This is cheese country.  And not just any cheese, but home to one of the best and most famous in the world–camembert. 

So, with friends coming from Paris for the weekend, we were determined to show off a little bit and make a special camembert the star of the cheese platter. 

That turned out to be easier said than done.

At the local market we spotted Madame Durand at her stand.  Thank goodness she’s here this week, we thought, because if there were royalty in the cheese world, Francois and Natalie Durand would be king and queen. 

As far as food purists are concerned–and isn’t everyone in France a food purist?–the Durands make the only truly authentic camembert in existence.  That’s because their cheese is the only one in the universe still made from the milk of purebred Norman cows who graze only on the grass within the confines of the Camembert commune.  No other milk gets added to the mix.  This is the one and only camembert of Camembert.

We hurried over to Madame Durand and ordered our camembert.

She had been standing behind her outdoor stall for hours, selling a cheese here, some eggs there, as well as cream so thick it took nearly a minute to slide off the ladel into a glass jar.  “When do you want to eat the cheese?” she asked.  She carefully picked up one cheese, removed the round wooden cover and pressed it lightly with her thumbs.  We told her it was for that night.

“Then I don’t have anything for you,” she said resolutely, covering up the cheese and putting in back in the display case.  “None of my cheeses will be ready to eat for three days.”  There were stacks of camemberts in front of her, and few customers remaining as the weekly market drew to a close.

“Well, that’s  okay.  We’ll take one anyway.”

She was wearing an old dress covered by an apron stained from the day’s work. Behind her was the battered, tiny truck she used to haul her products to–and usually from–the market.  Although their cheeses make the Durands unique, they obviously do not make them rich. 

She looked us straight in the eye.  “No,” she said.  “I won’t sell you one.”  And she turned away.

We were stunned.  “Why not?” we asked.

She turned around sharply.  “I know your type.  You’ll eat it tonight anyway.  You don’t have respect for the cheese.  No, you cannot buy any of mine.”

We felt humiliated and angry.  We were going to pay for the cheese, after all, so what difference should it make to her when we ate it?  

But as we walked away we began to think about what happened.  We had just been taken to task by a woman who knew what she was about, who believed in her cheese and her work.  There was no way she was going to sell those things short, even if it meant she didn’t sell them at all.

Camembert, as Madame Durand well knows, has a pedigree that reaches back more than two centuries.  It was a product of the French Revolution when Marie Harel, a young dairy maid working on a farm on the edge of the village of Camembert, hid a royalist priest fleeing the revolutionary soldiers. 

During the day as she milked and churned, she would release him from the tiny hiding space she had created behind the fireplace.  He tasted the cheese she made.  Everyone loves the flavor, Marie said, but it always comes out looking grey and not very appetizing.  The priest, a native of the Brie region, suggested she try the same air-drying method his compatriots used for their cheese.  Et voila!  The small round cheese destined to be made everywhere from South Dakota to South Africa was born.

The farm where Marie Harel lived and worked still exists, but camembert, the cheese, is no longer made there. 

Instead, Madame Durand is the well-deserved inheritor of Mademoiselle Harel’s mantel.  She treats her hand-made cheeses like the jewels they are and is ever mindful of camembert’s distinguished traditions.  There are no compromises chez Durand, but there is an abundance of pride.

Monsieur and Madame Durand know each of their cows and do all their own milking.  Thankfully their daughter recently joined them to help on the farm and in the business, assuring that there will be “real” camembert for another generation.  Nonetheless, their operation is strictly mom-and-pop and is a stark contrast to the large factories who make the bulk of camembert sold today.  Those companies buy their milk from farms scattered throughout Normandy and have it hauled in twice a day in large tanker trucks.

It’s quite different at the little farm in Camembert.  Once her cows are milked, Madame Durand pours each cheese into its mold; she salts the outside of every round by hand. There are no machines or long hoses with nozzles for spraying racks of cheeses with penicillin as there are in the factories. Nor is there a computer to manage the aging of the cheese.  It is Madame Durand herself, who checks her cheeses individually each day and turns them as they ripen. 

