The oak next to the Chateau fell this winter...with an old story in its rustling leaves...

Dear Friend,
 
“Moi qui t’ai connu jeune et beau, moi qui t’aimais…
Je te salue au seuil sévère du tombeau…
Passons; car c’est la loi; nul ne peut s’y soustraire;
Tout penche…
Oh! quel farouche bruit font dans le crépuscule
Les chênes qu’on abat pour le bûcher d’Hercule!”
 
“I, who knew you in your youth and beauty, I who loved you…
I salute you at the stern entrance to your tomb…
We die; because it is so; nothing escapes;
Everything falls…
Oh! What savage cry sounds in the twilight
As the oaks are slaughtered for the funeral pyre of Hercules!”
 
Henry paused. 
 
“Only,” he added, pensive. “I never knew you in your youth and beauty.”
 
Monsieur raised his eyebrows at these expressions of romantic melancholy.
 
“Victor Hugo,” explained Henry to his father. “Speaking at the tomb of Théophile Gauthier. Texte fondateur, Père, we memorized it in school. They were old friends and fellow poets, comrades defending la liberté and the rights of man.”
 
We stood in a small cluster beside the massive fût of the fallen oak. It came down in a winter windstorm, with such force that one of its branches was driven into the soil and pins it down. Its roots, torn out of the earth, stand out in the cold air like the wild coiling hair of a medusa head. And its trunk is so long and thick with branches that it’s as if a forest of small trees has sprung up to cover it. 
 
Our farmer, who had driven up in his pickup on the way to feeding the cattle, gazed at the calamitous heap, pressing his lips together. Fortunately, he commented, the oak spared the pasture fence in its descent.
 
“Do you have that mètre?” demanded Monsieur. He took the measuring tape from Henry. “We’ll get the circumference.”
 
He and Henry walked down to the collet, the swelling collar where the roots attach to the trunk. 
 
“The fût starts here,” he said, referring to the long, mostly branchless shaft of the trunk above the roots and below the leafy houppier at the other extremity. It measured 4 meters and 15 centimeters around, a little over 13 and a half feet. The grume, the useable trunk, itself was over 6 meters long.
 
“Plenty of planks in that fellow,” remarked Monsieur with satisfaction. “There’s your flooring for le fleuriste.”
 
The majestic tree lay stretched out on the ground, massive in its ruin.
 
Our gardien had joined us as well. At these words, he shook his head.

Monsieur Xavier had calculated the weight of the trunk. There is, he informed us, one tonne per metric cube of area. The formula is simple, he added: volume times density, then add leaf weight. Although since it is winter, the sparse leaves are brown and can’t weigh as much as green leaves.  But, he admitted, cocking his head sagely, calculating density is the real problem. Green wood is less dense, but then…some of this tree might already be dead. In fact, it might even be hollow. And oaks are more dense than other trees. En outre, a dormant tree weighs less but is more dense than a tree in summer, because it contains less water. 
 
But trees that are dominant – as this oak clearly is, Henry interjected with the Cartesian rigeuringrained by 13 years in French schools, are they more or less dense than co-dominant trees? 
 
Monsieur Xavier, like the rest of us, looked non-plussed. Our farmer spoke up. 
 
“Too heavy for the téléscopique,” he stated, with the air of closing the discussion. “It’ll only lift three tonnes. That’s at least six.”
 
Monsieur Xavier rebounded. Monsieur Jean-Yves was quite right.
 
Furthermore, our gardien added, frowning slightly in condemnation, les scieries nowadays no longer have the equipment to saw a trunk of such enormous dimensions. In these days of commercialisme and disregard for the noble métier of woodsman, sawmills are set up to handle young trees, barely more than saplings. 
 
Monsieur Xavier had, however, discovered one old-fashioned artisan. But we would have to carry the grume to his mill.
 
“Eh, là!” sighed our farmer, turning to go back to the basse-cour and the hungry cattle.
 
Next winter, we thought, the ground would be hard again, and heavy equipment could lift away the heavy trunk without making ruts in the lawn.

Meanwhile, we poked around for acorns. Like forestiers of yore, we want to sow a new generation of oaks from the seeds of this mighty forebear. For according to more calculations, this time based on its prodigious girth, this oak first sprouted at Courtomer in about 1620. The formula, diameter times three, says it was more than 400 years old when a tempest laid it low.
 
A rapport of November 7, 1620 in the Courtomer archives describes a motley assemblage of medieval towers, guard houses, walls, moats, defensive ditches and farm buildings, with a fortified logis for the seigneur and his family. But, as the writer enthusiastically noted, there were fine plantings of trees. In particular, near the Chateau was an allée “de viefs et jeunes chesnes,” young and lively oaks.
 
“Sacred tree, speak to me,” invoked Odysseus at the grove of Dodona, asking the sacred oak for a prophecy to guide him on his long voyage home, back in the 13th century B.C. The dry and rustling leaves of our old tree might also have wisdom to impart, for the oak has born witness to memorable events in the life and history of the Chateau.
 
