A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  You can still guess at what the house was once. Some of the furniture is left, a couple of the rugs terribly battered. No paintings, of course. We can’t think in terms of restoring it. It would be difficult and the result would be most uncomfortable without a slew of servants. What is making me most impatient right now is the wait for the stuff I’ve ordered so that I can put up bookshelves, so that we can get all the books out of closets, cupboards and attic, and look into them.

  We’re off this morning to Honfleur, or Caen, or a castle to look at Delacroix paintings and a moat—depending on the weather in half an hour.

  Now. The room in which I am sitting is the world’s perfect guest room.…

  “There were eight in Tante Margot’s generation that Julia could tell you of,” I said to Margaret and Ruth. “One male, who got the house, and seven females, including Suzette and Charlotte’s mother, who lived the next town over, and Thérèse’s mother. The Lafontaines’ house”—I pointed to it; we’d been walking along the road, uphill, in the direction of the town, between steeply rising fields bordered with fern, thistles, nettles, or horsetail, under the dripping trees that lined the road, Andalouse always keeping to the middle, as indifferent to the rain as if it were mere chickens—“there, on the left, the funny-looking brick one with the steep roof and the hundred chimneys and enough windows to qualify as a château—we thought of it as Victorian, but it’s really late sixteenth-century and has a tennis court somewhere. It gets called either La Maison Mère or Le Château Lafontaine.”

  “It’s younger than yours,” Ruth said.

  “Depending on whom you believe,” I warned. “But it was built to be splendid, unlike ours, which had its splendor thrust upon it.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  We continued uphill, our rubber boots clunking on the pavement or squelching in the mud beside it, and crossed the spring from which we had drawn our drinking water that first summer, in three-foot-tall plastic pitchers that we hauled back to Tante Margot’s chaumière. Off to our right, from a vantage point in the road high enough that we could see straight across the valley as far as my house, the swirl of caked mud in a drive showed the industry of the Bouquerels’ farm. Year-round residents of the town, they did dairy, the whole business, as it used to be done on my land—or rather, the land that I realized I was accidentally thinking of as mine. We drank in the scents of dairy, and grass, and earth, and rain, with woodsmoke wreathing through it.

  “There’s your house,” Margaret said, rubbing it in. She pointed back at the black cube shining in the rain; Ben’s smoke wiggled upward from the chimney on the far end from us, crows wheeling around it as if it carried something edible. “It just takes your heart and gives it a good jerk, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “And from here, the prospect pleases. It looks perfect from this spot,” Margaret said. “There’s nothing like it in Cambridge. Not even in Brooklyn.”

  We went past the café, which in the twenties had been a one-room grocery store in a house the rest of which was lived in, as was still the case. Outside the café, on the small flagstone terrace across from the church, stood a few plastic tables and chairs of the type that collects half a cup of rainwater in the seat. Striped umbrellas spread open above the tables dripped rain. Within the café’s open doorway, two men in blue were improving the morning with a smoke and a drink, and talking with madame at the bar.

  The church of Notre Dame, where our first three children had made their First Communions (though none of them more than once), sat in its churchyard in a Y of roads. Other than this and the café, there was not much commercial (or institutional) activity left in Mesnil, really. The string of small residences that had once held shops were now only residences. Out of sight from where we stood, the new school built after the war functioned only occasionally, as a salle des fêtes (festival hall). I told Margaret and Ruth how I had spent the longest afternoon of my life there the summer Julia and I swore to take advantage of every cultural occasion offered (free).

