by Susie Kelly
We followed a well-maintained cycling path for a couple of miles into dark woods. Just as we were remarking what a fine track it was, it came to an unannounced and abrupt halt on the edge of a shallow ravine. Across a gulf of about twenty feet a group of workmen were breaking stones, and a merry voice shouted, unexpectedly, in English: “Jump!”
Terry and I smiled at each other, turned our bikes, retreated fifty yards down the path, and took deep breaths. Then, pedalling furiously, we hurtled towards the chasm, took off at the edge and sailed effortlessly through the air, landing with small thuds on the opposite bank, to the tumultuous applause of the workers standing there.
Of course we didn’t. Not really. I’m just being silly. Instead we waved and turned back until we found a very bumpy track through the woods, culminating in a fallen tree over which we had to haul our bikes, and from there through a quiet residential area and back onto the main road. The river Marne makes a long sinuous loop northwards at Meaux, and following it to our next destination would have entailed an impractically long ride, so we opted instead to keep to the road for this stretch. Although busy with heavy traffic, it was wide and straight with good visibility, and forewarned by the bright Day-glo orange flag that flapped from a 3 ft. high pole behind my saddle, passing vehicles gave us plenty of room.
The sun came out. Our hideous cycling helmets offered no protection to our faces, and when we arrived in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre my upper eyelids were a bright powdery pink from constant dabbing at incessant tears caused by the wind in my face, and my cheeks were a glowing raspberry tone from a combination of sunburn and chapping. The differing shades blended harmoniously with my beetroot-coloured hair. There were only head-height mirrors in the campsite’s washing rooms, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to see face and body in the same frame.
You couldn’t find a cleaner, quieter, more peaceful town than La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. Sitting astride the river Marne and its tributary le Petit Morin, in a well-mannered, tidy way, with a pretty park and neat streets, it has the appearance of a sleepy place where nothing has ever happened; whose sole purpose might be as a commuter town for Parisian workers.
But for nearly 400 years, from the 15th century until early in the 1920s, La Ferté-sous-Jouarre had bustled with activity, producing the finest millstones in the world, exported all over Europe and as far as North America. The locally quarried stone was used to create French Burr millstones, which, with their unique composition, were able to grind out all the goodness from the wheat, leaving virginally white flour. While quarry owners flourished and built fine houses, the lives of the workers were hard and frequently short. They worked with sledgehammers and crowbars extracting lumps of stone from the quarries in all weathers – except when it was too cold, when they didn’t work, and didn’t get paid – and if the stone-dust which clogged up their lungs didn’t finish them off, the cheap wine they drank to drown their miseries probably did.
The quarries of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre did not yield sufficiently large pieces of stone to make whole millstones; instead the pieces were shaped into wedges, cemented together to form discs, and bound around the circumference with iron. Strangely, La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre does not make any apparent effort to advertise its heritage as the producer of the very best of one of the most useful items known to man. Had we not known about it before we arrived, we would have remained ignorant, because we didn’t find any evidence or mention of the millstone industry in the town, apart from one large and very old specimen half-buried in grass at the entrance to the campsite.
What we did find is that the Fertois are the most hospitable people. The campsite gardien and his wife were warmly welcoming, and suggested that they charge my bike’s battery in their office overnight, so that we would not need to pay for electricity. In the town centre we asked an elderly gentleman where we could find a supermarket. He seemed delighted to find himself talking to English visitors, and equally delighted that he was able to tell us the supermarket was no more than one minute’s walk away. He grabbed our hands and pumped them energetically, wishing us bon weekend and turning every so often to wave as he toddled off into the distance. The cashiers in the supermarket were just as cheerful and friendly, and so were all the people we passed in the streets as we cycled around admiring the elegant three-storey houses, mostly built of flint tied in with red brick corners, and pointy slate roofs with spikes upon them.
There is also a pretty Byzantine building, originally a synagogue, built in 1890 for the town’s growing Jewish community as they migrated westwards from the German annexation of the Alsace region. Over the next few decades many of these early immigrants evolved from traders into professionals and artists, and moved to larger towns, or the capital. During the Second World War, members of the Jewish community were sent to German death camps, and after the war only a few Ashkenazim remained in the town. Orthodox Jews and Sephardic Jews arriving from North Africa preferred to worship in Meaux, and so La Ferté-sous-Jouarre’s synagogue deteriorated from neglect. Now it belongs to the town and houses an art gallery and museum for the work of local artist André Planson, a painter of bold, vivid landscapes and equally bold females usually depicted baring their upper assets.
The afternoon sunshine was short-lived, and developed into a dreary grey evening. We were not greatly looking forward to the prospect of spending another long cold night under canvas, so killed some time cycling around the town again, and along the banks of the river, until just before darkness fell, when we set up our new tent. At least it was comfortably spacious, but even snuggled together beneath the polar blanket, the rustling aluminium blanket, our jackets and the flysheet of the borrowed tent, we were still shiveringly cold. Next morning we were slow, like reptiles emerging from hibernation, and it was eleven o’clock before we cycled out of the site in timid sunshine, entrusting the borrowed tent to the gardien, to be collected on our return in two weeks’ time.
