A Visit To Emmaüs

A Digital Postcard From The South Of France

Emmaüs is a French institution.

In 1949, Catholic priest Abbé Pierre founded the secular organisation Emmaüs to combat poverty and homelessness. Abbé Pierre is a national hero in France. He was a member of the French resistance during World War II and was arrested twice by the Nazis. He travelled to Spain then Gibraltar before joining the Free French Forces of General de Gaulle in Algeria. At the end of the war, he was awarded the Croix de guerre with bronze palms and the Médaille de la Résistance.

‘So it’s an op-shop,’ I said to Charlotte on the way to Emmaüs.

‘It’s not just an op-shop,’ Charlotte scoffed. ‘It’s an institution.’

There are 400 Emmaüs organisations in 44 countries. Our local Emmaüs is located at La Seyne-sur-Mer. It is a large shed with no insulation and no air-conditioning. Perfect, we thought. This is exactly the place you should go during a canicule (heatwave). To make it even hotter, we decided to go at high noon, to really get the blood pumping. Drink your sweat, as they say in the French Foreign Legion.

A Citroën 2 CV plays junkyard dog

We had an hour to peruse the store before siesta. Teddy was strapped to my chest and could explode in the heat at any moment. Sweat dripped down my back. No fan. Charlotte made a beeline for the women’s clothing section, anxiously fanning herself with a scrap of paper, muttering something about too much rosé last night. As usual, without even thinking, I ended up in the book section.

I didn’t expect to find a live chicken.

The Emmaüs book section unearthed a number of unusual finds.

The first was a book on suicides.

The second was even more bizarre: Hitler and The Secret Societies—An Investigation of the Occult Sources of Nazism by René Alleau. If only I could read French at a level above Tintin.

Our goal was to find something high-quality and French.

We had trawled through a lot of junk and come up empty handed. All we had was a medieval back scratcher, a buck foot handled carving set, and a pair of books that I couldn’t read. I looked at the clock—we had ten minutes.

Toss the salad with a medieval back scratcher.

Foot in mouth: carving fork with buck feet.

The cookware section was at the back of the shop. I got down on my hands and knees to dig through a myriad of pots and pans. Teddy, already clammy against my chest, did not appreciate this. Sweat droplets rained onto the floor. Teddy squirmed.

Bingo.

A pair of Le Creuset cocottes.

The price? €20 each.

Jackpot.

I put the buck feet carving set and the medieval back scratcher aside. Dan, let it go. The final choice: do we opt for the cocotte in Le Creuset’s famous burnt orange or the sky blue edition? The blue version was in better condition.

The sky blue cocotte now sits in La Melonne’s kitchen awaiting the next pot-au-feu.