Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Dear Valued Customer,

Beside the Risle, the little stream that runs through the parc, our gardener planted Solomon’s seal. It has just come into bloom for the first time. Its oval leaves lift and twist slightly from gracefully arcing stems. White bells, delicately fringed with green, hang along the underside.

Solomon’s seal is a wildflower throughout the northern hemisphere, from the Americas to Europe and Asia. But our sceau de Salomon came from another garden in France. It was a gift Monsieur Martyn carried with him to Courtomer. We think the variety is the old Polygonatum odoratum, grown in herb gardens and used until the 19th century for healing wounds. It is sweetly fragrant.

“Not even Solomon in all his glory,” said Monsieur Martyn, looking down fondly at the sprightly plant and its exquisite little flowers.

The effortless beauty of a wild plant is a surprise and a delight.

*Solomon's seal flowers beside the stream in the parc.*

“Consider the lilies of the fields, they toil not neither do they spin, yet verily I tell thee, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these,” is the full quotation to which our gardener alluded.

And how apt are these words to describe this week in May at Courtomer. The deep blue sky, the rich green leaves of trees and grass, the reflection of clouds in the waters of the moat, the sunlight glinting on the restless flow of La Risle owe nothing to human ingenuity or effort. Not even the biblical king, as famous for magnificence as for wisdom, could rival Spring’s natural splendor.

Acquiring Courtomer and its parc in dilapidated condition, we mowed, reseeded, pruned and planted. We put in an orchard and made a wildflower meadow. We trained roses and wisteria over walls and doorways. We cleaned the banks and bed of the stream so its water can tumble freely over stones. Just last week, Monsieur Martyn put on his waders and pulled sticks, leaves, and a child’s ball out of the moats.

Timidly, the water lilies we planted have sent out early leaves. The green pads, rimmed with red, lie upon the surface of the moat. On the water’s edge, an iris versacolor “Kermesina” blooms for the first time, gorgeous in reddish purple streaked with gold. We watch jealously over the progress of these plants, ready to take up arms against encroaching ragondin, scourge of our aquatics.

Precious as these specimens are, the results of long and often perilous voyages of discovery, of the patient science of botanists and amateurs, they pale beside the unplanned glory of nature.

Five hundred years ago, the château of Courtomer was still a medieval fortress. The seigneurie had barely begun its ascent into a marquisat. But the vast blue sky and greenery, the distant hills and encircling fields, the woods and water must have lent the landscape the same splendor it has today.

Nature abides.

We gardeners toil on the surface. But the real work of creation exceeds our most valiant efforts in scope and duration.

This weekend is the “pont de l’Ascension,” the first of two long weekends in Spring after Pâques. The next one is Pentecôte, in early June. These are grandes fêtes in the life of the Church, and with a brief exception during the Revolution, have been jours fériés in France since the 5th century. Almost 20 years ago, a French government attempted to remove lundi de Pentecôte, the Monday after Pentecost, from the list of public holidays. Even the most fervently anticlerical labor unions threatened to strike. The next president made haste to reinstate it.

Like the passage of seasons, the holy feasts continue to mark the years.

This weekend, celebrating the Ascension, the little cousins returned to Courtomer. Free of schoolwork, sidewalks, and the fenced-in playgrounds of Paris, Eugénie and her younger sister Clo ran over the lawns, climbed on the backs of the stone lions in the walled garden, and fished for bony carp in the moat. They flourished in the fresh air like the lilies of the field.

Like belles plantes themselves, the sisters have grown since they first scampered over the grass at Courtomer. And, like our wildflowers, their natural talents and graces have been cultivated.

Last winter, their mother signed them up for an atelier at the palace of Versailles, “Danser chez le roi.” Once at Courtomer, they put on their long dresses and showed us the “révérences” and “maintien” they had learned for “dancing with the king.” They climbed the perron and gave us queenly waves from on high.

Their curtsies and stately posture would not have been out of place at Courtomer on a fête de l’Ascension in days of yore. We don’t yet know much about the earliest families at Courtomer, but by the 1500s, our archives tell us, three young sisters lived here.

