After drunkenly applying to be an Artist-in-Residence in Provence, France, an aspiring novelist finds herself on a journey of self-discovery, tracing the footsteps of her Huguenot ancestors through ancient French villages.
It starts with wine. That’s how all great, terrible, and completely unexpected life decisions begin, isn’t it? A bottle (fine, two) of Shiraz, an evening of Googling, and an application I fill out mostly as a joke: Artist-in-Residence, Château Saint-Pierre de Méjans, Provence. It sounds absurdly grand. Like something meant for real artists—painters in smudged overalls, poets who drink absinthe, musicians composing tragic operas.
I’m none of those things–just a writer. I’m not even French. My ancestors, yes—Huguenots who fled persecution in the 18th century—but me? No. I’m a woman from Australia with adult children who barely need me anymore, a husband who has long since perfected the art of being married to a wife of some eccentricity, and a novel-in-progress that has been “in progress” for seven years. I nearly drop my laptop when the acceptance email arrives.
We are pleased to offer you…
My first thought: There’s been a mistake. My second: I don’t even speak French.
Enter Ritva–Finnish, mad as a box of frogs, and alarmingly cultured. She once dragged me to a five-hour Wagner performance in Berlin where we both fell asleep somewhere in the second act and woke up pretending we’d had a transcendental experience. (It was probably payback for dragging her up Mount Kilimanjaro for her 60th the previous year.) She’s fluent in seven languages, including French, which is how I convince her to come with me:
“Come to Provence, Ritva! You can drink wine, cook for me, keep me on the right side of the road, and prevent me from accidentally ordering snails for breakfast.”
And so, here we are. Well, not quite so easily–she forces me to drive. When I said she could keep me on the right side of the road, I meant she would drive.
“Upskilling,” she calls it.
“Torture,” I call it.
We miss our scheduled train from Lyon to Aix—too busy getting lost in an art gallery, debating whether Monet had cataracts—so by the time we collect the rental car at the airport, it’s already dark. I’m jet-lagged, disoriented, and about to pilot a vehicle on the wrong side of the road through an hour of unlit French backroads to a château I have never seen before. The trouble starts immediately.
“Start the car.”
“I’m trying!”
It sits there, silent, judging. There’s no key, just a button that refuses to acknowledge my existence. When we finally get it going (foot on brake, button smashed in frustration, emergency prayers whispered), we lurch out of the lot and into the abyss. Then—fire.
“Oh my god, we’re burning!” I shriek.
“Seat warmers,” Ritva says, completely unfazed, adjusting her scarf. “I guess you don’t need those in Australia.”
My backside is on high roast. I press every button I can find, succeeding only in turning on the hazard lights and blasting the air-conditioning. The roads are narrow, winding, and completely unmarked. The streetlights—if they ever existed—are apparently an optional extra the French have declined. I keep a death grip on the wheel, knuckles white, entire body clenched. Except—where is my lane? I flick what I think is the high beam switch. Instead, the windscreen wipers start swiping.
“Why are there so many goddamned roundabouts?” I wail, narrowly avoiding a van that looks older than me.
“EU funding,” Ritva says, as if this explains anything.
Google Maps is screaming instructions in French, and Ritva is yelling, “The ramp! The ramp! Exit here—LEFT!”
I jerk the wheel, and somehow, miraculously, with an inch of grace and divine intervention, we do not end up in a ditch. By the time we crunch over the château’s gravel drive and park, I sit there unable to move, hands still clenched around the wheel as if bracing for impact. Ritva sighs, undoing her seatbelt. “I honestly expected you to get out of the car still holding the steering wheel in your hands. That’s how tight you were gripping it.”
The château is impossibly old—12th century, with stone walls that have outlived monarchs and revolutions. There’s a vineyard just beyond the terrace, olive groves on the far side, and a chapel that smells of damp stone and beeswax. Our rooms are at the top of a stone staircase so treacherous, I’m convinced it was designed to weed out the weak. There’s no TV, the WiFi is unreliable, and the plumbing has character. I love it.
