Grand'm

Guy and Nicole Bellanger run a food-delivery service in the Normandy village of Saussay-la-Campagne (pop.

380), and always had trouble finding someone to care for their son Pascal, now six. The isolated, rustic life was too quiet for young women. In the small town of Bohin, 125 miles away, a widow named Edmee Blin, 72 but active, found herself "absolutely alone on this earth." Her only son was dead, and she desperately needed companionship.

Now, thanks to a Paris advertising man, Pascal has a live-in baby sitter and Mme. Blin has an adopted family. The case is not unique in France. Since last year the ad executive, Jean-Pierre Coffe, 35, has placed 1,411 lonely old people in families that need a grandparent.

Most of the matchings are temporary -- lasting for a summer vacation or a holiday period -- and Coffe has been able to place only half a dozen men. "The whole world welcomes a grandma," he says, "but almost no one wants a grandpa. It's sad."

Morocco Winter. The grand'mere au pair program started last year when a welfare agency asked Coffe to promote a fund-raising campaign to benefit the elderly and indigent. Coffe did not like the idea of a charity appeal. "It's nothing," he says, "for a person with money to drop a coin or a bill into a tin cup."

He decided to try something modeled on the au pair system, in which families take in students. The girls are not paid servants, but they help out with kids and housework in exchange for room and board. "Everybody thought I was mad," Coffe recalls, but he was sure the idea could be sold, substituting old people for young. He decided to handle the campaign "as I would a noodle account" and set about placing stories in newspapers and on television.

The response last summer was instant -- thousands of letters from both interested families and lonely old people.

Not everyone got the idea straight. A farmer wanted a worker for "gardening, tinkering and the care of 20 goats." One family took in an elderly woman and demanded that she serve dinner to 22 people every night. In another household, the 88-year-old patriarch made unrequited passes at the new granny.

Most of the experiences have worked out better. Simone Lefebvre, 73, a retired secretary from Paris, had never had children of her own. She was apprehensive when she signed on with a young family vacationing in Normandy "I was afraid they would look upon me as a maid," she says. "In fact, I was treated not only as an equal but as a guest."

While tending the couple's one-year-old son, Mile. Lefebvre was taken on sightseeing trips and to restaurants.

In a few cases, the grannies encounter outright luxury. Coffe tells of an 82-year-old woman placed -- supposedly for two weeks -- with a banker's family near Aix-en-Provence. "Not only was she met by a chauffeur-driven car and served by maids," says Coffe, "but when I phoned to find out how she was doing, she said she had taken her first plane ride and was planning to winter in Morocco with the family."

Mme. Blin will have to settle for a winter in Normandy, but both she and the Bellangers are so happy with the arrangement that they have agreed to make it open-ended. "I'm sure we'd never put Edmee out," says Nicole Bellanger. "I've told her that when she gets too old to do anything, we'll get a grand'mere au pair to look after her."

Whether Coffe's service will be available then is uncertain. He charges families 100 francs ($23) and loses money on every transaction. This year, he figures, he will lose about $5,000. He runs the operation from his own office, buys an insurance policy for each granny, runs up huge telephone bills and has each applicant's letter read by a psychologist and a handwriting expert in an attempt to screen out eccentrics. Coffe never intended to make money on the scheme, but rather to show that it could work. Now he wants an established social welfare organization to take it over. So far, however, the tradition-bound bureaucracy has resisted the idea.

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