The French have a name for a bill or an invoice. They call it la douloureuse, the painful. When we met with our project manager two weeks ago, I jokingly asked him for la douloureuse and good Lord he didn't disappoint. Fortunately for my ego I glimpsed the final figure before he handed the breakdown of the quotes to me and had just the time to compose a collected and non-expressive expression on my face. But my heart sank. It was 30 thousands over budget. That was a karmic slap across my face for having gloated to the bitch notaire about the school, no doubt.
I looked at Fox, unaware, collecting the tiles that didn't shatter when thrown up in the air when the storm that battered the Poitou the week before hit the roof of our préau. I wasn't too worried about the roof, I was happy to leave it to the insurance to sort it out (if anything I was disappointed that it wasn't the house's roof that didn't get damaged, I would have been delighted to pay the small deductible for a brand new slate roof). He too would be so disappointed, and I was saddened to be the one to break the news to him.
Luckily, we couldn't dwell on it as we were expected at the neighbours. All those living at the end of the village were up in arms against the Mairie for having stopped the collective sewage system just meters from their home, leaving just a handful, us included, on independent septic tanks. So they were putting up a fight and wanted us to join the movement as well as recruiting the English next door since they couldn't communicate with them. Besides allowing us to absorb the bad news individually, this meeting had the additional advantage to introduce us to our immediate neighbours and giving us the upper hand by being of service to them. But no matter how welcome this distraction was, we knew we would have to go back to the drawing board and rethink everything.
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