Early morning on New Year's Eve, a quiet moment to remember our bonheurs...and to discover a porte-bonheur
La Fête du Saint Sylvestre
Dear Friend,
The house is quiet on this early on this winter morning. Our children stayed up late last night, playing games of chess and listening to Henry on the piano and to Viola sing. The muffled melodies drifted up the stairwell as we fell into the virtuous sleep of tired parents after Christmas.
Now, Monsieur and I are having a quiet moment in front of the fire. Coffee is brewing and a "couronne de Noël," studded with candied cherries and sprinkled with rock sugar, heats up in the oven.
The door opened.
“Noël au balcon, Pâques au tison,” announced Monsieur Damien with a draft of chill morning air.
“Bonjour, bonjour!”
He carried an armful of logs which he carefully deposited next to the chimney. He paused, shaking his head and looked down into the dancing flames.
Spend Christmas on the balcony, you’ll spend Easter poking up the fire to stay warm.
This dicton is more, to Monsieur Damien, than a weather prediction. The idea of a hard season following excessively good weather is part of the natural order of the world, in which all good things are menaced by subsequent unhappy events.
Our homme à tout faire has gone through much of his life with his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed against the slings and arrows of misfortune, beginning with being dropped off at an orphanage by his parents when he was a little boy. They divorced, then his mother married again and had other children. He never saw either of his parents again.
At the age of 14, he left school and the orphélinat to be a farm laborer, and then a trucker, delivering meat to Paris from the abbatoirs in the countryside.
“I once carried a calf that weighed 100 kilos!” he told us the other day in a tone expressing both pride and regret. All those years of toting carcasses explain his painful sciatique, due to five collapsed vertebrae in his lower back. Now, he straightened himself with a pained grimace.
“Yoga?” I suggested. Suddenly merry, he gave a chuckle. No, he’s planning to have a back operation.
In the long years that he has worked for us, Monsieur Damien’s character has softened. For years, for instance, we could not keep a cat. He took the attitude that a cat is a nuisance, particularly to tasty little birds like moineaux, sparrows. Like most French countrymen, he preferred to lay down poison for mice and rats, and to eradicate the feline population with gunshots. But one year, we rescued an orphaned kitten, whom we named Auguste after the month in which we found him. With great trepidation, we left this grey and white tabby in his care while we went back to America for a long visit. When we came back, Monsieur Damien had renamed it César. They are still fast companions.
Today is the last day of 2021, a year of many bénédictions despite the pandémie. Little Audoin was born just after Easter. And our Viola was married in October. Henry has become proficient on the piano, delighting us of an evening with Bach, one of Schubert’s Impromptu, and the beginnings of Chopin’s Opus 71. The other children seem to be progressing in their lives.
As the sun rises in the morning sky, gilding the trees in the park and the stone facades of the barns, our hearts are light. Monsieur invites Damien to join him in front of the fire.
"Un petit café?" I ask, and serve three cups along with the warm couronne. We sit in happy silence for a few moments.
“Aha!” exclaims Monsieur Damien. "J'ai la fève."
Out of his morsel of couronne has dropped a blue ceramic fish, the “fève.” The fève, as every man, woman and child of France knows, is the porte-bonheur, the New Year’s good-luck charm. The tradition goes back to the ancient Romans who used a fève, literally “bean,” baked into a cake to select the king of Saturnalia in January. Starting in the Middle Ages, the Christian Church replaced the bean with a baby Jesus, then with all the personae of the crèche – Mary, Joseph, angels, the ox and the ass, shepherds and sheep, kings and camels. In our own -- hélas! -- secularized times, the fève is just as often a Disney princess or a fish as a religious figure.
But our Monsieur Damien is tickled.
“Bonne année à tous!” he toasts us, raising his cup.
And here’s to you and to yours on this fête du Saint Sylvestre -- and to a bonne, belle, saine et sainte année 2021!
P.S. Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com) will be happy to help you with your family vacation or holiday (2022 and onwards) gathering at the Chateau. Please feel free to call or write us.