On a whim, American journalist and foreign correspondent T.D. Allman bought a centuries-old house in the French mountaintop village of Lauzerte.
He returned there for over three decades, until his death earlier this year, soaking in the shifting atmosphere of rural French life. He got to know the local eccentrics and, perhaps inevitably, became something of a local eccentric himself. Allman’s latest book, “In France Profound,” completed before his death, distills the view from his roughly 12th-century house as well as describes the years he spent rambling the countryside and browsing through books on the region.
The result is an idiosyncratic but often lively tour of French history, from the Crusades and the Black Death to Nazi occupation and all the way to the latest supermarket opening. “The melodramas of many epochs lurk in its ancient beams and period parquetry. From my House you also perceive the structure of the universe,” Allman writes.
“My House breathes. It teaches. It speaks.
You can hear its wooden beams shifting in the night, and when there’s a storm, the House moves like a ship.” He writes that he purchased the house as a refuge and escape from the globe-trotting reporting on conflicts and disasters around the world. Allman’s articles were published in a number of America’s best-known publications, most notably Vanity Fair.
That magazine’s generous pay rates during journalism’s heyday in the 1980s, Allman notes in the acknowledgments, help.