Notes from the Cévennes : Half a Lifetime in Provincial France

Adam Thorpe's home for the past 27 years has been an old house in the lower Cevennes, a wild range of mountains in southern France that forms part of the Massif Central. In his writing Thorpe has explored this area, drawing on the legends, history and above all the people of this part of France for his inspiration. He has reflected on hunting, Brexit, French nationalism, ecology, religion, hippyism, the French Resistance and wartime collaborators. In this book, Thorpe takes up these themes, writing at fuller length about his surroundings, the village and his house at the heart of it, as well as the contrasts of city life in nearby Nimes. In particular he is interested in how the past leaves impressions, marks on our landscape and on us. What do we find in the grass, earth and stone beneath our feet and in the objects around us? How do they tie us to our forebears? What traces have been left behind and what marks do we leave now? He finds a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his house's front doorstep, discovers Roman tiles in the Gallo-Roman foundations, explores the attic once used as a silk factory (the area's main source of income before synthetic fabrics), ponders mutilated fleur-de-lys (French Royalist symbols) in the hinges of his study door, finds a priest-hole in his study and the graves of two sisters in the garden and excavates a lance-tip from the Camisard wars. Then there are the personal fragments that make up a life and a family history, memories dredged up by `dusty toys, dried-up poster paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box.' Part celebration of rustic France, part personal memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose demonstrates a wonderful stylist at work, recalling books such as Notes from an Odd Country by Geoffrey Grigson and the travel writing classic Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis-Stevenson.