  Someone discovered there was to be a Grand Festival de la Musique on a Sunday afternoon and off we went, taking whatever guest was with us at the time, and whatever children we had. We packed into the very middle of the room, which was filled with many strangers as well as everyone in the town, including old M. Lafontaine and Mme., who had long since celebrated their noces d’or (golden wedding anniversary). The chairs were small and hard, and the first half of the concert turned out to be accordion music played by children scrubbed and dragged in from far and wide. Each child, and each child’s selection, was introduced by a smooth professional emcee in a tuxedo. Although he was only from Lisieux, he could have been an import from Miami, or from outer space, he was so slick. All wore their best, and the occasion had the aura of a major event, almost as important as a First Communion, but one done for TV. Two thirds of the children played “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” which we were already too familiar with in the French milieu, since as part of its lurch into the vernacular in obedience to Pope John XXIII, the church we attended on Sundays had been inflicting on the congregation a sing-along folk Mass in which such popular tunes as “Oh, Susannah” and “Turkey in the Straw” had been subverted to sacred words in French. Even the Sanctus was sung, in French, to the tune of “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys Are Marching.” In our favorite, the Alleluia was substituted for “She’ll Be Comin’…”: our knowledge of the alternate English version got in the way of our piety, and our children gurgled and snorted with rising merriment each time she came around again.

  First Communion of Sadie, 1976. (Left to right, Frances Kilmer, with Christopher, Sadie, and Maizie; Fr. Robert Murray center.)

  So two thirds of the starched children played “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” and two thirds of them played “Lady of Spain,” and each time the selection was announced with a straight face by the emcee with his microphone; and the other two thirds played “Oklahoma!,” but very slowly, because “Oklahoma!” was hard on the accordion. Nobody was limited to a single selection, though, so there was a great deal of variety as well—as far as there can be any variety at all, that is, in an accordion concert played by children. I left after the first half, plunging through the crowd during the intermission and skipping the vin d’honneur, after learning that in the second half, the same or different children were going to take advantage of the Gounod portatif organ, which had been lugged across the graveyard from the church. Julia stayed, with half our party; Julia was always more gregarious than I.

  Next to the salle des fêtes was the mairie, open for one hour every Wednesday, which had notices of local importance tacked to its outside wall, describing hunting season and trash day.

  “If the church isn’t used, it can’t be open,” Ruth said, “can it?”

  The square eighteenth-century tower with its slate domed cap, which stood at the church’s stern, contained a bell that, I told Margaret and Ruth, was connected historically to our house, “or to a former owner of it—whether the Mesnier-Bréards or someone else, I don’t know. But it’s a story that should be true, since it came from Monsieur Chevalier.”

  At that very moment, just as we were crossing the road, Thérèse Chevalier came out of the church carrying a notebook. After the requisite introductions and greetings, which took place in the rain and in the road, she confided to me, “I had to get back to my research.” Her car, she said, was parked around back, next to the presbytery. We followed her into the church. The smell of limestone and damp was reminiscent of my downstairs kitchen, with a touch of incense added.

  16 août 1968

  Yesterday they had Mass at the Mesnil church which is dear [Julia’s mother wrote her friend. She had just arrived and was eager to make sense of her surroundings], with painted wood beams from Viking times of dragons. Land owners of importance were sort of part of it. They are a very old club here. Kenton [Kilmer, my father] went to an annual dinner once. Sort of elders, I think. [Julia’s mother was tr
ying to understand Mesnil’s chapter of the Frères de Charité.]

  After church I met half of the area, most of whom are in one way or another Lafontaines. Mostly I am confused and tomorrow we go to someone’s open house. They will remember me but I will not remember them.…

  “Of course I remember Julia’s mother!” Thérèse exclaimed. “She was always having such a good time. How could anyone forget Mrs. Norris?” And then she was off, eagerly adopting the two new students I had brought her, feeding them what history she could in the brief time allotted.

  The inside of the church was rather sad, being so unused. Thérèse had obtained the key, which was twice the size of the one to my kitchen door, because she had wanted to check a date from one of the marbles inside. The church was small, with a barrel-vaulted roof supported on transverse beams whose gilded and painted ends were carved into dragons’ heads. Nobody could say when the heads had been carved, but the gilding, like the paintings copied from Philippe de Champagne’s Nativity in Rouen, dated from the restoration project of 1874.

  “Naturally it’s the church that ought to keep the history,” Thérèse said. She dragged us halfway up the nave to see the marble tablet on which she had been checking the recorded names and dates of Mesnil’s vicars and curés, starting with Girard Rosney and Guillaume Harenc, vicars, and Vincent Boissel, curé, in 1590. She wasn’t sure the tablet was accurate, and planned to cross-check someone’s dates. She showed us the place where a plaque commemorated the glorious, brief life of one of the string of lords who had held Mesnil in fief to the Viscount of Auge, thence to the king, in the old days: Messire Ann Houel, chevalier, seigneur de Morainville et du Mesnil, killed at twenty-three, in the Battle of Nordlingen in 1645.

