Chapter Thirty-Eight: Village Power Moves

The party planning committee is in desperate needs of a vibes check.

Cloudy skies: metaphor alert

In late February, the flyer was slipped into my mailbox: an invitation to attend the village party planning committee, which somehow sounds more serious in French: le Comité des Fêtes. The headline in loopy cursive font and the balloon icons dancing across the page would turn out to be inapt.

There was no question I’d be attending. If last year’s Fête de Village in mid-August was my first introduction to Saint-Maxime life, now I wanted to see how the sausage was made. Plus, I had learned that everyone comes out for this kind of thing. Even if you had no interest in pledging support, by not making the scene you signaled disinterest, which is the kiss of death in a small town.

I had now spent an entire summer in the region and was starting to understand the role of these annual village parties. The flea market and some kind of entertainment for kids was supposed to lure people out from neighboring villages to spend money on grilled sausage and tons of cheap beer, and, for the kids, the same packaged ice creams they got regularly at the supermarket. The point was conviviality, and making a little bit of money and showing the other towns how things were done.

I took my place in the small meeting room at our City Hall, bang on time. The little space was already almost to capacity at forty-something people. I took a seat next to Angelique. Cassandre and Jean-Yves were one row up, as I knew they would be thanks to our “Neighbors” text thread, and Charlotte the shy painter, and Stan and his mother. Almost everyone else was past retirement age, some by quite a lot. It seemed docile enough.

Danger lurks.

Seated at a long table in front, facing the group, were four people I didn’t recognize, alongside the mayor, who peered out at us all officiously from under her unkempt grey mpo. Behind the table was a cabinet with a row of trophies heralding feats of glory I couldn’t discern, and on the table were several large, very full binders. After a few minutes, the youngest of the bunch, sitting at the center of the panel, a fellow in his mid-thirties, loudly cleared his throat to call the meeting to order. He was Benoît, and when I whisper-asked Angelique who he was, she told me he lived on the outskirts on the other side of town and was an inspector for the local school board.

Ah, a petit fonctionnaire, a low-mid-tier civil servant, the most self-important class of people in my adopted country. These are the dauphins who control the movement of your paperwork, the ones to whom you close your letter with, “Avec mes respectueux hommages, je vous prie d’agréer l’expression de ma considération la plus distinguée,” when you are asking them to remove a mistaken upcharge of €75 on your last tax bill, or you can bet it won’t happen. I should have known Benoît was one of them. He was wearing those dour skinny rectangular wire-rimmed glasses they all do, and he acted as if he was born to lead a meeting.

Benoît stood up. After a perfunctory hello, he got straight to order. “First we’re going to do the financial rundown, and then we’ll do the moral one.” (Translation note: there isn’t really a proper English equivalent to the French adjective “moral” in this context. It’s a formal word that, here, means more “vibes,” in the sense of morale, than “ethics.”) He opened one of the massive and perfectly organized binders and, for the next twenty minutes, ran down the back and forth movement of several hundred euros as most everyone in the audience pretended to listen and thought about better things. Long story short, there wasn’t a lot of loot in the bag. “Covid didn’t help,” Benoît said. “We tried having concerts and no one came. Because of health regulations we couldn’t do the grill stand, even though other villages did, against the rules.”

A few gasps went up from the crowd.

If you think of France as a country of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, sexily flouting convention pourquoi pas, I’d advise you to update your references from Serge Gainsbourg and Just Jaeckin. “Against the rules,” when coming from the mouth of a school inspector, is extra not on. There is no longer corporal punishment in French schools, but everybody’s knuckles still expect a rap when they hear this phrase.

Finally Benoît came around to the vibes portion of the rundown. He stood up even straighter, and announced point blank that the entire committee was quitting en masse. Right now. His voice rose steadily as he ranted about no one having any energy anymore, and not enough people helping. Five minutes in, he was legit yelling. “We wanted to do something really big for Christmas and we had no help putting up trees and Madame _____ was standing up on a ladder next to the church in the freezing cold. She could have fallen.”  As he spat that last point out, I heard the faint sound of snoring behind me. Tough room.

Benoît threatened that if nobody raised their hands to take over the job this minute, we simply wouldn’t have a summer party, nor any Christmas decorations. The Christmas stuff was fine by me, our village decorations are shopworn and fugly as hell. But the party? Cassandre and Jean-Yves looked at each other, shrugged, and put their hands up. Angelique followed. I sat on mine—sorry, I was in the home stretch on a book project—but I promised them I’d volunteer on the days leading up.

After Benoît took a breath and a seat, the vote was taken and it was determined that Cassandre would be running the show, with Jean-Yves flanking her, and eight more people onsides. Why we needed treasurers and assistant treasurers and secretaries and assistant secretaries to handle an annual budget of €2500 was beyond me, but apparently if they wanted to reduce the number of committee members, they had to refile the charter in the big village just to the east of us, and that could take weeks. Vive la France!

Next came a long discussion of what kind of sausage to serve now that we could do the grill again. Far too many hands went up for andouillette. Andouillette has nothing to do with New Orleans andouille. It is pork intestine sausage wrapped in literal colon and if I am in a restaurant and anyone within a thirty-foot range has it delivered to their table, the moment they slice into it, an unwashed ass smell goes up like a neutron bomb and I run to the squat toilet for better air.

I was chuffed to see that my people were going to be the new power center, but heavy is the head that wears the crown. In the weeks that followed, Cassandre told me that meetings were not going well. Angelique and Jean-Yves were cool with her mission to up the stakes culturally—why not square dancing, an organ grinder, some jazz music at a sit-down dinner? But there was apprehension from the others around anything that wasn’t exactly like years previous. It seemed that the point wasn’t to be dynamique and put Saint-Maxime back on the Fête de Village map as it was before the pandemic, but to grind out the same five centimes per ass sausage and call it a day.

Cassandre was vexed. There was an especially intense power struggle with another committee member, a retired hippie from across town who used to work as a prop master in Paris. (My only contact with her was when she chased me down at least three times to hand in my census form a good several weeks before it was due.) Cassandre suspected her of setting up a rogue Facebook group in the name of the committee and trying to monopolize the mailing list. Every small decision—we put the posters up at which roundabouts? Ass sausage would come from which supplier?—was subject to ten rounds of votes. “Honestly in these village things, you just can’t win,” she told me one night over drinks at her place.

I spent most of my first year in this burg recovering from social anxiety bit by bit, worried that my non-joinerism would give me a bad reputation. I was starting to feel better about it now.

Before this larger tale is through, we will get to experience the Fête under Cassandre’s guidance. It may end up being one of the last chapters of our little adventure. I’m still working that out. Thank you for sticking around thus far!