Music and straw, a country summer in Normandy

Chère amie, cher ami,
 
We ran across Madame Apolline in front of the petite épicerie at Courtomer. 
 
“Nous sommes dans les pailles,” our farmer’s wife informed us, looking tired but pleasantly cheerful. Bringing in the straw, la paille, is almost the last task of summer. 

In the big fields that surround the Chateau, farmers are pressing and rolling the straw left over from the harvest of wheat, barley, and oats.  Wagons loaded with the huge bales roll slowly across the stubbled fields and down the narrow roads. 
 
In days of yore, women and children, having helped to thresh the grain with hands, feet, or a fléau, used pitchforks to help pile straw into heaps. Nowadays, harvesting is performed by machines. But farmers must still work late into the night and as soon as the sun is up to make sure the straw gets baled and stored before wet weather ruins it. On the many family-run farms in Normandy, the whole family is a vital part of the labor force.
 
But while diligent farmers and their families stock greniers and silos, sheds and stabu, wiping the sweat from brows dusty with chaff, some of us stepping out in summery attire, light-heartedly tapping our toes and humming a little melody...
 
We hope we won’t end up like the cigale in the fable, known so well to French school children! Our own young ones memorized several of the Fables in their tender years at l’école primaire. French literature starts in elementary school.
 
“Wasn’t it bad of the fourmi not to give the poor hungry cigale some food?” wondered our little Edward uneasily. His temperament in those early days was given to singing and dancing rather than schoolwork.
 
“Chut!” scolded Henry with the pious certainty of the older brother who is also an excellent student. “The cigale should have planned ahead!”
 
Long ago in the 17th century, the royal favorite and poet Jean de La Fontaine described the dual aspects of country life in the “Fable de la Cigale et la Fourmi,” the old story of the heedless grasshopper and the thrifty ant. 
 
La Cigale, ayant chanté

Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue :
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau. 
Elle alla crier famine
Chez la Fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu'à la saison nouvelle. 
"Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant l'Oût, foi d'animal,
Intérêt et principal. "
La Fourmi n'est pas prêteuse : 
C'est là son moindre défaut.
Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.
- Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise. 

- Vous chantiez ? j'en suis fort aise.
Eh bien! dansez maintenant,” 

recited Henry. He had learned the Fable par coeur. It’s the first in La Fontaine’s famous book, “Fables,” published in 1668.

Grasshoppers and poets are made for singing in the sunshine. Others, like farmers and the fabled ant, use that sunshine for growing crops.
 
Towards the end of La Fontaine’s poem, the desperate grasshopper pleads with the ant for “quelques graines pour subsister,” a few grains of wheat.
 
“I’ll pay you “avant l’Oust!”” she promises. In the parlance of those times, L’Oust, “the August,” meant the grand culmination of les moissons, the intense period of the grain harvests that begins in July and ends with gathering the straw in mid- to late August.
 
“L’Oust” was the most important event of the year. Subsistence for most of the population depended on good harvests. Political stability depended on it, too. Bad harvests opened the way to famine, bread riots in towns, and peasant revolts in the countryside. Dread of famine and vivid memories of the catastrophic famines of 1693 and 1710 played a role in setting off the French Revolution...there was a riot against rising bread prices on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille fell.

But these days, most of our friends think of August as a time for lying in a transat with the latest Prix Goncourt, its bright red band unbroken, beside them on a coffee table – and a copy of the immortelle Jacqueline Susann in their hands.
 
“Dead to culture!” exclaimed young Clara, impatiently. She has come to stay for a month in the country, with a copy of “Great Expectations” in her suitcase and a violin. Clara is 12 years old and ambitious.
 
Summer at the Chateau corresponds to her high-minded ideals, but it is not enough. Nor is contemplating the straw-laden wagons rolling down the country lanes.
 
In the best tradition of the cigale, we turn to music.
 
Our musical month of August began far from the fields of Normandy. Friends had invited us to join them for Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” on the shores of Lake Constance, a train-ride away from Paris. We climbed the belvedere of their shloss, an 18th-century country house on the foundations of a medieval stronghold, to see the lake sparkling in the distance. There was the paddle-steamer, the last survivor of a trio of steamships that had plied the lake until 1944. Even from a distance, it gleamed with varnished mahogany and polished brass. 
 