  While Thérèse talked, Ruth and Margaret looked around at the late stained-glass windows and the sparse collection of commemorative tablets. Mesnil had not been wealthy, not ever.

  “As far as records go, at least written ones,” Thérèse said, “and we historians always think history is what got written, because that’s all we can find—the first record I have from this parish is dated the thirty-first of January 1693, a dispensation of a bann of marriage for Louis Leprevost of Mesnil. You’ll still find Leprevosts here. Before that—well, a church stood here in the nine or ten hundreds, but I haven’t been able to find anything from that time yet. Church records get lost, too. The first written mention I’ve found of the town is in the cartulary of the Benedictine monastery across the river, at Saint Hymer, in September of 1410, when Huet le Bonnier, of Fierville, took in fief from the monastery’s prior—the prior might as well have been a lord in those days; you can see the revolution coming—a piece of land in Mesnil, for the annual rent of two sous and one capon. That may have been your property, Nick; who knows? It’s all there, all the history, if you just look. In 1777, there was Messire Alexandre Duquesne, the curate of Mesnil. In those days the curates were chosen by the local lord, and by 1777 this curate was evidently not up to the task and so resigned his office back to the lord, who lived not in his château in back of the trees there, but in Caen, in the parish of Saint Julian, where he frisked about under a pile of titles—hold on to your hats—Messire Claude-Jean-Baptiste de Franqueville, chevalier, baron de Morainville, seigneur et patron présentateur du Mesnil, seigneur et patron honoraire de Beuvillers, Livet, le Coullière, Corbon, et autres lieux.

  “After he resigned, Father Duquesne kept half the presbytery that the English people live in now, and a pension of five hundred pounds, as well as some of the presbytery’s rental properties in the commune. The new curate, Messire le Tetu, moved into the other half of the presbytery and got the rest of the parish rents, of which he had to fork over a portion to the bishop—and the bishop a piece to the pope, and so on. My point is this: this was a lot of hoorah for a parish that never had more than thirty hearths to keep warm. When the revolution hit Mesnil, Le Tetu wouldn’t take the constitutional oath but instead hid in England, confiding his furniture to parishioners—the way your grandmother did, Nick, during our war—and not returning until 1803. But what did I want to tell you? Oh, about Duquesne: he was the first curé to be buried not in the church itself but in the churchyard.”

  “We’ll find his grave outside, then,” Ruth said.

  “I doubt it; there’s only so much room. They have to dig us up to make space,” Thérèse said, “you know, after nobody cares anymore. It’s a big graveyard, but we’ve been filling it up for the last thousand years.”

  In the Lady Chapel, under the tablet commemorating those of Mesnil’s sons who had fallen in recent wars, I noticed the folding cart that was used to support the casket during funeral Masses.

  “What was that story you were going to tell, the one my father told you?” Thérèse asked, poised to remind me that her father’s preferred medium was hearsay rather than documentary history.

  TWENTY-NINE

  We stood in the vestibule and looked out into the dripping churchyard through the open door. Andalouse padded in and out, exploring in the thick grass, its tips silvered with large drops that gathered size before rolling down further. Above us rose a chorus of votive marble plaques, each a souvenir of thanks or recognition to a saint—most often Sainte Thérèse, the Little Flower, Lisieux’s answer to Queen Victoria. Her basilica overlooking the train station in Lisieux far outshone the Crystal Palace.

  “I can’t put on your father’s Algerian hat, or smoke his Gauloise, or make it funny,” I apologized, “but I’ll do my best. If the church’s tower is eighteenth-century, so is the story, because it has to do with the bell—but no, stupid of me, we’ve got to accommodate a railroad, too, so shift the date to the late eighteen hundreds, after the Mesnier-Bréards.

