No Mo’ FOMO

Ever since I moved to southern France some two decades ago, I have suffered from a fear of missing out related to having chosen Languedoc over Provence. For years I’ve heard that the grass is greenest over there in Provence. I finally went to see and discovered the grass is just as green right here. I’m back from a little roadtrip and have to say it didn’t feel like a getaway at all. It felt very much like around here. This isn’t to slight Provence, which is as beautiful as everybody says, but it’s to say that it’s just as beautiful–even a very similar genre of beauty–but with fewer hassles. I’ve never been so happy to be right where I am.

Seen on the street. Very cute! Potential future DIY…

The point of the trip was the antiques market at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, which I’ve wanted to see since forever. It’s supposed to be the third-biggest brocante in Europe, after London and Saint-Ouen on the outskirts of Paris. I love the déballage at Pézenas, and the regular antiques markets in Limoux or along the les Allées François Verdier in Toulouse, or the town of Mirepoix, with all its antique shops. Isle-sur-la-Sorgue has a big fair at Easter and Aug. 15 (a holiday in France), and the off-season brocante is much smaller. I just hadn’t expected how much smaller.

My usual tactic for brocantes is to be there early. I got an AirBnB in town for Saturday night, since the market is Sunday. Surprisingly, quite a few restaurants close on Saturday, and vegetarian options were few and far between–just two places.

The AirBnB was so quiet that I slept longer than I had planned, and didn’t head out until 8:30 or so. To my great surprise, vendors were just setting up their stands for the food market. I’ve been to the Saturday food market in Carcassonne as early as 7 a.m.–when it was still dark–and I think they start even earlier in summer. So I got a window table at the Grand Café de la Sorgue and enjoyed a huge café crème and a chocolatine. The waiter primly corrected the order as pain au chocolat. I thought we were in the south! However, I just revisited the question, and indeed, chocolatine is just used in the southwest. So the waiter must have decided I was some kind of country hick from the even-more-rural southwest. On the map, my département of Aude looks split, but I can attest that Carcassonne is in chocolatine territory, or choco for short.

The food market was immense and diverse. The brocante part was not. It’s on Avenue des Quatre Otages (Four Hostages Avenue–in honor of a WWII tragedy). I don’t know if there were even 10 stands, because by the time I left, around 11, some were still setting up.

I stopped at the tourism office, where they confirmed that I had seen the entire brocante, and that the main attractions were the antique shops, which were mostly clustered around courtyards on the outside of the ring around the town center. Like many villages here, there’s a big church in the center, and the town wraps around it. In Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, that center is an island, formed by canals that deviate the Sorgue river. This leads to many little bridges and several still-turning waterwheels, plus ducks. And waterfront cafés. All lovely.

The antique dealers’ courtyards were lovely as well. Antiquaires tend to have an eye for aesthetics. (No photos because they all had signs forbidding snapping pics.) I saw many beautiful pieces, but they always had a zero or two too many in the price. I saw a montgolfier (hot-air balloon, but upside down) chandelier for 450€ that was identical to one I bought for 40€ from a couple of retirees who were moving out of their house near Toulouse, and I had to help them disconnect it from the ceiling (which is one way to know it worked).

40€ or 450€?

Looking at all these fine pieces in fine settings was enjoyable, but what I find really fun is rooting through a dusty warehouse space packed with disorganized stuff and spotting just the right thing, buried under piles of junk, paying next to nothing for it, then taking it home, cleaning it up and having a piece that everybody will compliment–and, most importantly, that I enjoy. The Carnivore had a kind of antique-tuned X-ray vision and could home in like a laser on the nugget of gold in the pile of junk and then could haggle down the already-low price even farther. Another thing I enjoy is buying secondhand from Le Bon Coin (kind of a French Craigslist), where I found my chandelier, and I had a wonderful chat with the sellers over coffee before heading home. I’ve had a number of enjoyable encounters, and no creepy ones, both buying and selling on Le Bon Coin. While you can have stuff shipped and never meet the person, for something like chandeliers and furniture you go to their house to pick it up. This has given me an inside view of private homes, and they can be mind-blowing, both for good (like, this should be in a magazine) and for sad.

