French Village Life

The Flies Were Driving Me Crazy — My Attempt To Send Them Away Raised A Few Eyebrows

Who Was This Strange Woman?

It was hot, my first summer in France. By July, the exterior stone walls that had kept the apartment cool, sometimes verging on frigid, had absorbed enough heat that my living quarters felt like a low degree oven.

I’d described the apartment (leased sight unseen before I came to France) as a cave. Not a huge exaggeration. Concrete floors and plaster-covered walls. Two small windows that opened onto a street lined with tall stone houses provided the only source of daylight. More about it at the link below.

Back in the States, I’d decided I wouldn’t need a car — I’d ride a bike everywhere. How little I knew then. If I’d had a bike, which I didn’t, I could ride around the village — to the epicerie, the boulangerie, the boucherie— even to the salon de coiffure where elderly ladies (anyone older than 68 year old me) got their pale yellow hair shellacked into place, but that was it.

Anything else would require an eight-mile ride to the nearest Intermarche then eight miles back, with whatever I’d bought shoved into a basket or backpack and French drivers zooming up to my back wheel, laughing uproariously at the startled old girl on her bike, then zooming off again.

No thanks.

I needed a car.

Except, I couldn’t afford a car — I’d depleted my already minuscule savings with too many Amazon purchases, mostly rugs and lamps necessary to transform the cave into something I could live in for the duration of the lease.

But, I wanted a car.

I wanted to get away from the heat of the cave. I daydreamed about driving the forty-odd miles to the Mediterranean beaches. Sparkling waves, cool breezes . . .

Instead, I was stuck in the cave-oven with flies. Flies and more flies. I’d never seen so many. Hundreds, thousands of them, swarming in through the two small windows. Fluttering across my face every morning, swarming on my hands as I typed, doing their thing in my hair — how was it even possible that I could feel something so tiny moving around in my bird's nest mass of hair? No idea, but I could. They were relentless And they were driving me crazy.

Window screens apparently didn’t exist in France. The weekly market sold contraptions of net stretched over wire frames used to cover food. Fine, but not much good when you’re trying to eat the food and flies are walking all over it.

Did you know flies taste through their feet? It’s true. If they decide something’s delicious, they refuse to leave.

“You’re in Europe,” my English-speaking friend said when I complained that flies were beating me to my scrambled eggs. “Get used to it.”

Easier said than done.

Before I got used to flies buzzing me awake with their vibrating thoraxes and mocking my attempts to swat them, I’d go absolutely bonkers.

My morning exercise constituted leaps around the cave, arm-waving followed by thirty minutes of vigorous fly-swatting. This was repeated on the hour throughout the day and into the night. All to little avail.

Something had to give. I wasn’t thrilled with the thought of spraying insecticide, but I was on the verge of buying Raid, or the French equivalent.

Then I saw something, on Facebook.

Coins in a water-filled plastic baggie will terrorize flies.

They’ll see the coins as giant eyes — this is not a scientific explanation — which spooks them so badly, they take off and never darken your doors, or compete for your food again.

Sounded worth a try.

I’m of the persuasion that if one thing works well, ten will work even better, (a bad idea when it involves medication or wine)so I rounded up some coins, distributed them among half a dozen ziplock bags — sacs en plastique — filled the bags with water, zipped them and fastened them to the window frames. The front door had a frosted glass panel with a decorative wrought iron frame so I stuck one there too.

Then, just in case any of the neighbours hated the flies as much as I did, I wrote a helpful little explanation, in French using Google translate, to explain the purpose of the coin-filled baggies.

Well.

It kind of worked on the flies. Fewer of them showed up at mealtime — or perhaps they’d tired of my cooking — and there seemed to be fewer hanging around the cave.

But tongues were wagging in the village.

My English-speaking friend mentioned this when she dropped by a few days later. It wasn’t the first time I’d unknowingly attracted attention. A few months earlier, she’d asked me to pick up something from the epicerie.

“He’ll know who you are,” she’d said. “Everyone in the village knows who you are.”

I’d given her a look.

“You’re blonde and you’re American.”

Actually, I’m not American, but hey ho.

I suspected it was because I’d been overheard slaughtering the language of Moliere — which I’d apparently done again with my helpful note about the flies.

“Did you really mean that you want to attract flies?” my friend asked.

It was late evening and still hot. Too hot for sitting in the cave-oven. Ever the consummate hostess, I’d dragged the two kitchen chairs, one with a broken leg propped up on a Bon Maman jam jar, out to the street where we sat drinking wine and breathing in fumes from passing cars.

Apparently (merci Google translate) my note was essentially an invitation to the flies to come on in —welcome, welcome, the more the merrier. Plenty of food to share.

This made people wonder about me, my friend said.

Were my water-filled baggies some sort of art project? Was I, perhaps, an eccentric artist of some sort? She grinned. “Or perhaps a little crazy?”

I laughed.

She drank some wine and motioned to the house across the road. “Paulette thinks perhaps you’re a witch.”

A witch.

Had Paulette peeped through one of the cave-oven’s two tiny windows, and spied my early morning fly abatement gymnastics? Had she watched, mouth agape, as I leaped into the air, slapped at my head, all the while muttering imprecations in a strange foreign language?

Even without the coin-filled plastic baggies, I could see where she was coming from.

So not just a blonde American, also une sorcière

A few months in France and I’d already taken on a new identity.

Maybe I’d start referring to the cave-oven as the coven. And maybe I wouldn’t need a car after all, or even a bike, I could just fly to Intermarche on my broomstick.

I’d like to say the fly baggies worked, but they didn’t. Neither did the spell I cast under the light of a full moon as a black cat walked across my path.

A couple of other stories about my first years in France:

Did you know that you can also take me along on your walk, or wherever? Just press the listen button at the top of the story to hear it read aloud.

Thanks in advance.