"He's less wimpy," said Sophie Crumb, now 25, who lives in a village a half-hour drive from her parents with her American boyfriend.
Three times a week Aline Crumb leads an American-style Pilates-yoga-dance class in her village's Napoleonic-era barracks. Regulars include Estelle Kohler, a legendary actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company; and a French marionette maker, married to a man who publishes a newsletter about flying kites.
The village seems to be thriving with such free spirits. An Israeli, Khaim Seligman, set up shop making wooden flutes. Melinda Trucks, the wife of Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers Band drummer, has taken Aline Crumb's exercise class. The Truckses have bought a nearby estate.
A longtime friend of the Crumbs, Peter Poplaski, moved to the village in the 1990s, collaborated with Crumb on a 2005 collection, The R. Crumb Handbook, and continues to work on a pet project he describes as "the quintessential Zorro book of the 21st century." Poplaski, a Wisconsin native, dresses as Zorro for festivals to entertain the village children.
Despite her dalliances, Aline Crumb is fiercely loyal to Crumb. In addition to overseeing much of his business, she has transformed their labyrinthine home into a sort of Crumb archive and museum.
A narrow stone staircase leads unevenly from a room at the front door to a long hallway, whose ceiling reaches up three floors.
In the hallway hang two abstract oil paintings by Crumb's younger brother, Maxon.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the dramas around him, Crumb continues to find the inspiration to produce art.
After dinner one night at Coudures' apartment, Crumb sat looking at a book his wife's lover had brought to the table about the World War II escape of many European artists, Jewish and otherwise, via Marseille to New York.
There was a photo of a grandly smiling Salvador Dali and his wife, Gala, in front of a painting. "He was a real self-promoter, that Dali," one dinner guest said.
Crumb pointed at the wife.
"She was behind most of that," he said.
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