| Friday, August 15, 2020

Dear Friend, 

"Tout va bien au Chateau, Madame la Marquise!" was Madame Francine’s tart reply. « Everything’s fine at the Chateau, Madame the Marquise!”
 
"Mamie!" exclaimed young Sarah, her grand-daughter, scandalized. Francine was referring to a famous comedy sketch, in which Madame la Marquise calls to ask how her château is faring. And it isn’t faring too well. In fact, it’s on fire.
 
Francine is fond of me, I know. But she doesn’t approve of such a long absence in Paris. She shares Mark Twain’s appreciation of the city and its inhabitants.
 
“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”
 
Mark Twain thought that was because he and his fellow travelers were Americans. 
 
But Madame Francine knows that it is because Parisians are not really French.
 
In Paris, they permit traffic conditions that the rational French mind would never admit. Doubtful? Try getting into and out of a herd of cars driving around the Arc de Triomphe. Waiters have been taught to call an honest café au lait a café crème or worse, a noisette, a hazelnut. They call a good simple baguette with butter and ham a "Parisien," as if they invented it. And cuisine minceur! An affront to nature and being French. Mais que voulez-vous! C'est les Parisiens.
 
With Francois 1er, whom we mentioned in our Letter last week as the founder of the royal collections at the Louvre museum, Francine would agree:
 

« Paris n’est pas une ville, c’est un pays. » 
Paris is not a city, it is a country.

 
But to Francois 1er, Paris represented an opportunity for glory and enchantment. Defeated and imprisoned in Italy after the ill-fated battle of Pavie, he returned to Paris in 1526 inspired by the architecture and cultural sophistication of Italian city states.
 
Francois 1er transformed Paris into a Renaissance city, wealthy, cultivated, powerful, and beautiful. But just as Paris is “a country unto itself,” it has outstripped even the imposing personality of François 1er. Strolling toward the river Seine in the hazy early morning air, presage of another very hot day, I admire the splendid proportions of François 1er’s palace of the Louvre rising on the Right Bank of the river. But I had just walked through the Jardin de Luxembourg, where Marie de Medici’s fountain of 1630, restored by Napoleon in 1811, cooled the air. The splendid golden dome of Les Invalides, the home for disabled veterans established by Louis XIV in 1670, is behind me. Inside it is the cold and imperious tomb designed for the remains of Napoleon, brought back to Paris in glory from his exile’s grave. 

I was headed to the Right Bank, toward the north-east, up to the Grands Boulevards. Once this was a picturesque if tawdry section of old Paris. But it offended the progressive virtues of the 19th century, and was razed. Light, air, and order would come out of unhygienic chaos. This was, after all, the Belle Epoque!
 
The Baron Haussmann, who was in charge of the project, created handsome shaded boulevards around the northern perimeter of Paris. And here, a swathe of sumptuous petits hôtels sprang up, constructed by the great, the good, and the newly rich of 19th-century Paris. 
 
They were the aristocracy of a new age, the lords of banking and finance, of railroads and retail, of coal and steel.
 
One of the interesting characters of this time was Edouard André. Curiously enough, he was distantly related to the Comtesse Henriette de Pelet, who bought Chateau de Courtomer in 1905. Her mother’s Swiss cousins were partners in banking with Edouard’s grandfather.
 
Edouard’s paternal and maternal grandfathers had founded a bank in 1808, which, among other endeavors, financed the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Waterloo ended Napoleon’s empire in 1815. It also, as a philanthropic gesture, managed the funds of the Philhellenic Committee, which financed the Greek war of independence from the Ottoman Empire. 
 
Like many French banking families, the Andrés and the Cottiers were cosmopolitan and resolutely Protestant. Their origins of their fortunes, going back to the Renaissance, were in the lucrative commerce of textiles, particularly silk. As Protestants, the Cottiers had taken refuge in Geneva, but maintained strong ties with the silk-making city of Lyon, where François Cottier was born.
 
The André family had been silk merchants in Nîmes, a known hotbed of Protestantism since the massacre of Roman Catholics there back in 1547. Edouard’s ancestor David established a branch of the family business in Genoa, Italy, then a thriving port and center of international banking.  All through the years of religious faction, the Andrés adhered to their Protestant faith, while the Nîmes branch developed the silk trade and the Genoese branch turned to banking. In 1800, Edouard’s grand-father Dominique moved to Paris – and the André family was poised to help finance the explosive growth of 19th France.

Edouard André, born into great wealth and influence in 1833, was many things – military officer, politician, connoisseur -- but also a banker. With the Rothschild brothers, he helped to negotiate the credit for paying the Franco-Prussian war indemnity of 1871 -- 5 million gold francs, then an immense sum, equal to 25% of France’s gross national product. It was the price for ending the war and getting Prussian troops off French soil.
 
Edouard had been disillusioned by a military career, spent fighting in Italy and Mexico to win fleeting or no advantage for France. At the age of 30, he turned to politics, becoming a député. But he found politics no more civilized than war. Four years later, he resigned from his elected position and gave himself to the arts. In 1868, he commissioned the construction of a hôtel particulier from the prominent architect Henri Parent, who had just finished the Opéra Garnier. 
 
