The Benediction

...a memory of Marie At Courtomer, the Spring Equinox brings new buds, but as the poet T.S. Elliott wrote, it also "stirs dull roots"...

The pear tree blossoms against the old wall in the basse-cour of the Chateau

Chère amie, cher ami,

This past week, the full moon of last Friday was on the wane. In a week, it had dwindled by half. Now, in the darkness after the sun sets, the stars begin to shine.

With the naked eye and the aid of an app, we see that Orion, the brightest winter constellation, has begun to slide westward, while Leo appears earlier in the night sky. On Sunday, the sun crossed the equator to travel north, and the lengthening day was as many hours long as the shortening night. The Equinox now brings forth spring buds and the greening of our fields, planted during the winter with rapeseed, wheat, and oats.

Ineluctable, inexorable, elusively comprehensible, the stars and planets roll through the heavens…and our world moves with them. Sometimes joyfully, like golden Apollo gliding across the horizon, drawing the sun after him…sometimes in darkness, like Cali’s chariot crushing the faithful mob with huge, bloody wheels.

Little Audoin, the youngest of our family, celebrates his first birthday at the end of April. He already says “bird,” whinnies like a horse, and can kiss his Bonne Maman. He is crawling and his parents, poor dear things, eagerly anticipate that he will be running around the Chateau this summer.

At Courtomer, guests are planning weddings, light-heartedly selecting florists and the menu, and starting the more strenuous work of seating plans.

And on March 24, an old friend unexpectedly died.

Marie lived in Switzerland, far away from these Calchaquíes Valleys where we are spending a few months. We look up to the foothills of the Andes and think of her laid to rest in the shadow of the Jura mountains.

“Jacques says I’m a solar battery,” she would say, leaning back and basking in another spring’s sunshine, on a visit to us in France. She no longer lived with her husband, but they remained “en relation.” She appeared to weather life’s turbulence with insouciance…an ironic downturn of curved lips, a shrug of elegant shoulders, a lifted eyebrow, a sly and smiling sidelong glance, an anecdote.

She had been sent to live in a convent at the age of three, after her parents’ divorce. She saw her father twice a year. Her mother, the principal of a school, preferred to keep her own children at a distance. 

Jeanne, Marie’s mother, had protected Jewish children during the War. One year, she was awarded the medal of Les Justes, those who had defied the German “Final Solution” to save the persecuted.

“Eh bien,” commented Marie, smiling with cool nonchalance. “I don’t know if she liked the children, but she hated the Germans.”

She looked around at us with the amused confidence of a raconteur.

Marie was passionate and rash, a woman whose temperament and contradictions made her fascinating and often unhappy. On a vacation in Cuba at a tender age, she fell briefly in love with a dashing adventurer. From a wealthy family in Brazil, he had hijacked a plane to join the Revolution. Of this fleeting affair a precious remnant stayed, her first child, a son whom she adored, admired, and, despite herself, antagonized.

Through a curious train of events somewhat connected to my mother-in-law’s French family, Marie and her children were already part of our lives before we even moved to France. My belle-mère was a second mother to Marie, and Marie’s son Edouard was born in her house.  “Mamianne,” the name our children called their grandmother, had already been bestowed upon her by “le petit Edouard.” Large boxes of Swiss chocolates faithfully arrived at Christmas time. Later, “le grand Edouard” was our own youngest child Edward’s godfather. And Marie’s daughter was named for my mother-in-law.

When we moved to France, Marie and Edouard came to visit, bringing French picture books, puzzles, and games that had amused Edouard and his sister. She taught the children songs and rhymes in French. She taught them the Bénédicité, too, the grace before meals. Marie was not religious. But perhaps she wanted them to partake of a memory that was distinctly of her own childhood.

With Marie and Edouard, accompanied by Mamianne and her sister Tante Jacqueline, we went on expeditions and picnics, discovered a gothic bridge and a ruined tower. With Marie, I went to the first French movie I ever saw without subtitles.

When one summer our cook left with barely a day’s notice, Marie set to work with the girls and me in the kitchen. Mamianne and Tante Jacqueline sat beside the cheminée. Edouard was outside with the boys and their father.

“What do we need a cook for?” Marie asked. “This is more sympa, en famille.”

A family, she knew, was more than “sympa,” or nice. It was as necessary a nourishment for body and soul as the food on the table. It seems fitting to end this souvenir of Marie with the words she taught us:

Bénissez Seigneur la table

Si bien parée

Remplissez aussi nos âmes

Si affamées

Et donnez à tous nos frères de quoi manger.

Bless, Lord, this table

So well prepared.

Fill our empty souls also.

And unto our brothers give each their daily bread.

Amen.

Requiescat in pace, Marie, in the spring sunshine and beneath the starry night.

— Elizabeth

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