July 24-25, 2013
After much thought, much investigation and much consultation, I decided to buy the house I first looked at near Notre Dame du Cros. When I first came to Caunes-Minervois, the last thing I thought I would ever do was buy a house. Yet the house I have bought overlooks the forest and offers wonderful views, as well as being in mint condition. Thanks to the downturn in French real estate, the house is affordable. My sellers, a couple who have moved to Minerve, have done all they can to leave everything in working order so that I can turn the key in the lock and move in without further ado once the paperwork is completed.
The paperwork involves a visit to the notaire in Mazeres, Ariège, in the Midi-Pyrenées region, two hours away. The notaire is one the sellers' famlies have dealt with for generations and rely on. Ariège is the poorest of France's départments, with l'Aude one notch higher on the list. Although l'Aude is fertile, this part of Ariège is dry: this is cattle-country. To get to Mazeres will be a challenge, though. My Michelin map is only for Languedoc-Roussillon, and the GPS does not recognize Mazeres in the Ariège, only one in the Haut Garonne, five hours away.
The notaire's e-mail asked me to meet the sellers at 10:30 a.m. at the house to check on a promised repair, then meet in Mazeres at 2:00 p.m. I mistakenly thought that we were driving together, but the sellers are staying overnight in Mazeres, where they have relatives, so I have to drive myself there. With the GPS not cooperating and map-less, Madame volunteers to sit in the passenger seat with me while her husband leads the way.
The trip turns out to be much more simple than I thought it would be: there is a turn-off towards Foix where the péage splits off, but from there I have only to follow the exit to Mazeres. The two cars arrive timely at the notaire's.
The buildings in Mazeres are three-story rose-brick structures without much ornamentation. There is an austerity about the landscape and the shape of the town that reminds me of Spain, which is not surprising, as we are edging towards its border. (We are also only two hours from Andorra, the kingdom in the Pyrenées that lies between France and Spain, and which is ruled jointly today by the Count of Foix and the French President.)
The notaire's office is a storefront above a residential building around the corner from the church, an enormous brick building without ornamentation inside or out. The office is spare, two women are now in charge, having taken over from the man who originally had the license de notaire. After a wait of five minutes, the notaire whose name is on the firm's official documents comes out to greet us. She is about forty years old, and is wearing a one-piece playsuit over a white t-shirt and platform heels. She conducts us down the hall into her office.
The office is dominated by a large bureau plat, a desk table in front of which three chairs for clients have been placed, with the notaire's chair opposite. All the bureaus plats in lawyer's offices in France, indeed, all the desks of government officials of high rank, are in the style of pre-Revolutionary France. Which is funny when you think that even though France is a Republic, all the desk furniture is in the style of the monarchy that the revolution overturned, the grander the better: Louis XIV, XV or XVI.
To the right of the table is a large computer screen on which the contract appears. For the next three hours all of us go over the terms of the contract and the mechanics of the sale transaction. That task completed, buyer and seller have to initial or sign every page of the contract, including the reports of electrical, lead, asbestos, and energy experts. The transaction cannot be finalized until the mairie, the City Hall in Caunes-Minervois, declares that it has no interest in the property for public purposes; or, in stopping the sale and exercising its right of first refusal.
The latter occasionally happens. Sellers often want to get out of paying taxes on the sale and will report a sale price that is unusually low relative to the assessed value of the house, while taking the balance of the actual purchase price of the house as a payment for "furniture". In the case of one commercial property in Caunes, the sale was stopped by the mairie, which exercised its right of first refusal. After the property was transferred to the mairie, it sold the lot to a local for a price near the assessed value, but less than the total sum that would have changed hands had the original transaction gone through. The seller lost the difference between the price the mairie paid and what the cost of the "furniture" would have been.
The contract reviewed and signed, the purchase price paid, all depends on the mairie, which could take up to three months to decide whether to exercise a right-of-first refusal. We are all hoping that, with the real estate market so poor, the mairie will produce the necessary document permitting the transaction to close sooner. I will give the notaire a power of attorney to complete the transaction if all the paperwork is not completed by the time I need to return to the States. In any event, the sellers will let me store my belongings in the house, which is a great favor.
Within twenty-four hours the news I am to become a Caunoise of sorts will be all over the village: the neighbors across from where I am staying include a gendarme who just retired. Bob and Annabelle Thorp, who take me out to dinner in Villeneuve to celebrate the house purchase, introduce me to him and his family (three generations living together under one roof), as a new neighbor. Everyone remembers the house as having belonged to the curé, although he died decades ago.
***
The cycling club sets out at seven-thirty as usual, this time heading towards Peyriac and further on to L'Auriole. Everyone is happy to see that I now have cleats on my cycling shoes along with the new pedals into which they have to snap in. The group is smaller today: Bob, me, Jeannot, Patrice and Claude.
We start pedaling in the cool, early morning light: the fields glow in the sunshine. As I pedal past row after row of Minervois vines on both sides of roads mainly used by farmers, I take such pleasure in the land's fertility: la belle France, one of the most arable countries in the world, trying so hard to resist the force of bigger and bigger forms of organization, so suspicious of the world of economies of scale, which threatens the intimacy of life at the local level.
For example, while pedaling through one of the villages early into the ride, a woman crosses our path, followed by two dogs, one of which lags behind. I try to go around it, but its movements throw me off and I cannot disengage from one of the cleats fast enough and tumble to the ground. I am able to get up, but a bit bruised, and one of my knees has a scrape. Everyone stops riding and comes back for me. I get up and say I want to drink something, walking over to the wall of a house to lean against it and drink. One of the club members moves my bicycle over to the wall, while everyone makes their assessment of what I did wrong, and whether I am capable of continuing.
While this is happening the woman with the dogs comes up, clutching a bottle of Betadyne antiseptic and a bag of cotton pads. She cleans my scrape and adds a bit more Betadyne for good measure, making sure I have no other abrasions before letting me go.
"Only in the villages will you find that", says Bob. "People look after each other."
We ride on and I fall one more time, this time on the other side, without injury.
Not wanting to make much of this second failure of coordination, I joke that now I have fallen once on each side.
Vous êtes équilibrée! (You're well-balanced now!) laughs Claude and we ride on.
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