rentrée

A friend who was to stay here in this house over the summer had to leave.  He said that the house "didn't like him;  it was like wearing someone else's clothes."  The rest of his family didn't feel anything of the sort apparently,  just him.  I keep looking around wondering what went into giving him this sensation.  For the sake of argument, let's assume--perhaps correctly, who knows?-- that it has nothing to do with me.  Then what is it about the place that produced this hostile vibe?  I look around me and see the tinted rough plaster with all its blotches, the happy friendly band of tile above the cherry cabinets, all welcoming and warm.

I would have said that we completely transformed this house, almost literally turning it upside down.  We even moved the stair and aimed it the opposite direction.  Couldn't be the kitchen, could it?  With it's view of the river and big round table.  The living room with its African hangings from the nice ecological lady's shop in Cazals, the silly elephant table, the simple chestnut staircase.  Living room, ok.

The spare bedroom?  A hard space to get your head around:  it's where, for the time being, you enter the house.  For some time it was the shop and even now harbors the old hollow piano case into which I intend to use to insert the electronic piano I bought from Karl.  Otherwise it has a huge bookcase with giant curtains that conceal our stock of toilet paper, wine, the peanut butter stash,  kitchen overflow.  The ancient oak ceiling joists are painted a possibly gruesome brown that sometimes reminds me of an Elks Club bar room minus the mounted, moth-eaten 6-pointer.   The floor here and in the main bedroom is click clack and the furnishings pretty much pure Ikea.  You must pass through the laundry room with its odd slanted ceiling of frosted glass.  Behold the bathroom, a bright but low-ceilinged, roomy room.

By the time you reach the main bedroom from the entrance you have made no fewer than five 90° turns.  An amateurish design if there ever was one, but hostile?  The main bedroom has light from three directions and the dark brown click clack plasticky flooring gets lost beneath the beautiful cherry armoire and oak chest and the veneer drawers on loan from Kim's house.  The rose tinted plaster has lots of splotches.

Did the tinted plaster suggest a Rorshach test to my friend?  It's occurred to me that it would have been terrific grist for an acid trip in 1968.

So if we're assuming it's not me and we've absolved the decor, then that leaves the psychic remnants of previous inhabitants.  The house for a long time belonged to the Miran family, skilled woodworkers who made fancy Louis XIV furniture.  There's a hamlet called Miran over by Fages and Mirans buried in the Castelfranc graveyard.  One of them committed suicide in this house.

Or it could be previous inhabitants.  God knows how old this place is.  I wonder how far back tax records go?  Did they survive the Revolution?  The town itself seems to go back to around 1250.  Opinions vary on when this house was built, whether before or after the Revolution.  And Rue St Roch lies along the long Roman road that ran from Lyon to Bordeaux.