the Kindest Strangers We’ve Ever Met

Objectively, we must have been pretty pitiable: a young foreign couple with an ailing infant who had just moved into a dirty, damp, drafty old home, at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords who hadn’t readied the rental as they’d promised. We were so clearly out of our element.

We had moved from Paris on a wintry day in 1980: two American city kids adrift in a tiny Provencal village. The 16th-century picturesque “writer’s retreat” we’d expected was clearly a disaster.

What had we been thinking?

      With our families thousands of miles away on the other side of the ocean and our friends hundreds of miles away in Paris, we felt very much alone. No Internet to access resources or advice, not even a Bureau d’Accueil (welcome center) in the village of Bonnieux, population, 800.

A stunningly beautiful perched village in the small mountain range of the Luberon, east of Avignon, Bonnieux was indeed picturesque. And, from a distance, so was the house. It was built into the sixteenth-century stone ramparts in the upper village. We were told to park our car on the road above and descend the long stone stairway to get to our “street.”

As nearly uninhabitable as our new home was in the beginning, the real low point came one evening just a week after our arrival when we suddenly saw a frightening shadow on the wall that resembled an enormous bat. A bat it was (though fortunately less massive than it had appeared in the shadow). We always liked to think that growing up in New York City had prepared us for anything—but definitely not for bats in our bedroom.

The chauve-souris (fittingly, in French, literally bald mouse) disappeared into the 20-foot rotted rafters in our bedroom. We warily tried to sleep that night, imagining beady little eyes looking down at us.

The next day, weary and thoroughly depressed, we reached out in desperation to the only people we “knew” in the region. In this case knew meant three or four degrees of separation: the cousins of the French husband of an American woman I’d met in Paris in my group for expectant mothers.

I spoke to the cousin’s friendly 20-something daughter on the phone. Her valuable suggestion was that we contact the village’s volunteer fire department—but that’s another story I will definitely write about someday. In the meantime, she kindly invited us to lunch at their home in the nearby village of Roussillon the next day.

That visit held the answer to our dreams, and was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

As we soon discovered, our saviors were a fascinating and talented family of artists. Edith, my Paris friend’s husband’s relative, was originally from the Azores and was a ceramicist, as was her Russian émigré husband, Eugène. He was also a well-known painter and collagist who knew Picasso well. Their French-born daughter, Nathalie, a ceramicist, was already following in her parents’ footsteps.

Fortunately for us, they all spoke excellent English.

Eugène had led a colorful and at times difficult life. As a Jew, he took an assumed name during the Occupation, when he hid from the Nazis in Roussillon along with the writer Samuel Beckett.

      We spent a delightful afternoon with their family that day. They made us feel comfortable immediately. When our new friends learned of our travails with our house and fawned over our seven-month-old baby, they were clearly moved. Eugène and Edith were leaving on vacation in Egypt that week and, incredibly, invited us to move into their home for a few weeks while they were away. Nathalie would be staying behind.

We were stunned.

They pointed out that living there would enable us to go to our house to clean and prep for a few arduous hours each day with the luxury of returning to clean, comfortable lodgings each afternoon or evening. In fact, far more than comfortable, their beautiful home was filled with cheery and colorful artwork, pottery, and fabrics.

We gratefully accepted.

After moving into their home, we dragged ourselves back to our house on most days and got to work with mops, rags, and a vacuum cleaner. I’m guessing the landlords had done some cursory cleaning to prepare a house that hadn’t been lived in for three years, but it took only a second to spot the cobwebs in the corners and on the walls and the grime on the floors.

My husband and I took turns entertaining the baby while we worked and took full advantage of his naps. Once we finished scrubbing everything, we laid wall-to-wall carpeting on the stone floor in the baby’s room, knowing that he’d soon be crawling.

      Thanks to our friends’ kindness, we managed to do what we needed to make our writer’s retreat (hah!) habitable before their return.

It’s still hard to fathom. We were total strangers to them, but they opened their house and hearts to us, when we really needed that help. We have never forgotten their kindness and have, in fact, remained in touch with Nathalie and Edith all these years later.

I’ve long since forgotten the name of the American friend in Paris who put us together, but I’ll be forever grateful.

Much like Proust’s petites madeleines, often when I look at the colorful ceramic tiles on our dining table or the distinctive Picasso-esque hand-painted bowl on the shelf, which all reflect their creator’s signature styles, memories of these warm, special one-time strangers rush back.

A version of this story first appeared in The Narrative Arc, a Medium publication. See it here.