'French markets are charming, but filled with crimes in the name of upcycling'
A few weeks after we moved to France, Pézenas held one of its biannual antiques fairs, where the town’s many antique shops spill out onto the streets to join other dealers – more than 200 in all – laying out their stalls of the beautiful and the improbable (I really should have bought that dog pram).
Le Grand Déballage Antiquités-Brocante is quite the hot ticket and I needed to buy a small table with some urgency (it’s not terribly dignified for someone in their 50s to conduct Zoom meetings from their blow-up mattress which, along with two deck chairs, was all the seating we had until our furniture arrived a couple of weeks later). But I barely needed an excuse: I have long been obsessed with the lure of the old and the slightly knackered – I think sellers call it “character”.
When I was eight or nine, we had a neighbour, Mrs Lishman, who was an antiques dealer. Occasionally, she’d make me a present of an old chocolate box, slightly dented, or a chipped vase – the dregs of a house clearance – but I treasured them as though they had only recently arrived from Sotheby’s. She would stand in her garage, fur-coated against the cold, surveying lot after lot of brown furniture and, dragging on her cigarette, announce: “All I need to do is wash their little faces.” She was the most glamorous person I’d ever met.
So, fortified with coffee and cash, I walked Pézenas’s route des Antiquaires. As it got closer to lunchtime, stallholders flapped vintage linens over trestle tables and laid them with mismatched plates from their stock, which they filled with rotisserie chickens, cheese, charcuterie and baguettes. Glasses – from Duralex to Louis the Something – appeared and were filled with wine, quickly emptied and filled again. Antique dealing is clearly very hungry work.
Much as I was seduced by this charming scene, it didn’t quieten the internal cries of “How much?” as I inspected anything, including many items that looked a breath away from being tossed in a skip. There were so many crimes in the name of upcycling (are there any other paint colours but grey?) I feared we must urgently convene a special session at the Hague. It was a bit rich for my canny northern heart and I was reassured that it wasn’t just me who thought so when I overheard a woman on her phone say: “Oh, I am at the antiques fair at Pézenas. No, nothing special. Same old stuff, just three times the price.”
So I came away without a table (a neighbour loaned me a small one to spare my colleagues the background hiss on any further airbed conference calls) and a few weeks later, our own furniture arrived. A London friend who knew our house there almost as well as her own came to visit and expressed surprise at how well our old things fitted into the new property. It was then I realised how much of it I had bought in France, hauled back to London, and then packed into a van and brought back here: I wasn’t so much moving it as bringing it home.
Inevitably, there were gaps that needed to be filled, though not at Pézenas prices. One of our neighbours runs vide grenier ( “empty your attic”) sales in her garage and is a great source of almost everything – if she doesn’t have it, she will know someone who does. From her, we bought a Siemens cooker for €100 (£84): “Nearly brand new; the lady died before she could cook on it.”
Then there’s Emmaus, a movement founded in 1949 by Catholic priest Abbé Pierre to combat homelessness that now runs charity shops throughout France. We drove through the vines on the flat plane outside of Servian to a large outlet. Outside the hanger-like building, tables and shelves were filled with fish kettles and pressure cookers. Pans that once cooked Christmas dinners or birthday lunches were stacked in a heap, rusting. There were racks and racks of terrible paintings: long unloved; never lovely. A battalion of ironing boards stood sentry by the door. Inside was everything from clothes to books, children’s toys, 1970s sofas, mattresses and hulking furniture. It was incredibly cheap – and when it came to the enormous wardrobes, I foresaw a lot of grey paint in their futures.
Just outside of Agde, our local dépôt-vente – a second hand shop where goods are sold on commission on behalf of their owners – was calmer and more ordered; all neat labels and bar codes. There were chandeliers and rugs, endless Provençal plates, and sensible, sturdy bedside tables that still smelled of beeswax. It was less furniture anarchy than Emmaus; more your granny’s second-best dinner service.
Here and there were traces of other British immigrants: stacks of Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith cookbooks; a Gwynedd Constabulary policeman’s cap. In a display case, two dozen plates embellished with Freemason symbols were reduced from €165 to €135. Next to them was a barrel-shaped cigarette holder, filled with filterless Gitanes, the tobacco so dried out they were as deflated as month-old balloons.
Perhaps our greatest Furniture Buying Adventures, however, have been had via Facebook Marketplace, where prices are generally low. There’s the added bonus that we get to test our SatNav to its limits as we navigate hillsides, farm tracks and remote villages in pursuit of kitchen dressers and console tables. The only downside is that by the time we have driven 30 miles, I feel committed. When I’m standing in a stranger’s bedroom inspecting a chest of drawers as their pants gently dry on the radiator, it kills my negotiation skills stone dead. Invariably, I pretend I haven’t noticed the woodworm and quickly shove as many euros as possible in their hands and flee.
Back in England, we bought most of our furniture at the Criterion auction rooms in Islington, north London, and Addisons auction house in Barnard Castle (if you’re looking for it, it’s not your eyesight failing you: Addisons sadly closed in 2015). The thrill of the chase has never left me, though what I’m learning about antique buying is that quality is everything, charm is overrated, getting something re-upholstered is more expensive than buying new by about the factor of a thousand, and you will never, ever find replacement handles for that little cabinet, so you will continue to open it with a tab of ribbon tied through the hole until forever and if you can live with that, fine.
But mostly, I follow my heart, wash their little faces, fold them gratefully into our home, and get on with life.
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