Our expedition to the medieval bishop's city of Sées

Chère amie, cher ami,
 
The winter sky, as luminous and cloudy as a pearl, hangs close above the roofs and bare trees of the farmyard at the Chateau.
 
It has been bitterly cold in France for the last few weeks. The pantry where we keep groceries is as glacial as an icebox. So are the upstairs bedrooms. But in the ample kitchen downstairs, a warm fire crackles on the hearth.
 
And Monsieur is lying on the sofa fast asleep. He’s been cutting up the branches of a monumental oak that fell last winter in the copse next to the Chateau.
 
Franck, our cook, is at the stove, preparing a gigot de sanglier, trophy of the boar hunt that took place here earlier this month. We are expecting friends for dinner.
 
In the midst of this peaceful scene, there was a loud crash and an exclamation. Monsieur started up from his slumber.
 
“Oh! Pardon!” whispered Franck.
 
He began chopping parsley with the hushed intensity of a teletypist in an old war movie.
 
“So how was the service?” asked Monsieur.
 
The service, an ordinary Sunday mass in the countryside, took place in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in our nearby town of Sées.  

The road from Courtomer drops gently down from fertile plains into the bishop’s city. Sées, built on water meadows near the source of the Orne River, is an ancient settlement. Ceasar’s officers found a tribe called the Sagii living here. These Gauls wisely submitted to Roman rule, thus avoiding possible extermination. They gave their name to a new town, which found itself on the Roman road from Spain to the English Channel and prospered.
 
The Sées of our time developed in the chaotic aftermath of the Roman Empire, amid waves of conquest and pillage, settlement and pacification. An already ruined Roman temple was the site of Sées’ first Christian sanctuary, built by the evangelizer Saint Latuin around 440. At the time, what is now Normandy was part of a rump state of the receding Roman Empire, the kingdom of the Roman general Syagrius. It was surrounded and cut off from the Italian heartland by kingdoms of Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians. Defeated by Clovis in 486, Syagrius fled and Sées became part of a new Frankish kingdom.
 
Meanwhile, in Sées as throughout most of the former Roman Empire, the Church rose to fill the vacuum in civil and even military authority. Church law courts dispensed justice, and not only on ecclesiastical matters. They punished murderers, wife-beaters, rogues and thieves. Bishops and abbots rode at the head of small armies. And the Church took a vigorous role in society. It provided hospitals and medicine for the ill; fed and clothed the indigent. Church schools taught the old Roman trivium. Clerics kept civil records and monks compiled histories. Extensive Church lands produced food, textile fibers, metals, wood and other essentials of medieval life.
 
In 541, the bishopric of nearby Exmès was transferred to Sées. More than 1500 years later, Sées is one of the earliest French dioceses still extant today. 

Coming into Sées from Courtomer, we pass an Intermarché grocery store at the entrance to town. This is a grande surface, much patronized by residents and inhabitants of the villages and farms in the surrounding vicinity. Here you can buy all the staples of the French larder, plus school supplies, electronics, and clothing. This is the contemporary face of the French countryside, and it is anathema to small shop owners in the centre ville, or the old Bourg-le-Comte around the ruins of Sées’ feudal château. 
 
“Ah!” lamented a friend one day as we strolled along the winding streets of Sées, “we used to have nine butchers and now there’s only two!”
 
I should note that she and I had just come out of L’Oiseau-Lyre, a bookstore. If there are fewer choices in sausages, shopping in the historic centre-ville of Sées still has many delights. 
 
Similarly, the Cité Episcopale remains remarkably true to its original purpose. Following the road to the Cathedral, we pass the austere and majestic façade of Le Grand Seminaire. The vast convent complex of the Communité de la Miséricorde, dating from 1822, stands on the other side of the street.
 
The impulses that drove the construction of these impressive structures may no longer resonate in today’s world, but the edifices still serve the aims established here so long ago. 

The first Grand Seminaire in Sées was the confident fruit, in 1653, of the “Contre Réforme,” the French Catholic response to the challenge of Protestantism. Parish priests must be educated in theology and scripture, able to confound critics and argue in defense of Catholic doctrine. 
 
Although we drive serenely past today’s Seminaire, we might note that over at Chateau de Courtomer, our predecessors had built their own Protestant Temple barely 20 years before, in 1622. Like many Norman aristocrats, they had taken up the new Protestant ideas with enthusiasm. Our “habitacle” with its ostentatiously tall roof “en pavillon” went up forty years after the Massacre of Protestants during the Saint-Batholémy. 1622 was the same year that Louis XIII reduced the number of militarily protected Protestant strongholds in France to only two.

The 18th-century buildings of Le Grand Seminaire were sold off during the French Revolution, when all Church lands were seized. The current structure was built in 1938, with public subscription. It closed in 1968. Now, it is a Catholic school for boys.
 
“Les bonnes oeuvres,” or charitable and practical works, not religious orthodoxy, led to the founding of the convent of the Miséricorde. After the forced “déchristianisation” of the Revolutionary years, the Church rebounded. Young women flooded back into the orders, many of them newly created. But girls without a dot – money or property to support themselves and their order – could not join a convent. The Soeurs de la Miséricorde accepted young women of modest means. In turn, they were trained to nurse the ill and elderly in their homes.
 
The Miséricorde, though now mainly active in Africa and Latin America, continues to fund vocations.
 
Arrived in town at last, Notre-Dame de Séez springs upward from its parvis, with flying buttresses and soaring arches. Here is the heart of Sées, an expression of the heavenward yearning of the medieval world, holding a visible light to the world in the lanterns of its twin spires. 
 
