The bells of Courtomer
Today's Letter is about bells, time, and a little history...on a wintry morning at the Chateau
Tuesday morning, January 25, 2022
Dear Friend of Courtomer,
Morning arrives with the stroke of the clock on these winter days, well before the sun’s rays pierce the long night. The bells of the Angelus from the church in Courtomer ring faintly through the misty air, telling us it’s time to push away warm covers.
Here at the farmhouse where we are spending the winter, no light from roads, cars, or other houses can be seen. We might as well be living in the 15th century, when the tolling of the morning Angelus became widespread.
Otherwise, we sleep to the rhythm of the moon, which was full on Tuesday. As it rises above the trees, it fills our bedroom window with shafts of light, mimicking the dawn. By midnight, the pale globe hangs at its apogee, illuminating the frosty grass, the slate roofs of the farm buildings, and the leafless limbs of the orchard with bright, colorless beams.
We waken for a few moments. Eyes open, still half in a dream, we gather our mental energies for the day’s tasks -- and then realize it’s the middle of the night.
Waking up to moonlight is rather unsettling. It seems dangerously like insomnia. It’s a rupture in the proper order of the world. Yet in days of yore, moonlight was a useful part of life and work. Travelers waited for the rising of the moon to set out on their voyages. Laundresses bleached linens in the powerful rays of the moon's reflected light. The paysan taking his produce to market might start at midnight, and in the towns, as a memorialist of the Ancien Régime recalled,
“Between two and three in the morning, if you listened well,” there would be “an instant of silence…then, the wagons of the peasants…the braying of a donkey…the bells of their horses.”
Painting by Jean-François Millet, c. 1872. Le Parc aux moutons, claire de lune (The Sheepfold, Moonlight). Musée d'Orsay, Paris
By the time the Angelus tolls seven o’clock, the moonlight has drained away. It is dark again.
How pleasant it is on a dark winter morning to let one’s thoughts drift, like the ebbing and flowing of the moon itself.
How pleasant to meditate on the sound of church bells, sacred instruments calling us to take up our worldly tasks, while also reminding us of the vocation of the spirit!
Bells were rare in early Christian practice, associated as they were with pagan ecstatic religions like the cult of the wine god Dionysus and with amulets to ward off demons and the "evil eye." Church fathers, like John Chrysostom, condemned them for use by Christians. But early saints used them anyway. In the 5th century, Saint Anthony famously brandished his bells to drive a demon out of a pig. And abbots and abbesses, the heads of monasteries and convents, also carried bells. They were an outward sign of authority, like the crozier of a bishop or a king’s scepter.
Bells were personal. They took on the miraculous nature of their saintly owner; they might be venerated as holy relics. A bell represented the powers, not just of saints, but of cities and rulers.
During the French Revolution, bells were taken down from churches. Sometimes they were exhibited like booty seized from the enemy, like the bell of Saint-Georges in nearby Caen. For more than two centuries, this bell was on display in the city’s mairie until it was finally rehung in its own belfry in 2014. And some bells, sadly, were melted down for cannons.
18th-century church bell of Saint Georges de Caen, seized during the French Revolution, finally returned to its belfry in 2014.
Perhaps that is what happened to “Jeanne,” “Marie-Louise,” and “Louise-Rose,” the bells in the old church at Courtomer. The first two had been donated at the coming of age in 1712 of the Marquis de Courtomer. The largest bell was named for his mother, Jeanne de la Force; the smaller after his sister. A half-century later, the family donated another large bell, sponsored in the name of its 16-year-old heir. This one was named after the young Marquis’ mother, Louise-Rose de Thiboutet.
The Courtomer tradition of donating and naming the bells after the women in the family continued after the Revolution. In 1866, the Marquis’ descendants donated three new bells to Courtomer’s church. Gabrielle, the largest, was named for the Comtesse de Turenne d’Aynac; Camille-Charlotte and Marie-Elisabeth were her daughters. These bells now hang in the “new” church in the village of Courtomer, constructed in 1879.
The daily bells at Courtomer have been heard for centuries, perhaps since 1472, when Louis XI of France called for three prayers a day to be addressed to the Virgin Mary in honor of the Incarnation. This is the Angelus, named for the first line of the prayer, a citation from Scripture: “Angelus Domini, nuntiavit Mariae” or “the Angel of the Lord announced to Mary.” Mary will conceive the son of God; "the Word" will become flesh, or incarnate. Christians hearing the Angelus are still encouraged to pause in their daily occupations to recite three “Ave Maria.”
These days at Courtomer perhaps such devotion is rare. But three times a day, we still hear the three “tintements,” the bright, sharp melody of the Angelus, followed by a rousing peal of the bells, “la pleine volée.”
The Angel, or Angelus in Latin, tells Mary she will bear the son of God; Raphael's sketch for his 15th-century painting of the "Annunciation" is at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Turning back to days of even greater yore, bells had become a convenient way to mark the passage of time in monasteries. The hours of prayer needed to be independent of the changing movements of the sun and the moon. Laudes, for instance, was theoretically meant to occur at sunrise, but since dawn varies according to the seasons, this orison took place at the fifth hour after midnight.
The rhythm of nature, at least in the medieval view, was not that of the spirit!
As technology developed in Europe, the bell changed from metal pieces that clanged or tinkled together, depending on size and thickness, to the familiar hollow instrument in cast bronze. These bronze bells could be of great size. They were capable of nuanced musical expression. By late medieval times, large bronze bells and belfries to hang them in were widespread in the monasteries and churches of France.
Bells served more than the call to prayer in sacred places. Their powerful chimes were rung to deflect storms and lightning. They swung to ward off fever and plague. The “tocsin,” made by beating the outside of a bell with a hammer, sounded the alarm in case of fire and war. Bells protected human being against the very real dangers of nature and their fellow man.
Also, by the 1300s, mechanical bells in many towns automatically rang the 24 hours of the day and night, providing a regimented framework of work, play, prayer and rest.
One might almost say, I thought, as the last peals of the Angelus vanished in the mist, that bells allow man to divide his life of faith, his life of toil and his pleasures into convenient compartments -- without needing sunlight to remind him!
“Et Verbum caro factum est,” commented Monsieur, pausing from his morning ablutions to poke his head, its lower half lathered for shaving, into the bedroom.
“Isn’t that what the bells say? Isn’t that about the unity of spirit and body, faith and work?
"Isn’t it time to get up?”
Yes, he’s right. “And the Word became flesh,” as the Angelus has it. Bells might separate time into parcels, but the Angelus is about the melding of spirit and substance.
And though if it is not yet dawn, the bells tell us it is time to rise!
P.S. Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your family vacation or special gathering at the Chateau. They can suggest activities in the surrounding countryside and towns for all ages and seasons. Please feel free to call or write us.