She literally raises each cheese herself and, as Madame Durand made clear to us, none of her “babies” were going to be allowed to go to a bad home. 

Chastened, we headed home from the market knowing we had met a genuine artist and had learned something special from her.   Brillat-Savarin, the “philosopher in the kitchen,” wrote that a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye. 

We had discovered that sometimes a meal can be even more beautiful because there is no cheese.

After World War II, France embarked on a program of modernization, part of which included improved sanitation.  It was not as easy as expected.  In villages all over the country controversies errupted like the one immortalized in Gabriel Chevalier’s novel Clochemerle.  Should we have a public urinal or pissoir, and if we install one, where should it be? 

For centuries French men had answered the call of nature whenever and wherever it occured.  French women had grown used to the sight of slightly hunched men standing on the side of the road, in the fields, behind buildings.  It was such a prevalent habit that many town buildings sported Defense de uriner on their walls in fervent hope men would take their “business” elsewhere.

In the ficticious village of Clochemerle, the proposed new pissoir split the town in two as half of the people argued the newfangled contraption would lower the community’s morals, and the other half argued the opposite.

It seemed like a quaint little story until our village decided to restore its 17th century public washhouse or lavoir.  Attached to it was a 1950s era pissoir.  Over it was a sign that read “No swimming. Basin only for use by firemen.”  The sign, however, had nothing to do with the rusted green metal pissoir.  It referred to the pond behind the lavoir which had formerly served the women of the village for washing clothes.

Our mayor, Monsieur Genet, is devoted to the history of the village; his family has lived here for generations.  Ever since his election several years ago, Mayor Genet has had the half-timbered lavoir on his wish-list of things to restore in the village.  First he created a lovely little garden around the pond, then he approached one of the weekenders who heads a car company in France and asked if the company would subsidize the work on the building.  “What do washhouses have to do with cars?” the company man asked rhetorically as he said, “No.” 

The mayor was so depressed he put aside his dream until he retired from farming.  Then he announced he could do much of the work himself; hence the village could now afford the restoration of its pretty little building.  

On a hot summer day last year, the mayor and two of his cronies began the laborious–and dirty–job of knocking out the old torchis or daub and wattle.  They stripped off their shirts and soon looked as though they had been rolling in mud and straw.

“Next we attack the pissoir,” they said as the last bit of torchis hit the ground.

Instead they found themselves under attack. 

“What do you mean?” other villagers asked.  “The pissoir is part of our patrimony, part of our heritage, just as much as the washhouse itself.” 

No, explained the mayor.  It’s not authentic; it’s too modern.

It soon became clear the village was every bit as divided over its pissoir as Clochemerle had been.  But the split was unique and revealed new rural realities.  It was “foreigners,” the new-comers, mostly weekenders, who wanted to keep the old two-stall urinal.  It was so folksy, so country, a fun thing to point out to visiting city friends and share some chuckles about.

Natives had a different view.  It was old-fashioned and a source of ridicule.  Old-timers pointed out that now everybody–well, nearly everybody–had their own indoor plumbing so the pissoir was no longer necessary.

When the daughter of one of the city councilmen was married, for instance, the proud father announced there would be a vin d’honneur after the ceremony for everyone at the Place du Lavoir.  At the back of the church, some of the guests laughed saying “You mean the Place du Pissoir.”  Indeed, the tables, covered with white tablecloths and adorned with glasses, bottles of wine and nibblies had been set up right in front of the rusty relic.

The battle raged for days and “pissoir preservationists” delighted in the all-too-appropriate initials of their designation.  The natives did not see much humor in the situation.   

For the “P-P’s” it was a hopeless cause, as they suspected from the beginning.  The mayor himself struck the first hammer blow against the old “monument” and down the metal walls came.  Then the porcelaine troughs.

When the debris was cleared away, those working on the site made a discovery that more than vindicated the mayor’s drive for heritage authenticity: The pissoir was nothing more than decoration.  The two large urinals merely covered two holes in the ground. There was no plumbing attached at all. 

Everything that went into those old urinals drained straight into the washhouse pond. 