It started raining again. We cycled along for twelve miles through open countryside with no distinguishing features other than its featurelessness, until we arrived in Viels-Maisons. On the face of it this very small town seemed like the sort of place that you would pass through without noticing that it was there. There were no shops, not even – quelle horreur – a bakery. Just a post office, a Mairie and a few houses. It didn’t look as if anything notable ever had or ever would happen there. However, within the uninspiring bosom of Viels-Maisons is a treasure chest, a Pandora’s box of delights. If you can find the sign, and follow it down a very narrow alleyway, you will find yourself at the magnificent gardens of Madame de Ladoucette, in the grounds of her château.
As we reached the entrance to the gardens two things happened simultaneously: Madame de Ladoucette arrived in an electrically driven golf cart, and the sun suddenly burst into life. Madame is a handsome woman with a very direct gaze, and I imagine a will of steel. I pictured her having a stern word with the Lord, reminding him that it was now early May. We’d already had several months of rain and cold and she expected him to do something about it, and quickly. It seemed that he had listened and obeyed.
Madame de Ladoucette guided a group of a dozen of us around her splendid estate, talking in her native French and equally fluently in English. She had recently broken her ankle, and was encased in plaster almost to her knee, hence the golf cart, but she dismissed her injury as “Nothing – people have much worse.” With the help of just one other lady she had created, and maintains a family of gardens living in harmony behind her white, classically elegant château. Of the original building only the portico had survived the Revolution, unlike the owner at the time, who had not. The château gazes lovingly at its reflection in the pond, framed by varieties of blue and white plants dipping their toes into, or sipping from the water.
Most of the ten diverse gardens appear deceptively natural – the kind of effect only achieved by carefully designed and knowledgeable planning and planting. Resplendent rhododendrons, leafy, quiet water gardens, arbours
and herbaceous borders blended into one another. At the bottom of a slope is a cool, mysterious area of water and ferns; leathery ferns and feathery ferns; giant-leaved gunneras and slender reeds; in the dappled shade, on a floating piece of bark, a frog sat with a contented smile on his shiny green face.
The English garden consists of a number of flowerbeds, each in three colours, and each bed carrying over one colour to its neighbour. Next to the virginal white garden is an analemmatic sundial, an unusual and ingenious timepiece formed by a semi-circle of slabs set into the ground to represent the daylight hours, and a line of slabs on which are inscribed dates, which joins the semi-circle, like the trunk of a tree. If you stand on the slab bearing the current date your shadow becomes the “dial” of the clock and points to the stone showing the current time. By adding an hour for summer, and some extra minutes that are engraved on the slabs, the result gives an accurate reading of the time.
The most formal of the gardens is that of the Parish Priest. By tradition it contains seven elements: flowers for the church; fruit and vegetables for the priest’s table; medicinal plants for the sick; water for the birds and garden; vines to produce the wine for Mass; box, the symbol of eternity, and a statue of the Virgin Mary. This garden is laid out in thirty-two equal rectangles contained within four squares, skilfully designed so that each square is a mirror of its geographic opposite in colour. Seen from a bird’s perspective, it would resemble a tapestry of subtle pinks, blues and yellows.
In the introduction to her book ‘Les Jardins de Viels-Maisons’ Madame de Ladoucette writes how she was inspired to create her glorious gardens as a means of attracting visitors to the family’s beautiful 11th century church, a church that was seldom used.
Together with a lady landscape gardener, she achieved her vision. Then the terrible storm that swept through France at the end of 1999 destroyed more than 500 trees in her garden. Entire roofs from nearby houses were blown into the flowerbeds causing absolute devastation. A lesser woman might have put their head in their hands and wept to see eight years of hard work ruined. But Madame is not that kind of woman. I have a vision of her rolling up her sleeves (she is a hands-on gardener, not one who leaves the work to somebody else), and going round with a wheelbarrow shovelling up the mess while writing a list of replacement plants to order. Replacing the 540 trees brought down in the pinewood would maybe have taxed even her determination. Instead she created her Grandchildren’s Wood where each girl has a spring foliage tree, and each boy one with autumn colours. This is explained on a small blackboard, on which the number of grandchildren had recently risen – twenty-two had been erased and replaced with twenty-three.
Although spending two hours walking round a garden would normally bore Terry, who has an exceptionally short attention span unless he’s looking at engines of war, boats or aeroplanes, he found the gardens of Viels-Maisons a perfect place for photography, and didn’t fidget once.
The adjective that comes to mind when I think of Madame de Ladoucette is ‘redoubtable’ – the huge house, the enormous gardens, all those little children’s names to remember. Plus she has time to spend talking to all the people who visit the beautiful gardens that are one of her great passions. If you would like to visit, it’s only one hour’s drive from Paris, and the gardens of Viels-Maisons are open from 1st June to 20th September, from 14.00 to 18.00, every day except Wednesday and Thursday.
