Today's Letter from Elisabeth...Unexpected riches in Alençon's musée...a treasure house near the Chateau...

Dear Friend of Chateau de Courtomer,

“There’s nothing to do,” complained Liam, morosely. His mouth turned down and his eyes were suspiciously damp. He stared out the window of the library at the grey January mist, heavy with rain that was predicted for the afternoon. The ash trees lining the stream on the other side of the pasture were barely visibly, like a tracery of thread in a piece of fine lace.

He had been poking at the fire. An ember had rolled dangerously close to the carpet.

“Put down those tongs, tout de suite!” his father had exclaimed, looking up from the computer and his emails.

“You could try reading a book!” said Clara, in the bright tones of one who is conscious of being gainfully occupied.

Liam leapt over the arm of the sofa and snatched “Missee Lee” from his sister’s long and slender fingers.

“What’s this! Captured by pirates in the South China Sea with a pet monkey! Very edifying.” He resumed scornfully.

Clara, habitually imperturbable, grew as red as a boiled shrimp. Sparks glinted in her narrowed eyes.

“Rouge comme une tomate!” jeered Liam. “Red as a tomato.”

“Actually, in France we often say “vert de rage,” or green with anger,” intervened l’Oncle Henry. “It’s one of those expressions from the late medieval Theory of the Humours. Anger comes from an excess of bile.”

The two children looked at him blankly.

“Bile is green,” he added. The children were silent. Clara returned to her book. Liam stared sulkily out the window.

Over lunch, we decided to visit the Musée d’Alençon. It is less than a-40 minute drive from the Chateau. And even Liam was inclined to be cheered at the thought of a chocolat chaud and a marron glacé chez Jacky Pedro afterwards. I felt some slight trepidation, however.

These days, as art critics and op-ed pieces will tell us, a visit to the museum is not just about art and artists. It is about colonialism. Spoils of war. Consumerism and hoarding of “stuff.” The desire of wealthy donors to buy respectability after a life of ill-gotten gains.

How would we explain all this to the children, while enjoying ourselves?

I need not have worried. The museum of Alençon encompasses all these things tout naturellement.

The initial collection was created from “saisis révolutionnaires” of the French Revolution: paintings, sculptures and objets seized in 1793 from churches, abbeys, châteaux and anyone suspected of being a counter-revolutionary. The Emperor Napoleon 1er embellished it with some of the booty from his lightning conquest of Europe. Napoleon III, his nephew, made donations from the vast collections of the Louvre. The new 19th-century cultural and industrial elite of Alençon made bequests. The fashionable 19th-century “académies,” amateurs of provincial archaeology, history, and the arts, raised money for acquisitions. A retired colonial administrator of the French colony of Indochine gave his collection of photographs and objects from early 20th-century Cambodia.

Finally, the museum incorporates the archives of the last lace-making school in Alençon, with a wide collection of portraits and paintings, as well as countless patterns and examples of luxurious “Point d’Alençon” lace, uniting both popular and high culture, lower and upper classes, lace-makers and those who wore the products of their skilled fingers.

Best of all, Alençon’s Musée des Beaux Arts et de la Dentelle is a small museum. It is a perfect size for discovering art in pictures and statues, and for exploring Alençon’s remarkable heritage. And the museum itself is a microcosm of French culture.

We arrived in the afternoon, just as the doors re-opened after la pause déjeuner. Lunch, we explained to the children, is a serious occupation in France. Bien sûr! It is to them as well.

Since 1981, the museum has occupied a handsome 16th-century school, formerly the Collège royale, in the heart of old Alençon. We parked in a walled courtyard, and walked past a chapel with a magnificent carved wooden door. Now the municipal library, the former chapel houses a venerable collection of manuscripts and other valuable sources of Alençonnais history.

The chapel was built in the 1670s by the Jesuits, who had established a school on the grounds of the Château of Alençon in 1623 under the patronage of Louis XIII and ad majorem dei gloriam – for the glory of god, as the Jesuit devise puts it. Chief among the king’s preoccupations was to provide a Roman Catholic educational alternative in a city that was overwhelmingly Protestant – and  that risked joining the seditious Huguenot forces in Normandy.

“Assez longtemps nous avons croupi dans l'ignorance et la corruption,” wrote Martin Luther, in a 1524 treatise on the education of youth. “Too long have we crouched in ignorance and corruption.”

“And,” he added, “don’t object that you haven’t the time to instruct your children: you find enough time to teach them to dance and play cards!”

Translations of the Protestant Reformation leader’s writings were widely disseminated throughout the 16th century among French réformés, as Protestants and Huguenots were also called. Schools were founded with enthusiasm, particularly by the intellectually adventurous and cultivated Huguenot nobility in Normandy. It was the “Age d’Or,” the Golden Age of the court of the Duchess of Alençon, Marguerite d’Angoulême. She supported, protected, and published Humanist scholars, poets and religious reformers. Throughout the heyday of Protestantism in Normandy, schools were heavily-attended and available to children as young as six.

Meanwhile, the Counter Reformation, launched by the Roman Catholic church to meet the Protestant challenge, also began to stress the importance of Christian education. Schools must feed and direct the soul as well as the mind. By the end of the 16th century, the Jesuits had created the Ratio studiorum, laying out a curriculum and an organisational model for collègesand their adolescent students. These schools aimed to prepare the sons of aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois for worldly success. And they were highly popular, even among Protestants. The order’s close connection to the monarchy was an added attraction. Henri IV, whose conversion to Catholicism had decisively ended the long Wars of Religion, had chosen a Jesuit priest as his confessor. In Normandy, Henri’s influence was deeply felt; not only were many Norman noblemen – like the seigneurs of Courtomer -- his former comrades in arms and his mother a famous leader of the Huguenot rebellion, his grandmother had been the Duchess of Alençon.

Henri IV personally authorized the founding of Jesuit collèges. These existed, in his words, to “instruire la jeunesse et la rendre amoureuse des sciences, de l’honneur et de la vertu, pour être capable de servir au public.”

“To instruct the youth and to make it love sciences, honor and manly virtues, in order to take up public service.”

A couple of centuries later, the Musée de Beaux Arts of Alençon opened in 1857 with a similar theme: to improve and instruct. In the optimistic 19th-century of railroads, telegraphs, and myriad new inventions that improved everyday material life, the museum would inspire the development of less tangible realms: art and culture. Tucked into the new concept of the “beaux” arts, the arts of the beautiful, was the idea that being exposed to beauty in painting and sculpture would awaken virtue in the beholder.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” remarked our Henry.

“Can we go inside now?” asked Liam politely.

“Do you think they have a painting of Napoleon?” he added. His hazel eyes gleamed keenly.

Clara seemed to awaken from a revery.

“Isn’t Cambodia on the South China Sea?” she asked. “And was Aunt Viola’s wedding veil made in Alençon?”

To be continued next week…