A house in France becomes an American writer’s portal to history

On a whim, American journalist and foreign correspondent T.D. Allman bought a centuries-old house in the French mountaintop village of Lauzerte. 

He returned there for over three decades, until his death earlier this year, soaking in the shifting atmosphere of rural French life. He got to know the local eccentrics and, perhaps inevitably, became something of a local eccentric himself.

Allman’s latest book, “In France Profound,” completed before his death, distills the view from his roughly 12th-century house as well as describes the years he spent rambling the countryside and browsing through books on the region. The result is an idiosyncratic but often lively tour of French history, from the Crusades and the Black Death to Nazi occupation and all the way to the latest supermarket opening.

“The melodramas of many epochs lurk in its ancient beams and period parquetry. From my House you also perceive the structure of the universe,” Allman writes. “My House breathes. It teaches. It speaks. You can hear its wooden beams shifting in the night, and when there’s a storm, the House moves like a ship.”

He writes that he purchased the house as a refuge and escape from the globe-trotting reporting on conflicts and disasters around the world. Allman’s articles were published in a number of America’s best-known publications, most notably Vanity Fair. That magazine’s generous pay rates during journalism’s heyday in the 1980s, Allman notes in the acknowledgments, helped foot the considerable bill for his home’s renovation and upkeep.

Allman dubs the region that surrounds and includes Lauzerte as “France Profound,” a play on France profonde (“Deep France”), a widely used term for provincial society in the French countryside – somewhat akin to the frequently invoked idea of a “real” America beyond the big cities. “Profound,” Allman writes, “has the force needed to convey how special it is.”

He likens the region to the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, the setting for most of William Faulkner’s work, packed full of “many strange truths” and “curious characters.”

The French town, in Allman’s telling, finds itself both tied to nearly every major historical development to roil Europe and yet simultaneously insulated from the upheavals. “Throughout its long history, as today, France Profound doesn’t make history. History periodically remakes it, and then rolls on its way. Somehow what remains is revelatory,” writes Allman.

The author’s style is at turns bombastic, entertaining, eccentric, and insightful. His writing, which verges on the baroque, sometimes spills over into overwrought. For fans, that is surely part of the charm, although it can be exasperating. There are also moments that call his rigor into question. He mentions the Children’s Crusade, a religious movement in the 1200s, for instance, but never brings up the scant historical documentation for those events – and the degree to which they may have been pure mythology. Elsewhere, he claims that Europeans were “innumerate” before the Italian mathematician Fibonacci popularized Arabic numerals, a claim that would astound the ancient Greeks.

There are still plenty of deft and vibrant bits, but “In France Profound” remains thin on the texture of everyday life, especially in the descriptions of decades spent in what – Allman repeatedly assures us – is a bustling village packed with big personalities.

Readers only rarely get to meet any of Lauzerte’s present-day residents, who are largely relegated to the acknowledgments in the back of the book. 

At one point, while digging through records, Allman discovers that a certain “genial old gentleman” named Martial Paris – “who at every Saturday market provisioned me with poultry and wisdom” – had once escaped from Nazi German captivity. Allman goes on to contemplate what the old men of Paris’ childhood might have once witnessed – and the chain of living memory into the deep past.

“When I tried to calculate it, I was surprised. As few as a dozen, certainly no more than twenty, was all it would take to shake hands my way back to 1291,” when the people of Lauzerte managed to push out occupying English troops in an episode long enshrined in local lore. It’s a lovely passage, but it also points to a shortcoming in the book. There’s not a word from Paris himself, no firsthand account of his life and little sense of his personality.