At some point in the night, I wake up thirsty and fumble my way to the tiny kitchenette down the hall. The floor is cool under my bare feet. I pour a glass of water from the ceramic pitcher and wander to the window, drawn by the hush of the countryside at night. Beyond a stand of cypresses, the sky is a swirl of deep indigo and molten gold, the stars hanging in clusters so dense they seem almost tangled. Clouds drift in loose, luminous streaks, as if smudged by a careless thumb. It’s Starry Night. I stand there, glass forgotten in my hand, staring at a sky that is too familiar to be real.
There’s no way Van Gogh painted this from inside an asylum.
He must have stood right here. In this very room. Seen this very sky. I wake to the sound of church bells from a distant village, cicadas buzzing in the afternoon heat, and the occasional splat of an olive dropping onto the terrace below. The air smells like lavender and woodsmoke. Leaning out my window, I see rows of vines stretching into forever, the sky wide and unbroken. It is, objectively, paradise. I don’t know what to do with it.
I tell myself the goal is to research my ancestors. The Huguenots—Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution—escaped France with little more than their faith and their lives. They sailed to new lands, learned new tongues, and rebuilt from nothing. I stand in these same places, holding my laptop and a café crème, trying to connect with their suffering. It feels a bit… disingenuous. But something in me stirs when I walk through the villages where they might have lived, touch the crumbling walls of old churches, and run my fingers over names in the archives–Cosvèr, Dubois, Fontaine. I don’t know these people, but their blood is in me. And sometimes, unexpectedly, it hits.
Ritva and I are in the Cévennes, standing in the Musée du Désert, surrounded by relics of a faith that had to be carried in whispers. A portable pulpit—made from a folding wine barrel—once carried on the backs of itinerant pastors who risked their lives to speak. I stare at it, trying to imagine what it meant to them. Not just a piece of wood, but a rebellion, a refusal to be erased. Ritva watches me.
“You’re feeling it now, aren’t you?” she says, not unkindly.
I run my fingers along the wood, pressing against it as if I might touch the past itself. For a moment, I’m not a woman on a self-indulgent writing retreat, but a woman carrying a hidden faith, a voice that isn’t supposed to be heard, a name that was meant to be forgotten. I don’t answer her because some things don’t need words. I’m part of something older, heavier.
If not for Ritva, I would have perished by now. She cooks, thank God. Left to my own devices, I’d be living on supermarché baguettes, brie, and whatever I could mime at the bakery. (Pain au chocolat? Oui? Non? HELP.) But she doesn’t just keep me alive—she drags me out into France, kicking and sighing.
“You’re writing about history. You need to breathe it.”
And so, we go to ancient washing troughs—la bugade—where women once scrubbed linens against stone; to fountains in every village square, each one bubbling away like it has a purpose; to the caged church bells—trapped in iron because the Mistral wind would send them ringing into madness. The first one is covered in pigeons. Hundreds of them, crammed wing-to-wing like some bizarre avian jury. They watch me, unmoving, unblinking. For one wild moment, I think, This is an omen. Some ancient Provençal judgment upon me for crimes unknown.
“Why are the bells in a cage?”
“The Mistral.” Ritva shrugs, as if this explained everything. And perhaps it does. The wind here is not just wind—it is an entity, a force. The Mistral sweeps down from the north, rattling shutters, bending cypress trees, howling like something half-alive. With a shiver, I hurry past. And yet, every time we step into one of these villages, something in me stirs. Because the past isn’t just a thing in books. It lingers in the spaces between.
And So, This is How You Find Yourself (Apparently?). I came to Provence for my ancestors. To retrace their exile, to understand their loss. But it turns out, you can’t chase ghosts forever. Somewhere between the Huguenot names carved in stone, the cicadas buzzing in the thick Provençal heat, and the silent weight of the château’s chapel, I stop searching for them. And I start finding myself. It isn’t dramatic. No divine revelation. No ah-ha moment of self-discovery–just a quiet knowing; a shifting.
The book I came to write—the one I’ve spent seven years circling—finally loosens in my hands. Not because I’ve cracked some historical mystery, but because I’ve stopped trying to write someone else’s story. I expected Provence to be beautiful, but not to strip me bare. Sixty years old, and I thought I knew who I was. Turns out, I’m still figuring that out.
And that—more than history, more than legacy, and more than ghosts—is what I will take home with me.
