Henriette Pouget, my 90-year old French mother-in-law, who lives alone in a house with nothing out of place, is no longer able to navigate stairs on her own.

Though she's been to Germany, Luxembourg, Martinique, and America, her basement is now out of bounds. Neither of her two daughters will allow it. They are very firm about that. The key to the door is still in the lock, but she has not turned it in years. Touched it? Maybe. But turned it? No. So when it was time to retrieve the shovel for today's planting of purple flowers on her front lawn, it was my turn. Slowly, I opened the door and began my descent.

The first room I entered was at least 10 degrees cooler than the ones upstairs, a nice surprise on this brutally hot day here in the north of France. "Climate change" the neighbors like to say. "Mon dieu!"

It is small, this room, but not too small, kind of like a 3-table jazz club only the locals know about. In the corner is a bar, built on weekends and nights, by Jean, Henriette's long-deceased husband -- a project, I am told, that was very important to him -- his chance to make something special away from the noise of the factory floor where he worked the day shift, building Citroens, for 32 years. Many half-filled bottles line the shelves above the bar: rum, Nolly Ambre, Gran Marnier, a St. Raphael rouge, some Scotch, Pernod. I can see Jean pouring a round of drinks for his favorite neighbors on a Saturday night, much laughter filling the room, Henriette with a tray of something in her hands.

On the wall, across the way, are framed pictures of classic cars: a red 1936 Bugatti, a white 1928 Excalibur, a blue 1927 Rolls Royce and three others. In the far corner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a few of his writer friends are knocking back cocktails and practicing their French. They like Jean. He's a good man. And though he didn't have all that much to say to his wife and two daughters, his words, when he spoke, stood guard for years, like the tiny tin soldiers no one ever gave him as a child.

Behind a door, to the right, is a guest room -- or used to be -- the place where Henriette's sisters, once a year or so, would stay. On the wall? Two framed photos. One is Evelyne, my wife, at six months old, with a blond mohawk before it became all the rage. The other, directly over the bed, is a black and white of Evelyne and her brother, Gille, Henriette's first born before he died, at nine, of some kind of rare blood disease the doctors couldn't quite explain. He is five in the picture. Evelyne is three. She is kissing him on the cheek, her eyes closed. He is smiling.

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