About the Bookstore Browse Aisles Search Desk Shopping Basket Book Trade Terms Just Released! Return Policy Help Here is the full reference card for this book... If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113. Crossing the Loire by Heidi Fuller-Love 271 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0253; ISBN 1-4120-2425-0; US$24.00, C$26.37, EUR20.00, £14.00 Packed with twisted humour, sticky camembert and plumbing tales to make your hair stand on end, Crossing the Loire is the wicked, witty, worrying modern 'Clochemerle', about moving to rural France. Read more! about the book about the author sample excerpts catalogue info About the Book Satisfied, she turned to me. "Good?" she enquired. "Absolutely delicious," I lied. She eyed me suspiciously. "Quoi?" She said. Was she deaf, as well as blind? "Tray bonn," I bellowed, waving my glass in the air and praying she wouldn't offer me a refill. Her eyes rolled round the room as if she was seeking an intruder. "I think she's confused by your accent," Fabrice explained to me in English. "She is an Anglaise," he said to Mother in French. "Anglaise?" Mother repeated as if he'd said 'Martian'. "It is the best liqueur de prune que j'ai jamais tasted," I said hypocritically. Mother turned on Fabrice in fury. "We aren't in Angleterre now - tell her to speak Français for the name of God!" "But je suis speaking Français," I squeaked indignantly. But Mother had given up. "Les Anglais, huh! she sneered. "What do you expect from the ones who killed our Joan of Arc?" Crossing the Loire is an important psychological moment, because France's most famous river is said to signal the climatic divide between north and south. But when Heidi Fuller-love and her French lover quit their respective lives - and comfortable centrally heated homes - in London and Versailles in the late 1980's, to live in a tiny French hamlet with twice as many cows as inhabitants, they discover they haven't just crossed a river, they have crossed over into a whole new way of life. Settling in an ancestral family hovel with no heating to speak of, just enough hot water to spit at and sadistic decorative elements and electrical facilities which would be the envy of Death Row, they struggle to survive in a world populated by colourful characters like Lenin-worshipping Dede, père Renard whose wife 'no longer provides', Steamy Specs the Mata Hari of Mouzon, and Lulu, who lives with his brother, the 'little nutter' in the old house by the church and beguiles the village with endless accordion renditions of 'The Chicken Dance'. Initially treated with great kindness, when the young couple decide to set up their own business they find themselves pitting their wits against French bureaucracy and rural inertia, in a battle which threatens to drive them stark, raving barmy. Packed with twisted humour, sticky camembert and plumbing tales to make your hair stand on end, Crossing the Loire is a wicked, witty - and sometimes downright worrying - modern 'Clochemerle' about moving to rural France. Not for the faint of heart! About the Author Heidi Fuller-love was born in Kent, to a Dutch mother and an English father. After running a successful comedy cabaret venue near Lewisham (where the likes of Mike Myers/Austin Powers,and Jo Brand 'cut their teeth'), and guiding misguided Americans on tours of haunted London in her spare time - she moved to France in 1988 and opened a Chambres d'Hôtes. Since then she has written and photographed features for hundreds of French interest magazines, both at home and abroad, and has regular columns in 'French magazine', 'Living France', 'Spanish Homes magazine', 'Design & Architecture' and many others. Her 'Notes from a Spanish Pueblo', a humorous account of buying and renovating a ruin in a tiny pueblo blanco lost in the heart of Andalusia, is a regular slot in 'Everything Spain' magazine. Heidi Fuller-love now divides her time between a charming hovel in Charente and a half-renovated ruin in Andalusia. Her next book, to be published shortly, is 'A Deadly Mix', the spine-chilling and highly evocative true story of the woman who inspired Flaubert to write Madame Bovary. If you would like to read some of Heidi fuller-love's travel features, follow one of these links: article in Travel Intelligence The author's home page

Sample Excerpts

Punching at the lumbering 'Deux Chevaux', buffeting its badly reefed canvas roof, the banshee wind snatches at its glass ears, flaps them open, curses, bangs them shut again.

"Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien," sobs Edith Piaf over our crackling car radio. It is the perfect - if melodramatic - accompaniment to my mental farewell. We'd left our old life behind us, shed the town and its habits like a snake sheds its skin, and were heading for a distant point splashed with jam on the map. Mouzon. Forty, or so, inhabitants and twice as many cows. Somewhere in the heart of France.