The opera took place in the lake. We sat in bleachers on the shore, looking across a band of water to a platform as fantastic and beautiful as Japan must have seemed to the young American officer in the opera, Pinkerton. It was a huge sheet of paper, draped and folded as if it had been blown there by the wind, painted to look like an ink drawing on rice paper. Of course, it is an illusion, built of plaster and wood. Like Madame Butterfly’s happiness, it is not meant to last.

But if the opera tells a tale of fickle passion and battered love, “Madame Butterfly” itself is a monument to the enduring enchantment of music. The crowd of 6,000 spectators came prepared with parkas and blankets to endure rain and cold under the open skies. And the singers, the staging, and the costumes were magnificent.
 
Clara was not on this expedition, but I had taken tickets for a local production of “La Traviata” a few days later. 
 
Realizing the score was beyond the abilities of a small ensemble of aficionados with limited time to practice, the producer – the scion of a local chocolate fortune -- had hired three professional singers and several professional musicians. He had cleverly reduced the scope by using snippets from the original play, “La Dame aux Camellias,” to narrate the events and connect the arias and duets of Violetta, Armand, and Armand’s father.
 
It was a great success, even if the producer introduced the performance with a long and triumphant reminiscence of prior productions and the set consisted of an art-deco sofa, three office chairs, and a rug.
 
“La Traviata” took place under a tent for 100 spectators on the grounds of an empty and ancient monastery. Two evenings later, I took Clara and her brother to hear the Brussels orchestra there. The program started with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
 
“The piano is fighting with the horns!” exclaimed Liam.
 
Clara was delighted to inform her brother that “concerto” comes from the Latin word for contest. Her violin teacher said so.
 
The pianist won, with a standing ovation, and returned to the stage with a beautiful Chopin Nocturne.
 
Next, we heard a symphony by Dvorak. Clara followed the violins with eager eyes. But the culminating excitement of the evening came after the triumphant passage of the horns in the fourth movement.
 
The conductor collapsed onto the stage. The pompiers were called.  One of our friends, a doctor, joined the throng around the maestro. He came back to his seat, reporting that it was merely “un malaise vagal” – a momentary loss of consciousness caused by a moment of intense stimulation. In solidarity with their chef, the orchestra members announced, the concert would end. We filed out silently past the still recumbent conductor. In a courtyard outside, a fiddler and a couple of accordionists played Slavic folk tunes under the summer stars. 
 
“Et dansez maintenant!” as the ant cried in the Fable. “And now, dance!”
 
The show would go on after all. Liam and Clara stood in front of the trio, as entranced by their lively melodies as they had been by “La Traviata” and the concerto.
 
La Fontaine is somewhat ambiguous about the moral of the Ant and the Grasshopper, as young Edward had noticed. Perhaps the story is not only about harvest and hunger. There are two other characters in the Fable, hidden behind the insects – the narrator and the reader. La Fontaine dedicated his book of Fables to the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV’s oldest son and heir.
 
Perhaps La Fontaine himself was the grasshopper, singing for the pleasure and education of his young prince. Perhaps he wished to suggest, delicately, that the prince be more open-handed than the unfeeling ant. 
 
And that music is as precious as wheat.

And straw.
 
“It’s a good thing our son-in-law is on hand,” Madame Apolline concluded, before climbing back into her dusty farm car. The harvester had broken down, but they were able to make up the lost time with Arnaud and his equipment.
 
“Otherwise,” she continued, shaking her head gravely, “we’d never have gotten the moisson in.” 
 
She drove off, intent on les pailles.
 
                                                A bientôt, au Chateau!
 
Elisabeth
                                      
 
P.S. A classic: Charles Trent sang "La Cigale et La Fourmi" accompanied by Django Reinhardt in 1941.

Au cas où...in translation, La Fontaine's Fable:

The grasshopper, having sung
            All summer long
Found herself very short-stocked
When the wind began to blow:
Not one single morsel
Of a fly or a worm.
 
She went to cry famine
To her neighbor the ant,
To beg her to lend her
A little grain to survive on
Just until the next season.
 
“I will pay you, she told her,
Before the August, word of an animal,
With interest and principal.
 
The ant is no lender:
It’s a little fault.
 
“What did you in summertime?”
She said to the borrower. 
 
“Night and day to all who came
I sang, please don’t be displeased.”
 
“You sang! I’m delighted.
Well! Now dance.”