12 August 2002

Highway Robbery

This is the first house we have lived in that we locked the door.  In fact this is the first time we have lived in a town since we were first married.

When we moved into the house in Senlis we were instructed by the landlord on how to use the keys.  There is a blue key for the double gate for the car to enter.  There is a gold skeleton key for the iron gate on the street side.  There is a red key for the glass entrance door to the foyer and two separate silver keys for the heavy wooden front door.  There is also a silver key for the back door to the landlord’s garden.  All of this took some getting used to.

Every time we would leave the house or go to bed I would laugh and tell Jay, “All of these locks only keep out the good people.  Someone who knows how, can get in here.”  Still, we dutifully locked every door.

There are also metal shutters that latch from the inside so that we can cover every window on the first two floors of the house.  We were dutiful to cover the front windows, but the side windows faced the walled garden so we didn’t latch them.

On a recent Saturday morning after walking our little one to school we decided we would drive to Chantilly (shawn tee ee) to The English Shop to buy the English newspaper.  English newspapers are a treat right along with ice cream and cold drinks here in France.

Upon our return through the gate we noticed that one of the windows to the house was open.  Our first reaction was confusion.  Then we discovered the fireplace screen had been moved.  My husband ran up the steps of each floor searching to see if someone was in the house.

It became painfully clear that a couple of people had pried open the garden side double window and entered our home.  They went through everything on the first and second floor.  Just as they were finishing flinging our clothes around in the closet we must have opened the gate to return from Chantilly.

All they took was a phone card worth around seven euros ($6.50), a CD player and a box of gold wrapped chocolates I had wrapped as a gift for our neighbor.

Once we realized the robbers were only looking for money we had to laugh.  From the looks of the outside of our house they must have thought we were rich.  We live in a very large elegant-looking house.

On the inside our house is filled with new Scandanavian furniture from IKEA in Paris.  I have no jewelry.  Our laptops and palm pilots were still right where we had left them.  That was a big relief.

Our landlord was really disturbed by the whole incident.  He says he can’t ever remember a robbery in our section of town.  I guess he was worried too as he lives on the other side of our garden wall. 

When we calmed down our only thought was that we were all fine.  No one was hurt.  Nothing of real value had been taken.

In the end the thing that kept going through my mind was that I am grateful for a simple life.  The things I need to protect hold my hand on the way to school in the morning and kiss me goodnight before I go to sleep.