A romance amid the trees...
Chateaubriand plants a garden and launches a mode…The Landscape of Courtomer, a series
Above: photographed in early May at Courtomer...horse chestnut trees in the allée, benches, in the bright morning light
Chère amie, cher ami,
Today, I meant to write you about how we have started to plant trees in the parc at Courtomer. How I chose each species of tree...where we’ve decided each would thrive...how with Monsieur Martyn we have begun our program.
I wondered how trees would have been planted in the long-gone days when the Chateau was built, in the 11th century. What purpose would they have served the châtelain, the châtelaine and their family...and their retinue of knights, servants, and laborers in medieval times.
And then, how to interpret the first description we have of the grounds, from the 1600s. Or the first sketch, from 1758. A watercolor and engravings from the 1800s. Postcards...photographs.
How do our gardens and parc at Courtomer fit into the world around us...with the gardens and landscaping of centuries past...and with the way we want to live with nature and plants today.
I came across the fascinating, tempestuous, irritating and enchanteur François-René de Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand has a connection with Courtomer. His passionate affair with Delphine de Custine, who bought a country place 30 miles away from our Chateau, inadvertently brought him into the family circle of the Marquis de Courtomer. Delphine’s only son married Léontine, the youngest daughter of the Marquis. And Chateaubriand, I found, was as passionate about planting trees as he was about the many women in his life. And far less fickle.
Portrait of Chateaubriand as tousled Romantic genius, by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles) / Gérard Blot
“spatio brevi spem longam reseces”
“Life is short; should hope be more?”
quoted the illustrious François-René de Châteaubriand in the opening pages of his Mémoires. He was remembering his garden at La Vallée-aux-Loups, the valley of wolves, just outside Paris.
The park around the château, where he had planted and nurtured hundreds of trees:
“de toutes les choses qui me sont échappées, est la seule que je regrette,”
“of all of the things that have escaped me, is the only one I still long for.”
Few things escaped Chateaubriand. His high opinion of himself was shared by many. Like Horace, whose Ode to the passage of time he cites, Chateaubriand enjoyed fame, influence, and the intimate company of beautiful women. He, too, was an emperor’s favorite – for a time.
“Carpe diem,” writes Horace in the same Ode, “quam minimum credula postero.”
“Seize the day, trust not to future happiness.”
Perhaps these lines had a particular poignancy: like most of his generation, the trajectory of Chateaubriand’s life had been overthrown by the French Revolution. He was 20 when the Bastille fell. His father was already dead. His mother and sisters were imprisoned. His older brother and sister-in-law, age 23, were guillotined. So were hundreds of friends and contemporaries. The family’s property was pillaged. Trees were cut down and carried off for lumber or firewood. Then everything, from land and houses to jewellery and mattresses, was confiscated.
But, like a well-rooted sapling, Chateaubriand survived the tempest. He flourished.
“Je me suis rencontré entre deux siècles, comme au confluent de deux fleuves. j'ai plongé dans leurs eaux troublées, m'éloignant à regret du vieux rivage où je suis né, nageant avec espérance vers une rive inconnue.”
“I found myself between two centuries, as at the confluence of two mighty rivers; I plunged into the turbulent waters, carried away from where I was born, swimming toward an unknown shore.”
Chateaubriand lived with contradiction. He looked back to Horace and classical civilization, the centuries-long heritage of ideas, ideals, and culture. Yet he was fascinated by man in a state of nature, in the New World of the Americas. Brought up amid the rationalism and vague atheism of the 18th-century Age des Lumières, he became an apologist for a devout practice of Christianity. He convinced everyone but himself, it was later said, that marriage was a sacred bond.
Trees had a particular meaning for Chateaubriand. At the age of 21, he’d travelled to the young United States. The French Revolution was in full swing. It was 1791 and the Ancien Régime was falling apart.
“I entered into woods,” he wrote in his Mémoires, “which had never been cut down, I was overwhelmed, drunk with a sense of freedom. I went from tree to tree, shouting “No roads, no towns, no monarchy, no republic, no presidents, no kings, no human beings”...my guide thought I was stark raving mad.” He set his first novel, Atala, in the American wilderness.
At La Vallée-aux-Loups, he made his own version of a New World wilderness with Old World overtones.
Assisted by his wife, admired by visiting mistresses and friends, Chateaubriand planted trees that reminded him of his wild sensations 16 years earlier. There were Virginia maples, catalpa, bald cypress from Louisiana. There was evergreen magnolia as described in Atala, “dominating the forest, a tall, immobile cone crowned with white roses.”
Nature in its primeval glory, as imagined by Chateaubriand and illlustrated by Gustave Doré for Atala, Chateaubriand's wildly successful first novel.
