The Further Adventures of Colombe

Part 1: An author meets a descendant of her fictional character

When my sister Christine conceived the idea for her novel, “Colombe,” she was inspired by her environment: The French mountain hamlet she had made her home some years earlier, the little stone church located right next to her house and the neglected churchyard nearby, which she lovingly maintains. A memorial plaque on a gravesite, and a mysterious inscription on a pink marble stoup (holy-water basin) sparked the characters in her imagination.

Her ancient stone house, built against the mountain slope, is not very big, and when she acquired it she was told that it had been formed by the merging of two separate, even smaller dwellings. It’s not obvious if you don’t know. The characters and their surroundings came to life in her novel. The central pair, Colombe and Michel, were named after the couple on the plaque (photo above), and share their birth and death dates. Imagining an explanation for the 20-year discrepancy in age between the husband and wife in the churchyard was one factor that set the writing process in motion. However, their lives as described in the book are fiction, entirely of the author’s creation.

In November of 2019, the Dutch-language book was published in Belgium, her (and my) homeland, where it garnered enthusiastic reviews from readers, as well as critical acclaim. (I have completed the English translation, and we are currently trying to find a publisher for it in the USA.)

About nine months later, on a Sunday afternoon in August, Christine was relaxing in the coolness of her house when she heard voices nearby. She realized she must have forgotten to close the property’s metal access gate, whose creaking usually alerts her to visitors. Looking out the window, she saw an unknown woman in her tiny backyard, and heard someone warn the stranger, “You can’t do that, someone’s living there!” The lady stopped, saying, “I think it’s being restored,” and retraced her steps to the street side. “Sunday people,” Christine thought, “They’ll soon be gone.”

They’re still here?

But when she ventures out to the recycling container a little later, she spots the couple having a picnic near the lavoir; and hours later, going to harvest some tomatoes from her vegetable patch, she is accosted by that same lady.

“Excuse me, are you a resident of this hameau?”

They’re still here?

A conversation ensues. The visitor’s name is Angela, and she is Spanish.

“My friend had family living here,” she says.

Emerging from the churchyard, the man joins in, “My father is buried here, he was M. Garrigue.”

My sister nods; she knows all the names on the graves.

“And my mother was a Trabis.”

Now Christine is getting goosebumps. “Like Colombe Trabis?”

“That was her grandmother,” the man says. “She lived to be eighty-six, in that house behind the church. We were hoping to have a look at it, but we didn’t like to trespass.”

Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined her characters actually living in her own house.

It turns out that the Colombe from the churchyard, Michel’s wife Colombe, lived in the part of Christine’s house that is now the kitchen.

Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined her characters actually living in her own house. “Of course,” Christine writes in her blog, “their real lives probably were nothing like the imagined ones. But it’s a strange feeling to discover this.”

Strange synchronicity, indeed, and possibly ominous? Now she can’t help thinking of Colombe living, long ago, in her kitchen, a stone’s throw from the little church that the fictional Colombe and Michel saw being built, from the bench in front of their house, in her novel.

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