When I first told my friends that I was planning to leave my cosy flat in downtown Greenwich, and head out to live in the wilds of another country with a Frenchman I met on holiday, they stared at me as if I was doomed.

"Doomed!" said eyes that would no longer look into mine. "Doomed!" whispered lips which snickered behind my back.

And even when I got out my much pored-over map and showed them the village of Mouzon, nestling between a large marmalade stain, a glob of camembert and the vine-grower's district of Bordeaux, they didn't seem particularly convinced. After all I already had everything a gal could ask for: posh flat, good job, great mates (!!), what the heck did I mean when I said I wanted 'more?'

"Sure you won't be homesick?" my flat mate asked. She was hovering out on the landing, torn between the horrified fascination of watching me pack, and the guilty excitation of listening out for the kettle's shrill whistle which was the signal she could legitimately clock-off for another of those comforting cuppas which bribed her through her - writing - day.

"Homesick?" I remember thinking as I stared around me at the dismal Greenwich council flat we'd shared for so many years. It struck me that I'd been here so long the bedroom carpet was worn to a thread by my passing.

'Homesick?' A goods train rattled pas, and its screech below neatly synchronised with the kettle's whistle above. I gazed out through the fast-dimming window at the drizzle-and-smog soaked fug of another waning city day and just shook my head. How could I tell her that I was far more sick of home, than I was ever likely to be homesick?

A few days later, when I'd crossed the Channel with all my worldly goods in tow and stood-by whilst Fabrice informed his family that he intended to leave his modern apartment, with all mod-cons, in the heart of chic Versailles and set up house in an ancestral family hovel in the depths of the Charente countryside, I met with the same - brutal - incomprehension.

Maybe it was normal for me to do this sort of thing, because I was 'an English' and everyone knew that the English were hopelessly eccentric, but Fabrice was young, well-educated and French, and young, well-educated Frenchmen do not just 'up sticks' and head off to start a new life in the countryside. It just isn't done.

Usually at each others throats for reasons ranging from the size of wreaths bought each year to put on the family's various ancestral tombs at 'Le Toussaint', to who would inherit what when grandma died, Fabrice's family were united for once, then, in their condemnation of 'our foolhardy departure'. One misty morning in late October, they assembled on the pavement to wave us off: mother, sister, half-brother, and even la petite grandmamma, all wearing that smug air of disgust, mingled with told-you-so glee and just a soupçon of downright contempt, which is generally reserved for greenhorns setting out, unarmed, to meet the head-hunters of Borneo.

"You'll be back!" Fabrice's mother cackled from the safety of her Versailles sidewalk. "They're all peasants out there, you'll see. Just a bunch of local yokels!"

The car juddered forward. Pots and pans rattled. The cat peed on the backseat. "But we're only moving to the countryside," I protested feebly.

Her shriek echoed after us down the elegant, shop-lined street. "Only?" I heard her cry. "What do you mean, 'only'?"

"It's my wife, you see - elle ne fournit plus," said père Renard and I'd been chatting with our next-door neighbour for several minutes before he'd come out with this mystifying statement. Just seconds before we'd been exchanging views on cattle farming and his bushy brows had caterpillared up and down as I'd described the antics of veal protestors across the channel.

"Les English are..," he began and then he'd coughed and after casting a surreptitious glance at me corrected himself with: "..the world is crazy." After which had ensued a brief verbal tussle with world madness in which he, père Renard, emerged as the sole hope for sanity on the planet, and then he'd gone off at a tangent about his wife.

'Fournir,' I pondered now. I knew that the verb was generally associated with the electricity board, or a dairy herd, and generally meant 'to provide'. Now I knew that milk cows were said to no longer 'provide' * and the electricity board was notorious for 'providing' at an exorbitant price - but his wife?

At that point Renard's brief - yet eloquent - gesture towards the flies of his sagging corduroys enlightened me. "It is the age you see * she no longer wants it," he said sadly and not even the sight of Fabrice emerging from the house clad in thigh-length waders and a beekeepers mask could bring a smile to his sex-starved lips.

Fabrice was dressed to do battle with his worst enemy. We'd woken up that morning to find the corridor awash with toilet waste. "La merde is like that," said Renard, who was watching Fabrice now with gloomy interest. "Just when you think its gone forever, it comes backing up on your own door step," he said and his sepulchral tones seemed to imply that Watergate was nothing compared to the treachery of raw sewage.

