| Sunday, January 10, 2021

Dear Friend,
 
So much has happened this week...Snow fell, cloaking with velvety white the eaves of the Chateau and the farm buildings, tickling the back of our necks with melting flakes that slid beneath scarves and caps. In national life, the first post-Brexit ferry from England arrived at Normandy’s port of Ouistreham, docking without incident. The Camembert wars reached a truce…but that is a story for another time.
 
At home and throughout housebound France, we paid homage to le Roi de la Fève, the “king of the bean,” known in English as the Lord of Misrule.
 
Christmas is over. But on January 6, the little plaster figures of Melchior, Balthazar, Gaspard and their trusty camel arrived at last on the library writing table, now transformed into a stable in Bethlehem. Our camel, which had already seen better days when I was a child, hopped after yonder star on three legs. The Three Kings, two of whom had made their entire journey in kneeling position, now directed their worshipful gaze to the babe in the manger. Little Jesus, modestly attired in swaddling clothes and a halo, stretched plump little arms toward them.

In the excitement of moving the figures, one of the kings lost his hand. We found it under the sofa, still holding an incense-burning lamp, not far from his body. A tear welled up in the eye of a small boy. His lips trembled.

“Ne t’en fais pas, petit!" said Henry kindly, wiping away the tear with his handkerchief. He knelt down to pick up the pieces. “Don’t worry, little one. It’s a clean break. We can mend it. Besides,” he added, fixing his nephew with a twinkle in his blue eyes, “he probably did something wrong.”

“Did they chop off his hand?” asked the young one’s brother, looking up with vivid interest from a picture book. Liam has been turning the pages of an illustrated history of France found on the Chateau’s library shelves. Written for 19th-century children, it provides edifying examples of medieval punishments.

We had gathered in the library on Wednesday night for la fête de l’Epiphanie, la Nuit des Rois. A couple of thousand years ago, the three Magi had followed a bright star to find the prophesied Messiah in a manger. So on this January 6, we celebrated – along with most of France – with a special cake, the galette or gâteau des Rois. In Normandy, this is called a nourolle, and it’s a buttery brioche. Despite regional differences, all King’s cakes contain a “fève” – and whosoever finds it, is king for the night.

Fève means “bean” in French, although since the late 19th century, the actual seed has been replaced with a porcelain favor. These hard little figurines of kings, babes in swaddling clothes, Virgin Mary’s, lucky four-leaf clovers, or a host of secular trinkets – from Smurfs and soccer balls to miniature cars and Japanese dolls -- invite nibbling rather than tooth-cracking hearty bites.

“Why a bean?” asked the little one. Que sais-je? I don’t know. But the ceremony is an ancient one – centuries older than the birth of Christ or the travels of the Three Kings. The Roman conquest of Gaul in 51 B.C. ushered in Roman gods and their ceremonies to these territories. The Roman feast of Saturnalia, which also involved a cake with a bean, has been observed in France ever since. In the fourth century, the Christian church found the better part of wisdom was to incorporate the rituals of Saturnalia into the Epiphany and the Night of the Kings – rather than try to “cancel” an extremely popular pagan festival.

Saturnalia, like the old-fashioned English Twelfth Night and our Nuit des Rois, was a festival of reversal. In the Roman temples of Saturn, the woolen bonds that held fast the legs of the god during the rest of the year were ceremoniously loosed. Drinking, gambling and wild behavior was the rule. And in every Roman household, a king – the Saturnalis princeps -- was chosen by lot; it was he who chanced upon a bean in his portion of cake. This king was typically a slave or at least a servant. During his rule, the master waited upon him.

In medieval France, the Nuit des Rois was celebrated with almost as much riotous abandon and “misrule” as Saturnalia. The feast day was also closely connected to medieval ideals of kingship. The king is a symbol of natural harmony and order in the world. His personal health and power are a guarantee of the health and prosperity of both realm and subjects. During the Night of the Kings, as during Saturnalia, royal power was momentarily overthrown. The Roi de la Fève was in charge. Disorder reigned until the following day brought a return to the proper social and political hierarchies.

Adding the Christian story of the Three Kings to the old pagan festival of Saturnalia only strengthened the theme of royal power. Theirs was a moment of Epiphany, which means “manifestation of god.” Here were three kings, chosen to represent the nations of the earth, discovering the godhead in the manger.

Images of the Adoration of the Kings, or the Magi, abounded in France as throughout Christendom, adorning churches, chapels and private devotional manuscripts. Not far from Courtomer you can see a particularly fine example, now in the Musée de Beaux Arts in Rouen, painted in 1497 by the great Italian artist Perugino. Nearby, a stained-glass window from the 1520s shows the Adoration scene in Rouen’s modern church of Jeanne d’Arc. The window came from the church of Saint Vincent, destroyed in the bombings of 1944. (Fortunately for posterity, in 1939 the far-seeing president of Rouen’s Academy of Sciences and Arts had most of the city’s stained glass packed away for safekeeping.)

The Three Kings had always represented the “three ages of man” – wise old age bearing gold, the prime of life bearing incense, and youth – with its fleeting charms -- carrying the myrrh used to embalm corpses and thus a reminder of mortality. The kings also came to represent distinct cultural and racial groups. Melchior, the oldest, was a Persian. Gaspard was Caucasian. Balthazar was Babylonian. But you’ll see that in Rouen’s 16th-century stained-glass depiction, as in the example from Quimper above, Balthazar has become an African. This seems to be related to a little piece of French and Norman history: the Ethiopian embassy of 1306, in which 30 Ethiopians paid a visit to Pope Clement VI during the papal exile in Avignon, France. Clement had been bishop of Rouen as well as an abbot in Normandy. Perhaps his encounter spurred enthusiasm in Rouen – and elsewhere -- for an Ethiopian Balthazar.

Times and credences change…Christianity, kings and the Nuit des Rois fell out of favor during the French Revolution.

“Any feast day called after a king is counter-revolutionary and must be abolished,” expostulated Pierre Manuel, deputy to the Convention charged with establishing the new French republic.

In the face of this earnest ideologue, the assembled “conventionnels” burst out laughing. But the Revolution soon lost its sense of humor. The king was guillotined. Manuel himself, who had voted against the death penalty for Louis XVI, was executed. The fête des Rois was renamed the fête des Sans-Culotte. The role reversal was for real -- those without pants, the "sans-culottes," were in charge; those with crowns were...dead.

Receiving the disturbing news that the fête des Rois was still being celebrated a year later, the Commune directed the revolutionary committees to put pâtissiers under surveillance. Rogue bakers of gâteaux des rois were to be surprised at their ovens and the “orgies celebrating the last tyrant” – the king -- to be suppressed.

But revolutions rarely last. France briefly restored its monarchy. Those without pants went back to being the hoi polloi. And the fête des Rois seems to be as popular today as Saturnalia was during Roman times. About 32 million galettes des rois are sold every year.

We followed the rituals scrupulously this year. The cake was brought forth. The youngest child wiped away his tears and got under the table. The master of the house took up the knife and cut the cake into parts for each person.

“Phebé dominé,” says the little one. This traditional question comes from the Latin fabae domine, or “about that fève, my master...”

“Pour qui?” answers the maître de maison. "For whom?"

The child names the person to receive the part. We all wait expectantly. Eventually, someone crunches delicately down on the porcelain figurine – and dons the golden crown of the Roi de la Fève.

And with this pleasant memory, of expectations of good things, and looking forward to better days to come for us all, we welcome another New Year!

A bientôt, au Chateau de Courtomer,