In particular, those of A.D. 1620, when our venerable “chesne” was part of an allée of flourishing young oaks. The year was an important turning point at Chateau de Courtomer. 
 
The domain of Courtomer and its extensive lands and feudal rights were the dowry and heritage of Léonore Le Beauvoisien, the oldest daughter of the baron of Courtomer.  On June 1st, 1562, she married Artus Simon, an officer and seigneur from the Cotentin Peninsula to the north. Both were born into proudly Protestant families, and the ceremony took place in the Protestant Temple that still stands on the estate. 

Perhaps the nuptials were overshadowed by the recent Massacre of Vassy, which had taken place that March. A Protestant congregation in the East of France had refused to stop singing and praying, despite the orders of the Duc de Guise. His armed men began to cut them down, and more were killed trying to escape. 
 
The Massacre shocked Europe. It set off a wave of similar attacks throughout the spring. And in May, Protestant iconoclasts in Rouen, the chief city of Normandy, retaliated. They broke into Rouen’s Catholic churches, destroying what they considered to be ungodly images and confiscating valuable sacred vessels. Catholics fled. Protestant forces, anticipating punishment, closed the city to defend it. Thus began the French Wars of Religion, which lasted more than another 30 years. 
 
Artus must have taken quick leave of his new wife. He took part in the siege of Rouen and spent the rest of his life fighting alongside the future Henri IV and fellow members of the Protestant aristocracy. He died in the last great battle, at Ivry in Normandy in 1590. Two years later, his son Antoine-Alcibiade was killed at Camp d’Yvetot. Shortly thereafter, the Wars ended with Henri IV’s accension to the French throne in 1594. 
 
The widowed Léonore, now in her 50s, had lost her husband and her oldest son. The estates, like much of Normandy, had been laid waste in decades of skirmishing and pillage. But the baronne douairière was resilient, resourceful and ambitious.
 
The king, formally recognizing the loyal service of her husband and son, awarded her a pension. Her surviving son, now 18 years old, received compensation from the royal coffers to rebuild farmhouses and farm buildings. The king included a gift of “60 pieds d’arbres chesnes,” 60 oaks from the royal forests. 
 
We don’t know whether these oaks were cut into boards, but it is tempting to think that instead Léonore may have planted them in the allée where our fallen oak once grew.
 
In the years after her husband’s death, Léonore set about accumulating more land and more feudal privileges, like the right to be exempt from taxes paid by roturiers, ordinary people. She ran the estate shrewdly, accumulating the means for her son to live “like a nobleman,” an essential element for social prestige and political preferment in the Ancien Régime.

Meanwhile, while they were still newlyweds, Artus had successfully petitioned to style himself Artus de Saint-Simon instead of plain Artus Simon. Adding the “particule” de and putting the family under the protection of a holy patron would promote its upward mobility.
 
In 1620, these efforts came to a crowning conclusion. Léonore was in her 80s. Henri IV had been assassinated and his son, Louis XIII, had been crowned. Louis was loyal to his father’s comrades in arms.

“Estans bien informez de bons et recommendables services qui, de tout temps, ont esté renduz à ceste Couronne,” the king signed Lettres Patentes in which “la dicte terre, seigneurie, et baronnie de Courtaumer” was elevated to the dignity of Marquisat. Jean-Antoine, Léonore’s surviving son, was the first Marquis of Courtomer. She died two years later, “filled with joy at the realization of all her hopes,” as the family archivist put it.
 
But her sons fell like stricken oaks, though shaken by the tumult of war rather than earthly gales and tempests.
 
Jean-Antoine, following the destiny of his father and brother, was killed at the siege of Bar-le-Duc in 1629, fighting for the Dutch Republic. His eldest son, Antoine-Georges, wounded at his side, was killed months later in a duel. Another son, Henry-Artus, who had replaced his father in the Dutch army, fell ill and died the following year. 
 
Léonore had already been laid to rest beside her husband under the pavement of the Temple at Courtomer. The bodies of her son and two grandsons were brought from Holland and buried with the rest of the family in 1630. Nine years later, Cyrus-Antoine, third son of Jean-Antoine, was shot and killed during the Revolt of the Nu-Pieds, a tax rebellion that spread through Normandy in 1639. He also lies buried at Courtomer.
 
Monsieur Xavier stood silent, looking at the gisant, the cadaver of our great oak, one of the last remnants of the 17th-century dreams and ambitions of the family at Courtomer.
 
“Il se peut qu’il va retrouver ses feuilles cet été,” he said, fondly. 
 
“That old oak might very well leaf out again this summer.” 
 
“Passons; car c’est la loi…” The planks can wait until next winter.

            With warm regards from Chateau de Courtomer,

Elizabeth

www.chateaudecourtomer.com

info@chateaudecourtomer.com