Children of the Big House

She lived in the big house, there, rising above the others, above the field and its wheat. It is beautiful, straight and tall, looking out at the sea in the distance.
From the living room windows, you have the most beautiful view of a sunset. Around this table, there were breakfasts, coffees (croissants) and surely lunches that mattered.

In the evening and late into the night, we talked about life, theater, news from Paris, the windows were open (to the night) letting in the warm wind of summer vacation nights.
It was in this house that I came, that everyone came, friends, children, family, to make indelible lifelong memories of those summers in Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer.


Her name was Christiane, Christiane Fey Desbois, she was an actress.

She was an orphan, adopted at 34, bureaucracy told her it was impossible to be adopted at 34. But it was. Her father was a good man. Very early on she became an actress, and as is customary in theater, she acquired a family, a real one, of friends for life. 

Here she was, when I was at school, I found her at the turn of a page, of a Molière play, beautiful, standing tall. Her name was Desbois, then she met Stéphane and it became Fey. He was (handsome and tall, Irish) also an actor, had grown up in Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, with an Irish mother. They were in love. And all their friends joined in this love, [becoming happy]. The big house then belonged to his mother. For a time it was a hotel or an inn. Christiane had chosen a floral pink wallpaper. In this room where I slept, you could hear the sea at night, hitting the walls.

When Christiane fell, there was no one there. And she died. The house remained closed, the (un)certain shutters began to lean and finally fall. The crack, along the wall, kept growing. (Her) The beautiful garden was abandoned, with its small gate overlooking the sea.
And then one day they put up a metal fence to cut off the garden, half was sold. It was then that from the street, I still saw the ghosts of happy days populating the garden, stretched out in the sun in deckchairs reading.

And then one day [it was] the house [that] was sold. A man came and he emptied the contents of the house, books especially, and some photos, Stéphane's watercolors and a wonderful portrait of him as a child that my sister loves so much.