"Le grand hyver"...April snows...the origins of Revolution...climate change and the weather...

statue of the gardener watches over the snow-streaked park

Dear friend,
 
Easter Sunday at Courtomer could not have been more beautiful. The sun shone hot, beating a record for April in some parts of Normandy. The little cousins and their parents arrived after Mass, having closed up their apartment in Paris. France has gone into 'le confinement" again, and Courtomer beckoned with open arms. The little girls scampered around the farm yard and the walled garden. Their mother had hidden chocolate eggs on window ledges and amid the bright yellow forsythia. 

Lundi saint, the next day, they went fishing with their father in the village pond. Home with the girls came a pair of trout, silver, speckled and fat.

Hélas! Un goût de vase! The roasted fish tasted like the muck at the bottom of a pond. But that was hardly a surprise. Trout are meant to live in running water, in streams, not in village ponds.

The real surprise came the following day. Snow began falling in the early hours of the morning, flickering through the air like icy confetti. By Wednesday, it lay over the countryside around Chateau de Courtomer in a thin white crust.

"Les saints de glace" have arrived early this year,” remarked our farmer. Our breaths froze in the air like cartoon captions. We looked out at the field of yellow-flowering colza. The proud stems drooped earthward; puffs of snow lay on the golden buds. But colza, or rape, is a hardy crop, related to the cabbage and the cauliflower. We had planted it late last summer. After a long growing season, with ample rain in autumn and early spring, the plants are well-rooted and healthy. They will hold against the cold – for now.

Monsieur Jean-Yves is by nature an optimist. But nature has taught him to keep it to himself.

“On travaille avec le vivant, on doit subir,” he told me.

“We work with living things, we are subject to fate.” That goes for the weather as well.

The “ice saints,” les saints de glace, are expected in mid-May, on the feast days of Saints Mamert, Pancrace and Servais. These saints aren’t particularly cold-natured. Mamert and Servais were both bishops and evangelizers in the early Christian church; poor Saint Pancrace, from a noble family in Rome, was martyred at the tender age of 14 in 304 A.D.

They are the saints de glace because the anniversaries of their deaths fall on the dates of May 11, 12, and 13, a period observed to be risky for tender plants. Once their feast days are past, tomatoes, petunias and other frost-tender plants may be set out with impunity.

Saint Pancrace, martyred for his Christian faith in ancient Rome, was cousin to Saint Denis, patron saint of France. Relief sculpture from a French church.

“Climate change? » exclaimed our friend Reynald. He was taking a walk and had joined us beside the field. I had mentioned the extremes of temperature in the last five days. Everyone seemed to think it was most abnormal.

«Rien à voir avec le climat ! C’est météorologique!»

he explained, more patiently. “Nothing to do with climate!”

Our neighbor Reynald is an academic, an historian in a French university. He is tall, thin and horrified by imprecision. The warm temperatures of last week came with winds which carry warm air up from North Africa. And the cold air is simply blowing down from the North Pole. This is weather, he elaborated. Weather happens. Climate is. And such fluctuations in Spring are normal for our climate. Why it had been colder in 2014!

“Also,” he added. “April’s cold snap does not mean the ice saints have finished. We could have more arctic temperatures in May.” “Agreed,” said our farmer, shaking his head. “En plus, there is la lune rousse.”

The “red” or “red-headed” moon?

Reynald smiled happily. He adjusted his scarf around his neck and went on, with scientific precision. "La lune rousse" is what we call the first full moon after Easter. This year the new moon is on April 12 and finally wanes on May 11, the first of the saints de glace. Of course, the moon isn’t red-headed. “Rousse” is an adjective from the verb “roussir.” It means to burn or scorch, the way frost seems to burn vegetation, turning it black and withered.

When the moon following Easter is clearly visible, which is often the case, it means there is no cloud cover to protect against a drop in temperature, which can result in a killing frost.

“Au commencement ou à la fin, la lune rousse a du poison et venin,” stated Monsieur Jean-Yves, gloomily. “At the beginning or at the end, the red moon brings poison and venom.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Reynald, taking out his notebook. “An excellent proverb!”

His scientific esprit is unruffled by the emotional aspects of agriculture.

