End of an era
Sometimes, when things change, nothing is ever the same again...
Chère amie, cher ami,
Above: scattered roses from one of the climbers against the Orangerie wall.
In the darkness, six peals ring out. The morning star is a tiny, bright glint, like a last cinder in a banked fire. Two bats swing through the air in large, deft arcs, catching last moths before swooping home.
The days are getting shorter as summer draws to an end.
In half an hour, daybreak touches the edges of clouds with reddish light. The sky whitens. The sociable song of birds begins, with calls and twitters in the grove of trees outside the window. And, as if all our neighboring farmers had turned the key in the ignition at the same moment, the distant hum of tractors rises from surrounding fields.
The delicate colors of dawn are fleeting. By seven peals of the church bell, the sky is a mottled silver grey. It will be another very hot day.
By evening, the stone façade of the Chateau will radiate heat. But for now, there’s a pleasant freshness in the early morning air.
Up in the bourg, the heat is a reliable topic of conversation. So, too, is the “violente averse” that soaked Courtomer last Saturday. Our violent rainstorm made the pages of “Ouest France,” Normandy’s newspaper of reference.
The daughters of the assistant coiffeuse, out on a bicycle ride at Courtomer, had been “trempées jusqu’à la culotte!”
Soaked right through to their underwear, I learned as I sat in a fauteuil having my hair rolled up in bigoudis.
Puddles of water, I proffered to Madame Valentine, coiffeuse and owner, still sit in our cellars at the Chateau!
Ma foi, how strange! Because there was no rain at all in Saint Germain le Vieux (population 60), where the assistante had gone home for lunch that Saturday.
She wondered whether it had rained in Tellières-le-Plessy.
“Well, if it did, it must have been a catastrophe,” said the coiffeuse, shaking her head. We all agreed. Tellières is up in the ring of hills that surround Courtomer. The rainwater would have washed down in sheets on the asphalt roads that lead up to the village.
“Was it raining in Bazoches? wondered the dame waiting for her husband to have his favoris trimmed. None of us knew.
But it had certainly been dry as a bone in St Germain.
Our next general topic of conversation concerned les chauve-souris, bats.
“C’est la saison,” sighed Madame Valentine. They always fly into her house at the end of summer.
“Is it true they nest in your hair?” winced her assistante. She wears her own hair in a chic bob.
The man with sideburns spoke up. He explained why bats hang by their feet.
“J’aime bien les livres sur les animaux,” he added. The upside-down position, he’d read, provides a good lift-off when a bat opens its wings to fly.
The heat, the downpour, the bats...a verse in the song of the seasons. Like the planting of the fields in August and les commices, the agricultural fairs, of September, these are the expected events of summer.
And soon, as expected, summer will slip away.
Already, we make lists and plans for the coming season. Les artisans emerge from their white vans with tape measures and notebooks, to jot down lengths and angles.
In the walled garden, pears are hanging, ready to fall at the gentle pinch of finger and thumb. The cider apples in the orchard redden. The wild blackberries in the hedges and the peaches espaliered against the stable walls are almost finis.
Summer melds into the familiar mellow fruitfulness of autumn.
Our peach tree grows against the stable walls, near the loge du gardien.
But while the seasons follow each other, as constant as the spinning ball we live on, our lives follow another pattern.
Sometimes, when things change, nothing is ever the same again.
Our gardien of many years is leaving us soon. Monsieur Xavier came to the Chateau 15 years ago on another September day. We’ve grown to know each other, to take the measure of temperament and capacity.
We’ve pondered solutions to the complexities of bringing an Ancien Régime château into modern times, renovated the farmhouse, fixed roofs and repaired leaks. With his profound distaste for approximate measures, some of these tasks lasted months and even years.
Ingenious and an inveterate tinker, cantankerous and affectionate by turns, he yearned for perfection. Even the pictures he hung on the walls march across the plaster with unrelenting exactitude. The other day, moving a few of them, I found the neat cross marking the place to drive a nail, and the faint lines that traced a level.
This morning, as I pass their loge on my walk, our gardien’s wife hurries from the kitchen bearing scraps for her chickens. A couple of grey kittens play in front of her door, waiting with their mother and a small tribe of other faithful cats for their turn to be fed. Madame Francine nods and smiles distractedly; her sons are coming to help with the move; there is much to do.
Relics of a long past, and not only her own, to sort through and then pack carefully into boxes. Her mother’s plates, with their décor of onions and carrots, les tasses de grand’mère, photographs and mementos. And piled along with old kitchen appliances, in the storage behind the loge, are the paraphernalia and the jetsam of a busy life: boxes of school papers belonging to a granddaughter, posters and toys, enough bicycles to start a team for the Tour de France, a tricycle, a couple of baby carriages, and miscellaneous objects of mysterious and long-forgotten provenance and value.
Out in the stables are Madame Francine’s rabbits, a gift from one of her sons. Do they feel a change is coming, and not just of the seasons? They stare out with bright inscrutable eyes from behind the doors of their clapet.
The rabbits look out from their clapet in the stables.
Madame Francine inherited la main verte from her father, whose admirable memory she evokes with a ready tear in her blue eyes. Under the overhang of the house is the lemon tree she grew from a seed, now as tall as a tall child. Inside, at the north window, flourishes a little forest of orchids and aloe, African violets and jade plants. A new window and a different view await them all.
The shadow of this great departure, now imminent, has touched the light-filled summer months with a little sadness.
Other hands will till the soil where Madame Francine’s potager grew. Other fingers will link wires and adjust knobs at the Chateau. Other minds will, we dearly hope, also decrypt manuals. But as the great Victor Hugo wrote, “to regret is folly.”
C'est donc avoir vécu ! c'est donc avoir été !
Dans la joie et l'amour et la félicité
C'est avoir eu sa part ! et se plaindre est folie.
Voilà de quel nectar la coupe était remplie !
"To have lived, to have existed
In joy and love and happiness
Is to have had one’s part! And to regret is folly.
With such sweet nectar our cup runneth over!"
For now, the long day drifts, warm and still, into another summer night. A graceful flight of swallows swoops through the blue crepuscule. Faintly, the stars begin to gleam.
Set aside until tomorrow then, are lists and plans for another season!
A bientôt, au Chateau...
Elisabeth
A sketch from Viollet-le-Duc's "Dictionnaire" of medieval French building techniques evokes, for me, many pleasant hours planning the restorations and renovations at Chateau de Courtomer.