Carnet de Voyage: Found French Family

Travel notes from the real France. Carnet de Voyage is a weekly personal travel story in France sent in by readers. If you’d like to write a story for Carnet de Voyage, head here for details on how to submit.

As an American artist I travelled to Paris for many years. One year, I took a painting workshop in Les Cerqueux sous Passavant, a forgotten village in the Loire Valley. After 3 days, I bought a house there!

My neighbors welcomed me with open arms (as did the Mayor), always expressing their gratitude to Americans during war times. 

I adapted immediately, even though my French was less than perfect, and their French was a dialect! They good-naturedly accepted my hand gestures and accent, with fond giggles. One of my fondest memories is when I asked my neighbors to sit for portraits.

As I painted the first, Dédé, everyone in the village gathered around my studio to watch! Everyone loved it, except Dédé. “Why did you make me red?” (He was a rose farmer, with a buoyant red face!). The second, was an elderly woman lounging in a beach chair in her flowered housedress and a big straw hat. I asked if she might sit for me. Her immediate response was “But yes, of course! When?”. I was afraid I might never find her again, so I replied “Right now!”. 

Madame Tilkin walked robustly into my home, we sat at the table and sipped a coffee while I looked for an appropriate canvas. All I could find at that moment was a huge 6ft one, so I dragged it out and began to paint her. She placed her hands under her bosoms and tried to push them up. She proclaimed “Look at these! How they sag! I am not such a beauty anymore”. I put my hands under mine to say “me too”.

Our conversation became quite extraordinary. It seems that what I perceived as an elderly, quiet, unobtrusive, simple woman was far from that. Madame Tilkin had great notoriety as a Resistance fighter who won the French Legion of Honor’s ward for her work during World War II. Her husband was a victim of the Holocaust. I sat with her and later spoke with her in depth at a gallery exhibition she had honoring her husband. It was incredible to read and see first-hand photographs and newspaper articles about this tragic time in history.

I happened to be at my home in “Le Cerq” (as we fondly called it) on 9/11. At about 3:30pm, a friend came by to invite me to meet a friend of his, in the nearby village of Vihiers. When we knocked on her door, you could hear the television, and people yelling. The woman was sobbing, tears running down her face. Both my friend and the woman spoke in German, and I could not understand a word. We went inside, and I thought she was watching a war story on TV. Then, it came…my friend translated “Two planes have flown into The World Trade Center in New York, and demolished both buildings. It is believed to be a terrorist attack.” 

I was stunned, then hysterical as I watched it happening in real time. I immediately asked to use her phone to call my family in New York City. The phone lines were all out of order, I could not not get through. 

To make things worse, no one in my village had a TV, and at that time no internet service.  I didn’t even have a phone yet in my home. A neighbor found an old television, and set up an elaborate wiring system in someone’s garage, so we could see what was happening. After an hour or 2, I got in my car to listen to the BBC news on my car radio. 

The next day, people from all the surrounding villages came to express their condolences to the Americans in my village, and I personally received many condolence letters from people who attended my gallery show. The mayor visited our homes and also arranged a church service for us. People from all the neighboring villages attended.

For me, France and its people hold a very special place in my heart. I have a huge French family there, and I will never forget their friendship, support, kindness and generosity.

Read our other Carnet de Voyage entries here.

Lynn Marrapodi was born in Brooklyn, New York, and can remember her first introduction to art was with Crayola crayons…while she was being potty-trained. Her Parochial School education fortunately ended when her high school Lay art teacher called her parents to tell them that she should be attending The High School of Art and Design in New York City. She went on to The Parsons School of Design and The Fashion Institute of Technology. A successful career followed in the Fashion and Beauty industry leaving only time at the weekends to draw and paint. While on a business trip in Paris in 1989, she saw the Gaugin retrospective and sent her resignation from the Hotel Meurice in Paris. She knew she had to paint, or she would die.