It should be a sleepy little French village just like a thousand others. Cuverville-en-Caux (pop. 233) nestles in the Lezarde valley a few miles inland from the Normandy coast and would be unknown to the world if a Nobel Laureate for literature hadn't lived there.
But André Gide did live there, and as a result the village is now plunged into an extraordinary, and very French, row embroiling architects, literati, journalists and more government agencies than you can shake the author's collected works at.
It all began in 1996 when the current owner of Cuverville's manor house, in which Gide lived and wrote for more than 50 years, decided that the place needed renovating. He contacted respected architect Jean-Claude Rochette, formerly France's inspector general of historic monuments, for advice on what needed doing.
Rochette decided that the manor needed to be restored to the way it looked when it was built in 1735. As a result, off came the white shutters that Gide knew during the last century, builders chipped away at the pale yellow rendering to uncover wine-coloured bricks, six rectangular columns were revealed and the pediment above them was painted white. Work cost several hundred thousand francs.
The result? According to Emmanuel de Roux of Le Monde : 'The renovation works have given the place the profile of a British manor house, chic and elegant, but one that the writer who stayed there until his death would not recognise at all.'
It is this fact that drives Gidophiles crazy. 'It's a massacre,' says Michel Drouin of the renovation works, while adding they are 'happily reversible' and indeed must be reversed to restore the manor to its 'Gidean state'. Drouin is a nephew of Dominique Rouin, a distant relation of the writer. It was she who inherited the house from Gide's widow Madeleine, and who sold it to the current owner in 1963.
Drouin is leading a campaign to have the renovation work undone. He has already embarrassed local conservation watchdogs, who are themselves angry that the renovation was undertaken without their say-so. Now he is hoping to convince President Jacques Chirac to get involved and order the re-restoration.
Drouin says that in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Gide's death, the manor house should be main tained as a shrine. At present the house is private and is not open to the public.
Drouin cites a 1946 report by Inspector General Dalloz for the Minister of Education, which says: 'Cuverville, in the history of French literature, will have its place like Montaigne's chateaux. It merits protection. It is Gide's presence that transformed this honest, banal Norman manor house into a place that's worth keeping.'
In one of Gide's best novels, La Porte Etroite ( Strait is the Gate , 1909), Cuverville features under the guise of the fictional village of Fougueusemare (a rather poor guise since there is a real-life village of Fougueusemare just up the road).
The manor house itself receives a less-than-glowing description: 'Standing in a garden which is neither very large nor very fine, and which has nothing special to distinguish it from a number of other Normandy gardens, the white two-storeyed building, resembles a great many country houses of the century before last. A score of large windows look east onto the front of the garden; as many more on to the back; there are none at the sides.'
The house also figures in Gide's novel The Immoralists and in his Journals. It was at Cuverville that Gide received some of the great European literary figures, including the poet Paul Valéry, for tennis parties and literary discussions. Here he also worked with the co-founders of the Nouvelle Revue Française, one of Europe's most important literary journals.
Former Culture Minister Catherine Trautman has said that everything should be done to 'restore the building in the state it was in when the writer knew it'. Some Fr300,000 of state money has been pledged, and Drouin reckons that Gide devotees will contribute enough to make up the shortfall.
It remains only to convince the owner, who has heroically guarded his anonymity throughout the affair, that his home must be changed once more for the sake of French heritage. But should he be compelled to restore the property which he restored recently from his own pocket?
On Friday, no one was at home at the Cuverville manor house to answer this. 'Looking for André Gide?' yelled a passing motorist. 'You won't find anything of him there. Try the church.' And, a few hundred yards away in a grave under a simple slab in the churchyard lies the writer. It proved impossible to confirm if Gide was turning in it, but it wouldn't be a surprise if he were.