Trees from Asia Minor, where he’d also travelled, made up an allée. There were plane trees from Greece, cedars of Lebanon and the Atlas Mountains, pines from Jerusalem. These places were the setting for his third novel, Les Martyrs, about the merits of Christianity. And because a Druid priestess falls in love with the Christian hero, he also planted French oaks. The oak was sacred to the Druids.
But Vallée-aux-Loups, “a house with an overgrown orchard, a ravine, and a thicket of chestnut trees,” as Chateaubriand described it, was also a retreat inspired by ancient Rome.
“Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus,hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquae fonset paulum silvae super his foret,” had written Horace, eighteen centuries earlier.
“I’d always wished for a portion of ground not over large, in which was a garden, and a fountain with a continual stream close to my house, and a little woodland besides.”
“I’m attached to my trees: I address them in elegies, sonnets, odes...I know their names as if they were my own children: this is my family, I have no other, I hope to die beside them,” Chateaubriand added.
If Chateaubriand was passionately attached to his trees, he also enjoyed passionate attachments. His series of mistresses and friends were intelligent, well-connected and rich. They too succumbed to his passion for trees.
Natalie de Noailles, duchesse de Mouchy, brought him young subjects from her father’s magnificent landscape park at Méréville, in Normandy. In the gardens at Méréville, he met Natalie’s cousin Claire, duchesse de Duras. Madame de Duras was delegated to find him plants and trees at her husband’s château d’Ussé in the Loire Valley.
The Empress Josephine herself ceremoniously presented him a rare purple-flowering magnolia, despite his fall from favor with Napoleon,
Meanwhile, Natalie’s predecessor, Delphine de Custine, had planted her own parc with trees. The year she fell in love with Chateaubriand, the marquise had purchased the chateau de Fervaques, 30 miles to the north of Courtomer. Here, in what she described as “une petite Suisse,” a little Switzerland of hills and valleys, she prepared for Chateaubriand’s visits. He came to stay several times in the summers of 1804 to1806. Then, he departed, enamored of a new love.
Delphine de Custine, one of the most beautiful and intrepid women of her time, fell passionately in love with Chateaubriand. She was a neighbor of and visited Chateau de Courtomer. The youngest daughter of the Marquis de Courtomer married her only son.
Many years later, he visited Delphine again. And, curiously, he accompanied her to Courtomer. In 1821, Delphine’s son Astolphe had married Léontine de Saint-Simon de Courtomer, youngest daughter of the last Marquis de Courtomer.
It's tempting to imagine that Chateaubriand’s love of trees left a mark on Delphine, and in turn influenced the landscape plantings at Chateau de Courtomer. In a letter she wrote to her mother about her new chateau at Fervaques, she describes the young trees and the jardin anglais, or natural landscape park she is making with the help of a rascally gardener.
At Courtomer, apart from the American sequoia and a struggling evergreen magnolia, little remains today to suggest that the great writer’s sojourn in the 1820s might have influenced the plantings.
Perhaps it was unlikely, given the transitory nature of Chateaubriand’s passion for Delphine.
Yet...a watercolor of the Chateau de Courtomer and its parc from the early 1800s shows paths winding through the Great Lawn and a bushy flag that might be our sequoia in its infancy. By the 1860s, the trees have matured. The Chateau, shown in engravings from 1868, is framed in green wilderness.
Watercolor of Chateau de Courtomer, early 1800s. Note the bushy plant to the right; perhaps our big sequoia when a young plant. The watercolor hangs in the entrance hall of the Chateau.
Chateaubriand, with his romantic evocation of the primeval forest and of the peaceful glades of classical antiquity, set a fashion in literature that extended to the arts of gardening, including his own. If he had not directly influenced the planting at Courtomer, his ideas about the human experience of nature were part of a new mode in landscape gardening that is evident in the 1860s engravings.
An earlier generation had set aside the formal jardin à la française in favor of the jardin à l’anglaise. But the latter was also too clearly a garden of artifice, made to be looked at and admired. Man-made hills and water features were peppered with garden follies that evoked the classical world and exotic travels.
Chateaubriand and his contemporaries developed le parc romantique, a romantic landscape where human feelings and nature were in communion. Trees themselves replaced Greek temples and Chinese pagodas as objects of revery and emotion.
When Chateaubriand fell upon hard times a decade after buying his chateau and planting his trees, he sold his books. Then, at last, as we have seen, he sold Vallée-aux-Loups.
“...de toutes les choses qui me sont échappées, [elle] est la seule que je regrette,”
“...of all of the things that have escaped me, [th]is the only one that I miss.”
An inspiration for future plantings at Chateau de Courtomer...if not for our library or for the path of true love.
To romance, to trees, to springtime!
A bientôt,
Elisabeth
Botanical dawing of a magnolia from Malmaison, the garden and parc of the Empress Josephine, by Pierre-Joseph Redouté