Running wild at Courtomer

Chère amie, cher ami,

I hope you’ll enjoy today’s missive. Tomorrow is “la rentrée,” when schooldays begin in France and “les grandes vacances” come to an end.

“The rat, the rat!” shrieked Charlie. Dorothée came rushing around to the front of the Chateau, where the adults were having a drink in the shade of the trees.
 
“Il est mort, mort, très mort!” she announced with glee, her eyes lit up with the pleasure of righteous wrath. The phrase sounded like a line in one of Perrault’s fairytales that we’ve been reading. These, written in the 17th century for the amusement of court society and the literati, are not tender about the fate of malefactors.
 
“Come see,” she insisted.
 
A large, sleek ragondin floated upside down in the moat.
 
Recently, we have been plagued with a clutch of myopotame, a South American native foolishly imported into France in the 1880s for its fur and allowed to escape into nature. The animal reproduces in the quiet waters of mares and étangs, and now in our moat.
 
We might not mind sharing our aquatic world with a yellow-fanged rodent from the Southern Hemisphere. But it has eaten our waterlilies. 
 
Monsieur Martyn planted these subjects two years ago. He waded into the cold waters of spring with long boots, his rubber overalls held up with a strap, to set the baskets of roots on the mucky bottom of the moats. He fertilized them. He paddled about in a rubber raft, checking on them. We watched their progress from tentative round, green leaves to the splendor of this summer’s graceful, richly-hued flowers.

We had chosen the four plants with great care: And not only for the poetry of their names, nor because they would flourish in Normandy’s cool climate. These waterlilies came from Latour-Marliac, the first and longest-established waterlily breeder in France. They were to become part of the garden patrimoine of the Chateau, linked to the plantsmanship and the landscape design tradition of Normandy.
 
And pouf! Now, they are gone. Monsieur Martyn is hopeful that the roots are unaffected. That once the ragondin are “no more,” as he delicately puts it, the waterlilies will rebound next summer.
 
The little poules d’eau don’t like ragondin, either. The lone hen who persevered despite the invasion struts up and down the bank, clucking nervously to her young. The chicks paddle under the overhanging turf, close to their watchful mother. The wild ducks, meanwhile, have already flown away, presumably to a quieter spot.
 
Ragondin are not carnivores. But they are competitors for edible vegetation. And they don’t hesitate to defend their new quarters. They burrow into banks, disturbing the nests and the young waterfowl sheltered there. Eventually, their tunnels – usually about 6 or 7 meters long -- cause the banks to collapse.
 
Arriving at Courtomer just as the last traces of the waterlilies vanished, the children threw themselves into the war against the ragondin with gusto. Sticks and stones and loud cries don’t deter the bold invaders. But we believe that a discreet chasseur quietly slips by in the early morning.
 
“Little savages,” admonishes their mother in tones of contented admiration. 
 
Quelle joie to see the children outdoors during the long summer days of les grandes vacances! They make spears out of sticks, nurse dying flies to health, eat blackberries until they have the collywobbles, listen avidly to gruesome fairytales, and sleep heartily all night long.
 
They sniff a rose, look up at rays of sunlight glowing through red petals. There are wildflowers to gather. A praying mantis to tickle a suntanned neck.

“Now don’t fall in!” adds their mother, putting on her sunglasses and preparing to fall asleep in a transat. There’s a novel by her side, but in three weeks she does not seem to have read three pages. Tant mieux! She needs the rest. La rentrée is coming soon.
 
The children understand the arrangement. As long as they don’t tumble down the bank and into the water, they can be drawn to it, fascinated by its murky stillness, the glittering waves when a little breeze ruffles by, the reflection of trees, clouds, and chateau, the life upon and within it.
 
On his first day at Courtomer, Charlie found a set of colored boules in the games room down in the cave. He threw them, one after another, into the moat, aiming at the carp flitting just under the surface.
 
“Bonne Maman!” cried Dorothée, calling up to the open kitchen window. Charlie was trying to fish the boules out with a long stick. He stared back at me with a glint in his eyes that hinted at stolid defiance.
 
“Charlie can’t swim!”
 
A boule is rather heavy. I managed to extricate only a few before the rest sank.
 
The carp in the moat provide hours of amusement. In the hall closet, Dorothée found a fishing rod. Sitting on the steep sides of the bank, she waited with luckless patience for a bite. Meanwhile at the end of canal, her older brother paced along the bank with a bow, arrow drawn, looking down at the dark shapes that moved just under the surface. The carp darted forward quickly, with a flick of tail and fins, then glided away.