I did chat with the antiquaires. Usually they would ask where I was from as soon as I opened my mouth and betrayed myself with my accent. My response of “Carcassonne” would generate a raised eyebrow. I told a couple of them that I hadn’t realized the Sunday antiques market was an indoor affair. I got the same reaction when I said I’d been to Pézenas a few times. “Oh you mean the brocante,” they answered, saying the word as if it were an insult. “That is not what we sell here.” I should say not! Brocante prices have fewer digits! The line between antiquaire and brocanteur is fuzzy. A brocante might have antiques, and nice ones, but it could also just be anything that’s second hand. An antiques seller usually specializes in a specific period, maybe also a specific kind of furniture of that period, and they are experts on it.

Adorable free library in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. And I love the “correction” on bibliothèque.

I’ve been reading the works of Marcel Pagnol, who is famous for his loving portrayals of turn-of-the-century Provence, and part instigator for this provençal trip. (He wrote the novels Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs, which are delightful books. If you don’t read French, check out the great movies, by Claude Berri in the 1980s, with Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Emmanuelle Béart and Daniel Auteuil–must see!) Pagnol also wrote a series about his childhood, Souvenirs d’enfance, which I recently acquired (on le Bon Coin, with covers by Sempé, for 4€ for four volumes!!!). In the first volume, La gloire de mon père, or My Father’s Glory, he recounts his father’s obsession with brocantes, a love his mother didn’t share. Here’s my attempt at an abridged translation:

Every month, when he got paid, he brought back a few marvels: a broken muzzle (0.50 francs), a math compass (1.50 francs), a bass bow (1 franc), a surgical saw (2 francs), a sailor’s telescope where you saw everything upside-down (3 francs), a knife for scalping (2 francs), a hunting horn a little ovalized, with a trombone mouthpiece (3 francs), without speaking of mysterious objects for which nobody has ever found the use, and which were lying kind of all over the house.

The father defends himself, giving the example of the hunting horn. He says with condescension to his wife, “You don’t realize that this instrument, perhaps useless on its own, is a veritable mine! Reflect a second: I saw off the bell and I get an acoustic horn, a sailor’s loudspeaker, a funnel, a phonograph horn; with the rest of the tube, if I roll it in a spiral, it’s the tube of a still. I can also stand it up to make a blowpipe, or a water pipe, in copper, mind you! If I saw it in thin slices, you have 20 dozen curtain rings; if I pierce a hundred little holes in it, we have a showerhead; if I adjust it with an enema bulb, it’s a cap gun.”

And so, before his enchanted sons and his beloved, disappointed wife, he transformed the useless instrument into a thousand objects just as useless, but more numerous.

A remnant of olden times, advertising showers, baths and furnished rooms.

The best deals are at vide-greniers, or empty-the-attics. These are village-wide garage sales, but instead of happening at individual garages, everybody hauls their stuff to a central place (football stadium, parking lot, just in the streets in the village center…), where they pay a couple of euros per linear meter (proceeds for the village football team, school, or some such good cause), and folks can walk along, perusing the flotsam and jetsam of other peoples’ lives. This is where you get the best deals, because nobody wants to haul this stuff back home after sitting there all day. The best items go early, and I do mean early. I have been both buyer and seller–as a seller you try to get there by 6 a.m. to set up, and the professionals (as buyers) will already be there with flashlights, looking for treasures to stock their shops. It’s quite a party–you chat with the sellers around you, somebody usually comes with a thermos of very strong coffee to pour into little cups for the sellers, and you meet all kinds of people. If it weren’t so exhausting to sit there all day, it would be a lot of fun.

More on Provence coming soon. Share your tips and observations, whether about Provence or antiquing. Also a question: Do you read this on a computer or on your phone? The format comes out very differently, so I will adjust…

The plastic sheets are windbreaks for the market stalls.