Good morning, Francophiles.
On the advice of Zvi, our chief Francophile, Karen and I set out for Chateau des Rochers. This was a preliminary-preliminary trip, to be followed by a preliminary trip with Zvi, and after that, an in-depth tour, with those of you who want to join us.
I’m just asking. Not for me. For a friend. He’s very drawn to his mother. Is there a name for that?
Sure. “Oedipus complex.”
I have another question. Not for me. For a friend. She’s very drawn to her father. Is there a name for that?
Sure. “Electra complex.”
I have another question. Not for me. For my mother. She’s very drawn to her daughter. Is there a name for that?
Enough already!!! Go write a book about it!!!!
Well, there’s already one like that…
On the left, friends, is the cover of Nir Ratzkovsky’s book, A Beloved Daughter. Already the cover is a wonderful work of art. A delicate lace tablecloth. Stained. Stained. Stained. What’s the book about? About a book.
On the right, friends, is the book of letters of the Marquise de Sévigné. Love letters. To her daughter. Nir based his book on this one. It’s time to get acquainted: the Marquise de Sévigné.
Did we set out? We did. It’s about 90 kilometers. An hour’s drive. An hour? Three hundred fifty years separate us. And a great deal of talent in writing. Hers. “And so we set out on our trip…”
Trip Route Map
First, a general orientation:
And now the route and points of interest:
1 Our château.
2 The Fairy Rocks (dolmen).
3 The château of the Marquise de Sévigné, at Les Rochers, near Vitré.
4 Vitré. Vitré. Vitré. (We’ll dedicate a separate article to this place soon).
The road, of course, is beautiful.
La Roche Aux Fées (the Fairy Rock)
Waze knows the place.
The Neolithic period. 5,000 to 2,200 BCE. The great leap had already happened. In fact, it was the last leap forward. The people who lived then were no different from our ancestors. They gave up foraging and hunting in favor of farming, painting, writing.
We made the next leap. A backflip. We gave up farming, painting, writing, in favor of the keyboard, the smartphone, Facebook. We communicate in 😊☹️. But that’s already been said before. Let’s get back to the fairies.
Contrary to popular belief, they’re not that small, and not always nice either.
The main reason they’re not so nice is that we don’t believe in them. “Why do you make such a big deal out of it? Do you believe in us?” I ask. But there’s no one to talk to. Obviously. They don’t exist.
The fairies of Brittany are indeed fairies, but first and foremost, they’re Breton. A Breton woman is no pushover. The fairies of Brittany got up one night, dragged giant rocks, fifty tons each, and built a dolmen. It’s the largest and most impressive dolmen in all of Europe.
“Now they’ll believe us,” they said to each other. We didn’t believe it. “Humans built this,” we said.
“Humans? These are rocks weighing 50 tons each,” the girls laughed. “Indeed, no one knows how, but you don’t exist,” we said.
Honestly, this site feels steeped in more magic than the dolmen itself. Pure sorcery. Picture this: a neat parking lot. A handsome entrance building. Sparkling restrooms. A screening room showing a film about the place. An English-speaking guide who explains things and hands out a brochure with a map. A link to an app that accompanies the tour inside the dolmen. How much does it cost? “Free of charge,” answers the good fairy.
“Wake up, she doesn’t really exist,” Karen scolds me. Fine. I won’t fight with Karen over a fairy.
“Ön létezik,” I whisper to the fairy in Hungarian, so Karen won’t understand. “You exist.”
“Megértettem minden szót,” Karen answers in Hungarian. “I understood every word.”
A place of magic. Better to leave before I turn into a fairy myself. Yes, there are male fairies too. Otherwise how would they multiply? By magic?
“How he had aged, even the hair of his wig had turned gray”
One Francophile said to me, “Why don’t you write about the women of Brittany?” I went looking, and came across the figure of the Marquise de Sévigné. History’s first blogger. A serial letter-writer. Most of them to her daughter, but not only. The letters were compiled into a book. A detailed, exclusive picture of life in Paris, in Provence, and yes, also in Brittany, in the 17th century, just moments before the great Revolution.
I went digging online. First I found the letters in French. Then in English. Then in Hebrew, in Nir’s book.
“I found it!!!” I announced to our Francophile. “Of course. In Nir’s book,” he replied dryly, and added, “I already wrote about that.” And sent a link to the article about the walking route in Paris following Madame de Sévigné.
I went to check. Bummer. Gone was the Marquise. Gone was the article. Or maybe not?
“It’s about Paris, only about Paris…,” I tried. What, is the Marquise registered in his name at the land registry?
“Fine, write about her outside Paris. Just don’t go anywhere near Île-de-France,” he warned, and just to be safe, sent the map of the region he holds exclusive rights to:
A Few Words About the Marquise de Sévigné
Hundreds, according to another version thousands, of Madame de Sévigné’s letters have survived. But first, a bit about her:
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), was born on February 5, 1626, and died on April 18, 1696. At eighteen she married Henri, Marquis de Sévigné, of Brittany. When she was twenty-five, the Marquis was killed in a duel fought over another woman’s affections. From him she inherited his title and his château at Les Rochers, near Vitré. That’s where we’re heading now.
