August at the Chateau...summer nights and shooting stars...hot days and French traditions...
| Friday, August 21, 2020
Dear Friend,
It was so hot last week, there were pictures of the thermometer in the local newspaper. Rouen, the capital of Normandy, measured the hottest day on record – more than 100 degrees!
Though the mornings were fresh and cool, by midday we might as well have been in the Sahara. A way of experiencing foreign lands without leaving home, Madame Francine told me. She still hasn’t gotten over my week-long trip to Paris.
But last Saturday was the Fête de l'Assomption, August 15. A storm tore across Normandy and our sister region, Brittany. Lightning crackled and thunder clouds burst, pelting the dry earth with gallons, or perhaps we should say, liters of water.
"Il pleut des hallebardes!" exclaimed Monsieur Jean-Yves, using a military metaphor from another age. The rain was coming down hard, slicing through the heavy air like a medieval battle ax. He was splashing through the puddles that had suddenly filled the niches de poules or “hen’s nests” as pot-holes are called, in the farm road.
As soon as they see Jean-Yves in the evening, our cattle start walking toward their feeder.
Come rain or shine, the cattle need their ration of hay -- for it’s been a dry summer up ‘til now. It’s not just the herbe sur pied, the grass in the pasture, that is giving out. Between a wet winter, a dry spring, and a succession of heat waves in June, July, and August, the harvests here have all been bad, too.
"Miserable!" said Jean-Yves’ wife, Brigitte with disapproval, as she handed me the bons for the delivery of our latest crop, oats, to the cooperative. But she was resigned. Despite her noble and tenacious spirit, like all farmers she is a fatalist.
"Après la pluie, le beau temps," added Jean-Yves, more optimistically. "Ça repousse dans les prés,"
Yes, after the rain, the good times…and it’s a consolation that the grass already shows signs of regrowth in the pastures. We sell some of our herd at the end of the autumn, so they need the nourishment of our rich, green Normandy grass to be at their best. And feeding them our stocks of hay, when the moisson was so meager, risks depriving the remaining cattle of their proper ration in the coming winter.
Jean-Yves trudged off, dodging the piercing rain, his rubber boots clogged with clumps of mud. Brigitte’s broken ankle forced her to stay in the camionette. Never one to be idle, she was preparing to update the register of new calves.
“La Vierge du quinze août arrange ou dérange tout,” she said to me with a dry smile, as she turned to her papers.
“The Virgin of August 15 fixes it. Or makes it worse.”
Official dogma? No, the voice of centuries of rural life. L'Assomption, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on August 15, announces, as infallibly as might any pope, a change in the weather.
Madame Brigitte is not particularly devout. Heaven helps those who help themselves -- “Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera” -- probably resumes her creed, although it is actually a line from one of the Fables of La Fontaine. Despite increasingly secular attitudes, the Virgin and the saints live on through common expressions as well as venerated traditions in France. The Saints Glaces, the Ice Saints, are three days in May when late freezes can be expected. A Saint Martin is an Indian summer. The Saint Michel, September 29, is when rural rents are due. And at Courtomer, the bells of our church still toll the Angelus, the call to prayer immortalized in Jean-François Millet’s painting of 1859.
Two Norman "paysans" pause for prayer at the tolling of the Angelus in Millet's 1859 painting. The bells still ring out the Angelus from the church at Courtomer across our fields.
The feast day of August 15 commemorates the Virgin Mary’s bodily “assumption” from deathbed to eternity in Heaven. It’s been an important holiday in France since 1638. That’s when the future Louis XIV was born. Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, his parents, had been married since the age of 14. In 23 years, no child appeared. Though they were on notoriously bad terms, they both appealed to the Virgin for an heir. One stormy night, they were trapped together in the palace of the Louvre. Louis Dieudonné (“the god-given”) was the happy outcome of this unplanned tryst.
In thanks for little Louis, his father had vowed that henceforth the kingdom would be consecrated to the glory of Our Lady of the Assumption. But even in those days of absolute kingship, it is interesting to note, Louis XIII needed Parlement's consent to fulfill his promise. The king’s subjects had their say about being offered to the Virgin!
Amid stormy clouds, divine light shines approvingly upon Louis XIII, offering the royal crown and sceptre to the Virgin Mary. Philippe de Champaigne's "Le voeu de Louis XIII" was painted for Nôtre-Dame de Paris. It was confiscated during the Revolution, and now hangs in the Musée de Caen, an hour's drive from Courtomer.
The French Revolution did away with the Feast of the Assumption, as with all Christian celebrations. Napoleon restored relations with the Church under the Empire, but not the vow to the Vierge de l'Assomption. Also, August 15 just happened to be the “Saint Napoleon,” the feast day of a highly doubtful martyr, who seems to have been conjured up by the Vatican to appease the Emperor. Under Napoleon and his nephew, the emperor Napoleon III, this was celebrated with self-conscious pomp.
After the fall of both Napoleons, everyone politely forgot about la Saint-Napoléon. The restored kings had resurrected the Feast of the Assumption as a national celebration.
Deck chairs on the lawn, we're getting ready to enjoy the long summer evening...and once night falls, August's magnificent display of shooting stars.
And despite two centuries of a stormy church-state relationship, churches all over France, as around Courtomer, still resonate to the favorite old hymn:
Chez nous, soyez Reine
Nous sommes à vous,
Regne en souverain
Chez nous, chez nous!
Here with us, you shall be Queen!
We are yours.
Reign as a sovereign
With us, with us!
It’s now been a few days since the deluge, though still cloudy and cool. The rain has refreshed the roses in the parterres along the moat and climbing up the walls of the Farmhouse. Heat-weary annuals are brightening up, a cheerful contrast to the stone walls of the old stable block and in the garden of the Orangerie. This week, Jean-Yves is drilling wheat in the field above the Chateau, toward the Church of Saint-Lhomer.
And we’re still enjoying les grandes vacances, summer vacation, though we drape a shawl over our shoulders as the late afternoon shadows lengthen across the Great Lawn. We linger outside often, enjoying the dark nights…because August is also the month of shooting stars! And our skies, unpolluted with city lights, provide a majestic screen for viewing these flying pieces of cosmic dust.
A très bientôt, au Château,