His intention was to create a palace, worthy of his art collections and worthy companion to the dwellings of his neighbors. These included the Camondo family, who were bankers to the Ottoman Empire and had modeled their hôtel on the Petit Trianon of Versailles, and the Reinachs, whose banking empire later went temporarily bust financing the Panama Canal, and whose hôtel particulier was a rendez-vous of the rich, powerful and artistic elite of Paris. 
 
As I arrive in front of 158 Boulevard Haussmann, I have to agree that Edouard succeeded in placing his petit hôtel among the gems of the Belle Epoque.
 
Meanwhile, as the hôtel was being constructed, Edouard pursued his artistic ambitions. With his cousin Maurice Cottier, he purchased the Gazette de Beaux Arts, the prestigious arts review. And in the same year, 1872, he commissioned a portrait of himself from a fashionable young painter, Nélie Jacquemart.
 
The world of Edouard André was not limited to the wealthiest sliver of 19th-century Paris. In those days of rapid wealth creation, high society was a heady mix of men and women from many walks of life. The beau monde mixed with the demi-monde, the aristocrat with the parvenu.
 
Into this world sprang Nélie Jacquemart, somewhat like the Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson of an earlier age. Jeanne herself was the daughter of Parisian grands banquiers. She was talented, clever, well-educated, and beautiful. The king, introduced to her at a masked ball, fell deeply in love. As Madame de Pompadour and the favorite of Louis XV, she became the greatest patron of the fine and decorative arts of 18th- century France.
 
Although Nélie, unlike Jeanne-Antoinette, was the daughter of modest parents, she was taken into the orbit of her father’s employers. Their home was Domaine de Chaalis, outside of Paris. On the grounds were the ruins of a Cistercian abbey built by Louis VI “the Fat” in 1137, and a chapel with frescoes by Primaticcio painted during the reign of Francois 1er.

Finding that Nélie had artistic talent, Madame de Vatry arranged for her to take lessons in a private school run by the painter Léon Cogniet. Cogniet was a professor at the prestigious Ecole de Beaux-Arts, but following the restrictive mores of post-revolutionary France, the Beaux-Arts now declined to accept female students. 

 The connection proved fruitful. 

 Cogniet had won the prestigious Prix de Rome back in 1816, studied at the Académie de France there, and shown regularly at the Paris Salon, then the world’s top art exhibition. His sister, who taught at his workshop, was an accomplished portraitist.  By age 22, in 1863, the same year that Edouard resigned from the army, Nélie exhibited her first accepted painting at the Salon. 
 
Four years later, she traveled to Italy and, like her mentor, studied with the director of the French Academy at Rome. One of her portraits won a medal at the Salon of 1870. In 1872, the same year she painted a portrait of Edouard André, she painted one of Adolphe Thiers. He was, of course, the politician who had negotiated the end of the Franco-Prussian War, as well as a distinguished historian. He was now president of the fledgling third French republic. 
 
Nélie was launched.
 
Edouard André had shown no particular penchant for Nélie, but they moved in the same world. In 1881, they married. He was 48 and she was 40. Private archives suggest that Edouard’s parents were concerned that he might marry his mistress, and that as he was in ill health, this would be disastrous estate planning. But if indeed it was arranged, the marriage was a happy collaboration.
 
Edouard built Nélie a handsome studio in his new mansion, which she never used. Her painting career was over; masterpieces by other hands would hang there instead. They set sail for Italy on a collecting expedition. Perhaps it was the early influence of the great Primaticcio‘s fresco at Chaalis, but one of the couple’s purchases was the ceiling and an entire wall, frescoed by Tiepolo in 1745, from the Villa Contarini in Venice.

Nélie Jacquemart-André was Edouard’s sole heir when he died in 1894. After her death in 1912, their houses and collections went to the Institut de France. A year later, the Musée Jacquemart-André opened its doors on Boulevard Haussmann. The couple had amassed an extraordinary collection of Old Masters, from Botticelli to Rembrandt, of 18th- and 19th-century painters like Canaletto, Fragonard, Chardin and David, and of fine French furniture, porcelain, and objets.
 
Visiting this splendid 19th-century mansion is to step into an opulent past. And as were its founders, the Musée is still in quest of the beautiful and the rare. It regularly hosts special exhibitions. This year and until January 2021, a selection of Turner watercolors and paintings from the Tate Museum in London are on view.
 
Wandering through rooms filled with Turner’s glowing skies and turbulent seas, his precocious experiments in abstraction and “impressionism,” one can imagine that Edouard and Nélie would be delighted with the success of their artistic mission.

As a man, Turner never made close friends, never married, and barely knew his two illegitimate daughters. Perhaps he found his perfect union in capturing the natural world through paint. He loved the landscape and seas of France and came here often. His views of the French countryside and coast close to Chateau de Courtomer remind me that it is time to go home now.
 
Monsieur Xavier comes to meet me as I step down from the train in L’Aigle.
 

"Comment va mon Chateau, Monsieur Xavier?" I ask him, as I pass him my packages and bag.
 "Tout va bien au Chateau, Madame!" he answers. All is well at the Chateau.

 
And as we drive through the gates, I can see that here at Chateau de Courtomer, all is indeed well. The Chateau, too, is its own special, private world. As François 1er could have put it, "c'est un pays."

A bientôt, du Chateau!