She had a son and a daughter. The son, Charles, comes across as a classic anti-hero. We’ll get back to him. The daughter, Françoise, married the Comte de Grignan, who was appointed governor of Provence right after the wedding. She moved to live in his château, breaking her mother’s heart in the process. We’ll get to that too. In any case, the Marquise’s letters to her daughter burst, explode, and spray in every direction with an immense love for her daughter.
My correspondence with you is the only happiness of my life.
She writes in one of her letters, and really, in similar words, in all of them. The letters span about 25 years. She wrote almost every day, sometimes twice a day. In her efforts to interest her daughter in the correspondence, she vividly describes life at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, “L’État, c’est moi” (hold on, Zvi, I just mentioned him. Already leaving!!!).
Wikipedia says that in Brittany she admired the simplicity of the peasants’ lives, and was sensitive to their suffering. I didn’t quite see that myself, but I won’t argue with Wikipedia. The letters were published about thirty years after her death, by her granddaughter Pauline. The granddaughter destroyed her mother Françoise’s letters, and prepared copies, accurate or not (a matter of debate), of her grandmother’s letters. But as Nir writes in the afterword of his book, we should thank the granddaughter, who inherited the letters, for the fact that they were published at all.
Wait. The right place to read the letters is where they were written. I’m not allowed near Paris, and Provence is too far. Let’s go to her château near Vitré. Waze knows the château.
The Marquise de Sévigné’s Château
Important: as you come off Route 88, you’ll see two signs. One points right, toward the château. The other points straight north, toward the museum dedicated to the marquise. The road looks blocked, but it isn’t. You can actually drive right up to the museum’s door, which is devoted entirely to the marquise.
Now, as we sit comfortably on the manicured lawn (most of which has become a golf course) and look up at the marquise’s château, we can leaf through her letters, filling in the gaps with what Nir wrote in his book, assuming the mood he captured came straight from letters he didn’t quote directly.
Then again, friends, maybe we shouldn’t sit on the lawn. Not with the marquise watching.
Let’s cross the golf course, with the restaurant behind us, and head to the garden behind the château. It was there, right there, and maybe we can even say: here, right here, Madame de Sévigné used to walk, accompanied by a single guard armed with a rifle, in case of wolves. He surely walked a respectful distance behind her, while she was probably busy composing her next letter to her daughter. Because the garden was magnificent, and it still is today, but her true happiness was found at her writing desk.
We, who aren’t obsessive writers (except for a few of us), would rather stroll through the garden. There may be prettier gardens out there. But Madame de Sévigné never walked through them.
“Cold as a Pumpkin Boiled in Snow”
Let’s go back to Charles, the marquise’s son, Françoise’s older and only brother. We called him the anti-hero earlier. Françoise got their mother’s love. His father, on the other hand, left him his mistress, Ninon de Lanclos. Twenty years after a man died in a duel defending her good name (apparently, even mistresses had a good name to defend back then), our Charles took his place in her bed. He never fought a duel for her; she simply threw him out, claiming he was “as cold as a pumpkin boiled in snow.”
His own mother didn’t think much of him either:
He drinks sin like water… I find nothing good in him.
She gossips about him in a letter to Françoise. And in another letter, she outdoes herself:
He has a soul made of porridge, a body of wet paper, and a heart like a pumpkin boiled in snow.
By Nir’s sharp pen, Charles takes on the apathy and blandness his mother pinned on him, and regrets that he wasn’t more like the cook Vatel.
The story of Vatel, the chef (that’s what we’d call him today, since there are no more cooks, only chefs, just as there are no more gardeners, only landscape architects) to the Prince de Condé, is one of the best in the marquise’s letters.
Listen closely:
The prince hosted Louis XIV at the Château de Chantilly. Twenty-seven tables were set for the guests. It turned out that the last two tables were a bit short on roast meat. Not that there was none at all, just not enough of it. “My honor has been mortally wounded. This is a disgrace I cannot bear,” Vatel said. But he might have borne it, if not for another incident. The next day’s meal called for fish, ordered from several suppliers. Vatel ran into the first supplier to arrive, carrying only two buckets of fish. “Is that all?” Vatel asked. “Yes, sir,” the supplier answered. Vatel didn’t know more and more fish were on their way. He thought that was it. He went up to his room, leaned his sword against the door, and fell on it. He was only wounded twice. On the third try, he managed to pierce his heart.
“Poor Vatel, sacrificing yourself on the altar of perfection…” Charles envies him.
From her château at Les Rochers, near Vitré, the marquise writes to Françoise, who was pregnant again:
As for the chocolate you’re drinking, what can I say… the Marquise de Coëtlogon drank so much chocolate while pregnant last year that she gave birth to a son as black as a devil….
As it turned out, the chocolate didn’t do Françoise any favors either. She didn’t give birth to a black son, but the newborn caught smallpox and died at three weeks old.
“Floating in my little boat, down the slow-moving stream,
far from my château, oh, what folly it does seem!”
