Shopping in the back of beyond....

Rural France (Photo credit: Woolythebear)

Moving from rural France to within striking distance of San Jose in Costa Rica I have rediscovered the pleasure of looking in shop windows and occasionally entering in search of clothes or handbags.
Were I a shoe fanatic, I should be well catered for...I have never seen so many shoe shops to the block in all my life...all displaying shoes with heels higher than the Shard and just about as glittery.

Rural France was never like this.

For clothes shopping there were the supermarkets, there were cheap clothing outlets like 'Vet'affaires' - with the odd Brit roaming the aisles of sweatshirts looking anxiously for the Frontline - and there were the boutiques, offering vastly expensive underwear guaranteed to give rise to a fatal chill if worn in the rural French bedroom or neat little suits for the wives of notaires in colours judged compatible with the obligatory red hair dye used in the local hairdresser's salon.


I had been used to shopping in London...quickly whittled down to Waitrose, John Lewis and Monsoon...or in a provincial city where there were second hand book shops, charity shops and firms making affordable hand made shoes, apart from wine merchants, delicatessen and good butchers so the shopping desert that was rural France came as quite a surprise.

It's not something you notice as a tourist, using restaurants or buying your picnic supplies.....
It's not something you notice as a holidaymaker in your gite, decompressing in a deckchair with a glass of wine to hand...
But you sure as hell notice it when you live there.

Luckily clothes were not my first priority. I needed furniture.
I wanted to buy a bed and found a furniture store in the local town.
The furniture store.
Fair enough, it specialised in foam sofas covered in psychedelic patterns, formica kitchen tables with spindly metal chairs and plastic seat pads...but it did have beds.
Not exactly Design Centre stuff, but beds.
At reasonable prices.

Except when I came to buy one I discovered that the price covered only the bed frame itself.
The mattress? Extra.
The headboard? Extra.
The footboard...you guessed it...extra.

There had to be other solutions.

I tried the small ads...and as a rule of thumb I reckon that once you learn to read the small adds in a foreign language you are on the path to fluency in understanding, if not in speaking.

Overwhelmed by the antiques on offer - Henri III bedroom set....Lous XV bed and night tables...Louis Philippe wardrobe - it was as well that Mr. Untel took a hand before I set off to purchase any of these items.

He regarded the ads solemnly and then  said

You do know it's all plywood and veneers, don't you?

But they didn't have plywood in the time of Henri III....

And these weren't made in the time of Henri III....they're copies, the lot of them...come from factories....and they won't be cheap either. Why do you think there're no prices?

He introduced me to the depot vente, where people put their stuff up for sale and the owner took a percentage.
The answer to prayer.
You could see everything in one place without traveling miles to be faced with a piece of expensive junk and...a miracle for France...the prices were clearly marked.
It was an Ali Baba's cave....

This was a period when people were 'modernising'.
Moving from their stone houses to the breezeblock bungalows sprouting like unlovely growths on the edge of the villages.
Getting rid of the furniture they had inherited, turning out the accumulations of generations - and buying formica kitchen tables with spindly metal chairs with plastic seat pads.

The depot ventes were full to bursting point with farm tables, benches, sideboards, wardrobes and everything from racks of  hand blown bottles to ornaments and hand tools.
A rummager's dream.

I bought a bateau style bed, rather like the one in the photograph.
You will note that it is just a carcasse....but at least the head and foot came with it! I then discovered that old French beds are not of the same dimensions as modern French mattresses...but that's another tale.

I was tempted by the farmhouse tables, but they were all too narrow to lay out central serving dishes and two rows of places....after all, when they were in use the women would be serving from pots at the hearth...none of your chi chi tureens and vegetable dishes in those households!

There were the plain depot vente establishments and the ones a bit more upmarket, who were picky and tended - even in that period - to be collecting stuff to sell to regular dealers from England and America, but if your taste didn't coincide with that of the dealers there were some nice things to be had, especially lamps and chandeliers.

Emmaus - the foundation set up by Abbe Pierre to help the homeless help themselves - had depots too, though here the goods had been donated and were often from some rather grand houses.
I used to haunt the local ones for things like the floor to ceiling curtains I needed and picked up some beauties..not to speak of the linen and cotton embroidered sheets that people were disposing of because they were a nuisance to dry.

Over the years, Emmaus too went the way of the dealers until it was rare to find anything but junk, but I'd had the good years and was well stocked!

Needless to say, the eye was caught by non essential items....no, what am I talking about, non essential...

No French household is complete without its corkscrew...

Or its wine glasses.....

What would I have done without the guidance of Mr. Untel!

The various depot vente outlets were a continual pleasure, and made it possible to set up home if not on a shoestring, then at least on a ribbon and with some attempt at style.

Clothes would be a different matter.....