I imagined that Marie-Antoinette would have delighted in the gardens of Viels-Maisons. With her love of informality and flowers, and Madame de Ladoucette’s aristocratic bearing and easy confidence, they would have been entirely relaxed with each other, walking slowly around arm in arm, stopping often to admire and discuss the plants. The Queen could have forgotten, for a little while, her troubles and the need for speed. But the gardens weren’t created until two hundred years after Marie-Antoinette and her family passed by.
During their flight, they too had stopped at Meaux and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, to change horses, and again at Viels-Maisons, where Louis stretched his legs around the town square.
When we had finished our exploration of the gardens the sun was blazing down and our clothes were steaming as we set off to the next staging post, Montmirail.
CHAPTER SIX
An Abundance of Railway Stations
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” Ernest Hemingway
AS the wide-screen horizons of the plains morphed into a steeply undulating switchback we breathed hard hauling uphill, and laughed with excitement on the high-speed downhill swoops. While we cycled conversation with Terry was seldom possible as I couldn’t maintain his speed, and he was usually far ahead of me. So I amused myself by speculating on the royal occupants of the great carriage as they trundled eastward. Imperturbable Louis, I imagined, would have been reminiscing about their triumphal journey along this road in 1775, on the way to his consecration in Reims. He’d be recalling the fine meals he had enjoyed, and discussing the suitability of the landscape for hunting, while Marie-Antoinette listened dutifully, prompting him, behaving as if they were simply out for a joy ride, both of them conscious of the need not to alarm their children, whom the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, would be entertaining with stories and games.
As a family they hadn’t previously travelled any great distance – they didn’t need to since everything that they wanted was right on the doorstep of Versailles. Within just a few miles were the Royal châteaux of Fontainebleau, St Cloud, Rambouillet, La Muette in the Bois de Boulogne, Meudon, Choisy, Compiègne and Marly. Whilst the Queen herded her sheep and carried milking cans around her little hamlet, her husband could satisfy his passion for hunting by moving from one château to another without ever going far afield.
Marie-Antoinette’s brother, the Austrian emperor Joseph II had criticised Louis for not travelling around his kingdom and introducing himself to its towns and people. Maybe if Louis had listened to that advice and met more of his subjects he might not have aroused so much hatred. As they fled for their lives, the family must have been asking themselves and each other where they had gone wrong. Neither of them was unkind; there are no records of Marie-Antoinette slapping or pinching anybody, but many instances of thoughtfulness and generosity. Nevertheless she had made enemies in every quarter, and it seemed that she could do nothing right. Although she favoured informality, both in dress and behaviour, the court was scandalised when she dressed simply, and by doing away with much of the tedious etiquette she angered the aristos who lost their jealously guarded positions around her. If she wore extravagant clothing all the ladies of the court aped her, and their husbands complained that she was driving them to ruin. When she retreated to the modest Petit Trianon to entertain her close friends in the simple way they enjoyed, those nobles who were not invited were resentful and circulated slanderous and unfounded stories about her behaviour there. And, most unforgivable of all, she was foreign. Even as wife to the French king and mother of the heir, she was and always would be an outsider. But the early, clumsy union of the two teenagers had developed into a relationship of genuine affection and, extraordinarily for the time, Louis was faithful to his wife. What had begun as a mechanical mating machine had become a caring liaison between two very different and mismatched people, united in their devotion to their children, and strengthened by their misfortunes.
He may not have been a very good king, but Louis was not a bad man. He was courteous to everyone, regardless of their rank. Nobody ever accused him of any act of cruelty – unless you count chasing wild animals to their death.
Frederic Grunfeld, in his Treasures of The World: The French Kings, portrays a kindly, humane king who wanted to improve the lives of the poor and underprivileged. Louis XVI aboli
shed the forced unpaid labour previously imposed upon the peasants. He banned the use of torture as a means of extracting confessions. Under his rule Protestants, discriminated against since the time of Louis XIV, were tolerated, and the hitherto harsh taxation of Jews was lifted. Unfortunately his good intentions were too late to save him from the anger of his people caused by the excesses of his ancestors.
If the fates had been kinder to him, Louis XVI would never have been king, but it seems as if the gods were set upon picking off the French monarchy one by one. He was the last-but-one link in a chain of catastrophically bad luck for the House of Bourbon. It began with his great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV, the Sun King, who inherited the French throne at the age of five and reigned for 72 years. Louis XIV’s son predeceased him – the first link in the chain of disaster – and so did his grandson, the second link. It was thus the Sun King’s five-year-old great-grandson who ascended the throne as Louis XV. He had two sons, and in the normal course of events one of them would have taken over the reins when his father died after almost sixty years on the throne. But both his sons died before him – two further links in the bad-luck chain. The oldest of them left five sons, of whom the two eldest died in childhood – the final two links in the chain that left the third sibling to become the unfortunate Louis XVI on his grandfather’s death. If all these characters had not been called Louis it would have been a great deal less confusing, and if tuberculosis hadn’t been so rife during their lifetimes then most of these people would not have died when they did. Louis would have ended up as a minor prince far removed from the throne.