A glimmer of immortality...art and life on the farm

Dear friend,

C’est la rentrée! cry the advertisements, offering discounts on cahiers and plumes, notebooks and pens. The school year has begun. Children’s cartables are stocked with fresh supplies; the little ones wear smocks to protect their clothes; everyone has new shoes.

Les grandes vacances are over. Tout Paris has deserted its summer quarters in the countryside and along the Normandy seashore. Les estivants, the summer people, have headed back to the routine of métro, boulot, dodo – subway, job, sleep.

Meanwhile, here at Courtomer, we we gird our loins, too.

The busy harvest season is behind us, but now it’s time to take stock and make plans. Monsieur Jean-Yves will advise on the assolement, what crop to plant in which field. Barley in case the summer is cold and wet; it grows anywhere. Colza, or rapeseed, because the prices are always high. Wheat because that’s what our land produces best. Oats because it enriches and conditions the soil.

Meanwhile, we’ve already reserved a new bull for next season. He’s a handsome young fellow with lots of muscle, a quiet temperament, and, we are told by his breeder, a genetic profile that fits our herd. Several difficult births last season have made us apprehensive. The calves were too large. Was it the fault of the bull that sired those calves? Or pasture that was too rich while they were gestating?

A farmer is a gambler “malgré lui,” despite himself. He has a horror of risk, evoking as it does the ancient specter of famine and the real possibility of ruin. And like Lady Luck, the spirits of nature are fickle. Rain, hail and fair weather obey the pleading human will about as well as the roulette wheel.

Farming humbles a person. Especially one who has studied history and literature, but not much about crop rotation and bovine fertility. To read is to live in the imagination; to farm is to get your feet stuck solidly in the earth.

Perhaps that is why art exists. Like farming, its roots reach into the most ancient times. Unlike farming, it exalts the human spirit without drudgery. A work of art offers an experience of beauty that is like a glimmer of immortality…independent of chance and the weather.

So, it was with real pleasure that I bicycled into Courtomer last week for a rendez-vous with Madame Marie.

Madame Marie is the tapissière extraordinaire of our village. Here in our midst, among the farmers and the local shopkeepers is an artist, attuned to the variations of color and pattern, heft and hand as a poet is attuned to the complexity of the word.

We first met when I brought her four pairs of curtains to remake for a bedroom at the Chateau. The panels were at least seventy years old, a deep rose pink, mellowed with age. They came from a family home, and I loved them.

“Satin de coton,” she remarked. This is cotton cloth woven in the same way as silk satin. She took a panel in her hand and let it drop. It fell in large supple scallops onto her padded work table. The light streaming in the atelier windows reflected off its smooth surface with dignified sheen. She nodded approvingly.

A French artisan is not to be trifled with. But the cloth was worthy. Madame Marie consented to remaking the curtains. She looked at them intently.

“Attendez!” she commanded, disappearing behind a long screen that divided the atelier in two sections. She returned bearing a large cardboard box of passementerie. Inside was an exuberant amalgamation of silk, cotton and woolen cords, tassels, pompoms, galon, gimp, and fringe.

“Et ça, non?” she demanded, her almond-shaped blue eyes gleaming. She held a tangle of silk tassels in shades of pink and coral against the rose-colored curtains. It had come from the retirement sale of a shop owner in Paris. Exposed to the bleaching effects of sun and moonshine for decades, the mottled colors lay against the rose curtains like the silky tail of a pink tabby cat.

“Délicieux,” pronounced Madame Marie.

Yes, our tapissière has the eye of a poet. She is an artist of the scissors and la Singer, the sewing machine.

Today, we were collaborating once again. And it was a delightful respite from thinking about price per quintal – the traditional unit of measurement for grains -- and hay silage.

Years ago, I found a set of four 18th-century provincial bergères, or armchairs, for the grand salon. Someone had upholstered them in a brown suede-like material known as Alcantara.

Developed in a Japanese chemical lab in the 1970s, this textile appears, unfortunately, to be indestructible.

In like vein was a pair of capacious 1940s armchairs, their boxlike forms upholstered in a sturdy synthetic damask the color of faded orange hair dye. There was a set of adorable little armchairs for a bedroom, done up in tawdry polyester with glued-on trim. When you looked closely at the seat cushions, you realized their shapes defied geometry. They had been hacked out of foam. Finally, tucked back in the fumoir were a couple more bergères, covered in more Alcantara, in a dingy flesh color.
I lived with these gloomy chairs for years. I was being practical. I had never wanted to be, like the character in the Henry James novel, a person who could be kept awake for hours by the hideous wall-paper in her room.

But times have changed. If I have learned anything from the pandémie, it is that one must seize the day. Gather the rosebuds and cut the hay while the sun shines. If you want to travel to faraway shores, go! If you want to get married, get on with it! And if the upholstery is giving you insomnia…alors, quoi donc? Change it!

“Dieu merci pour les Anglais ! » exclaimed Madame Marie, piously, passing me a sample book from Colefax and Fowler, featuring woolen plaids. “Thank God for the English!”

« Et les Italiens, » she added, pulling out more samples, these from Italian manufacturers of luminous velvets.

France – and Normandy itself -- has a noble tradition of textile manufacturing, she conceded. But things are not as they were! Madame Marie sighed…then, brightening up, she showed me a sequined curtain panel embroidered in Madras, once a trading port of the British East India Company…

I almost fell of my bicycle on the way back to the Chateau, basket filled with a profusion of fabric samples, and distracted by the colors and textures swirling in my mind’s eye.

Next week, more about latest decorating projects at the Chateau – and other news from the Normandy countryside.

Until next week, with warm regards -- et à bientôt au Chateau!