Danielle Postel-Vinay - Home Sweet Maison

T he first time I encountered a French home was in the United States.

Id been invited to dinner by a woman named Jacqueline Manon, the owner of an antique shop on the main street of my midwestern hometown. I was seventeen, a junior in high school, and had applied for a part-time job at her store, Manons, hoping to make some money so I could move into my first apartment after I graduated. I was taking my first steps toward living on my own, and fate had brought me to Jacqueline.

She didnt hire meshe was a one-woman operationbut she didnt turn me away, either. I spent many afternoons in her antique shop, where we sat in overstuffed chairs talking, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes, Benson & Hedges in a black enamel cigarette holder for her, and American Spirits for me. During those afternoons at Manons she taught me about her businessthe buying and selling of precious objectsas well as about her life. I learned about antique furniture and old jewelry and vintage clothes. I learned not only how one could experience culture through these old things, but also how they had the power to lead one to the future.

Jacqueline and I slowly created an unlikely friendship: I was a bookish girl in need of guidance. She was fifty-four years old, the daughter of a French mother and a German father, an ex-model turned hippie who was fierce in her tastes and protective of her privacy. She had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, thirty-five years before, moving first to New York City, then San Francisco, and eventually settling in the Midwest. It was here, in the middle of America, that she became my first mentor in the art of living.

I arrived for dinner at her home one April evening, climbed the steps, and rang the bell. It had taken months before Jacqueline had invited me to her home, a large Victorian painted lady overlooking a park. For her, home was a sanctuary, a place she went to escape the rest of the world. Her two Yorkshire terriers, Coco and Chantilly, were barking like crazy, their voices high and sharp over the sound of Edith Piaf playing on a stereo. The door opened, and there stood Jacqueline, wearing a patterned scarf tied over her gray hair, long silver earrings, and a hand-knit sweater.

Come in, she said, holding the dogs back. Dont mind my girls, theyre very protective of me. Come in, come in, make yourself at home.

We walked through the entryway and into a house unlike anything I had ever seen. Every roomfrom the entryway to the salon to the reading nook to the dining roomfelt foreign yet intimate. The house was filled with furniture and objects, plants and books and statues, and yet it felt spacious and elegant. There was nothing minimal or severe about Jacqueline's house. In fact, the very idea of minimalismthat heartless discarding of the pastwas the opposite of what I found there. The rooms were formal yet bohemian, orderly yet casual, with oil paintings on the walls and Joni Mitchell albums stacked on the couch. The air smelled clean, fresh, and yet there was dust on her old books and the silk of a spiderweb in the corner of a window. Her house, it seemed to me, was not just a place where she ate and slept, but also a vessel for her vision of life.

Jacqueline led me to the fireplace, where a crackling fire cast a glow over a small marble-topped table and two chairs. The table was round and beautifully arranged, but clearly had been carried over for the occasion, a little like setting up a folding tray before the television. As I looked around, I realized that there was no television, or at least not one I could see. When I was growing up, the television was the main attraction of our living room, the literal and symbolic center of family life. Here, it was the fireplace that brought us together.

Take a seat, she said, gesturing to a chair. I thought we could eat by the fire.

I sat down and looked around the room, noticing a dish of small ammonite fossils excavated in Germany, a jade Buddha shed bought on San Franciscos Haight Street, and a lacquered box full of Tarot cards, objects that, I would only later understand, told the story of who she was and where she had been.