Five Days in Dinan
Tilted Buildings, Dusty Gites, & Other Charms. Cotes d'Amor, Brittany, France.
Note: Dinan is a medieval city in Brittany, famous for its ramparts, and for the timbered buildings that seem to defy gravity, ever on the verge of collapse.
The following excerpt is from the red notebook, one of many notebooks I kept while living in Paris from 2018 - 2020. The entry is dated December 30, 2018.
An audio version of this post s available to paid subscribers.
29 Place St. Sauveur
The bells of the Basilica of St. Sauveur, just yards from the windows of our flat, rang for twenty minutes this morning, calling us to worship, but here I sit on the couch, wet-headed from the quirky shower, on my third espresso. K and O are still sleeping.
It is Sunday. We arrived in Dinan on Friday night, a four-hour drive via the A11 from Paris. It may be the prettiest town I’ve ever seen—at least the prettiest town I’ve ever seen that isn’t on a beach. From high on the hill, a five minute walk from our apartment, you can look down on the river Rance snaking through the valley.
We rented the flat for four nights, though it occurs to me now two nights would have been sufficient. According to the airbnb listing, “Authenticity and modernity combine in this apartment of character decorated by the works of painters.” The statement is half true, which in airbnb-speak is perhaps true enough.
The flat is so authentic, in fact, that the floors are significantly slanted—really more of a slope than a slant; you might even call it a hill. The armoire in the living room leans visibly sideways. A wooden block, about nine inches thick, has been shoved under the base of the kitchen cabinets to ward off collapse. Standing in the living room, one gets a sense of vertigo. Sitting is better than standing, so long as you’re willing to endure the considerable discomforts of the couch.
After two decades in California, tilted buildings make me nervous. “Don’t worry,” K said Friday night. “There are no earthquakes in Brittany.” I love that man, his steady reassurances, but sometimes his soothing pronouncements warrant a fact-check.
I googled “earthquakes in Dinan.” The first hit was a list of earthquakes in Brittany in the past 48 hours. The fifth hit was an article from last year titled “Should People in Brittany Be Worried About All the Earthquakes?” Subtitled: “Why is the northwest region of France so often hit by seismic activity?”
I told O not to hang out by the leaning bookcase. I went over to the window to see if the belfry of the basilica was tilting our way. It was. In the building directly across the square, I could see through the third-floor window the creepy portrait of a creepy man. I reminded myself that it was a Frenchman who designed the Eiffel Tower. The country has produced engineers galore. The building had stood for centuries; surely it could hold on for one more week.
Dusty Gite Avec…
K has observed that an accurate title for many airbnb listings in France would be “Dusty gite avec shitty couch.” (Gite is the French word for a holiday rental, usually in a village or in the countryside, but gite is often shorthand for a certain liberty with the hygienic arts). Our gite is located four floors up a winding staircase in an ancient building in the center of town, directly on the main square. The staircase, barely a foot wide at its narrowest point, has no lighting and is pitch black at night. The steps are about seven inches deep and a foot apart, so every ascent or descent is an adventure.