Although the pissoir is gone, part of the old sign remains: Baignade interdite, no swimming.   Even on the hottest days, it has not been necessary to enforce that ban.

Madame Mercier, our nearest neighbor, came to help when we moved in.  She ripped down old fabric from the walls, scrubbed and painted.  She watched us struggle with questionable plumbing and electricity.  “When we retire, I am going to have a new house in town,” she said, “none of this old stuff.” 

She knew exactly where she would find her new house when she finally left farm life behind.  It would be in Vimoutiers, a town much livelier than those around us, she said, where she could do things with her friends.  There is a weekly market there, clothes shops, cafes and a “Halle au Beurre” where a variety of activities are staged.  Our nearest village, on the other hand, has an 11th century church which is opened once a year, four or five houses and an old washhouse with a public pissoir attached.  That’s it.

Best of all, said Mme. Mercier, in Vimoutiers she would have a new bathroom instead of the make-shift shower she was putting together herself from the pieces we were ripping out. 

Like many of the small dairy farmers in our area, the Merciers rent their farm of about 35 acres.  Thanks to their ingenuity, they manage to eke out a living.  It is an Old-Macdonald sort of farm with chickens, rabbits and a big vegetable garden as well as the cows that are the financial mainstay of the operation.  There are also apple trees, which the Merciers and other farmers here regard as their insurance policy.  If milk prices plunge, their apples will still bring in money from the local ciderie.

It is, however, a hard life, as Mme. Mercier knows all too well.  She grew up on a farm not  much different from the one near us.  Her father was essentially a tenant farmer on a large property.  There were no modern conviences at all.  Mme. Mercier and her sisters carried water from the well and the nearby stream for their own needs plus those of the  landowner’s animals.  They worked in the fields and did the harvesting, helping their father earn enough money to care for the family. 

The house the Merciers live in is better.  There is running water and electricity, but cooking is done on a wood-burning stove. The stove also provides the house’s only heat in the winter; exposed stovepipes branch off in all directions.  Outside is an enormous woodpile and everyday Mme. Mercier brings in armloads of wood so the kitchen stays toasty. Most of the rest of the house is closed off until spring.  “There is nothing modern here,” she said.   

M. and Mme. Mercier, however, own their animals, as well as the crops they raise, even though they pay monthly rent for the farm.  

Still, cows do not take vacations and apples do not pick themselves.  It rains hard and often; the mud gets deep and the wind wicked.  It is no wonder Mme. Mercier looked forward to retiring to a life of amusements and conviences.   She even had a small savings account, she said proudly, that would go toward buying her dream house.

We had been living full-time in our house for about two years when she arrived at our door with tears in her eyes.  “He says we are only going to rent a place when we retire,” she said. 

“It means I will never have my own house,” she said.  She looked down and tears dropped onto the floor.  “I will have lived my whole life in somebody else’s house.”

“Have you talked to your husband about this?” we asked.  “Have you explained how important this is to you?”

Mme. Mercier shook her head.  “It’s no use.  When he makes up his mind, there is no changing it.”

The Mercier’s landlords are a strange family.  They lived an isolated life, having inherited a great deal of property and apparently never working themselves.  They also refused to make any repairs to their various holdings.  As a result, rental value went down as taxes went up.  Finally they were forced to sell some of their holdings.  The first people they approached were the Merciers. 

Normans have a reputation for being economical, for being downright tight with their money.  Mme. Mercier, a true Norman herself, was about to make that work in her favor.  If we don’t buy this house, someone else will, she told her husband, and we will have to move.  She laid out the cost of finding a new place and then moving to it.  He was convinced; it would be better to buy.

Then she went to work on the landlord.  “He wasn’t about to give it away” she told us, but he certainly ended up selling it for less than he wanted to.  Plus, Mme. Mercier wrung a concession out of him that her one son could keep the land he was renting to farm.

Within days of the final papers being signed, new bathroom fixtures arrived, and then new windows and front door.  True, it was not her new house in town, but it was something much better.

“It’s mine,” she said. ”My own house.”