| Friday, November 20, 2020

Dear friend, 

Last week was a time for memories in France. Not the golden memory of dining en terrace in Paris this summer before “le re-confinement.” Or of how it used to be, waiting cheek by jowl with neighbors for fresh bread at the boulangerie, back in the days before “la distanciation sociale.” 
 
No, it was a time for more sober reflections. Monday, November 9, was the 50th anniversary of Charles De Gaulle’s death. The president lay a “gerbe,” a ceremonial bouquet, on the General’s tomb. He evoked De Gaulle’s tenacious faith in the grandeur of France during the gloom of the Occupation and its bitter aftermath.
 
« La difficulté attire l’homme de caractère, » said De Gaulle, “car c’est en l’étreignant qu’il se réalise lui-même.» 
 
« Hardship attracts the man of character, because in coming to grips with it, he finds himself.”
 
Then, on Wednesday, November 11, “le jour de l’Armistice 1918,” the president bent to lay the traditional gerbe on the tomb of the “soldat inconnu.” It was the 100th anniversary of France’s creation of a monument to the “unknown soldier” of la Grande Guerre, one of two million French soldiers slain in battle or who died of wounds during World War I. And as dusk fell that evening, he ushered the remains of another former soldier, the writer Maurice Genevoix, into the Panthéon. Since the French Revolution, this former church has been the resting place of la génie française,from Voltaire to Marie Curie. Genevoix’ act of genius was his memoir, Ceux de ’14, of eight months in the trenches before he was badly wounded in 1915.
 

“I remember the slow tears running down the face of a dying man and his gaze penetrating my whole being, the indescribable sorrow of death at the age of 20," he wrote in his last book, then in his 80s. Reflecting on his own life, he added, "There will be no death. I will have my paradise in the hearts of those who remember.”

"Je me rappelais les lentes larmes coulant sur le visage d’un mourant et son regard faisant passer en moi, dans tout mon être, la peine de mourir à vingt ans...Il n’y aura pas de mort. J’aurai mon Paradis dans les cœurs qui se souviendront." 

The act of memory is man’s defiant grasp for immortality.

And it is visible in every village, parish, and town throughout France, each with its Monument aux Morts. At Courtomer, a pair of marble plaques in the church and an obelisk next to the mairie are engraved with the dead of both world wars. One of the dead was Pierre de Brimont, brother of the comtesse Henriette, then owner of the Chateau. And still brightly painted after 102 years, the statue of a poilu, the blue-clad soldier of la Grande Guerre, presides over the electrical wires and crossroads of the nearby village of Gaprée. 
 
Armistice Day last week was un jour brumeux, a day of clouds and fog. Monsieur Xavier and Madame Francine watched the ceremonies of “le 11 novembre” on television. Afterwards, he turned to his computer and clicked onto the website, “Mémoires des hommes,” memories of men, to see if he could find the war records of his forefathers. 
 
“Ah, Madame,” he told me the next day. “Dans un mois de temps, ils ont tous disparus! » 

His great-grandfather, Albert François, was killed in the Marne on March 9, 1915. In early April, the younger brother Emile was killed at Verdun, aged 23. Three days later, their older brother Jean Baptiste died in an ambulance from “blessures de guerre,” war wounds. He was 34.

“Vous imaginez la peine de leur mère," Monsieur Xavier commented thoughtfully. These deaths and a mother’s grief marked more than a generation. His grandmother never knew her father. She was brought up as a pupille de la nation, receiving a state pension for her upkeep.

The story of Albert Pierre, Madame Francine's grandfather, is a happier one. He was a 19-year-old farmworker when the war began and quickly promoted into the elite corps de chasseurs à pied. Although he was shell-shocked at Verdun in 1916, and eventually became completely deaf, he carried on as a message runner until he was wounded in 1918.

“Agent de liaison remarquable pour son courage,” says the hand-written report recommending him for the Croix de Guerre, “et son haut sentiment du devoir a rapporté des ordres urgents dans les violents bombardements capables de faire trembler les plus déterminés. »

“Remarkable for his courage and his strong sense of duty, he carried urgent orders under violent bombardments that would have deterred the most determined of men.”

But memory, like man and his exploits, is not immortal.

“My grandfather was a fierce man. Fighting was his life. Yet his whole life and career have disappeared. I was too shy and dared not cross question him,” said Richard, with regret.

Born in 1880, Richard’s grandfather comte Albert de Pelet came to Chateau de Courtomer as the bridegroom of the comtesse Henriette Ruinart de Brimont, whom he married in 1904. The photograph at the top of this letter shows the young couple on horseback.

It’s hard to know much about comte Albert. He seems to have been reserved, in the stoic tradition of the late 19th century, and to have imparted little of his essence or experiences to those with whom he shared family life.

To a little boy, he was a soldier who stood up straight, who ate like a horse and was thin, who liked hunting and farming, and who loved the countryside and the Chateau de Courtomer. He went to England every October to see his grandchildren and to hunt, and every morning he read his Figaro newspaper from cover to cover. Although he went to China on a diplomatic mission “entre-les-guerres,” in the 1920s, he never spoke any language but French.

When the Great War started in 1914, comte Albert was a cavalry officer stationed near Lunéville, on the border of what was still the German territory of Lorraine. Did he participate in those deadly early battles of 1914, meant to bring a quick halt to the war? Did he cross paths with Albert Pierre or Albert François in the Marne or at Verdun?

He was awarded the Croix de Guerre in the Grande Guerre of 1914-1918, and later received the Légion d’Honneur.

On how he came to be awarded the Croix, or what he thought about the war “to end all wars,” he kept his silence.

“Yet before he died,” added Richard, “he said he wanted to be buried next to the German cemetery at Rouen. “I fought with them all my life. I will lie in peace with them,” is how he put it. He lies there now.”

“Que voulez-vous," said Madame Francine when I recounted this story. "Que l’on souvienne."

"What is there to do? Remember.”

A la semaine prochaine...with news from the Chateau,