The Boy from Toulouse and Other Reasons Why France...

“I am not a number! I am a free man!”

It’s the early 90s, and I’m standing on the steps of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, talking to a boy I assume is a few years older than me—I’m a high-school junior with two-and-a-half years of public-school French under my belt, and a sharp pang of romance tugging at my gut. It’s dusk in the early spring, and a mild March evening has brought hundreds to the hillside of Montmartre for socializing, guitar-playing, and conversation.

Sacré-Coeur, 1992.

Sporting scruffy black hair and blue eyes, this boy is conversing with me in half-English, half-French, which is just about as much as I can muster myself.

“I am not a number!” The boy repeats with a grin. He shouts these famous lines from The Prisoner, ostensibly to show me his knowledge of English language and culture. Though the late-60s show is British, I’m painfully American, and even more painfully interested in trying to have a conversation with this striking boy. He and I chat unexpectedly and briefly about our lives.

“Toulouse,” he says. “Je viens de Toulouse.” He doesn’t know it, but he just gave himself a nickname. For the rest of my life, he’ll be known as The Boy from Toulouse.

Though Toulouse is a place I won’t visit for another 30 years, its name will be etched in my mind like a point on an emotional map. Popping up in my poems and journal entries for years to come. Toulouse. Almost as though it’s a fixed point in my future, a plot twist I’ll have to keep reading to reach. During my teens and twenties, I’ll visit several parts of France aside from Toulouse, including Cannes, Nice, and a few moments in Avignon. All of it feels intoxicating.

Montmartre, 1991.

“Why is everyone in France so…interesting?” My friend, a year younger, tugs at my sleeve as we listen to The Boy from Toulouse talk and finish buttery crêpes with lemon. The sky grows orange and pink around us, and I think about how, growing up blue collar in the middle of rural Massachusetts, it doesn’t take much to impress me. Hell, Boston is a cultural wonder as far as I’m concerned at this point in my young life—which is another reason I’ve traveled here with my high-school foreign language club. Like some sort of Disney character, I, too, know there’s so much more to this life than what I’ve been born into.

“You mean why is Massachusetts so boring?” I whisper back to her, chewing. We nod and listen.

The Boy from Toulouse jokes with us about American films and music for a few minutes. I tell him about how uneventful it is in New England, and he tells me he loves art and music. Then, almost as quickly as he appeared, he waves, jetting down the steps to follow a friend toting a guitar. And just like that, The Boy from Toulouse vanishes into a distant memory.

I like to think of myself as a person who makes conversation easily, and it’s a skill that will only intensify throughout my life. I can chat about almost anything with anyone—this is a blessing as much as it’s a curse. But I love meeting people and learning about them. I love understanding people, and I’ll eventually come to know that understanding people brings me closer to myself.

What I don’t quite understand is how this brief interaction will imprint on me the idea that there’s a whole world out here of people and places and passions to get to know. That thirty years will go by, an act of terrorism will change the way my country navigates travel, I’ll run a global sport, and eventually survive a pandemic. Then, I’ll wake up one day feeling the urge to meet the world anew again—this time, as a grown adult.

And, likely to the surprise of no one who’s reading this, the place that calls me back again and again is France.

When I moved houses in 2019, just before the pandemic, my son was looking through my senior yearbook, sitting among a stack of boxes. Guess who I mentioned in my list of favorite things as a senior? That’s right, The Boy from Toulouse. Or, the way the editor accidentally printed it, Joulouse.

“Mom, what’s a Boy from Joulouse?”

I squint over his shoulder as he pages through my yearbook. “Oh, Toulouse. Well, it’s a place.”

“Was he one of your boyfriends?” He eyes me as I tidy.

“Oh, no. Just a boy I met.”

“In Toulouse?”

“No, in Paris,” I say. He furrows his brows at me, and I return to dusting. “I know, confusing.”

“Have you ever been to Toulouse?”

“No, actually…” Countless times through my life, I’d come back to this, off and on.

