The following article is from our September 2007 issue.

Pink Lion in Paradise A transatlantic farce: How a Chicago artist wreaked havoc among the British in a French village, and made the natives chuckle - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

For centuries, Verteillac was just a drowsy market town in the Dordogne, formerly known as the Périgord, a part of France Henry Miller called "the closest approximation of paradise." Suddenly, this place where farmers used to trade geese and truffles became a miniature Laguna Beach, an English-speaking artists' community. But its flair is still Rabelaisian, as the echoes of an outlandish deed by an American sculptor reveal.

When Edmund Ashby from Chicago lumbered into Merlaud's hardware store in Verteillac early this summer, curious eyes followed him closely. It's difficult for Mr. Ashby to avoid stares. At 6 foot 5 inches, he stands out in this Elysian part of France where most locals are not giants and where only a few of the English expatriates measure up to him. Ashby weighs 256 lbs and is a well muscled, thanks to many days spent moving chunks of limestone at Constant's Quarry in Paussac-St. Vivien, a nearby village where he sculpts. In short, Ashby cuts a formidable figure causing people to wonder, "What's Goliath up to now?"

The question is reasonable enough, given that Ashby has spent the last 17 years dotting France and his permanent home, Germany, with hundreds of gargantuan, offbeat monuments. For example, he has graced Ribérac, down the road from Verteillac, with a large fountain in the shape of a left hand. And its mirror image, a right hand, rests in downtown Rietberg in Westphalia, 800 miles to the northeast.

Ashby caused more alarm when he left Merlaud's hardware store, carrying five spray cans filled with paint - pink and fluorescent paint. Clearly, something spectacular was about to occur. Ashby admitted as much before driving off in his Bavarian-registered red Fiat van, whose rear is peppered with faux bullet marks. But what he really said is the subject of divergent oral histories. For example, Wendy, an earthy English real estate broker, reported - though from second-hand sources - that Ashby announced an action intended to "upset" Verteillac with its population of 716. "Why doesn't he upset his own (expletive deleted) village?" she wondered. Ashby, a gentle sort, refutes this version vigorously: "I hate to upset anybody. I might have said that I was planning a surprise."

The surprise came swiftly, and was fierce enough to split the 40 percent English-speakers among Verteillac's summer residents into two camps. It also impinged on local politics, while causing the town's shrinking French majority to hold their bellies with laughter. One Sunday morning, a truck with a crane plunked a grim-looking 1,100 lb concrete lion glistening in fresh pink fluorescent paint right on the steps of the restaurant La Verticalle, which stands next to the parish church of "St. Pierre des Blanches Terres" (St. Peter of the White Lands) and across a main thoroughfare from the "Mairie" (town hall).

A charming English couple by the name of Samantha and Chris Stacey had just taken over La Verticalle, intending to transform it into an upscale pizzeria - albeit a pizzeria whose walls are adorned with magnificent works by local Anglo-Saxon artists. One of these pictures is a breathtaking portrait by Andrew Gifford, who ranks among England's most significant contemporary painters but lives nearby. It depicts Elizabeth Doonan, the undisputed English Grande Dame of Verteillac and wife of another superior painter and sculptor.

Nicknamed Lissome Liz by admirers, she had enchanted locals and foreigners in her younger years by standing on top of Périgord farmhouses, her golden hair enticingly ruffled by a balmy breeze, repairing roofs for the benefit of hundreds of weather-weary English clients. They included many ex-colonials from Africa who had come to imbibe their "Sundowners" at the appropriate venue - in the sun, not in the rain. Liz saw to it that they would be dry during the wet winter months as well.

On the Verticalle's walls, there are also works by Peter Evans, renowned for his portrayals of storefronts, and by Francesca Spilley, an exceedingly powerful American painter. Spilley had married Edmund Ashby long ago in Laguna Beach, a California artists' community just like Verteillac, only larger, and brought him to the Périgord, where her father, a former "Peanuts" illustrator, lived - and where Francesca and Edmund promptly divorced.

Suddenly, true masterpieces received company in the form of Edmund's concrete lion. Well, actually it is not really his lion but a beast mass-produced in Portugal. Ashby had taken a fancy to it at a local gardening center, bought it for ?235 ($321) and then spray-painted it as a gag to draw attention to the upcoming art show of Barry Fox's extraordinary Galerie des Arts right above La Verticalle.

That Sunday turned out to not be a happy one for Edmund Ashby and the Staceys, who were soon seen huddling in consternation over what transpired next, initiated by what Spilley sardonically calls the "Tennis Set." This group constitutes one particular layer of Verteillac's English-speaking population and is not to be confused with French tennis players, who are not part of this social circle.

