We Were Told to Leave the Septic Alone
We needed the Marauder's Map and got a digger instead
If you’re new here: we’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and writing it all down. Welcome.
I’m writing this from a house whose septic system is currently being installed. The digger is outside. The trenches are open. There is mud where there used to be lawn. And somewhere beneath all of it, a team of French workers is trying to solve a puzzle that began long before we got here and is, frankly, weirder than anyone warned us.
If you read the last Castle Diaries, you know we were planning to leave the château’s septic alone. The wink-wink advice, the friend who said just wait until it breaks, the comforting French tradition of pretending the rule doesn’t exist until it inconveniently does. That was the plan.
The septic had other plans. Let me walk you through how we got here.
Sign One: The Bubbling
One day, someone (#someone) flushed a toilet on the second floor. Almost immediately, the toilet two floors below it began to bubble.
If you have never been in a house when a toilet started bubbling without provocation, I want to assure you that it is not a sound that fades from memory. It is the sound of something that should be moving in one direction moving instead in another. It is, in plumbing terms, the sound of an emergency politely clearing its throat.
That can’t be good, Sean and I said to each other, in the tone of two people who already knew it wasn’t good.
What it meant, we learned, was that the septic tank was full. Full enough that anything we sent into it had nowhere to go and was, instead, looking for alternate exits. The polite term is needs pumping. The accurate term is whatever you do, do not host a dinner party this week.
We called someone. We left a voicemail. We waited. They were, presumably, on vacation, as everyone in France is at all times. We held our breath (in more ways than one).
Sign Two: The Ceiling
A week or so later, my mom flew in from California, and my sister and brother-in-law (who live in the east of France) drove over with their new baby. We were all settled in the living room on the ground floor (the fire going, a glass of wine, the kids underfoot, the baby asleep, the works) while my sister was upstairs taking a shower.
And then, the ceiling started raining.
I want to be clear about what I mean by raining. I do not mean a weak drip. I do not mean a faint trickle. I mean a tropical-storm-style downpour, directly onto the sofa, of an amount of water that suggested the entire upstairs shower had decided to relocate. Sean and the kids grabbed every vessel in reach (bowls, large copper pots, a cast iron skillet, a waste bin) while I sprinted up two flights of stairs screaming my sister’s name with what I now realize was the full energy of a horror movie protagonist, while her infant was sitting downstairs, which I had failed to consider in the moment. (Sorry, baby. Sorry, sister.)
I found her mid-shampoo. She was alarmed. I told her to turn off the water. I escorted her, in a towel, down to my shower so she could finish. We called a septic pumping company.
This brings us to the truly French part.
The Tank That Nobody Could Find
The pumping team arrived, equipped and ready. They asked where the septic tank was.
We did not know.
This was, I will admit, a bit embarrassing, and a piece of information we had assumed someone would have given us at some point. We searched the papers from our purchase. Nothing about a tank location. We called our realtor, who confirmed cheerfully, with no real concern: Oh yes, the former owners didn’t know either. That’s part of why it’s non-conforme. It’s basically unknown.
I asked her where she thought it went, then. Where everything had been going. For years.
She said, equally cheerfully: It probably just runs straight into the river.
The river is beautiful. The river is the reason I have spent the last six months imagining the kids swimming in it, the kayaks the previous owners left behind getting actual use, picnics on the bank. The river was not, in that vision, also our septic output.
The septic, suddenly, became priority #1.
The Plan, and Why the Plan Did Not Survive
Replacing a septic system in France is not a project you just start. There is a process. You commission an étude de filière, a formal engineering study that determines what kind of system your property can support and where it should go. The study gets approved by SPANC, the local public office that regulates non-collective sanitation. (Yes, there is a French government body whose entire job is overseeing septic systems. Yes, this is incredibly French. Yes, I have learned to love them.)
Our study said: gravity-fed system, install behind the château, discharge toward the river side of the property. No pump needed. Relatively straightforward.
We got the approval. We hired the team, led by a man named Jérôme and the expert digger, Pascale. Excavation began.
The first thing they found was the old tank. Small and very old, and completely full. It had been sitting beneath our lawn for who knows how long, holding who knows how much, communicating with no one. The team removed it with the efficiency of people who have removed several of these in their careers. The mystery of where it had been was finally solved.
Then the real trouble started.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. You’ll get: why the engineering study turned out to be wrong, the €3,500 decision we paused the entire project to think through, the discovery that our upstairs shower and sink were not connected to the septic system but to the rainwater drainage (yes, really), the ancient brick-and-flint stone trench the team found running toward the river that nobody can fully explain, and where things stand right now — still mid-installation, still mid-mystery.
