Dordogne, France: Memory, Disrupted by Loss

We came to the end of a long driveway through a narrowing tunnel of trees, and the mansion appeared before us.

“Oh my God,” said my wife, Sheila. “Is this it?”

“It must be,” I said.

We had been driving southwest from Paris, and we were nearing the French department of Dordogne when we got off the main road. We had seen a sign that advertised a memorial for the filmmaker Jean Renoir, and we thought we would check it out. At first, there had been arrows that we thought were pointing us in the right direction, but then the arrows ceased, and we continued on in the faint hope that more might appear. Then we were kind of lost.

But now, suddenly we found ourselves in the parking lot of an enormous estate, a walled country chalet with a long immaculate garden trailing behind it. We got out of the car and stared. There was the overwhelming feeling of being in a fairy tale.

“It doesn’t look like anyone is here,” Sheila said. “Maybe it’s closed?”

“There must be a front office,” I said, and ambled onto the property, in search of someone who would sell me a ticket.

We walked along the perimeter of the manse and tried several doors, but finding them locked, we ended up walking across the back lawn.

“Hello?” Sheila called. “Il y a quelqu’un?”

Lawnis not exactly the right word for the elegant promenade we were walking along. The trees were spaced like chess pieces, trimmed into shapes of lollipops and aces of spades. Wisteria flowers drooped from trellises along a stone path, their lavender hue so melancholy that you had to stop and take a wistful breath. A life-size wooden statue of a buck with a crown of antlers lifted one hoof at the edge of a hedge maze.

“Holy crap,” I said. “I can’t believe this!” We clasped hands, and began to walk toward the labyrinth. “Dude, this is like ... a screenshot from ‘La Belle et la Bête’!”

Sheila looked at me sidelong, and I could sense a little judging. “That’s not Renoir,” she said, gently. “That’s Cocteau.”

“Huh,” I said. “Really?”

I knew she was probably right, but I considered arguing in order to save face. Luckily, at that moment, soft cries came from behind us.

“Monsieur! Madame!”

Although the calls came from a distance, we could hear the exclamation points. We turned and saw that a group of alarmed servants had gathered at the top of the lawn, and now stood outside the chalet, gesturing at us. They were wearing actual servant garb — maid and butler clothes, as if from a BBC Edwardian drama.

None of them spoke English, but they all tried to, and in a mishmash of anxious Franglais it was made clear that we were intruders on private property and that we needed to leave at once. They didn’t seem angry, but rather sad and puzzled, as if clowns with balloons had come to their mother’s funeral.

And he pointed us in the direction of the actual Jean Renoir museum — which was, it turned out, not nearly as magical as Inspector Gadget’s estate. It was nothing but a single room in a building next to someone’s house, where red and green lights crawled across busts and memorabilia. A deep, staticky male voice emitted from overhead speakers, telling us facts about the artist’s life and explaining his significance.

“Well,” Sheila said, as we left.

“That was informative!” I said, and we got into our car and turned back toward the main road. We were on our way to visit the caves of Lascaux, where on the walls Paleolithic people had made Picasso-like drawings of aurochs, ibexes and deer.

I’ve told this anecdote a number of times in the years since, but it was only recently that I decided to try to fact-check it. I can’t seem to find anything. There’s no evidence of a Jean Renoir museum in that region of France. If Jean Chalopin — the creator of “Inspector Gadget” — has an estate nearby, I cannot confirm that there is a hedge maze on it or a life-size statue of a deer.

Here is the terrible beauty of being in love: that you will know things together that no one else will know, that there are events that exist only in the commingling and exchange of memories. Is there a word for that kind of symbiosis? There must be one in French.

As time has passed, I’ve come to appreciate the ghostly, Brigadoon-like quality of these recollections. For a traveler, there is nothing more precious than to come across a place that you will never find again, and so it is with that French estate my wife and I chanced upon one afternoon more than a decade ago. We walked down the great expanse of lawn, and the chalet stood silently behind us, seemingly abandoned but not foreboding. I think there was a light mist that cast a gentle blur over the fantastical topiary forms of the trees. We spoke in soft, wondering voices, astonished, holding hands as we advanced toward a labyrinth made of holly, beech and ash.