At the end of the twentieth century, the sophisticated are turning from steel, plastic, and nylon to old rustic pans and pottery, furniture and textiles, tastefully displayed in urban apartment or second home in the country. There remain areas in France, far from the big cities and the tourist trails, where the realities of the old rural way of life can still be found, though it is fast disappearing. Marie-France Boyer, with her sensitivity for the extraordinary in the everyday, has traveled widely to seek out these interiors of genuine French country working life. She presents them, and the people who live in them, in a series of wonderful photographs--most taken especially for this book--of kitchens and stove corners, living rooms and bedrooms, odd souvenirs and family mementoes. The country people who follow the old traditions are now in their seventies and older. They use the bowls, baskets, and smoke-blackened pots that their parents and their grandparents used before them--they still call these objects by old local names, now forgotten by those who left the land. Their homes are working interiors, functional and mostly very frugal. Ancient family tables and wardrobes jostle with refrigerators and televisions, and plastic lace and fifties-style wallpaper are as popular as the traditional striped mattresses and flowery eiderdowns. Next to the family clock, candlesticks stand with oil lamps, both replaced by electric light in the 1940s. A fascinating record of old rural French ways of living, the book also provides information on places to buy the traditional furniture and objects, and on the regional museums that commemorate this disappearing lifestyle.