Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Dear Valued Customer,

“De pulsu campanarum et diebus festis ita sentimus… quod dies a die discernitur.”

“Concerning the ringing of bells and feasts days thus we judge,” the letter began, in 1544.

Jean Cauvin, known to posterity as Calvin, was against the ringing of bells on feast days. It was worse, he continued in an epistle to his Protestant brethren, “that a day should be distinguished from a day.”

Every day is a day to praise and worship God.

Back in the 1600s, when the seigneurs of Courtomer adhered to Calvin’s réforme and built their Protestant Temple on the grounds of the Chateau, perhaps the bells were silent.

But two days ago, under sunny skies at Courtomer, the joyful Easter chimes rang out.

And they brought nice surprises for children. Just before dawn on Easter Day, the cloches de Pâques flew over countryside and town, distributing chocolate eggs under bushes and amidst the daffodils. These bells, as children learn, are returning to France after a nocturnal visit to Rome, where they have flown to be blessed by the Pope.

*As the "cloches de Pâques" swing back from Rome...from a 19th-century illustration. Gallica BNF*

Calvin would have disapproved of the chocolates as he did the pope. All rites, traditions and beliefs not described in the Bible were stripped away in the reform movement that became Calvinism.

But even Calvin, austere, logical, unrelenting in matters of true doctrine and right practise, probably suffered bells to ring on Easter Sunday.

“These follies are rather to be borne,” he counselled, than that the faithful should forsake the austerities of the reformed church.

Almost half a millennium ago, celebratory bells undoubtedly rang out when Léonore Le Beauvoisien, heiress to the titles and estates of Courtomer, was married near where the Temple stands today.

It was June of 1562. Two months before, a massacre far to the north had set off the bloody guerres de religion. For the next 36 years, civil war would tear apart the kingdom, pitting Protestant and Catholic aristocrats, shopkeepers, peasants and churchmen against each other and against their kings. Normandy, with one of the largest Protestant populations in France, was divided. Churches and farms, towns and chateaux were devastated.

But amid sorrow, as the story of Easter reminds us, there is always newness of life. Bells ring for joy as well as to raise the alarm.

Léonore was married in the old Catholic church of Courtomer, built on land donated by her ancestors. Here, like her forebears, she would have been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith. Buried near the altar, beneath her feet as she recited her wedding vows, lay the defunct lineage of the Le Beauvoisien family including her father. Perhaps Léonore’s uncle celebrated the nuptial mass; he was not only her guardian but priest and curate of Courtomer.

Throughout the countryside around Courtomer, the presence of the Church was outward and visible. A few miles to the west, the lantern spires of the Cathedral of Séez still mark one of the first bishoprics in France, founded in 440. To the north, William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, and his wife Matilda had founded grand twin abbeys that soar above the city of Caen. To the south, the delicately-sculpted church of Notre-Dame d’Alençon dominated the marketplace and center of town.

*The cathedral of Séez, or Sées, with its twin spires, in an early 20th-century woodcut.*

The churches, monasteries, abbeys, priories and the noble families who endowed them were tightly intertwined. Generations of the Le Beauvoisien family had supported a small priory, no longer standing, near the church of Courtomer. Léonore’s youngest sister, Louise, had taken the veil in nearby Argentan at the Couvent de Sainte Claire, founded about 50 years before by Marguerite de Lorraine, duchess of Alençon.

Artus Cymont, Léonore’s futur, on the other hand, was from the deeply Protestant Cotentin peninsula to the north. “Les nouvelles idées” had spread rapidly along the Atlantic Coast. Books, scholars and prédicateurs or preachers moved easily across the water from the rest of Europe and England into the major port cities of Rouen, Caen with its university, and Dieppe.

The communities of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, Beuzeville, Fresnes, Chennebrun, Appeville were all part of the “Cymont” or “Simon” feudal territories in the Cotentin peninsula. By the 1560s, records show, all held converts to Calvinism. There was an official Protestant church in Saint-Mère-Eglise.

Artus was born in 1530, the year of the “Confessio Augustana.” This official attempt to reconcile “protestants” to the Church of Rome at the Diet of Augsburg did not entirely fail. It would be few more years before Calvin shook the dust of Rome from his sandals and turned his back, unreconciled, on his French homeland and the Church.

A devout Catholic in those days could still entertain “les nouvelles idées.”

A stronghold of the new ideas was the ducal seat of Alençon itself, where Charles II, both duke and archbishop, had edified the église de Notre-Dame in the 1400s and where the pious Marguerite de Lorraine had been duchess.

