It is a village of 900 souls in France’s Loire Valley, with an Avenue de la République, a grocer, baker, butcher, newsagent, chemist and two cafés — one, Chez Babette, run by 57-year-old Babette, the other by Marie-Thérèse Robichon.
”We are blessed,” Robichon said as waves of icy rain lashed the windows, the empty main street, the bleak if fertile fields around, and the famous convent just more than a kilometre or so away where a peasant girl claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in 1876. ”We are a village of miracles. And now the mayor will have to sort it out.”
The latest divine intervention — 130 years after the first — is the astonishing will left by the village’s oldest resident, Hélène Louart. The old woman, whom few knew and fewer suspected of wealth, disinherited her own family to leave about £1-million of cash, property, art and gold coins to the commune. ”It’s completely crazy,” said Robichon.
But there is a catch, and it is a catch that means, in the words of some locals, that the posthumous gift to Louart’s erstwhile neighbours is a ”poisoned present”.
Not only will the village get the £1-million only if the Avenue de la République is renamed after her, her favourite paintings are hung in the mayor’s office and her house is sold not to local people but, quelle horreur, ”only to people from Paris”, but Louart has added a further condition: that the money is spent on building council houses to be let at peppercorn rates to poor or destitute families. It is a prospect that is far from filling every inhabitant with joy.
”It’s a dilemma. Accepting the money will change the village entirely and I like it as it is,” said one 62-year-old local woman, who refused to give her name because ”in a little community you never know. It’s her revenge on us all. You can see from her photo that she had a nasty streak.”
Across the road, at Chez Babette’s, one client broke off a long conversation about Louart’s family — a niece apparently lives in the village — and the mysterious origin of the fortune to worry about the long-term cost of any construction project.
”It’s all very well building the houses, but then you’ve got to maintain them … and you’ve got to find jobs for all the new people and there are very few already,” he said.
No one is sure where Louart’s money came from. She spent most of her life in Paris, possibly living with or married to a high-society tailor, and only returned to her native village at the end of her life.
Elisabeth Petit, the patronne of Pellevoisin’s restaurant and bar, has one theory. ”She used to come in often. She was a nice old lady. She ordered you about a bit but was always polite,” she said. ”I think she had been in some tough situations when she was young and left the money to others in need. She was going to leave it to the convent, but fell out with the nuns.”
Housing crisis
Louart would not be the only one to have been concerned by housing problems among France’s poorest. La crise de logements is one of the gravest of the innumerable crises that fill French newspapers. Millions of houses are needed to ease overcrowding in the cities and to provide affordable accommodation in the nation’s relatively poor rural regions, not least to staunch the rapid flow of young people to towns.
But few want the new homes near them. In the cities, legislation to ensure a minimum level of council housing is widely flouted.
In Paris, richer areas are happy to pay the substantial fines rather than turn over housing stock to the low-paid or immigrants. The former political power base of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was mayor of the wealthy west Paris suburb of Neuilly, is among the worst offenders.
Claude Roux, the mayor of Pellevoisin, denied any such sentiments in his community, saying that the village was ”welcoming and open”.
There were, however, more pressing needs in the village — such as a new lorry for the local fire brigade and repaying the loans taken out to refit the school, he said. And 50 of the 900 villagers already lived in state-subsidised homes.
”The conditions that Mme Louart has insisted on will have to be obeyed,” the Socialist mayor said. ”But the term ‘social housing’ is open to many different interpretations and some arrangement can probably be found that would please everybody.”
For the moment, no decision is being taken until after the municipal elections in March. For the moment, in the butcher’s, just down from the mayor’s office, there is little celebration over the saucisses de pays and the andouillettes. ”It’s a free country,” said one taciturn client. ”People are free to do what they want. Life goes on.” —