When in France, Etc. By Brett D. Fromson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 21, 1998; Page E01

The working lighthouse in the town of Joinville. (By Carmel Wilson-Fromson)

She has died, but we keep going back. Outside of New England, where I was raised, there is nowhere I feel more at home. My wife -- who loves France, too, thank God -- and I have gone every year we've been together, to see family and friends or just bang around Paris and the provinces.

So it didn't seem too much of a stretch when great friends called from Paris and suggested renting houses on an obscure little island 10 miles off the Atlantic coast of France. The plan was for my wife, Carmel, our 6-year-old son, James, and I to stay in Paris for a few days and then hop the ferry to Ile d'Yeu to spend our summer vacation as the French do.

I hardly gave the trip another thought until we boarded the Air France overnight flight from Dulles to Charles de Gaulle. Sometime between my first and second mini-bottles of champagne, it dawned on me what we had signed up for -- two weeks in a house rented sight unseen, on an island we had never visited, populated entirely by the French. Was it really going to be worth the time and expense when, after all, we could far more easily have driven up to the beaches of Rhode Island or Connecticut or Long Island?

Paris was a jet-lagged blur. The morning after, we loaded the rental car and hit the autoroute for Brittany, to visit the family homestead. Not spiffy, chic, coastal Brittany, but rather the interior region -- Ile-et-Vilaine -- named for the Vilaine River that flows gently through the hardscrabble countryside between the Breton capital of Rennes and the interior river port of Redon.

The family house is in the middle of nowhere, a hamlet known as Cahan, some three miles outside a small and decidely non-touristy town named Langon. Set amid hay fields and apple trees, the old manor house -- we're talking 14th century -- is a place where Martin Guerre would feel right at home -- three-foot-thick exterior walls of rough stone and mortar, a slate roof and, inside, stone floors and cool whitewashed rooms.

My earliest memories of France are of that house. It was the first place my mom took us on our first trip. To this day, I remember the childhood wonders of the place -- the communal bread oven, the rabbit hutch, the hard-cider cellar and its tiny wooden stools, the funny old claw-foot bathtub where the only way to heat the water was to light the Bunsen burner underneath. I loved it all.

My great uncle, Lucien Duval, was the cockeyed seigneur of the house. He renovated the old place after World War II. Blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, he was, even in his eighties, boyishly charming and attractive to women. His great loves were his wife, Louisa, a series of mistresses and two dogs -- Mignon Un and Mignon Deux. His last amoureuse, about 30 years his junior, was the daughter of his best friend. Months before Lucien died, he and Marie-Therese married in a final romantic gesture.

I was looking forward to introducing our son to the old place. I hoped that down the line, he might have his own homecomings at Cahan.

So when we came bouncing down the country road and pulled up at gate of the house, I was distressed to find the grounds completely overgrown and the house locked up, seemingly abandoned. Peering through the doors and windows, I saw that the furniture and family photos and papers had been left exactly as I remembered, but they were covered with a thick layer of dust -- a Miss Haversham moment. Spiders the size of crabs guarded the door. Something was obviously terribly amiss. I kicked myself for not having written to say we were coming.

We spoke at length with a neighbor, who remembered my mother. She explained that Marie-Therese was no longer living in the house.

You could see the place slowly going to pieces, like so many other old structures in France's increasingly depopulated rural areas. I was quietly crushed.

In an attempt to salvage something, I showed Jamie the 10 martyr stones at the nearby crossroads, marking the massacre of some village boys by retreating German soldiers in 1944. The Germans had disguised their tanks and trucks with U.S. Army markings so that when the teenagers went out with old hunting rifles and shotguns to greet their liberators, the Germans captured them, lined them up and shot them.

I explained to Jamie how a younger brother of one of the murdered boys had picked a fight with me and my siblings when we first visited Cahan as kids. We were walking through the hamlet when he ambushed us and began throwing stones at us. We did not know why, but we didn't wait to find out before returning fire. Later, to our shame, our mother explained that the boy had thought we were Germans because our rented Volkswagen microbus had German license plates. Jamie really liked that story, especially the part where we chased the boy into the bread oven and refused to let him out until he stopped throwing stones. I don't know why. Maybe it was simply the tales of war.

We planned to catch a ferry the next day to Ile d'Yeu in order to miss the monumental traffic jams that plague the roads from Paris to the beaches each Aug. 1 as all of France goes on holiday for the month.

We boarded the boat along with several hundred other folks. The sun-filled scene -- chattering families, kids in sunglasses, straw hats everywhere, teenagers with guitars, dogs on leashes, the scent of suntan lotion in the air -- was comforting and much like the happy crowds on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard, Block Island or any other isle where people shuck the duties and worries of the mainland for bicycles and shorts. It was standing room only. No one seemed to mind.

Ile d'Yeu came into view off the starboard bow about 45 minutes later. The sun covered the island in brilliant light that highlighted the simple geometry of the rectangular white houses with blue shutters.

We slid past the breakwater into the harbor of the island's main town, Port Joinvillecq, an active fishing village -- the kind of place where fishermen, having unloaded their catch, drink beer and brandy and coffee in the cafes along the quay at 8 o'clock in the morning.

We made straight for our rented house. It was fine -- clean, airy and with a lovely view of the water.

The only problem, as we discovered when hopping into bed, was that there were no sheets or pillow cases. In France, you have to bring your own -- or else, as we ended up doing, rent them. how much?

The next day, and every day, we followed the routine of the French, which was easy, since they pretty much all did the same thing at the same time.