The young duchess of Alençon, Marguerite de Navarre, was sister to the great François 1er, king of France. As a Renaissance princess, she was taught Latin, Greek, and Italian alongside her brother. They studied the ancient classics and read contemporary philosophy and literature. By the time Marguerite was married and came to Alençon at the age of 17, the foundation texts of Christianity were also being read, studied and, for the first time, translated into French.

The beautiful and accomplished duchess drew les nouvelles idées and the men who studied, discussed and promoted them to her court. She corresponded with Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession, Luther, and Calvin. She turned to Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, first translator of the New Testament into French, as her spiritual mentor. She protected Clément Marot, who translated psalms into French verse and set them to music. These were the “Evangéliques,” those who re-examined la Foi and their own faith in the light of “les Evangiles,” the Gospels of Christ.

*Marguerite of Navarre, Duchess of Alençon, was fashionable, intellectual, and devout. Musée de Louvre*

“Il n’y a point aujourd’hui en France plus évangélique que la Dame d’Alençon,” it was said.

Early sympathisers of the new ideas met privately to read and meditate on the newly translated Scriptures. The essential sacraments of Christian salvation were eagerly discussed. The purity of early Christian baptism and holy communion was sought. The sacraments of pardon and of the priesthood were re-interpreted according to Christ’s sayings and his Apostle’s acts. Surely, it was agreed, the “tripartite cord” of Scripture, Reason, and Faith were essential to Christianity.

This happy state of questioning and discovery did not last. By the 1540s, both Lefèvre and Marot were accused of heresy for their unauthorized translations of Scripture. Marguerite, too, wrote a dangerous book, “Miroir de l’Âme Pecheresse,” in 1531. The “Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” in which the sinner turns to Scripture for guidance and inner absolution, was banned.

Opposition to les nouvelles idées was not merely a matter of Church and State cracking down on independent spirits. The overwhelming majority of the French population, like the king of France himself and Marguerite de Navarre, were Catholics, loyal to the Church of Rome.

When, on the morning of the Fête-Dieu of 1533, the inhabitants of Alençon discovered the beloved statues of saint Claude and the Sainte Vierge hanging from a gutter above the street, the scandalous news spread to Paris. The feast day celebrates the Holy Sacrament of Communion. Throughout France, it was a popular occasion to process through the streets with the Sacrament in an ostensoir and patron saints held high.

The court in Alençon, like the town itself heavily Protestant, scolded the malefactors and let them free. This was too much for the Parlement of Paris, staunchly Catholic. Neither the Holy Virgin, nor Saint Claud, nor the Sacrament of Communion were to be publicly mocked.  They prodded the king to his duty. A special commission overrode the justices of Alençon. It condemned the leading blasphemers to “sentence de torture et question extraordinaire et sentence définitive” -- gruesome public torture and death.

In Normandy, the executions were the beginning of an escalation of provocation and violent reprisal. Shortly thereafter in Rouen, “libelles” denouncing the sanctity of Holy Communion were found pasted on houses, inside churches, and even in the Palais, seat of the Echiquier, the  Norman Parlement.

The bishop of Rouen held a procession. Bells tolled. Sacred relics, crosses, statues, banners and the Holy Sacrament itself were carried through the streets in penitence. The Parlement and local dignitaries joined the throngs. The gates of Rouen were locked.

The unfortunate printer deemed responsible for the leaflets was sentenced for heresy and given a ghastly death over hot coals.

Over the next decades, a succession of kings and their mother, Catherine de Medici, attempted to calm religious passions with édits de tolération. These were usually resented by both sides and eventually flouted.

By the year of Léonore and Artus’ marriage in 1562, Normandy was on the brink of violent religious controversy. And the Temple of Courtomer had not even been built.

“Just one question,” Monsieur Martyn asked, as I set down my virtual pen and stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.

Ah! Transubstantiation?  The Real Presence?

“If you could just let me know about these trees.”

Just before the Easter weekend, 18 trees had arrived from a nearby pépinieriste. These are to complete the lines of linden trees that will circumscribe the Temple and its adjoining field.

For now, the story of Léonore and Artus Saint-Simon and the Protestant Temple of Courtomer must wait.

Surrounded by daffodils and tulips, magnolias and forsythia brightly blooming, it seems best to set aside the tumult of times past. As even Calvin would agree, Easter brings a joyful new start.

A bientôt au Chateau,

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P.P.S. At Chateau de Courtomer, we are taking bookings for 2025 and 2026. We still have a few opening for the Chateau, Orangerie and Farmhouse for 2024. Soon, we hope to open our "petite maison," the gatekeeper's cottage.

Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates. And Jane will be happy to preview the property on site. She can also act as your concierge.

English and French spoken.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Let the bells ring...à la joie!