This one is a British Set imbued with disdain for low-life Anglo-Saxon newcomers, noisy gore-blimey-types, drunks and notorious check-bouncers, who cause the English "toujours" (permanent residents) in the Dordogne endless embarrassment. On the other hand, the Tennis Set seems particularly protective of natives. So when Edmund drove into Verteillac, he found himself confronted by fuming sportsmen accusing him of offending the French with this display of garish taste. One of these, says Edmund, a straight-laced Midwesterner, showered him with crude invectives he had never heard before and did not care to remember.

At this point, the question must be pondered: Should English-speaking residents of Verteillac worry about the sensitivities of the town's original inhabitants, considering that the English lion had lorded over their ancestors until the end of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453)? This period is still present in the collective mind, philologically speaking. One example is the local term for a nun-like headgear elderly peasant women still wear consisting of a protruding visor which protected medieval beauties from the sun and from libidinous English soldiers: "kiss me not." As centuries went by, this word mutated to "quichenotte."

One must also consider the scandalous way Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), father of English literature, may have polluted local lore; at least that's what the French say. It could also be the other way around, considering that Chaucer traveled through the Périgord on his way from Bordeaux to Rome. At any rate, salacious stories such as Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" have been handed down for generations in Occitan, the original language of the French southwest. That even includes the part where a cuckolded husband emasculates his wife's lover, the parson, with fiery forceps.

As a result, there is justification for the tennis aficionados protecting local sensibilities from being trod upon with Anglo-Saxon crassness - including the funny act of dropping fluorescent-pink concrete lions smack into downtown Verteillac. Consider the town's layout. The eastern side of its market square has become a touchy issue, for most of its buildings are no longer in French hands. While the church is still outwardly French, there is no denying that the Verticalle and the gallery above are English-owned.

The pharmacy next door is French but its neighbor, the Hotel du Périgord, has English proprietors. Then there's the French office, the "Communauté de Communes du Vertillacois," or CCV, an association of communities in Verteillac County. The hairdresser, a Frenchwoman, comes next. Her neighbor, though, is the Welsh junk dealer Huw Thomas, the owner of Huw's Brocante, whose wife, the local newsagent, is French.

In the adjoining building, there is a tiny café whose name is pretentiously spelled in Greek letters: kappa-alpha-phi-epsilon. Now closed, it's the property of two ladies, one from New York and one from France. Slightly around the bend nestles a British bed and breakfast. Finally, Luc's Bar rounds up the ensemble. It is French-owned but displays a blackboard bearing the English words: "Bar Open." The French translation, "Bar ouvert," follows in smaller script below. A French customer, when asked whether he felt insulted by this linguistic order, replied, "No" with Cartesian logic: "This makes perfect sense. The English drive on the wrong side of the road and drink their beer lukewarm. How can we be sure they realize that the bar is open when it's open unless we tell them so? We French know, of course, that a bar is open when it's open."

So the locals don't seem to be very upset about half of their town having gone English. An informal poll taken by The German Times at assorted French dinner and cocktail parties produced this consensus: "What annoys us is that most of the English around here can't be bothered to learn our language. Monsieur Ashby's lion does not give us grief."

Ah yes, the lion. Such was the pressure from the Tennis Set that it had to be removed from the steps of La Verticalle. In the meantime, the locals had their fun with it. One morning, the beast wore a green Afro; another day, his ferocious eyes were hidden under giant sunglasses. Still, there was an attempt to call town council into session to debate this monster. But Mayor Jean Ferrier was in Italy, and when he returned, he called in Ashby and was satisfied to learn that the lion wasn't there for eternity, just for the summer season as part of the art show. He saw nothing wrong with that.

Then another mayor stepped into the picture. Mayor Alain Lucas of neighboring Vendoire is also president of the CCV, whose office occupies a building that used to be an inn called "Le Lion d'Or," (Golden Lion). "You can park your lion at our steps," he told Ashby but requested he spray the animal green. Edmund could not do that in good conscience: "In the art world, pink is the color of the year." Mayor Lucas relented, especially as pamphlets bearing the inscription "Vive le lion rose" (long live the pink lion) began circulating around town. Never mind that the author was a Dutch plumber, as Ashby found out only later.

Suddenly, though, there was another glitch in the form of parliamentary elections in France, and Mayor Lucas, a candidate, lost. In French jargon, losing an election is called "ramasser une veste" (receiving a jacket). And guess what? The next morning, a jacket covered the lion's back. So now he was out of favor and had to be moved again.

Now, there is a concrete lion sitting in between the knickknack outside Huw's Brocante, glistening in the headlights of trucks rumbling through Verteillac on their way north. Edmund sprayed him again - in fluorescent pink. The lion's image adorned T-shirts that Barry Fox, the gallery owner, had printed and distributed for free at a children's festival.

With its customary good grace, Verteillac seems to have adopted the American's garish monster, while the Tennis Set has quietly returned to its favorite pastime - the Wednesday tennis game.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis and has a home near Verteillac in France.