The view from the boudoir
A new perspective, far from the busy world
Above: Looking out the window of the new boudoir to the park on a sunny October noon
Chère amie, cher ami,
After the rentrée, le déluge, to paraphrase Louis XV.
The king made his famously gloomy remark, “Après moi, le déluge,” “after me, the deluge” during a year in which he narrowly escaped assassination, his army was almost annihilated by the Prussians, and Halley’s Comet was expected to bring catastrophic floods. Historians see in Louis’ comment an unconscious anticipation of the French Revolution. For when the Revolution came, forty-two years later, it must have seemed almost as cataclysmic as the Deluge of Biblical fame.
Here at Courtomer nothing quite so epic is taking place. Set amid green pastures and fertile fields, the Chateau is far from the cacophony of bad news in the wider world.
White vans ply the service road of the Chateau daily. They carry the electrician, the plumber, the couvreurs,our carpenter and his helpers. Projects on hold in the summer months wrap up at last. Projects that had dawdled along for years are finally being finished. New projects take form.
After the summer lull of les grandes vacances, in which most of France and everyone except farmers take a vacation, the rentrée has brought us all back to the réalité of work. Hence the interlude, mes amis, between my last letter and this one.
In the last few weeks, shelves, counter lighting, plug strips, plinths and crown molding went into place in the Chateau’s kitchen. We’d started the renovation, re-using my old cabinets from Paris, in January. The work had screeched to a halt in early April. In a mad scramble over the Easter weekend, we managed to install dishwashers, a microwave, wall cabinets, lights, and the gazinière – an opulent Italian Smeg with eight gas burners, electric ovens, and enough electronic programs to satisfy the most technical of chefs. Now this project is almost finished. There’s just the stove’s marble backsplash, still leaning against a cellar wall where it was set down in March.
The door connecting the kitchen area to the laundry, hung in January and nailed shut until last Friday, now swings open. There is a new oak threshold. Any day now, says Monsieur Christophe, our menuisier, the door will have knobs and a latch.
Out in the basse-cour, hammers are ringing and saws are revving. The roofers are up on the wooden skeleton above the porcherie and the four à pain, replacing rotten fermes, solives, pannes, lathes and, it seems, every other possible element of a traditional wooden charpente. We don’t have much use for these two adjoining farm buildings where once pigs were kept and bread was baked for the entire estate. And roofs are expensive, especially clad in authentic tile and proper Spanish slate. But...les bâtiments are part of the ensemble du château.
And who knows?
If the Déluge comes, we might be glad to have a pigsty and a wood-fired brick oven.
Neat rows of tile ready to attach to the charpente. Many of the old clay tiles can be reused. Those that cannot become rubble to fill pot-holes in the farm road.
Meanwhile, the farmyard pump is back in service again, after a couple of visits from the plumber, sending water to the cattle barns, the pastures, and Monsieur Martyn’s flower beds.
And of course, there has been the backdrop activity of our guardian’s déménagement, now coming to an end as he and his wife move into their new home. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large, flop-eared rabbit lolloping across the stable yard, temporary escapee from the packing.
In the midst of all the bustle and hump-busting, there was a moment of unexpected tranquility. An havre de paix came into being at the Chateau.
A light-filled room on the top floor of the Chateau had spent the last 13 years as a “fourre-tout” – a room to stuff away junk and spare furniture. It was full of children’s beds, a sink, rolled-up rugs, the parts of an 18th-century armoire, broken chairs, doorknobs, and lightbulbs. A roof leak, just before we replaced the slates on the west wing, had stained the ceiling. A multitude of flies, seeking warmth at summer’s end, had dried up in little powdery heaps on the windowsills.
Standing in the cluttered box room, looking out at the green world from the serene distance of the top floor windows, I pictured a boudoir. In the 18th-century sense of the word.
A château was never designed for the quiet life.
In the beginning, with the construction of the first stone fortifications by the conquering Normans in the 10th century, the château’s function was military. It was a base from which to control the local population. Later, it was also used to defend them against attack. In his château, the local seigneur heard complaints and meted out justice. A handy dungeon restrained malefactors, rebels, and enemies.
By the 1700s, when Courtomer’s medieval château was rebuilt, France and Normandy had settled down. The new Chateau de Courtomer was the architectural expression of a different world and a different concept of aristocratic life. It was a château for the Age des Lumières, the Enlightenment.