(From her letter to Françoise, written from her château in Brittany, after sailing down the Loire to Nantes)
Brittany’s Guerrilla War
Between September 1675 and February 1676, the marquise stayed at her château in Brittany. The region was far from calm. From Rennes in the north to Nantes in the south, the masses, peasants and townspeople alike, had risen up in revolt. Charles reports, by Nir’s pen:
The king’s greed and demands have truly gone beyond all bounds. He is utterly impoverishing our poor province. Brittany is not Burgundy, rich in fields and vineyards, nor Normandy, fattened on cattle, nor Provence, growing orchards of fruit and olive trees. My beloved land is half wild, thick with forests, gray-skied and black-cliffed…
Louis XIV taxed everything. A stamp tax, a tin tax, a tobacco tax, and finally,
The height of the scandal: he threatened to tax salt, the treasure of Brittany’s poor, the only gift the raging ocean gives us, the same ocean that drags our fishing boats down into its depths.
In Rennes, the governor stepped out onto the balcony of his palace to calm the angry residents, who drove him back with a hail of rotten apples. A rumor also spread that his wife, Madame de Chaulnes, had been taken hostage by the mob. That turned out to be false almost immediately, but isn’t the rumor itself enough?
We have a similar anecdote, by the way. A yeshiva student is summoned by his rabbi. “They’re saying you’re sleeping with a married woman,” the rabbi says. “But that’s not true!!!” the student protests. “What? Isn’t it enough that people say it, does it have to be true too?” the rabbi exclaims.
From quiet Provence, the king summons Forbin and Vins, two noblemen, to command an army of mercenaries. Four thousand savage soldiers descend on Brittany. They burn villages, topple church spires, pillage, rape and kill. In Rennes they hang poor people who did nothing wrong. They break men on the torture wheel. The rotten-apple throwers had long since fled into the forests. There, in small bands wearing red caps, they wage a guerrilla war against the king’s soldiers.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), writes to her daughter a short sentence that could, at a stretch, be read as sympathy for the unfortunate:
The rebels of Rennes fled long ago. So the good will suffer because of the wicked.
But right away, the aristocrat in her is revealed:
I find everything fine and good, so long as the four thousand soldiers stationed at Rennes, under the command of Messrs. Forbin and Vins, don’t stop me from walking in my groves, which have grown remarkably beautiful and tall.
I don’t think we should judge her too harshly. She was a product of her time. Her château was one world, and whatever lay beyond it was another. Nir thinks the same: “The horrors that took place just a few leagues from Les Rochers might as well have happened in Denmark,” he writes.
Let’s go back to the family dynamics. What exactly did we have here? Nir dissects it sharply, and serves it up with great taste.
But before that, something brilliant from Nir’s pen, which he puts into Charles’s words to his sister Françoise:
Imagine you write a letter here, on this very desk, and in an instant it appears, exactly as it is, on a table in Paris…
Laughing at us, as if from a safe distance of 350 years back in time.
The family dynamics: on the surface, everything seems clear from the letters themselves. The marquise is utterly consumed by a mad love for her daughter Françoise. She has little regard for her son Charles. Charles envies his sister for their mother’s love, wishing he had some of it for himself, even though he doesn’t think himself worthy of it.
But Nir thinks otherwise.
Françoise tells Charles:
Of the two of us, you’re the one she truly loved.
And what about the love letters she writes to Françoise? Letters that read less like a mother writing to her daughter, and more like a lover writing to his beloved?
On this, Nir puts the following terrible words into Françoise’s mouth:
Oh, the letters… for her, they weren’t a way to convey love. No, they were love itself… I was never really the subject of that love, I was only its object… without the writing and the distance, there would have been nothing at all…
The marquise was in love up to her fair white neck. But not with her daughter. With her own writing.
By the way, both Charles and Françoise died of smallpox. Which reminds me that sometimes, in our innocent nostalgia for times gone by, we forget that even kings and the great of the world, whose lives were lined with almost unimaginable luxury, and whom we envy, had the best doctors in the land, and still couldn’t be spared a simple toothache, let alone death by plague.
I don’t know about you, but I need some fresh air. Let’s pass through the marquise’s museum and continue on to Vitré, but not before we take an admiring look at Madame de Sévigné’s statue in the museum:
Visiting the Château de Rocher
Before we continue on to Vitré, which we’ll cover in an article soon, a few more words about the Château de Rocher. It’s a small, charming château that’s well worth a visit. You’ll find a chapel there that the Marquise de Sévigné built in 1671, a series of furnished rooms, and even a beautiful dress from the period.
So if the marquise has sparked your curiosity too, I highly recommend visiting the château (there are guided tours of the château itself).
You can find more information about tickets, tours and more on this website.
Did you enjoy this article? Want to stay in my château?
Want to discover the Château de Rocher for yourselves, along with quite a few other attractions featured in the various Brittany itineraries we’ve published? You’re welcome to stay at Danny’s manor and turn it into your home base for exploring the region. You can find more information about the château in the article Manoir de la Chausée: staying in a charming manor in Brittany.
And who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and run into the Francophile there, and we can explore Brittany together 🙂
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