'Real French treasures are now hard to find at flea markets'
Columnist Peter Wyeth laments that traditional vide-greniers are increasingly filled with flimsy plastic objects
Most stalls these days are filled with plastic toys
Paul Gueu/Shutterstock
When I started chasing vide-greniers some 20 years ago, treasure turned up regularly and delightfully.
In one hillside village we spotted our first tapestry, a paint-by-numbers widescreen format, painstakingly woven by a long-dead granny.
I had to haul it around for the rest of the morning, occasionally bumping into people as it felt a good two metres long and was mounted on a stout board difficult to maintain in the horizontal plane for more than a minute.
It cost all of €2, but the most remarkable part was that it was a down-home version of a modernist tapestry of the 1930s – and this in deepest France.
More recently, an entire house was being cleared by a granddaughter, without qualms about disposing of a touching black-and-white photo of her grandfather, whose house it had been, for a euro.
Read more: Make sense of... French vide greniers
Finding real treasures at a vide-grenier
He was in his best clothes – a suit and beret and polished black shoes – his arm resting on the back of a white chair, a posh prop in the photographer’s studio.
The finds my wife loves the most are the elaborate embroidering on immaculate linen sheets, parts of trousseaux that seem to have spent their long life in a drawer, beautifully ironed and never used.
Some have initials in curling script and contrasting colours. Others have patterns of flowers in various colours, done with such care that we almost cried at the idea of them living in the dark of a brown chest of drawers since they were hurriedly finished for the Big Day.
These days, sadly, such treasures are very few and very far between.
I did recently find a pair of English spray-guns with opaque tanks for quick decorating, only €20, but the romance was not quite there, even if they were made in Guildford, UK.
The age of plastic
Most stalls comprise pink plastic toys of all descriptions and functions, from small dolls to big slides, all equally unattractive, at least to those of us past pink, and with little to offer in the way of memories, heritage and mysteries of past eras.
The fact is that so many greniers have been emptied that Old France, la France profonde, is fast disappearing where it has not already vanished.
That may be the way of the world, but for the sentimental historians, among which I am not too embarrassed to include my ancient self, the days of chancing upon evocative scraps, dusty from storage, are almost gone.
