No short stay

Last night I was drawing when suddenly the telephone rang, which sometimes occurs. Friends of ours were back in the country, returned from a short holidaybreak abroad. After several months of hard work and low income (they started their own business), it was time for them to get away from it all. Not too long and not too expensive, off course.
We told them about a nice, cheap little hotel we stayed in last Spring: Hotel Croixville. It was not quite in the region where they had planned their holiday, which was far more south, but they could use an adress to sleepover on their way back home.
After a long detour, which was actually much longer than planned, they finally arrived at 10 PM to find out that Hotel Croixville was: ...closed. According to a sign which was placed behind one of the windows, the hotel is now for sale. Strangely enough madame Michelle, nor her son Christian, didn't mention last Spring that they had plans to close the hotel. In fact Christian had plans to renovate a large part of the rooms, fixing the roof and expanding the campingsite.
I wonder what happened there that made them close the hotel.

Inside our hotelroom

Our hotelroom in Hotel Croixville was quite small. The double-sized bed and the closet made it very difficult to move around. The room was even that small, that it was impossible for me to draw the sketch in the room itself. I made this sketch by memory, sitting in the foyer of the hotel.
At least the room was clean and the matrass was surprisingly good. Most hotels offer beds in which you can't sleep the first night, or all the nights of your stay, but this bed was actually very comfortable. We slept very well during our stay in Hotel Croixville. Except for one night.
We woke up in the middle of the third night of our stay. We couldn't tell why. Everything was dark and quite and just when we were snoozing away we heard a loud cry. It was difficult to say where it came from. Came it from another hotelroom? From outside? The mountains surrounding the hotel? For three or four times we heard someone screaming. We couldn't tell it was a man or woman. Suddenly everything was quite again, but we couldn't catch our sleep again that night.
The next morning we asked madame Michelle if she heard something that night, but she pretended (?) she couldn't understand our question. Later that day I spoke about the incident with Christian, but he also seemed not to understand our question. Too bad I didn't had the opportunity to speak to other hotelguests that day. Maybe they could give us some answers. For now it stayed an unsolved mystery.

Christian Michelle

As I told before Madame Michelle runs Hotel Croixville together with her son Christian. I am not exactly sure about his age, but my guess is that he must be at least 55 years of age. It is hard to get any information out of Christian, because he speaks only French and knows only a few German words. The only Dutch word he knows, by the way, is: "geitenkaas".
As far as I concluded out of a brief encounter I had with him in the lobby, Christian was never married. He had once a fiancee, but his mother was not very fond about his choice of heart. She did everything in her power to make the girl realize that there were far more better husbands-to-be than her one and only son Christian. After the death of Christian's father, monsieur Alphonse Michelle, he and his mother had to run the hotel together and Christian never had taken the opportunity to have a go at other girls.
If I understood him correctly there was about twenty years ago a German family staying in the hotel with their daughter. She was celebrating her 30th birthday in the hotel and Christian's eyes lightened up as he told me what happened afterwards that birthdayparty. I couldn't follow it completely, but it had to do something with the showers on the camping. I think.

A room with a view

As we entered our hotelroom we were quite surprised about the state it was in. Okay, it was clean, but the furniture was much, much older as we expected. Not to mention the bathroom.
First thing we did was opening the window with the intention to have a beautiful look at the lake. Now that was a bit of a disappointment. The window was next to the hotelsign, so we had to look around the hotelsign to see the biggest part of the lake. I am not to small myself, so when I stretched myself I could see almost the whole lake. My wife, however, is much smaller so she don't have that advantage. But we did have a lovely view at the south part of the lake. With a ough mountainside. At least a better view than we have at home, but if we only had a small window in the right wall of the hotelroom, things would be much better.

After a small talk about the pros and cons we climbed down the small staircase to arrange another room, but unfortunately all other rooms were not available due to bookings and/or renovation. If I understood madame Michelle well. As I mentioned before my French was still a bit rusty at that time, but we would have plenty of time to improve that...

Our hotelroom

After checking in we went up to our room. Madame Michelle apologized for not being able to carry our suitcases. Which we fully understood. After all, as I said before, Madame Michelle was quite old and not much bigger then our suitcases. We found out later that she was running the hotel together with her son Christian, but he was not available at that time. She told us that he was delivering some goods, or something like that (my Franch is a bit rusty lately), but we think he was coming in terms with his hangover. A few hours after we installed ourselves in the hotelroom we saw him sitting in the reception, rather sleepy and with quite an odeur, if you know what I mean.
Our hotelroom was located on the first floor which we had to enter by using a very small staircase. There was no elevator. Frankly there wasn't much space for, either. The staircase had a very old and wornout carpet which must be pre-war. World War One to be precise. Stumbling up the stairs with our suitcases in a constant battle with ourselves for space we were glad not to have booked a room on the upper floor. Which we usely do to have a nice view. But because Hotel Croixville was beautifully located on a cliff on the shores of a very blue lake, any room would fit to get the so much appreciated view. We thought before we entered our room...

Madame Michelle

When we entered the reception of Hotel Croixville we were a little bit surprised by the size of it. I mean, as inhabitants of a small country we are used to have not to much amount of space, but as we were in France we didn't expect such a tiny, little reception. There were two armchairs (very old and worn, by the way), one table with four dining chairs (even more worn then the armchairs), several paintings with somewhat obscure sceneries and in the back of the room was the reception counter. As we were coming from the sunny outside into the dark inside we didn't notice at first that there was a person behind that counter until we heard a loud, crumpy voice saying: "Bonjour monsieur et madame! Vous avez une bonne voyage?" At second look we noticed a tiny lady. We then assumed she was sitting behind the counter, but later we found out that she must have been standing because she was about as long as our eldest son.
That was how we met madame Michelle. Owner of Hotel Croixville in France.

Short stay

We were in France for a short stay. After two days on a really busy camping, we left and went looking for a small and quite camping. My wife directed us up in the hills, to the borders of a small lake where there would be a small camping. And finally, there was indeed a little, tiny, quite campingspot...
The place belonged to a very old hotel, which was apparently balancing on a cliff. According to the hotelmanager, madame Michelle (age: 250+), there was absolutely nothing to worry about. The hotel has been there since her parents founded it and it was supposed to last there for at least another hundred years. So the civil engineers had assured her after a landslide a few years before World War II had formed the cliff.
Although she was very firm in her statement we didn't mind to sit in our tent on rainy days, instead of booking one of the available rooms. Strangely enough the hotel didn't have any crack or other signs of disasters to come. It only needed an update in the bathrooms (authentic French, if you know what I mean!), new plaster on the ceilings and some fresh paint on the outside (as most buildings in France, if you know what I mean!)
Anyway, after a few days we left and we now even sort of miss madame Michelle and her 65+ son Christian.