A visit to Valognes

Chère amie, cher ami,

We came back from a week in Ireland, taking the ferry from Dublin to Cherbourg. The sailing began smoothly enough. We had a pleasant dinner in the Lady Gregory Restaurant, remarking that despite the almost full moon, nothing could be seen through the windows. But after all, the days are growing short as autumn advances to winter. And a storm was approaching.
 
During the night, the ship began to heave from side to side. It rose and fell with a loud whack and thud. A door in our cabin swung to and fro with an agitated, high-pitched squeak. Mentally, I went through my scant wardrobe. What to wear in a lifeboat on the high seas?
 
But by morning and approaching the shores of France, the waves had subsided. Out the window of the cabin we could see the wind and currents ruffling the surface, leaving traces of lacey foam.
 
“We won’t sail tonight,” the waiter in the restaurant told us cheerfully. “Gale expected. 
 
“Nor the rest of the week,” he added. It was the beginning of la grosse tempête Ciaran.
 
Cherbourg was wet and windblown. We drove inland down the Cotentin Peninsula, stopping in Valognes. “Le petit Versailles normand” read the sign on the highway. It was time for lunch.
 
It was also La Fête de la Toussaint. Nothing in the little Versailles of Normandy, not a shop, a restaurant nor a café, was open. We had a guidebook in my luggage, a trusty Baedecker of 1909 for Northern France, a gift from a friend. A succinct notice for Valognes, in small print, reads: a “decayed town with 5,746 inhabitants and a church, which dates from the 14th century.”
 
We drove past the church of Saint Malo. Thirty-five years after the passage of Baedecker’s scout, Allied bombs reduced it to rubble. Only the original choir still stands. The towers and the dome “florentin,” the “fierté des habitants de Valognes, si souvent representé par les artistes” and which survived the bombing, were blown up by American soldiers the next day. The “pride of Valognes, so often represented by artists,” had become dangerously unstable.

Away from the cluster of shops, we bent under the blustery rain to follow a stone-paved street, the rue des Religieuses. It rose and curved gently uphill, lined with large houses of soft, pale stone. Along the sidewalk were bay trees in wooden caisses. 

Here was a touch of Versailles! André Le Nôtre, head gardener for Louis XIV, invented the caisse. A wooden planting box held together with metal bands, it allowed the king’s collection of hundreds of orange and lemon trees to be carried indoors for the winter. Panels slide out for root trimming and renewing the soil. After 400 years, the caisse Versailles – cumbersome, costly, far heavier than plastic but practical and durable -- is still la référence. We have four of them at Courtomer.

The big iron gates of a school stood open. A short drive bordered by gardens stops in front of the 18th-centurymansion. The Ecole Sainte-Marie, we read on a plaque, was the former hôtel du Mesnildot de la Grille. The notice was placed beside the gates by the Comité royaliste de la Manche in August 1931. It commemorates the exile of Charles X in August 1830. 

Charles, the last of the Bourbons to reign over France, was overthrown in a coup by his cousin Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans.

This had taken place in the July Revolution of 1830, to great sorrowing and gnashing of teeth among the “légitimistes,” the advocates of a direct-line Bourbon monarchy. There must have been many of these in aristocratic Normandy, a region which still has the largest population with names avec particule – “de” – of the former noblesse of France.

And Valognes, well before the July Revolution, had a reputation as “plus royaliste que le roi,” more royalist than the king himself. For centuries, it was prominent as the administrative center of the Cotentin. The conquering Romans established a civitas here in the First Century, with a theater and public baths whose ruins can still be seen. The dukes of Normandy had a château in Valognes. Here, in 1040, William the Conqueror narrowly escaped being killed by Norman barons in revolt. 

By the time Louis XIV had William’s château pulled down in 1688 -- to discourage future defiance --  Valognes was thoroughly established as a provincial hub in the Cotentin. The town set the tone for the manners, mode and social hierarchy in Basse-Normandie. As France settled into peace and prosperity during the 1600s, local nobility moved in from the country and small towns to build fine town houses, petits hôtels. Valognes was a magnet for non-noble strivers, too. It was rich with fortunes made in shipping, commerce, and finance. Like Versailles on a provincial scale, Valognes offered amusement, financial opportunity, and relentless social competition.