Léonore, Claude, and Louise were all born in the 1540s. Dancing, curseying, and standing up straight – particularly in a stiff corset and long dress with wide paniers — were essential accomplishments for a fille de bonne famille, who would one day be expected to receive and be received by the local Norman aristocracy. Or even, like their father, live at court.

“La Belle Danse,” developed at court, was becoming increasingly complex and codified. La basse danse, imported from Italy in the mid 1400s, was part of aristocratic amusements everywhere. The girls at Courtomer surely learned “Le Petit Rouen,” associated with the city in Normandy. “Filles à Marier” (girls to marry), another popular basse danse, must have been part of their repertoire as well!

Hunting on horseback was another aristocratic pursuit to be mastered. Although some noblewomen learned to swim, it’s not certain that the ladies at Courtomer were tempted to take a dip in the moat. But perhaps, like our young visitors, they too paddled in the stream.

Indoors, the daughters of Courtomer would have practiced embroidery. Fine sewing, as popular manuals of the time insisted, taught “honeste maintien,” straight backs and downcast eyes. It occupied the hands and hours of young women otherwise prone to “oysiveté,” idleness. And needlework had long been an occupation for the nobly born, as suggests the famous tapestry illustrating William the Conqueror’s invasion of England, made by the duchess of Normandy, Matilda, and her noble dames. Broderies from aristocratic hands embellished churches and private chapels as well as the home.

But the sisters at Courtomer had little time for idle hours. Presumably and perhaps most important for their future lives, they would have been taught to manage servants and a household. Like their own mother, Marguerite du Bois, they could expect to be left on family estates as caretakers and managers while a noble husband followed his royal lord to war.

School was another matter.

These days, even at their tender ages, the little cousins must study les maths, le français, l’angais, les sciences, histoire, géographie, and éducation civique et morale in a curriculum set out by the ministry of Education nationale. They spend most of their waking weekday hours at a desk. But in the 1540s, an extensive education for those outside holy orders was only just becoming usual. François 1er, king of France until his death in 1547 and patron of arts and letters, never learned to read. Books were read aloud to him. Kings were statesmen and warriors; reading and writing were the traditional purview of counsellors, often churchmen.

While the sisters at Courtomer were growing up, however, a new educational system was becoming standard in France. The studia humanitatis taught students to read and write classical Latin. They studied original Greek and Latin texts: Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Plutarch, and the Greek poets and philosophers. They read “modern” Italian literature: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

These fine texts or “belles lettres,” the humanist scholar Guillaume Budé wrote to François 1er, “les anciens ont appelées humaines, pource que sans l’érudition d’icelles, le monde vit quasi brutalement et non pas humainement.”

Study of the “humanities,” as Ancient Greek and Roman authors had called the texts, taught the wisdom without which man and his world must slip into a brute state.

*An "enluminure" from Guillaume Budé's "L'Institution du Prince" of 1518 shows the well-educated prince with the author and a lady, probably Louise de Savoie.*

The various new académies and the new Collège de France founded by François 1er were not for girls or woman. Women had also been excluded from earlier educational institutions, the universities and monasteries of the Middle Ages. But the new emphasis on the moral and civilizing benefits of understanding the written idea encompassed women as well as men.

Increasingly, at least in the upper ranks of life, women were expected to be the companions of men. The early French court had been little more than the extension of an armed band around a chief. The king, surrounded by his close relatives, the princes of the blood, and by his allies, the dukes and counts who controlled his territory, moved from one place forte to the next. Wives stayed on the family land, managing its affairs as necessary and even leading armies to defend it in the absence of its seigneur.

By the time of François 1er, the court was fixed at various royal palaces. Feminine company was now an essential feature of court life. An entire code of manners and behavior had developed around the ideal of fin’amor, courtly love. With it was an ideal of the noble lady. She must be beautiful, graceful, intelligent, accomplished, and virtuous; a worthy object of admiration. Thus, women in high circles were often as carefully educated as their male peers. It was not enough to be a bonne ménagère, a good household manager, and a belle; one must be high-minded.

