14 October 2002

The House in Senlis - part 2

It’s been an interesting week.  Our friends from Scotland spent seven days with us exploring local sights and sounds.  I was fascinated with their observations about the war and how easily we had settled into life in Senlis.

Each day they would return from walking around the town to describe another location where they had determined bullets had been fired into a building during the German occupations of France.   This whole bullet thing got started because when they arrived in Senlis I told them the story of our house.

Rue de Republique is the main street through the town of Senlis where about 14,000 live and work.  Our house is situated on the edge of the downtown on this busy route.  According to our landlord, during World War II our house was shot at by the Germans.  Before that they burned down the 300-year-old farmhouse that stood in this spot.  Then they moved on down the street to murder the mayor.

When we first visited this house the landlord (who was born in this house just after it was rebuilt, and lived here during the German occupation of WW II) pointed out that my husband’s name was German.  Ouch!  He didn’t seem to hold this against us after I explained that in the US it is not very common to know much about your heritage, and my darling husband was not the exception.

In the basement of the current house there are three, two-foot square indentations in the wall.  Apparently these indentations go back to the time when the Romans controlled this area, which is several hundred years ago.  The indentations would have held lamps to light the passageway the French refer to as “The Cave”.  Throughout Senlis, Campaigne, Chantilly and all the way to Paris there are archways that made up a road system in those days.  Over time they became underground and created this “Cave” as they call it today.

The house has thick square sandstone walls, much like the ones built around Muskingum County in the early 1800’s.  We heat with gas from a big old-fashioned unit in the basement that heats the water for bathing and the radiator system.   Each room, including the sun porch has a large cast iron radiator, which keeps the house toasty.  In the summer we turn the switch for the furnace to the mysterious middle position, so all we have then is hot water for bathing.  In the spring we had trouble getting the setting just right so sometimes we had quite a shock when we tried to take a shower because the water was cold. 

The flooring on the first floor and four flights of stairs is chestnut, since chestnut trees are plentiful here.  Chestnuts in Ohio were killed off by blight many years ago.

The hallway, foyer and kitchen have intricate tile designs on the floor.  Each room has a marble mantel around the fireplace.

One strange custom in France is to remove the entire kitchen when the family moves.  The only thing left standing is the kitchen sink.  No cupboards, shelves or appliances are left behind.  They also take all of the light fixtures so that each room has a light bulb hanging from the 12-foot ceilings.

There are six bedrooms in this house.  We use one of them for a closet, as there are no closets.  The hallways are big enough for a single bed.  There are two rooms on each floor for the bathroom.  One room is for the toilet, and one room contains a bathtub big enough to swim in, a sink and a bidet.  Bidets are something I can never figure out, but apparently the French understand them.

The house has a glassed-in foyer big enough to comfortably hold several pieces of lawn furniture and provides for a pleasant place to sit and look out into the garden.  A rock wall that stands about 12 feet high surrounds the “garden”.  At the far end is a double door that opens out onto the street to allow us to pull the car inside.  The car is the tiniest vehicle you’ve ever seen (I am exaggerating because I saw a smaller one called a “smart car” the other day, which runs on electricity and only holds two people).  Our little car barely clears the walls of the gate.

After just a week of living in our house our Scottish friends started talking about what it would be like to move to France.  We just started laughing.  It occurred to us that we had made it sound too easy.