“Of course,” he continued, “this is nothing compared to the “grand froid” of 1709. Wine froze on the king’s table at Versailles!” I had read about this, of course. As the mémorialiste Saint Simon, who lived not far from Chateau de Courtomer, tells us,

Cette seconde gelée perdit tout. Les arbres fruitiers périrent…Les autres arbres moururent en très grand nombre, les jardins périrent et tous les grains dans la terre. On ne peut comprendre la désolation de cette ruine générale.

"All was lost in the second freeze. The fruit trees died…Other trees died in great numbers, the gardens perished, and all the grains planted in the earth. One cannot understand the desolation of this complete ruin."

In a country of 8 million people, 600,000 died of starvation and cold that winter and spring. Little could be done to feed them. Waterways, the most important mode of transportation in those days, were frozen solid for months. Even large rivers, harbors and the shallow seas along the coast were frozen. Roads were covered in snow and ice. And when temperatures rose, bridges exploded, blown apart by flying chunks of cracking ice.

Bread was the main staple of the French diet. But even where grain could be had, the wheels that turned the flour mills were frozen in place.

“And one can trace the French Revolution to the memories of that harsh winter,” instructed Reynald.

The famine and terrible winter were not quickly forgotten. A woodcut of 1709.

During the Ancien Régime, grain and bread prices were fixed; grain supplies, markets and bakeries were tightly policed. In part, this was because taxes on these important staples provided substantial government revenue. Equally, the king and his ministers were vividly aware that cherté, disette and famine –scarcity, hunger, starvation – led to peasant revolts, urban riots and general instability.

Under the dual pressure of failed harvests and blocked transportation, this system of control failed in 1709. Provincials were reluctant to give up the staff of life to the king’s officers so Paris could eat, especially since they now had to buy grain at the same high price as in Paris. And everyone knew that barges of grain had been stuck in the frozen Seine, while the precious cargo rotted! Rumors circulated that aristocrats had cornered the grain stores to make outlandish profits. Rioters took to the streets, blaming the king. It was the beginning of the end – the legitimacy of an authoritarian order in which the king controlled production and guaranteed supplies was on the wane.

The "police des grains" controlled grain storage and distribution in the Ancien Régime. The system failed during the terrible winter and famine of 1709.

“The hard winter of 1788-89 was the final straw. It launched the Revolution,” went on Reynald. “Why, just think of “l’émeute du gâteau des Rois” in Caen!”

Monsieur Jean-Yves and I looked at one another, perplexed. Caen is a big city an hour away, but we’d never heard of this Riot of the Kings’ Cake.

Reynald was prepared to enlighten us.

Grain was scarce after the bad harvest of 1788. Then, as in 1709, severe cold immobilized the axes of transportation. Again, the mills froze. Flour was in short supply in Caen, where the poor looked forward to an annual present of cake on the feast of the Three Kings in January. Instead, the city’s bakers decided to donate two buckets of grain a piece to feed the poor. This was a horrible miscalculation. When the grain police announced the change, furious rioters pillaged bakery shelves and tore open bread ovens. Hurriedly, the government and the bakers recanted.

There were bread riots in Paris, too. Six months later, the mob marched on the Bastille. The Palace of Versailles was next. And Chateau de Courtomer was pillaged the following year.

Reynald paused to take a breath. “You’ve heard about the dreadful winters of 1879 and 1956?” he asked.

Monsieur Jean-Yves tipped his cap and hurried back to his pick-up truck, his optimism clearly in a waning phase. It was time for me to go home, too. Reynald bade us both a courteous adieu.

Back at the Chateau, the little cousins put on boots, winter jackets and scarves. Clotilde tilted her head to the sky, savoring snowflakes melting on her tongue. Eugenie pulled her along, their feet making furrows in the thin drifts. Snow fell on the brightly colored outdoor furniture, just brought out from winter storage last week.

A snowy day this week at Chateau de Courtomer

Happily, I reflected, the lemon trees were still safe behind the glass doors of the Orangerie. And we have plenty of flour stocked up at the Chateau.

A bientôt, mes amis !

P.S. Let us welcome you, too, to the Chateau or to our newly renovated Farmhouse. Please write to Heather or Béatrice (both are bilingual in English and French), or, of course to me, at info@chateaudecourtomer.com. We look forward to hearing from you!