With its columns and central pediments, its symmetry and geometric proportions, it embodies the temples and palaces of the Classical Age, harkening back to the long tradition of knowledge-seeking, rational thought that began with the Greek philosophers and was thought to find its culmination in the 18th-century French academies of arts and sciences. The enfilade of reception rooms, lit with tall, wide windows, embraces the 18th-century enthusiasms for light and fresh air.
The new aristocratic life in France also embraced intimacy. Back in the day, even the marital bed was in a room where other people might wander through. Famous lawsuits asserting paternity produced witnesses who had casually noticed “les jambes et les cuisses,” legs and thighs entwined. A room was used for multiple functions: sleeping, entertaining, meals, bathing, business transactions. Appropriate furniture was carried in and out.
By the mid -1700s, architectural plans for new aristocratic dwellings show permanent and separate functions for each room. The chambre à coucher, the garderobe, the salle à manger, the salon de reception, le cabinet, les lieux – the bedroom, dressing room, dining room, drawing room, the study, the “water closet” – become standard. The boudoir appears.
Madame de Pompadour, the beloved première maîtresse of Louis XV, had one. So did Marie-Antoinette. The queen, with King XVI, signed the marquis and marquise de Courtomer’s wedding contract in 1784. Work on the new Chateau de Courtomer began the next year...surely a fashionable young bride would have insisted on a boudoir, too!
Like the palace, the 18th-century aristocratic château had evolved from a stern fortress to a place of protocol, pleasure, and private pursuits.
Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's beloved mistress, in the intimacy of a boudoir. The portrait was painted by François Boucher in 1756, the year before "le déluge" of military defeat and political setback.
Our new creation isn’t a true boudoir. As a student at the prestigious Ecole de Chartes in Paris shows in a recent thesis on the boudoir, the authentic model has a “niche.” This is an alcove for a lit de repos, a daybed that can be used as a sofa. Madame de Pompadour sits on one in the portrait above. Also, the boudoir is often equipped with a fireplace. It is supposed to be comfortable and cozy. It usually looks out to the restful scene of a garden.
Our long rectangular room, at the end of the west wing, has no alcove and never had a fireplace. But windows to the south, west, and north open out to a fine panorama of our park and the distant hills. And there are several hot-water radiators.
While the word “boudoir” logically conjures up the verb “bouder,” which originally meant “to seek solitude,” and by the 18th century also meant “to sulk,” the original boudoir wasn’t associated with a desire for moody alone time. Our “chartist” suggests that the word actually comes from the Old English “bur” or “bower” meaning an inner apartment as opposed to the “hall,” or public space, in a house.
In the 18th century, the boudoir was a place for men and women alike to withdraw into a private space. With its alcove for a couch, it was mid-way between a bedroom and a private study. One might decorate it with precious objects, like Madame de Pompadour. One might indulge one’s taste for sumptuous silk draperies “à la Turque,” like Marie-Antoinette. One might pray or read improving texts, as perhaps did the Bishop of Rennes, who had a boudoir designed for the episcopal palace in the 1760s. One might be very naughty and even wicked, like the author of “La Philosophie dans le boudoir.” His description of what went on in the boudoir sent him to the Bastille for insanity.
Banish the thought! One prefers “La poesie dans le boudoir”! This a collection of love songs by Pierre Delanoë, songwriter of many a great tube for French singers. “L’Eté indien,” “Indian Summer,” comes to mind on this mid-October day.
Opening the window of our new “boudoir” on the top floor of the Chateau, I look out to the bright blue sky, down to the dark green water of the moat below, over the leafy tops of trees. Mornings are cold these days and the sun rises later and later. But apart from these indications that the autumn equinox has come and gone, the weather this past week in Normandy has been as balmy as a summer’s day in June.
Up here in this quiet, sunny place, le Déluge is very far away.
A bientôt, au Chateau!
Elisabeth
P.S. I hope you’ll enjoy Pierre Delanoë’s L’Eté indien as sung by the fine French crooner, Joe Dassin, You could listen to this in the boudoir!
Zooming in on the view: a stone basket of fruit on the parapet of the bridge spanning the inner moat at Chateau de Courtomer
Next week: Le design...the Chateau's new Boudoir takes form...