You'd never know that this picture is shot from the other side of a high chain link fence where someone grazes them like livestock on the ruins of an old vineyard. This is not to say they aren't still growing a lot of grapes, but we are seeing more and more abandoned vineyards, sometimes with the vines violently ripped up and taken off, sometimes as though the old vintner just departed this life. Yesterday, hiking around the dolmens and menhirs above Castelfranc, we dropped down into Niaudon and passed several abandoned vineyards. A little further on, we came to some land I looked at buying a few years back when we despaired of finding an old place we could afford. That's exactly where I bumped into the wife of the most active developer/architect/builder in the area whose outraged clients dot our circle of acquaintance. She was out scouting around for building lots and found these at Niaudon too expensive. Now the lots are in the process of being built out like any old American suburb, munching away at the farmland that came down through, in this case, perhaps thousands of generations.
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This grandmotherly hutch is like the newest member of our family if they only sold relatives for 200€ at the chain of used furniture stores called Troc. We had been searching high and low, especially at the huge salvage yard in Pescadoires known as Mas Maury. How many frigid afternoons had we debated broken down, wormy armoires and buffets, some with sticker prices still expressed in francs. This one I loved at first sight and it didn't hurt that the great clerk, Yes-Yes. who insisted on using his servicable English found all the door keys and arranged for delivery from Montauban the following Monday. Yes-Yes.
The oak in this piece might cost almost the purchase price in the rough. And then there is the effusive carving. I'm thinking this was semi-mass produced in the nineteen-thirties. What about all the carving? I'm thinking of the row of pantographic pin routers they used at the carving shop next door to my old shop in the South End of Boston: the American eagle original in the middle and then 6 replicas being automatically mimicked to the left and to the right. One slip of the grinder and you had 12 broken feathers. So somewhere along the line there were boxes full of this floral oakwork ready to be glued on here and there.
It appears to have its original finish which suggests pride and weekly oil and elbow grease by the imaginary grandmother.
Such musings naturally lead to wondering about the other people who have lived in this house. Francis introduced me to a cheerful young guy of North African origins I would say. He partly grew up in this house and was a bit amazed to see how we have turned it upside down. He used to sneak out the back window to make a quick getaway from his mother.
Before his time, the house belonged to the Miran family, one with deep roots here to judge by the Castelfranc cemetary and the fact that there's a hamlet off toward Crayssac called Miran. These Mirans were apparently furniture makers and good ones too, according to the old lady whose family used to own the house next door. She said she played in his workshop among the Louis XIV reproductions. The last Miran here committed suicide. She said the house was originally build by a river captain who just rolled barrels of wine down to the shore for the bateliers to float down to Bordeaux.