We watched as Fabrice got his spade out and started digging. After a few minutes there was a loud 'clunk' which said he'd found the lid of the septic tank. The promise of a ringside seat at this cesspit romp seemed to have opened up hitherto unexplored recesses of Renard's mind and after snorking over the garden fence a few times he reverted to our earlier conversation and admitted ruefully: "Of course I'm not what I used to be either. I used to climb up on her at least once a month, but these days.." he broke off and shook his head sadly, then turned to watch the action again.

Fabrice was working away at the moss-furred tank with a crowbar now. "Can't ever have been opened * it's jammed solid," he yelled and then there was a juddering thud, the lid slid aside and after teetering on the brink as if bound by some scatological spell, with an audible grunt of fear Fabrice toppled in headlong.

"Garn - get in there!" bawled Renard rubbing his hands in glee. Fabrice came up gasping and Renard was overjoyed at this opportunity to make a witty play on words. "Now you're really in the 'merde'," he cackled.

I contemplated the love of my life - the man who'd wooed me in Chanel blazers and used to work at the Palace of Versailles -wallowing like a Hippo in unmentionable brown slime and it struck me that only I, who knew of the unspeakable horror of his childhood and the septic tank, could truly appreciate what a nightmare this must be for him.

Fabrice scrabbled gasping and spitting at the ledge of the narrow tank, desperately trying to get a foothold but the ancient excrement was as smooth as axle grease and he slid heavily back into the pit.

"Don't mess around - unblock it whilst you're down there," bellowed Renard. "And don't forget to bring some out for my garden, either," he added as Fabrice came up coughing and spitting for a third time. Renard turned away in disgust. "Townies!" he snorted, neatly forgetting that he'd been a 'townie' himself before he'd retired from Parisian life some 20 years ago. "Now if I was a little younger...," he added and the ensuing pause was fertile with significance. If Renard were a little younger I was to understand that he would have been in that tank like a ferret up a trouser leg - nothing on earth would have given him more pleasure than to spend a sunny afternoon up to his armpits in our offal. In fact, I was given to comprehend, it would have been a positive joy for Renard to battle with our wayward alluvium, if only he'd been a few years younger. But as it was, alas! He sighed once, or twice and shook his head and having neatly shrugged off the burden of a guilty conscience, settled back to enjoy the rest of the show.

Just then there was a muffled cry of triumph and Fabrice staggered out of the pit brandishing a plunger, festooned with dank loops of pink paper, victoriously. "I think I've unblocked the tank," he said advancing on me. "Give us a kiss?" he added with a leer.

I backed off hastily and collided with Renard who seized this heaven-sent opportunity to grope my buttocks. From the nether regions I heard a strangled sob. "Ma femme ne fournit plus," came his aching cry and he staggered blindly off down the path.

When you're penniless, poverty itself is an ongoing problem that requires constant solutions. Whether it was the wearing refrain of, "how the hell are we going to pay this bill?" or less frequently recurring questions like, "how do I dress for the doctor's when I haven't got a single scrap of underwear?" our brains were permanently stretched on the rack of financial exigency, constantly tortured to come up with a solution - or else!

With money near inexistent, paying for the slightest thing became a matter of tortuous discussion and when it came to using a last five-franc piece, non-paupers would surely be astounded at the surprising variety of choices. These included: buying a stamp to send an urgent begging letter, purchasing the cheapest spaghetti for one last bloated dinner, or spending our last coppers on a candle to light in the church, thus putting our faith in outside forces - and, inevitably, the spaghetti dinner won. As for our car, in the context of such grinding poverty it was the ultimate nightmare.

Having served us faithfully, for so long, our poor old 2CV was on it's last legs. We'd returned from what was laughingly called a 'shopping trip' buying a boot-load of tinned tomatoes, when a motor veered round the corner on the wrong side of the road and hit us head on. "You want us to pay out for that?" sneered the pimply creature sent by the insurance company to investigate. He sneaked a quick look under the bonnet to make sure there was really a motor inside and offered us a measly 200 francs to repair it. The money went on food and the car stayed the way it was.

