“I hope you won’t need me next week,” our neighbor and sometimes cat-sitter Madame Mercier said.  “I’ll be in Paris.”  It was said with more than a touch of pride.

From anyone else, it would have been a comment just tossed off, but coming from Madame Mercier, it was a startling statement.  In the more than 15 years we had known her, she had never once gone into the City of Lights, even though it was only a couple hours away.  In fact, she had been to Paris only once before in her entire 60 years, and that was when she was a young girl on a trip to Notre Dame with her First Communion class.

“Oh, what’s going on?” we asked her.

“I’ve won a trip for two for three days,” she explained, “and it includes everything.”  In addition to being a farmer’s wife,  Madame Mercier was the representative for a company that sold cosmetics and other products door-to-door, a sort of French Mary Kay or Avon.  It was a perfect fit for her and women like her in our part of Normandy.  Madame Mercier had excelled at her job simply because she loved it and really believed in it.  She adored trying all the new products herself and introduced them to her friends with genuine enthusiasm.  Already she had an Yves St. Laurent coat to her credit, which she wore with great style.  An all-expenses-paid trip to Paris for two was the next level of achievement in sales.

We talked over the details.  The first item of business was figuring out when she should have her hair done so it would look its best when she arrived.  She settled on a Thursday.  “I think we’ll take the train,” she finally decided.  ”Parking isn’t included and I don’t know where we would park.”  Unsaid was her fear of driving in the big city.  The “we” who would be on the train together was Madame Mercier and her adult daughter.  Her husband, a farmer through and through, hardly ever ventures beyond his farm and the closest town, the latter only for farm supplies.  He had no interest in  Paris; after all, his brother lived there and came to the farm for vacations, so the city couldn’t be that much.

A week later, Madame Mercier returned with eyes like saucers and her now-tousled head still in the clouds.  It had been a wonderful trip and she was bursting to share her experiences with fellow “jet-setters,” people who go to Paris.

“You can’t believe the hotel,” she told us.  They were staying at the Lutetia.  “So beautiful it was like being in a chateau.”  They could walk out the door and be right in the heart of Paris.  The hotel itself was full of other women like herself, all winners of prizes for their sales. 

“On the second night, there was a dinner for all of us in the ballroom with an orchestra.  We stayed up until 3 a.m.,” she said, “and then we went to each other’s rooms and talked.”  The next morning when they went down for breakfast, there were fresh croissants and other pastries, as well as toast.  “Our table had three kinds of jam on it.  Can you imagine?  Three kinds of jam, and in little bitty jars.”  They were all wonderful, almost as good as her apple jelly.

She had no desire to linger too long at breakfast, however.  “They told us check-out was at noon, so if we stayed even a minute more in our room WE had to pay for a whole other day.”

With that stricture hanging over her head, Madame Mercier hurried her daughter back up to the room.  ”I wanted to make sure we took advantage of the room,” she explained.  “After all, it was paid for.”  There they sat and sat and sat some more–until 11:58 a.m. when they made a mad dash downstairs.

At 11:59 a.m., Madame Mercier appeared at the check-out desk and took her leave of the City of Lights. 

“Don’t you think it’s a wonderful place?” she asked us dreamily.  We concurred.  “But,” she added quickly, “I don’t think I would want to pay for it myself.”

This just in: After nearly four years, Pedro has had all charges against him dismissed by the Civil Tribunal of the Norman town Bernay.  He is once again free, his record wiped clean of all crimes.

The presiding magistrate overturned a lower court decision which had found Pedro guilty of being a loud-mouth, awarding his neighbors who had brought the charges 3,500 euros (about $5000) in damages.

It was a difficult decision.  Civil rights had to be protected, the appellate judge said, and one’s true nature could not be denied.  She had dealt with lots of loud-mouths before, but, still, the judge admitted, this case was different.

Pedro, you see, is a donkey.  His bray, said his neighbors, was just too much.  Not so, the magistrate declared; that is the nature of the beast. 

 Pedro

(photo: Y. Barbieri, Fondation Assistance aux Animaux) 

Granted, the case has not set the legal precedents of Roe vs. Wade, nor did it achieve the celebrity status of a trial like that of O.J. Simpson.  What it did generate was outpourings of sympathy for the moleskin-colored donkey.

Donkeys have almost a cult status in Normandy.  They are delightful pets and, with all that braying, they make wonderful watchdogs.  They are affectionate but get lonely easily, so a companion for your companion is essential.  It can be another donkey or a goat or a pony or even a goose–anything to keep him or her company when you are not around.

The most popular donkey in Normandy, we discovered at a recent donkey fair, is a local breed called the Ane de Cotentin, the Cotentin being the peninsula that juts out from near Mont-Saint-Michel straight up into the English channel. 

