Stone cutters and masons are the republic… for 9.52€ the hour

Dear reader,

Peace is paradoxical. Find it in one place and it surfaces elsewhere as its opposite — a low-grade disquiet you can't quite locate, like a sound you stop hearing only when it stops.

April arrived. I removed my socks and shoes, hitched the skirt up, and waded into the Ardèche river one misty morning to bathe my feet. The cold crept up slowly. Then the clouds cleared and there I was — reflected in the quiet water, perfectly still, feeling like a racehorse in a starting gate. Weaving in the stall. Chomping at the bit. Peace, as ever, proving to be a thing on the horizon that moves at the same pace you do.

Getting my titre de séjour was a decision I made with my eyes open. I was leaving England — my sweet, exasperating England — and making France home. Which meant loosening my grip on certain things. Family proximity. Old friendships in their natural habitat. Cultural assumptions I hadn't even known I was holding. I knew growth requires sacrifice. What I hadn't quite understood yet was that finding your home doesn't necessarily mean finding your place.

After eight years in the same field, I changed course. Stone-cutting kept appearing at the end of every line of research — the most honest answer to the question of what I could do here, in this country, with my hands, that would let me live closest to my own values. So I followed it.

We move through our days largely unwitting to the built world around us. We live inside it, work inside it, assemble and worship inside it, and mostly we see structure without seeing craft. But every face of every wall carries the tradition of the tradesman — a knowledge passed from master to apprentice in an unbroken chain that has outlasted kingdoms. Our most ambitious buildings testify to what human hands can do. But it is the flame of savoir-faire that outlives even the stone.

Apprenticeship is a humbling thing. It is best approached with a sharp eye and very few fixed ideas about yourself, because the position requires you to try — earnestly, consistently — in full view of people who know exactly how much you don't know yet. The keen apprentice, though blind, should aim to clear the bar anyway.

There is a version of France that appears on postcards and in presidential speeches. It is ancient, load-bearing, irreplaceable. It is the aqueduct, the cathedral, the perfectly dressed ashlar. It is the unbroken chain of savoir-faire stretching back to before the republic had a name.

The people who maintain that chain are currently doing so for 9.52€ the hour.

Draw your own conclusions about what the republic values. I have drawn mine, in stone, at speed, for less than the price of a glass of wine in the sixth arrondissement.

What I've learned: putting in greater calculated effort produces a greater finished result. This is not a complicated observation, but it turns out to be one you have to discover with your body before your mind accepts it. A well-cut stone is easier to lay. It reduces the total labour required. It produces a more structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing building. The care taken at the bench travels forward in time and holds walls up for strangers who will never know your name.

Mastery in construction takes a decade or more — not because the skills are impossible, but because exposure accumulates slowly. New worksites, new people, new techniques, new problems dealt with tact. Excellence, like virtue, is won through training and habituation. The apprentice may be excellent in the same way a child may be wise — genuinely, and contingently, and with room still to become something further. Errors in the formative stages are not failures. They are, if approached with honesty, very precious lessons. The most noble struggle available to any individual is not against others but against the previous version of themselves.

I can only avow to a fraction of my own character in a statement like this, and even that fraction is subject to perceived self-truths. What I can say honestly is that every stone placed in my care parts in the same condition or better. I approach each task as if it were to be my magnum opus — not out of grandiosity but out of respect for the people who opened the doors to this trade regardless of my age, my gender, my nationality.

The finest chapter of my oeuvre is yet to come. I know this the way you know a thing before you can prove it — in the bones, in the hands, in the particular quality of attention that work well done produces in the body.

Let us strive for mutual edification. Let us glorify what brings peace.

And let us, perhaps, discuss the hourly rate.

…

Et parlons, peut-être, du taux horaire.