Next to it is a medieval chapter house, built of simple brick and beams dark with age.

But the Cité is a mostly a relic of the Ancien Régime, not of medieval times. The pride and wealth of the Church triumphant, secure in its privilege and status, transformed the episcopal city. In the 1780s, the incoming bishop tore down part of the medieval quarter to build a splendid episcopal palace. Monseigneur du Plessis d’Argentré was a scion of old provincial nobility. And he was spiritual tutor to Louis XV’s eight daughters. Fittingly, the Palais d’Argentré is today a Catholic school for girls.
 
In the 1840s, more of the medieval cathedral buildings were torn down for an imposing Hôtel de Ville, the municipal headquarters. It stands on a small promontory looking down at the Cathedral.
 
“The State protecting the Church,” was the approving observation made by my Sagienne friend. Perhaps! The Cathedral has a long and violent history of survival.
 
Viking raiders destroyed the 5th-century sanctuary in 878. Once the Vikings had settled down as Normans and Christians, a new cathedral rose. This was burned down several times, once accidentally by its own bishop in 1048, once when Louis VII torched it while fighting the duke of Normandy, in 1150. The current gothic structure was begun in 1220, consecrated in 1310 to the Virgin Mary. It was pillaged during the Hundred Years War, the wars of religion, and the French Revolution. 
 
Resilient as the cathedral stones, the exiled bishop and clergy returned to Sées after Napoleon ended the Revolution and came to terms with the Pope. The Cathedral and its then-failing foundations were restored twice during the 19th century.

Coming into Sées, a sign outside the Grand Seminaire announces, in faded blue letters, “la messe 10h30, au cathédrale.” 
 
But this month, there is no mass at the venerable Cathedral. Though the big iron gates were open, the parvis was empty. I reached my hand around the wooden door to push it open and felt another hand. Someone was coming out.
 
“Non, non, basilique,” he said. Chattering companionably to himself, he walked off in the direction of the basilica. This took us along the streets, lined with 17th- and 18th-century buildings, that wind behind the episcopal palace. 
 
A few late-comers were still scurrying up the steps of the basilica. Music and singing voices streamed out the open doors. High above the heads of the faithful, the vaulted ceiling gleamed with smoke-encrusted gold. 
 
A statue of the Virgin Mary, moving forward like the figurehead of a ship and haloed with stars, surmounts the altar. Stained glass windows, a medallion of the Father and Son, carved, gilded, and painted saints, prophets, flowers, wreaths, draperies and stars cover the walls above rows and rows of marble plaques. These are ex-votos, thanking “l’Immaculée” for miracles of healing and protection.
 
It is a densely decorated space. And as Monsieur le Curé told us over coffee in the Farmhouse a few weeks ago, it is a gem of 19th-century church-building. 
 
Victor Ruprich-Robert, its designer, was a renowned architect who had supervised the second restoration of the Cathedral. He was no fan of the neo-medieval mode for painting the interiors of gothic churches with bright colors. The Romanesque Revival church he created for Notre-Dame de l’Immaculée Conception was luxuriant with detail but sober in palette. The windows were in grisaille, or tones of black and white. The ornamentation was pure white, carved in plaster of Paris. 
 
“Ça ne plaisait pas!” Père Olivier recounted. The parishioners decided that a heavy campaign of gilding and coloring was de rigeur. Stained glass resplendent with rich reds, blues, purple and green replaced the grisaille.
 
“The architect never set foot in the basilica again,” he added. “But that’s life in a parish!”
 
“And that’s life with an architect,” commented Monsieur. As an amateur mason, he has strong views on architectural hubris.

The Immaculée-Conception, built as a large chapel, was the first church in France dedicated to the doctrine that the mother of Jesus was born without sin. As soon as it was declared Church dogma in 1854, the bishop launched a fund-raising campaign. The first stone was laid in 1855.
 
Hanging from the ribs of the vaulted ceiling are shield-shaped velvet plaques holding more ex-votos. On the columns in front of the nave is a panoply of crutches. The Immaculée of Sées was a place of pilgrimage, part of a vast popular movement to venerate the Virgin that took place over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Manifestations of the Virgin occurred in Paris in the 1830s, at Lourdes in 1858 and in the Mayenne, about an hour and a half from Sées, in 1871. 

 In 1902, the Pope gave the chapel in Sées the status of basilica “mineure.” 
 
“I like to think that Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux was exposed to the holy influence of the Immaculée of Sées, too,” said our companion. 
 
“Her mother came to a mass here when she was pregnant,” he explained.
 
The liturgy began. Several priests and seminarians assisted Monsieur le Curé, movements choreographed to the rhythm of readings, creed, and prayers. A cohort of young servants d’autel, robed in red and white, swung incense. The sermon was given by a newly ordained priest from Africa. Perhaps his words concerned the Letter of Pope Francis, printed on the front of the program. Responding to a contemporary debate over the use of Latin and traditional celebrations of the mass, Francis wrote that a “sense of mystery” must not be confounded with a proper “sense of wonder.” But, wrapped up in wonder and mystery myself, I caught just a few words of Father Mekti’s message.
 
“Construisons de nos vies les ponts et non les murs,” he said. 
 
“Let us be bridges and not walls,” I told Monsieur in response to his question.
 
Stirring a steaming sauce over at the stove, Franck nodded his head in agreement.

                                         A bientôt, chers amis!

Elisabeth

As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your own holiday or special gathering at the Chateau or just to rent the Chateau, the Farmhouse or both. We have just a few openings for the end of this year and in 2023, and are taking bookings for 2024 and 2025. We look forward to hearing from you. A bientôt!