Marguerite de Navarre, duchess of Alençon and sister of François 1er, was educated with her brother under the watchful eye of their mother, Louise de Savoie. The duchess’ motto, Libris et liberis, meant “for books and for children.”

“What is more delightful for a child,” asked the humaniste Erasmus, “than Aesop’s fables which by laughter and the imagination transmit the most serious philosophical precepts?”

Although François apparently did not read, as an adult Marguerite not only read but wrote poetry, short stories and a meditation on the “sinful soul.” Her books were printed and sold. At her courts in Normandy and elsewhere, she, too, was a patron of scholars who read, discussed and wrote about ancient texts and the new ideas they inspired.

Much had changed in the 1500s. The new continent of the Americas had been discovered. The fall of Constantinople sent manuscripts and scholars fleeing into Western Europe. The Bible was translated for the first time in 1,200 years, provoking a spiritual awakening and consequent religious strife. Galileo was born. Double-entry book-keeping, permitting a more precise analysis of capital, became standard. The printing press made possible the rapid dissemination of new discoveries, new ideas.

A woman’s role was changing, too. The “Querelle des femmes,” a spirited exchange of essays, poems and treatises that argued for or against the superiority of the female sex, tested the limits of old stereotypes and a new vision.

The old French dicton

Li premier hostel que eüstes
Furent lor ventre u jeüstes.

The first shelter you ever had
Was the womb in which you lay

was a pithy reminder that woman was essential to life and happiness. But a long tradition of misogyny was equally embedded.

“Optima femina rarior Phoenice,” wrote Saint Jerome tartly. His 4th-century Latin version of the Bible was still in use in the 1540s, and so were his ideas.

“A good woman is rarer than the phoenix.”

During the Renaissance, poets and scholars, especially those protected by powerful queens and princesses, took up the pen in defence of the ladies. “On the Nobility and Pre-Excellence of the Feminine Sex” was written for Marguerite d’Autriche; “The Advocate of Dames” was dedicated to Anne de Bretagne; “La Parfaite Amye,” the “Perfect Friend,” was written by a protégé of Marguerite de Navarre.

Léonor Le Beauvoisien and her sisters were neither princesses nor duchesses brought up amid great libraries, nor instructed by master intellectuals of the day. Neither was moved to write and publish poetry or tracts. But, as we know about Léonore from our archives, the eldest was a capable and shrewd steward of the estates she inherited from her father. Widowed, she enlarged their holdings, increased revenue, and “avec beaucoup d’intelligence,” as the 19th-century archivist of Courtomer wrote, solidified Courtomer’s feudal rights. By royal lettres patentes in 1622, the baronnie of Courtomer became a marquisat. Her son Jean-Antoine was the first marquis de Courtomer.

Coming back to Solomon and the Renaissance defense of women, Léonore seems to have embodied the “femme forte et vertueuse,” as extolled in a 16th-century commentary on the “proverb” Mulierem fortem quis inveniet. The Latin line is from Jerome’s version of the biblical Book of Proverbs, traditionally attributed to King Solomon:

“Who can find a virtuous woman; for her price is far above rubies…
She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard...
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children arise up, and call her blessed…”

Beside the Risle, the bells of Solomon’s seal are in full bloom. Nature is in all its glory. But, as Erasmus wrote almost 600 years ago, “Arbores fortasse nascuntur…; at homines, mihi crede, non nascuntur, sed finguntur.” Trees are born as trees…; but man, believe me, is not born human, he is made so.”

Unlike the lilies of the field, little girls at Courtomer must be taught to add and subtract, read fables, and curtsey. On Monday, the sisters returned to Paris.

Courtomer waits for them to visit again. Nature, in its grandeur and immutability, has its own éducation to offer.

A bientôt au Chateau,

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At Chateau de Courtomer, we are taking bookings for 2025 and 2026. We still have a few opening for the Chateau, Orangerie and Farmhouse for 2024. Soon, we will welcome guests in our "petite maison," the gatehouse.

Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates. And Jane will be happy to preview the property on site.

English and French spoken. Concierge services available.

The education of Léonore