Quiet spring at Courtomer
| March 21st , 2020
Dear Friend,
The Chateau is quiet. Our guests stay home. And so must we.
Today was the last day for the open-air market in the village. It must close, like those in the nearby towns of Seés and l’Aigle. Our little Carrefour grocery stays open, as do the two boulangeries and the cave à cidre. And, of course, the pharmacy.
We follow the news avidly for more information about the spread of coronavirus 19 and its impact. Here in France, strict confinement is the rule. Jogging is now limited to 1 or 2 kilometers a day. Cycling is discouraged. Articles appear about how to keep children occupied – and how couples can weather close quarters intact. And in France, as elsewhere, the economy is hard hit. A first wave of bankruptcies has begun. Yesterday, the French president called for businesses and their employees to keep working and producing as a civic responsibility.
Today, in happier news, the French government announced it is studying an exception to allow bookstores to re-open – a kind of essential service, like pharmacies and grocery stores, that feeds the soul and distracts the mind.
It is a delight to peruse the collection of old books at Chateau de Courtomer.
There is no bookstore in the village of Courtomer. But we are lucky, here at the Chateau, to have a large library left to us by earlier inhabitants. It reflects the tastes of another era, in which literature, piety, and knowledge were considered proper subjects of study and amusement. Plays and poems in Greek and Latin fill up several shelves. There is a fine collection of French literature of the 17th and 18th. centuries. The superbly eloquent sermons of the great 17th-century preacher Bishop Bossuet are at hand.
“Life is a dark night which we spend looking for a torch to guide us,” Bossuet noted with pithy gloom, in his private writings. Bossuet saw a lot of life, including periods of war, pestilence, and famine. He knew, as we do, that the familiar conditions of life can rapidly change. But he was for the most part an optimist, a believer in man’s ability to think through to solutions:
“The perfection of man,” he wrote, “is to live according to reason.”
Back to the library, the world before television and Instagram is revealed in a 19th-century encyclopedia – from which certain pages have been scrupulously snipped out to spare gentle souls! There are fashion revues from the 1890s. The last Count and his father read books about bloodstock and hunting in English, for the family of Courtomer has English cousins. Stacks of Arts et Antiquités magazine are piled in the cabinets under the shelves. And we have added children’s books, contemporary works, and histories of France, Normandy and our own Chateau.
Our young bull, enjoying a hay bale in the sunshine.
Books aside, we are especially lucky to be able to go outdoors at will on these recent beautiful spring days. The garden is growing and so are the weeds. Our son Henry will paint a fence this weekend – though buying paint is proving to be a challenge! And in the farmyard and the fields, life goes on regardless of human preoccupations – the cows must calve, the herd must be fed and cared for, the fields must be cultivated.
We hope you will enjoy these pictures from daily life at Chateau de Courtomer.
With best wishes to you and for a swift "retour des jours meilleurs",