With one headlamp drooping sadly on a level with the bumper, a caved in bonnet held together with string, a chassis with more holes in it than a colander and a windscreen with more masking tape, than glass, our trusty old banger could have modelled for Picasso's 'Guernica'. The ignition had packed up some time before and in order to get round this minor problem Fabrice, who was not the most patient of DIY guys, had ripped out the dashboard and to start the car he simply grabbed handfuls of brightly coloured wires and rubbed them together until something happened. As we puttered down the road at 5kmph it was not unusual for our badly handicapped banger to coil up and start coughing, like an old geezer addicted to chewing baccy, then spew out a volley of spark plugs. This particularly nasty habit was particularly embarrassing in town, when old dame's would stare after us, thunderstruck, as their darling pet poodles coiled up on the floor, coated with grease and whimpering in pain.

Another embarrassing feature was the exhaust pipe. Fixed to the chassis with binder's twine, it had an unnerving habit of dropping off with an almighty clatter in the middle of crowded streets. Often, as Fabrice grovelled on his belly amongst scoffing shoppers to tie it back on, I would slide, with a stealth born of long practice, beneath the gutted dashboard. Even the discomfort of nestling in a filthy pot-noodle of dangerously sparking wires, was better than the horrendous mortification of being recognised at the wheel of our battered car.

Utterly appalled at the state of our vehicle, a well-meaning relative made the mistake of giving Fabrice a cast-off bag of epoxy resin and various coloured paint sprays. "Well, it can't look any worse!" he quipped, gaily setting to. Surveying the Dalmatian nightmare a few hours later - great blobs of resin shoved into gaping, rusted holes, then sprayed with whatever colour had come to hand * I shook my head. "Oh yes it can!" I said.

Cautiously we congratulated each other. We even bought a 'new' car, a battered Renault 5. Life seemed to be looking up at last * and then we found the pipe Of course, we'd seen it before - how could we miss it? It's mouth was the size of a large gargoyle's and it spewed out just opposite our dining-room window. We'd enquired about this pipe before buying the house and - via his sullen-faced secretary - the mayor had assured us it was just an outlet for rainwater. We hadn't wanted to make a fuss - we were hooked on the old wool house by the stream - so we'd told each other we'd disguise the offending conduit with hanging baskets and plenty of ivy and then we'd forgotten all about it. Until now.

With summer temperatures soaring and hardly any water left in the stream, guests had started asking us if we had anything else on the menu, except rotten eggs. Soon it was mid-August. The days were broiling hot and sultry with thunder and the smell got steadily worse. Guests started avoiding the dining room - even at breakfast - and asking for rooms facing away from the charming little river. Reluctantly we were forced to admit we had a problem * that there was something more than rainwater coming out of that big, fat pipe.

With a growing sense of urgency we started making phonecalls, only to find the authorities we called were strangely evasive. Although I described the cloying odour to the 'Eaux and Forêts' representative, he maintained it was rainwater oozing from that funnel. When I described the thick, brown gunge seeping from our conduit, the man at 'La Chambre d'Agriculture' said that perhaps * perhaps! * someone was using the cylinder to empty water from their dishwasher - and steadily the smell got worse and the calls got more frantic. Soon we were spending hours on the phone each day pleading with each of the relevant authorities to just come out and take a look, but they wouldn't. "The mayor is 'the police' of his commune," they told us. "If you want us to do something about your problem you have to see the mayor first."

After months of living in gossip's shadow, we were understandably reluctant to do this. Now the tittle-tattle had died down somewhat, the last thing we wanted to do was draw attention to ourselves. Not that we knew the mayor - our dealings with him, so far, had always been via his disobliging secretary - but we knew he was a farmer and had a reputation of being 'entière', a term which was generally applied to non-castrated bulls and meant one, of two things: either he was a bulldozer when it came to getting things done, or, like a bull, he just charged at anything which got in his way. We hoped it was the former.

On the hard bench outside his office we began to suspect it was probably the latter. Monsieur le mairie was discussing footpaths with the representative of a local walking club. "I don't see why the our commune should pay good money because a bunch of namby-pamby prats, who've got nothing better to with their time than go out on poncey walks, are frightened of a few brambles. You can tell your members that if they want the footpaths cleared, to come and see me and I'll lend them a couple of sharp scythes!" we heard him bellow.

When the harassed walkers rep scuttled out a few moments later, we entered the mayor's office like sheep to the slaughter. Summoning up all the feminine charm I could muster I fired him my most winning smile.

He scratched at his clean, white collar irritably. "What d'you want?" he grunted, as if I was just another one of his ornery heifers.

Catalogue Information