What distinguishes this rather small taupe-shaded beast is its markings.  There is a black cross on it shoulders.  (Someone told us there is another one on its belly, but we have not crawled under any donkeys to verify that.)  The cross is a special one–the cross of St. Andre or Andrew–which has two lines of equal length crossing at right angles smack dab in the middle.

How the donkey got its cross is one of Normandy’s favorite tales and it may explain why its home territory is close to the fabled monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel.  

It seems the little donkey was the one chosen by Joseph to spirit Mary and the baby Jesus out of Israel as King Herod sought to kill all Jewish baby boys.  The stalwart donkey got them all the way to Egypt.  His reward for this service was the cross; all his descendants would be priviliged to wear it forever in recognition of his bravery and devotion to duty. 

It is unclear how he then got from Egypt all the way across Europe to Normandy and the peninsula that gave him his name, but we can only hope that somewhere along the line the donkey found a companion to join in his travels and that his reward included a barnful of the sweetest hay.

We were looking for organic fertilizer at our local hardware store cum garden/farming center when we saw a burly man with a mustache and a large bag.  He grabbed a big basket, pushed it next to the cash register and began pouring the contents of his sack into it.  Then he shook the bag a couple of times to make sure he had completely emptied it and folded it up. 

As he started toward the cash register, we ran after him. “Excuse us,” we said.  “But what were you dumping into that basket?”

He looked at us as if we were idiots.  “Ears,” he said, “Can’t you tell? They’re pigs’ ears.”

Our only previous encounter with unattached pigs’ ears had been years before on a beautiful August evening when we took friends out to dinner at one of Paris’s most famous restaurants, Le Pre-Catalan.  The restaurant had taken advantage of the perfect weather with great style, moving its elegant dining room furniture out under the skies and the trees of the Bois de Boulogne. 

With Paris in its sleepy, vacation mode, those tables were filled mostly with businessmen entertaining visiting foreign colleagues.  English was the lingua franca of the evening.  Which is why everyone turned our way when our friend nearly shouted, “My god, they’ve got stuffed pigs’ ears on the menu! Sows’ ears, of all things! Who would ever think that of a fancy place like this!”

Back at the store, we must have reacted with some of the same surprise our friend had shown, as well as a sense of creepiness.  “Whatever do you do with the ears?” we asked.

“They’re dog treats,” the shop employe answered, “you know, like the rawhide bones people give their dogs to chew.”  True, they had the same leathery look and feel.  They were dried and hard, but they still looked like ears.  It was easy to imagine them on a cute little pig with a curly tail and perky-sounding “oink.”

Where do you get them, we wanted to know.  Recently an abattoir in the area had brought some in, the clerk told us, and the store decided to order a few. The first batch was an incredibly successful experiment, and they had to order more almost immediately, he said. 

“Dogs love ‘em.  Why, we had a woman in here this morning who bought 30 of  ‘em.  They may just be ears, but they fly right out of here.”  He laughed at his own joke, but we must have looked baffled or pained.  “You know,” he said, “If pigs could fly and all that….”

He shook his head and moved to the cash register to check people out.

A few days later we stopped at a supermarket to buy food for our cat.  There, hanging above all the cans of pet food were cellophane bags of the latest thing in dog treats.  They looked like large chili-flavored tortilla chips, but, of course, they weren’t.  They were industrially-packaged pigs’ ears all set to be chewed by the family Fido or Fideau. No loving or squeamish master or mistress would have to pick these up individually from a basket.  In their potato-chip-like sacks, they were totally de-personalized–or should that be de-animalized?–and had lost all sense of ever being real ears.  They were just another product.

Once upon a time, M.F.K. Fisher wrote something about Americans needing to become less squeamish if we were going to remain a nation of meat-eaters.  We waste half of each animal we slaughter; we just throw it away, she pointed out.  We need to become more like Europeans, Ms. Fisher went on, and eat more of each animal to justify our killing them for food.  (This was before we started turning the “mechanically recoverable meat” into food for other animals, thereby creating Mad Cow Disease.)

Intellectually, we agree with Ms. Fisher about wiser use of animals raised for meat, but as we stared at that mound of ears, we have to admit “something sqeamish our way came.”  We grabbed our fertilizer and put it on the counter in front of the cash register.  We paid quickly and left, wanting to be well away before another customer dropped a pile of ears on the counter beside us.  There is, we decided, something good to be said for commercial packaging.

LA FRANCE PROFONDE

Not far from us in Normandy is a three-sided hut made out of corrugated fiberglass. It’s just big enough for one person to stand inside. It is a school bus “waiting room” built by a local farmer for his daughter.

The farmer had barely finished the hut when his wife planted a climbing rose on one side of it. Now, all through the spring and fall, the farmer’s daughter waits in a scented bower of pink roses.

And that is why we love living in the French countryside.

p.s. Recently in a spate of wicked wind and ruinous rain, the farmer added a door to keep his daughter warm and dry.