Last year, we almost didn’t get our château because of the month of August.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The bank wasn’t about to reject our mortgage simply because someone wanted a month at the beach. But when you’re an American trying to buy a centuries-old château in rural France, and every day feels like another chance for something to fall apart, it certainly felt that way at the time.
We submitted our mortgage application in July, feeling optimistic and confident. When we’d bought a house before (in the U.S.), the process had gone smoothly, without any major hiccups. We knew there would be paperwork, a few phone calls, maybe a delay or two, and then finally, the answer.
Instead, August arrived.
Our mortgage broker disappeared, as did the realtor and the sellers. Every person at the bank who had ever replied to an email seemed to disappear. The local bakery closed. The little boutique down the street closed. Handwritten signs began appearing in shop windows announcing that everyone would be back in September.
Our mortgage application wasn’t denied, but it was significantly delayed. I pictured it sitting in a folder somewhere, wearing sunglasses, happily shelved and getting some much-needed R&R.
At first, I found the whole thing maddening. Americans are taught that momentum is everything. That if something stops moving, you push harder. You send another email, you leave another voicemail, you send another text message. You “circle back” and “follow up.” We have an entire vocabulary dedicated to refusing to let anything sit still.
France, meanwhile, looked at my increasingly frantic follow-up emails and simply continued sending me those polite automated replies saying “We’ll see you in September.”
The French have a word that doesn’t translate neatly into English: la rentrée. You’ll often hear it translated loosely as “back to school,” but that barely scratches the surface. School is certainly part of it, but so is work. Parliament resumes, concert seasons begin, new books are released, builders return, cafés buzz again. It’s less “the end of summer” than the reopening of an entire country.
The closest comparison I can think of is New Year’s Day. Except, instead of making ambitious resolutions after a late night in December, France does it after a month of sunshine, long lunches, family gatherings, and actual rest.
The first time I really noticed la rentrée wasn’t because someone had explained it to me. It was because we walked into E.Leclerc (a major French supermarket chain) to buy school supplies for our kids, and the place looked like Christmas for office supplies.
Entire aisles had transformed into monuments to BIC, Maped, and Pelikan. Colored pencils in packs of twelve, eighteen, twenty-four. Felt tips, highlighters, chalk. Parents stood in little clusters comparing lists (which are long). Children examined pencil cases with the seriousness of architects selecting materials for a cathedral.
In France, schools don’t simply ask for “school supplies.” They issue what reads like a diplomatic agreement, and ours ran to a full page:
One erasable blue pen, Frixion type
Ballpoints in green, red, and black (no four-color pen)
One sharpener, simple, with a reservoir
One box of white chalk
One black ardoise, the small slate you’d assume went out with the Third Republic, and one cloth to clean it
One 30cm ruler, rigid. Not metal, and not plastic that bends
One A4 display folder, forty sleeves maximum
One compass and one set square
One dictionary: Robert Junior, ages 8 to 11. Not the pocket edition
The four-color pen (crayon 4 couleurs) is arguably one of the most beloved objects in French stationery, and it has been specifically, individually barred. I have no idea what happened in France’s educational history to justify such a consistently firm stance against four-color pens, but somewhere there’s a first-grade teacher with stories.
There’s also a note about the snack box - fruit, compote, and dried fruit will be accepted in the morning. Nothing else is listed, because nothing else is up for discussion.
And then, at the bottom, under its own heading: pour la classe du dehors (for the outdoor class). A small backpack, a pair of boots, a cap, and clothing appropriate to the weather. Yes, the kids have outside class here, rain or shine. It’s wonderful.
Lastly, you’re required to write your child’s name on every single item. Every glue stick, every folder, and every single pen and colored pencil - all 50 or so of them.
The lists made me laugh (and cry a little, because it’s a lot to translate and not everything is a direct or simple translation), but they also made me realize something I’d been missing, which was that this shopping was to be experienced as a celebrated ritual rather than just another trip to the store.
Every family in the store was preparing for the same beginning, and everyone was participating in the same collective reset. And it wasn’t rushed or chaotic. It felt…ceremonial.
If you want more dispatches from inside French life as an American, this is free and lands in your inbox each week.
Back home in the U.S., September often felt like the continuation of a race that had never really stopped. Summer ended, schedules exploded, and everyone lurched into fall already tired.
But here, September feels different. People return from August with stories instead of burnout. The conversations are about where everyone went, what they cooked, who they saw, how tan the kids got, whether the tomatoes did well this year (those are literally the things we talked about when catching up with the parents on the kids’ first day back to school last week).
There’s an energy to it that I don’t think I fully appreciated until we’d lived here long enough to experience both sides of it. August is considered part of real life, and it isn’t treated like an interruption, which changes what comes after it.
This week our coffee table and buffets disappeared beneath stacks of notebooks, fresh pencils, little glue sticks, and rulers that were, thankfully, rigid enough to satisfy the French educational system. We carefully packed everything into their backpacks before school started, and they were excited in the way only children with brand-new supplies can be.
I wrote their names on all of it, including every pencil and pen. Even on the black ones, where you couldn’t even see the sharpie. Just following the French directions.
Our mortgage was approved in November, by the way. Everybody came back to work in September. It still took until November.
C’est la vie,
Kamille
I’m Kamille, and I write about our family’s life in rural France, where we are slowly repairing a small 17th-century château. Two free posts a month, plus two more and the renovation diary for paid subscribers.
If this made you think of someone currently drowning in their own supply list, send it to them.
American parents, what’s on your list this year?
I’m feeling very envious and very connected, all at the same time. Appreciating the exposure to another way of doing things that sounds so…so…refreshing.
The reason they banned 4 colour pens is because the noise they collectively make when the whole class changes the colour is deafening and extremely annoying.