By the beginning of the 18th century, the town’s reputation was notorious enough to provide the setting for a hit play that ran at the Comédie française in Paris.

“Hum!” declares the jumped-up Madame Turcaret, whose husband was a lackey and is now a tax collector and heartless loan-shark, 

“J’y suis toujours à l’affût des modes...je puis me vanter d’être la première qui ait porté des pretintailles dans la ville de Valognes!”

“I’m always in the forefront of fashion...I can boast of being the first to wear “pretintailles” in the town of Valognes!” she tells La Baronne, the baroness.

Pretintailles were decorations sewn onto dresses. The word, in Norman, also means the bells on the collar of a draught horse.

“How charming to be a model for a town like that!” responds the baroness.

But irony is lost on Madame Turcaret. She has no intention, she continues, of living shut up in a country château! Her home, she explains, is “une école de politesse et de galanterie pour les jeunes gens,” a school of courtesy and galant behavior for young persons. There are fêtes, suppers, readings of witty literature. There is gambling and gossip. It’s “un petit Paris!”

“C’est une façon de collège pour toute la basse Normandie,” applauds her maid Lisette, a scheming wench who is helping the valet to rob their masters.

“A kind of school for all of Lower Normandy.”

Masked balls are another specialty of la bonne société of Valognes, pursues Madame Turcaret.

“Guess my costume!” she asks coyly.

“A goddess?” guesses the baronne.

“En Vénus, ma chère, en Vénus!” cries Madame Turcaret.

“En Vénus! Ah! Madame, que vous êtes bien déguisée!” smirks the Marquis, a hardened adventurer without a sou to his name. 

“As Venus! Ah, Madame, you disguise yourself well!”

Poor Madame Turcaret thinks the Marquis is flirting with her. Alas, it was all a sham. And Madame Turcaret's lifestyle itself was built on a masquerade.

Turcaret was produced in 1708, near the end of the reign of Louis XIV. The lavish cost of Europe’s biggest standing army, most glamorous court, and most fabulous palace and grounds had dilapidated state finances. Most of the taxes begrudgingly handed over went to pay tax collectors and the debt. There were riots. Financiers and tax collectors were reviled. For a time, Turcaret was refused by the Comédie – the financiers, it was thought, conspired to ban it.

At the end of the pièce, Turcaret’s ambitions have crashed to ruin. He and Madame Turcaret will return to the obscurity from which they rose. Meanwhile, the unscrupulous valet takes a final bow with a substantial sum of money and Lisette at his side:

“Voilà le règne de Monsieur Turcaret fini; le mien va commencer.”

“Voilà, the reign of Monsieur Turcaret ends; mine will soon begin,” he tells the audience.

Despite this ominous warning, la bonne société in Valognes remained firmly attached to the manners and monarchy of the Ancien Régime. The family at the hôtel du Mesnildot, as we will see in next week’s Letter, suffered the consequences...a story which partly explains the plaque on the garden wall...

We continued up the rue des Religeuses, passing other belles but shabby demeures, happily spared by the bombardment of June 9, 1944. Gazing into one courtyard, overgrown with ferns and clumps of grass, we met a propriétaire. With some trepidation, we accepted her invitation to come inside and admire theescalier d’honneur...more about that little visit next week. 

Valognes had more than 80 hôtels particuliers at the end of the Ancien Régime. About half disappeared in June of 1944. One of these, we found, had been built by the Saint-Simon family in the 1690s – very likely a branch of the Saint-Simon family at Courtomer. Artus Simon, who became baron of Courtomer through marriage in 1572, was seigneur of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, not far from Valognes.

Continuing our stroll, we crossed a stream that flowed, swollen with rain, beneath the street. We turned and followed the narrow Merderet River towards an open square and a park. Small stone buildings line the river bank, some of them dating from medieval times. This was the center of the tanning and cloth-dying trade that built the early fortunes of Valognois families. Much was flattened in 1944 and never rebuilt.

We turned back and nipped in to visit the interior of the church of Saint-Malo.

Then hunger and the rain drove us homeward. We returned to Courtomer under stormy skies and intermittent lashing rain, pondering the destiny of a town, how it had clung to a way of life and its splendors, and had almost been crushed to dust. 


          A bientôt, au château,

  Elisabeth

                 

P.S. La tempête Ciaran in action last week in Fécamp on the Normandy coast.