quality. I am happy to have met you . . . someone will buy my house".
I was even then being helplessly swamped by the terrible irresistible wave that drowns all the good intentions of the addict - the alcoholic, the gambler, the eater, the collector - and thought wildly: "I'll have a bit of that please", stepped forward out of the shadows and said: "I will buy your house." I hadn't even seen inside but when I walked in and threw open the shutters, in that moment my imagined world of France became a reality.
It was in a pretty bad state of disorder but I didn't haggle over the price because I had never seen anything like the view . . . from the windows and the garden which are on the ramparts of the village you look out over la France profonde towards the Pyrenees in a huge blue and green and golden panorama.
I spent years doing it up - re-roofing and rewiring it, putting in a fireplace in the salon, building a kitchen, restoring its every inch so that it became a house I could come back to and in an instant it would be ready for living.
It has two bedrooms and a third in the grenier (attic) and two bathrooms, one of which I modelled on the bathrooms in the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris, which is my favourite museum in the world. It has hand-fired Italian white tiles with a rolled tile green border at shoulder height and an Edwardian bath with terrifically grand French fittings. From this room, with its long wall of windows thrusting out over the roof below, the view is at its most spectacular.) There's a kitchen and a sittingroom and a hall which looks as medieval as it is and downstairs at garden level, I dug out a cool big room. I sometimes sleep here with the doors open to the garden under Patricia Jorgensen's huge botanical paintings and sometimes I have lunch inside when the sun is beating down. So much did I love the place that when the old man next door died I bought his house and garden too, though it was a sadly derelict ruin. If you put the two together you'd have a fantastic house. Or two. Sadly I am selling both; I can't get there any more. But I'll always see it in my dreams.
Address:3 & 4 rue des Cordelliers, 81440 Lautrec; house no 1 is 142.24sq m (1,531sq ft); house no 2 is 123sq m (1,324sq ft)
Price:€315,000 for the two-house package
Agent:Languedoc Living Lltd
Tel:00 33 468915635