James had made his own bow and arrow after an afternoon’s visit to the château de Falaise, the Norman castle where William the Conqueror was born and raised. He cut whips from the tilleul allée. He bent the limewood into a bow held fast with kitchen twine and a rubber band. He knew elasticity was necessary to propel the arrow. But he hadn’t yet discovered that the elasticity must come from the bow. Each time he released the string, the arrow plopped down to the ground.

James was undisappointed. The tools of the hunter are the props of his imagination. He defeated the English, won an archery tournament, brought home a deer for dinner.
 
A stern recommendation to find somewhere else to play sent the three children running into the long grass of the park. They have a playhouse under the gently drooping branches of the immense sequoia that stands to the east in the Great Lawn. They have tea-parties, Dorothée tells me, and Charlie, when he is obliging, pretends to take a nap while his sister pretends to be a mother.
 
Though they run wild, the children are helpful. One of their jobs is to feed the chickens and gather the eggs. They take turns carrying the bucket out to the poulailler, with a basket or an empty egg carton. The bucket is filled with scraps from our meals, dried and crushed eggshells, and stale baguette. Charlie has learned to balance the bulk of the bucket while running. He can carry the day’s eggs without breaking a single one, he shows me.
 
“Our hens love bacon,” reported James, who takes an almost paternal interest in les poules. It is true that chickens will eat a great variety of foods. They particularly relish fatty bits of meat and rinds of cheese.
 
One day, the children’s mother and I went on a shopping expedition to town with the two little ones. After an agreeably productive morning, lunch, ice cream and a merry-go-round ride, we went into a church that my mother-in-law had particularly liked. Une bonne petite fille bien sage, Dorothée lit candles for all our relatives. The clink of the coin in the boîte à aumone, the challenge of lighting the floppy wick, the ritual of a recited prayer were entirely satisfying. But Charlie, only three years old, became furious when prevented from running up the steps of the altar. It was time for his real nap. We drove home.
 
When we arrived, James was in the poulailler, chasing the chickens. The feathered creatures dashed hither and thither, squawking angrily. 
 
“They didn’t eat their dinner as well as yesterday,” James announced. He had made individual platters for them out of discarded oyster shells, which he had filled with tempting scraps.
 
“So I was giving them their exercise,” he explained. He’d also put grain in all their nests so they could eat while laying eggs.
 
Although the children never seemed to want to go anywhere, their parents thought they ought to try something new and improving. We took them riding. 
 
Charlie and Dorothée rode broad little ponies through the forêt domaniale of Bourse, near Courtomer. Their parents led them over fallen logs and around puddles. The forest is used for growing and harvesting oak, but it was also used by the German army to hide tanks and ammunition during the Battle of Normandy. Large pits in the woods were made by Allied bombardments.
 
Meanwhile, James was signed up for a “stage débutant” for half a day, at a stables nearby.  I went along as interpreter. He had to shut his eyes and follow directions called out to him by a little girl from Cherbourg with blond braids and blue eyes. 
 
“On peut tricher,” the monitrice, their riding teacher, confided to me. “You can cheat.”
 
Out of the question! I thought to myself, even as the pony wandered into the fence and came to a halt. James didn’t seem to mind. In his imagination, he was training as a squire.
 
James was supposed to make his steed trot, which the pony resolutely refused to do. Finally, I ran along beside him, encouraging it with the end of a riding crop.  James, bouncing along on the saddle like a polo ball being tapped up and down across the field, went over his first jump. He was excited. He wanted to jump again.
 
“Ah! Il est fou furieux!” said the monitrice, approvingly. “He’s a wild one!”

Perhaps all those hours of threatening ragondin and fraternizing with chickens made the children bold and fearless. Also, the ponies, unlike those their mother and I had known, never once bucked or made a run for it back to the stables. After the rides, they accepted long brushing sessions and politely nibbled the carrots the children had pulled out of the garden for them.
 
The children left Courtomer last week. 
 
At long last, as the long summer comes to a close and twilight falls sooner, les grandes vacances have ended. 
 
The children must prepare for the rentrée. Soon, they must sit still, stand in line, follow directions. 
 
And yet, falling asleep on autumn nights, surely they will dream of carp and dark water, of chasing ragondin and hens, of ponies, of creeping under the protective boughs of the giant tree on the Great Lawn.
 
Dormez bien, mes enfants chéris. Faîtes de beaux rêves!

Elisabeth

                                      
Below: On a summer evening, racing across the Great Lawn in front of the Chateau.