Before 9:30 a.m., no one stirred outside, save a few joggers and workers. Then at 10 o'clock, the French all began to appear on their bikes and headed toward Port Joinville to do the day's shopping. Until noon, it was a flood of mainly old one-speeds into town for the morning market. At noon, they reversed direction as if on cue and headed home to prepare lunch. At 2:30 sharp, everyone headed to the beach, where they remained until about 6. Then home, perhaps a few last-minute errands before long evenings of cooking, conversation, wonderful food and wine.

There is nothing, however, like living in a foreign country to notice the little ways in which daily life differs, even in developed countries like France and the United States.

Take, for example, shopping at the supermarche, a French amalgam of grocery, discount store and gourmet shop. Any store where you can get both tete de porc vinaigrette and cheap sandals, to say nothing of wine and beach balls, is my kind of place.

At the supermarket, the only problem was figuring out how to get a cart. In France, they lock them up, I suppose for fear that customers will steal them. To free your chariot, you must have a 10-franc piece, exact change only, and slip it into the cart handle, whereupon the lock pops open and off you go.

I had failed to note this cart arrangement in past trips, so like one of the Three Stooges, I tried wrestling a cart free for a minute before a kind lady explained the 10-franc trick.

After shopping, I could not for the life of me figure out how to re-lock my cart to the others. Turned out that I was trying to lock my blue cart to the queue of red ones. Blues only go with blues and reds with reds. Very Cartesian. You won't find that in any guidebooks.

Over the next two weeks, we settled into the easy rhythms of a French vacation.

Mornings passed in wonderful slow motion -- gently waking, coffee on the terrace overlooking the sea, baths, dressing, washing clothes and then hanging them to dry on the line out back. A local donkey appeared every morning at the low back fence. Jamie fell in love with the sweet doe-eyed beast and would feed him fresh carrots.

We dug the carrots a couple of miles away at a pick-your-own garden run by a charming, curly-haired schoolteacher. He grew lovely little strawberries, five different kinds of salad greens, several varieties of tomatoes, fresh flowers and sweet melons. He said it was extraordinarily unusual to meet Americans on Ile d'Yeu. It was the first time anyone ever made me feel exotic because I came from Washington.

Like everyone else, we spent mornings in Port Joinville. The town has a fishing fleet more active than any island fleet I've seen in the United States and boasts the finest fish store I have ever seen anywhere, including Paris. Located on the quay, the store offers a maritime cornucopia of freshly caughtmay fish of every kind -- tuna, sea bass, sea bream, John Dory, monkfish, sole, sardines -- and live giant crabs, lobsters, crayfish, cockles, mussels and tiny periwinkles.

Like everyone else, we cooked dinner at home each evening or went to our friends' place down the road for meals of grilled fish, fresh vegetables, good red wine, cheese, salad, poached fruit or ice cream for dessert.

Friends Isabel and Francois and her parents, Posey and Fink, would come over and we would eat on the terrace overlooking the water as the sun set over Port Joinville. Because the sun set at about 9 p.m., we could and did dine late into the night, laughing and talking and happy. Then off our guests would go for the short bike ride to their house as we cleaned up and crawled into bed to await another blissfully sunny day.

We went to the beach every afternoon. For me, it brought back memories of days and nights camping on the beaches of Brittany with my mom. She was nuts about the beach. Any time of the year. I remember swimming in the Atlantic in April in long pants, camping out on the beach in October, and steaming mussels in white wine and onions over a bonfire in August.

The island has dozens of fine beaches to enjoy, both on the coastline facing the mainland as well as the sauvage ocean side.

The beaches are long flat expanses that little ones can enjoy as much as grown-ups. And enjoy them the French do. More so than Americans, the French do things on the beach -- boule, paddle tennis, bike riding, horseback riding, soccer, kite flying, board sailing, snorkeling. I was surprised by how fit the French seemed. Maybe Ile d'Yeu attracts a particularly sporty set?

On the beach, French families stayed pretty much to themselves. The same clans could occupy the same spots on the sand day after day and yet hardly acknowledge the people 10 feet away. No one took offense. The French are just family-oriented, far more so than Americans. As comfortable as we were with the people on the island, who could not have been friendlier, it was a boon to have good friends to share the beach and the vacation in general.

On our last day, Jamie, Posey and I visited the tomb of Gen. Henri Philippe mawPetain, the marshal of France in World War I who during World War II served as head of the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Petain is buried on Ile d'Yeu, where he was imprisoned after the war.

It takes some effort to find his tomb, which is how the French like it. There were no signs outside or inside the cemetery. Petain is like a member of the family whom people would just as soon forget -- a national hero turned national disgrace, from war leader to Nazi collaborator.

But once found, the grave was, to my mind, startling -- a white marble slab surrounded by dozens of bouquets of flowers and bronze plaques from groups all over France. Make no mistake, Petain has his fans. As my mom used to say, there were more collaborators than resistants during the war. She knew from experience, having been trapped in German-occupied France during that time. She and her sister and Lucien passed messages for the Resistance, which was especially active in Brittany, but one of her aunts, who was the lover of a German officer, collaborated.

As always on our trips to France, the end came too soon. On the ferry back to the mainland, Carmel said she thought we would remember this as a special vacation. It was. We were taken completely out of our American rhythms and habits. We saw great friends who became even closer. Our son began to see and perhaps empathize with the France his parents love. And by the end of our visit, we were speaking halfway decent French.

Our last night in Paris, I dreamed for the first time in many months of my mother, who died several years ago. She appeared as she does in the old photos and home movies taken on past visits to France -- young, flaxen hair in a bun held neatly together by a gold pin. In the dream, she gave me a hug and a kiss on each cheek.

For information on travel to France, contact the French Government Tourist Office, France on Call, at 202-659-7779 or http://www.francetourism.com, or e-mail info@francetourism.com.