Most Americans would probably stop there and think of France as a nice place to visit, perhaps even spend a sabbatical. It’s delightfully rustic and modern country with rich history, unabashedly poetic artistry, and literally the best wine and cheese in the world. Just for sanity’s sake, it also has its problems: extreme nationalism (ahem, racism), sexism (I’ll tell you about how my ex-husband had to appear in the homebuying contracts, and plenty of crime and violence.

Not all Americans would ever dream of buying a house there. So, why?

Allow me to go back a second and talk about this global sport that I had the privilege to run, roller derby. With teams in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand, roller derby brought me to new places I’ve also come to love. Places like Copenhagen, where I learned the hard way that Denmark does not look kindly on Americans shoving a shoulder through a closing door in order to catch a moving train. On SEPTA, in Philadelphia, it’s a daily experience. In Copenhagen, it’s an arrestable offense. But I digress.

Whether drinking coffee in Helsinki, or eating hush puppies from a Wichita, Kansas roadside stand, I feel so lucky to be here on this planet, having the ability to explore. Yet, few places in this life feel like places I want to stay for a while. One of these places, I now know, is Aude, a department just south of Toulouse.

“So, have you been here? Have you been to the area?”

In February 2024, the woman who becomes my French realtor asks me these questions. Herself an ex-pat, she’s a Brit who lives in Carcassonne, and she’s trying to assess my level of seriousness in wanting to see this property for sale in Aude. And I don’t blame her.

“No,” I say, “I’ve never been to Aude before, but this listing in looks really cool and affordable.”

“Do you speak French?”

“Je parle français un peu?” I ask as a question, explaining that I took a few years of French in high school, plus another refresher course a few years ago.

“That’s alright,” she says reassuringly. “You’ll get the hang of it again once you’re here.” Something about this statement sets me at ease.

The original listing photo that drew me in.

I know it’s going to sound completely wild if I come right out and say, “I saw this photo of the place online and I just have to come see it.” But it’s the truth. And I guess, to me, it’s just as wild that an American might spend the same amount of money on a car or a cruise for their family. Or less than a year of an Ivy League education.

Like with my Boy from Toulouse, I saw this photo and was immediately smitten. I mean…just look at its dramatic, green-peppered mountains and ancient train overpass.

Even though this is exactly what real estate photos are designed to do—they try to communicate the feeling of being in a place. And in this case, the listing understood the assignment.

Aude, as luck would have it, is an incredible department in France that spans from land to sea, and I am only just getting to know it. There are almost a hundred departments in France, with nearby Ariège and Aude in the southeast, a section that includes Narbonne, Carcassonne, and some of the most diverse and breathtaking landscapes you’ll ever take in. It’s part of Occitanie, and from grotto to coast to vineyard, here you can do it all. And, unsurprisingly, eat and drink it all.

When I saw that the closest international airport was Toulouse, you can imagine the sizable cackle I let out, scrolling through photos on my phone. Of course, Toulouse.

Toulouse, itself, has a particular Philadelphia feel to me. It’s where industry meets history, set on a river with old growth trees. Though it’s not technically in Aude, it’s a clean, easy city to get in and out of, and it’s got a vibrant dining and art scene that I look forward to exploring. Like Philly, which is not New York, Toulouse is not Paris, and thankfully so. It’s an unassuming, little jawn, just as I like it.

Look, nothing against Paris. It’s pretty awesome, it’s just not Aude. 1991.

The Boy from Toulouse has created such a legacy.

I don’t look back on my interaction with him and wonder what he’s up to, or what would have happened if we’d stayed in touch. Our moment together was much too brief to command a Hollywood story. And that’s less the point, I think. Instead, I’m convinced the universe was less concerned about the person, and more concerned with the idea—with sticking a pin in a map, telling me this place would be important to me one day. That maybe it was a place I needed to be.

When I finally land at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport thirty years later, I’ll start to understand why. In my next post, I’ll talk about seeing my house for the first time. But suffice it to say I felt more at home in this tiny house in the mountains that I ever have in any other home in this lifetime—my own included.

TL;DR: If the universe tells you to pay attention to something, you should consider it. Otherwise, it might spend the next thirty years patiently waiting for you to listen. And this is time I’d much rather spend drinking coffee in Aude.

-E.V.