  “Whoever owned or rented my house at the time was a Freemason, and therefore emphatically anything but Catholic. The parish of Mesnil was in a frenzy of celebration over the anticipated arrival, by train, of the new bell for the church tower—which, coming from Paris, had to be routed through Lisieux. The Bishop of Caen himself had come to join the parishioners, who went down in procession, with a cart and horses and led by the Frères de Charité in their ribbons and torchères, to meet the bell at the station at Fierville, unload it, and bring it joyfully back to hoist into place. But our predecessor in the house, with some of his Freemason buddies, sabotaged the plan. They arranged for the train not to stop in Fierville but to steam past the reception parade and pull into Pont l’Evêque, where the bell was unloaded with no ceremony beyond the hoots of a few Freemasons.

  “Now you must imagine your father pausing, taking a long drag from his cigarette, and looking at everyone until somebody gave in and said, ‘Yes? And then?’

  “Well, and then the Freemason who lived in my house died, and his mortal coil was uncoiled and sent to the pompes funèbres people in Lisieux to be placed in his casket and readied for burial in Mesnil—in unconsecrated ground, obviously, since he was a Freemason. That meant nothing more than a designated part of the same churchyard that everyone else used; there was only one place a person could be buried in Mesnil, and after all, he had been a neighbor and a citizen. Anyway, the casket was put on the train in Lisieux, and the Freemason’s brothers, in their regalia, and with a horse and cart, paraded down to meet it with all due Masonic pomp at the station at Fierville, where they watched the train clatter by without let or hindrance, to dump the casket in the consigne de bagages outside the stationmaster’s office in Pont l’Evêque.…”

  * * *

  After he died, in September of 1939, my grandfather Frieseke, newly baptized, was buried in a plot chosen for him by the curé and located as near as possible to the children on the north side of the church, under the only remaining vestige of the original structure. This Thérèse pointed out to us, a Romanesque arch with a Saxon-looking zigzag of decoration resembling pointed teeth.

  Sarah Ann O’Bryan, Paris, ca. 1901.

  “He was a man of such innocence,” the curé had said. Of the people who now stood in th
e rain, only Thérèse had known him; I myself had him only through the testimony of his paintings and stories told by others, in which my vivid grandmother tended to predominate.

  I knew him and his attractive wife rather well, back when this century was in its swaddling clothes.… They were a curious couple in a way, with diametrically opposite characters and, as frequently happens, were devoted to each other. He was slightly introvert, a profound reader, with rather strong opinions which however he generally managed to keep in rein. She was … pretty, intelligent, very chic and possessed of a highly developed sense of elfin humor, verging on the diabolic. The following is an illustration of that last quality—an incident which despite their rather retired life [in Paris] got around and had quite a success at the time.

  On a warm, summery day, she was carrying some parcels and window shopping on the Boulevard des Italiens when she realized she was being trailed by a typical boulevardier of the period—top hat, boutonnière, probably a monocle et al. When she stopped to look in a window he seized the opportunity to exclaim dulcetly how deeply it grieved him to see such an exquisite example of femininity loaded down with parcels. Would she not grant him the great favor of being allowed to carry them for her? She would. With one of her alluring smiles she handed them over—and on they strolled. When they came to the Trois Quartiers she said she had one or two other things to get. Would he mind? On the third floor she bought a large, cheap paper lampshade, had it wrapped up and handed it to him. On the way down she espied a very large sponge which was just the thing Freddy had been looking for, bought it and added it to her cavaliere serviente’s collection. Out in the sunshine again, her gallant said “Eh maintenant, chère Madame?” “Maintenant, c’est tout, je crois, chez moi, si vous voulez?” “Parfait! Then if Madame permits, I will call a fiacre.” “Oh, it is such a lovely day and it really isn’t far. Don’t you think it would be nice to walk?” So, walk they did, across the Tuileries, across the Seine, up the Rue du Bac and up the entire length of the Boulevard Raspail and finally up the elevator to their apartment. There she pressed the button and when their maid opened the door, shooed her back, turned to her boulevardier with a last, captivating smile, said “Just a moment, please,” went in, found her husband in his studio in smock and slippers and said, “Freddy, there is a man out there who brought home some parcels for me. Do give him a good tip.”*