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12 LE PETIT SAINT-PAUL Halfway between Paris and Rouen in the province of Eure in southwest Normandy there is a village called Vernon. It rests on steep banks of the Seine, surrounded by pasture, farms, orchards, and dense forest of oak and chestnut. The river flows through the town almost imperceptibly, around several wooded islands and beneath the remains of a twelfth-century bridge and tower. Vernon’s houses, with half timbers and overhanging roofs, maisons a pans de bois, cluster around the church of Notre Dame, with its twelfth-century choir loft, thirteenth-century Romanesque tower, fifteenth-century nave, and Renaissance organ lift. Vernon was once a military rampart and a medieval battlefield for bloody slaughter between the English and French. Legend has it that the duke of Normandy, Richard II, held court in Vernon one Christmas Eve and decided to marry, to assure himself a male successor, who turned out to be Robert le Magnifique, father of William the Conqueror, first Norman king of England. Flandrau arrived in Vernon in June 1925. Lewis’s Arrowsmith had been published in March, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in April. Clark transported Flandrau from Majorca to Paris, and there Flandrau found himself alone again in a city that now felt crowded and noisy. A peaceful change of scenery seemed more conducive to writing. He “And you are satisfied to live alone in this hermitage?” Abelard asked. “Why not?” Gaucelin replied, “My friends bring me food, and the birds and the beasts of the wood bring me entertainment. I have friends among them all. They share my meals with me, and when I am not with them I meditate, which reminds that I must bid you goodbye, for the hour of my meditation has come.” From George Moore’s Héloise and Abélard (conversation of the Hermit in the wood) in Flandrau’s 1924 notebook remembered with fondness little Vernon and Forest de Bizy. Flandrau had spent part of an idyllic summer and autumn there a few years earlier , living alone in a quiet room above the Quervel hotel-restaurant. “All my life,” he wrote Gray later, “I have longed to live over a saloon, but it is only at Bizy-Vernon apparently, that I am able to achieve that high ambition.” He had searched the French countryside for a place to spend his final years. They seemed to be approaching faster than he had bargained for. As ancestral home of the Flandraus, Normandy seemed like a perfect symmetrical conclusion: unpretentious, peaceful , not yet dragged into the “Anglo-Saxon ‘social life’ of the countryside .” He called it “this really lovely, corner of France, where no tourists ever come, and where life is very sweet and sane and charming .” For extra inspiration to write, he was surrounded by legend. Flaubert wrote much of Madame Bovary there. Monet still lived in seclusion just across the river. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote part of John Brown’s Body a few yards down the Rue de Marzelles from where Flandrau eventually bought a restored farmhouse. Vernon became a colony for St. Paul society expatriates. When one of his St. Paul friends, Anne White, went to Vernon for a summer with her two children and governess, Flandrau had followed, returning to the same room over the Quervel. His two closest St. Paul friends, Francophiles Dick and Alice Lee Herrick Myers, also had a country home there. During the ’20s, the Myers were to the Flandraus what Gerald and Sara Murphy were to the Fitzgeralds — wealthy, connected expatriates, known for being known, artistic patrons and artists themselves. In fact, the Myers and the Murphys were close friends. Dick was an editor of the Ladies Home Journal, known in New York and Paris circles as an accomplished musician; Alice Lee was a Red Cross volunteer in France during the war and wrote a fashion column for the Chicago Daily News. Flandrau, however — as in Mexico, Majorca, and rural America — preferred the company of the natives to the cognoscenti. There was no shortage of local characters for amusement. He had long talks with a kindred spirit, the town drunk. He was “a charming, old peasant aged eighty-seven whose mind had remained an absolute blank since the Franco-Prussian war. Anything before that tragic event, however, he could discourse on at interminable length and with much shrewdness .” Every evening the man’s great-grandchildren would find him collapsed on a village street, load him into...

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