CHÂTEAU DES ROCHERS
The name of Mme. Sévigné rings through the ages. Vitré is full of it.
Inhabitants will point out, close to the ruined ramparts, the winter
palace where the _spirituelle Marquise_ received the Breton nobility
and sometimes the Kings of Brittany. To the south they will show you
the Château des Rochers, the princely country residence maintained by
this famous woman. She was a Breton of the Bretons, building and
planting, often working in the fields with her farm hands. She loved
her Château des Rochers. It was a joy to leave the town and the
gaieties of Court for the freshness of the fields and the woods. She
especially liked to be there for the 'Triomphe du mois de Mai'--to
hear the nightingale and the cuckoo saluting spring with song. With
Lafontaine, she found inspiration in the fields; but, as she preserved
a solid fund of Gaelic humour, she laughed also, and the country did
not often make her melancholy. She felt the sadness of autumn in her
woods; but she never became morose. She never wearied of her garden.
She had always some new idea with regard to it--some new plan to lure
her from a letter begun or a book opened. Before reading the memoirs
of Mme. Sévigné it is almost impossible to realize this side of her
nature. Who would have imagined that this woman of the salons, fêted
in Paris, and known everywhere, would be always longing for her
country home? It is only when you visit the famous Château des Rochers
that you realize to the full that she was a lover of nature and
country habits. Wandering through the old-world garden, you find
individual touches which bring back the dainty Marquise vividly to
mind. There are the venerable trees, under which you may wander and
imagine yourself back in the time of Louis XIV. There are the deep and
shady avenues planted by Mme. Sévigné, and beautiful to this day. The
names come back to you as you walk--'La Solitaire,' 'L'Infini,'
'L'honneur de ma fille'--avenues in which madame sat to see the sun
setting behind the trees. Very quiet is this garden, with its broad
shady paths, its wide spaces of green, its huge cedars growing in the
grass, and its stiff flower-beds. There is Mme. Sévigné's sundial, on
which she inscribed with her own hand a Latin verse. There are
the stiff rows of poplars, like Noah's Ark trees, symmetrical,
interlacing one with the other, unnatural but dainty in design. There
is her rose garden, a rounded and terraced walk planted with roses.
There, too, are the sunny 'Place Madame,' the 'Place Coulanges,' and
'L'Écho,' where two people, standing on stones placed a certain
distance apart, can hear the echo plainly. This garden, with its stiff
little rows of trees, its sunny open squares surrounded by low walls,
and its stone vases overgrown with flowers, brings back the past so
vividly that one asks one's self whether indeed Mme. Sévigné is there
no longer, and glances involuntarily down the avenues and the by-ways,
half expecting to distinguish the rapid passage of a majestic skirt.
What a splendid life this woman of the seventeenth century led! She
knew well how to regulate mind and body. The routine of the day at Les
Rochers was never varied, and was designed so perfectly that there was
rarely a jar or a hitch. She rose at eight, and enjoyed the freshness
of the woods until the hour for matins struck. After that there were
the 'Good-mornings' to be said to everyone on her estate. She must
pick flowers for the table, and read and work. When her son was no
longer with her she read aloud to broaden the mind of his wife. At
five o'clock her time became her own; and on fine days, a lacquey
following, she wandered down the pleasant avenues, dreaming visions of
the future, of God and of His providence, sometimes reading a book of
devotions, sometimes a book of history. On days of storm, when the
trees dripped and the slates fell from the roof,--on days so wet and
gray and wild that you would not turn a dog out of doors--you would
suppose the Marquise to become morbid and miserable. Not at all. She
realized that she must kill time, and she did so by a hundred
ingenious devices. She deplored the weather which kept her indoors,
but fixed her thoughts on the morrow. Ladies and gentlemen often
invaded her; all the nobility came to present their compliments. They
assailed her from all sides. When she resisted them, and strove to
shut herself away from the world, the Duke would come and carry her
away in his carriage.
[Illustration: A LITTLE WATER-CARRIER]
She always longed to return to her solitude--to her dear Rochers,
where her good priest waited, at once her administrator, her man of
affairs, her architect, and her friend. Her pride of property was
great, and she was constantly beautifying and embellishing her country
home. Each year saw some new change. On one occasion six years passed
without her visiting Les Rochers. All her trees had become big and
beautiful; some of them were forty or fifty feet high. Her joy when
she beheld them gives one an insight into her youthfulness.
How young she was in some things! She often asked herself whence came
this exuberance. She drew caricatures of the affectations of her
neighbours, and the anxious inquiries of her friends as to her
happiness during her voluntary exile amused her immensely. In a letter
written to her daughter she said:
'I laugh sometimes at what they call "spending the winter in the
woods." Mme. de C---- said to me the other day, "Leave your damp
Rochers." I answered her, "Damp yourself--it is your country that is
damp; but we are on a height." It is as though I said, Your damp
Montmartre. These woods are at present penetrated by the sun whenever
it shines. On the Place Madame when the sun is at its height, and at
the end of the great avenue when the sun is setting, it is marvellous.
When it rains there is a good room with my people here, who do not
trouble me. I do what I want, and when there is no one here we are
still better off, for we read with a pleasure which we prefer above
everything.'
The prospect of spending a winter at Les Rochers did not frighten her
in the least. She wrote to her daughter, saying, 'My purpose to spend
the winter at Les Rochers frightens you. Alas! my daughter, it is the
sweetest thing in the world.'
Mme. Sévigné was always thinking of her daughter, and of Provence,
where she lived. Her heart went out to her daughter. Everything about
Les Rochers helped her to remember her beloved child. Even the country
itself seemed to bring back memories, for the nights of July were so
perfumed with orange-blossoms that one might imagine one's self to be
really in Provence. Mme. Sévigné wrote in a letter to one of her
friends:
'I have established a home in the most beautiful place in the world,
where no one keeps me company, because they would die of cold. The
abbé goes backwards and forwards over his affairs. I am there thinking
of Provence, for that thought never leaves me.'
[Illustration: WEARY]
The château in which this wonderful woman lived, whence started so
many couriers to Provence, is an important building, gray, a little
heavy with towers, with high turrets of slate and great windows.
Resembling most houses built in the Louis XIV. style, it is rather sad
in design. At the side is a chapel surmounted by a cross, a rotund
hexagonal building constructed in 1671 by the Abbot of Coulanges.
Inside it is gorgeous with old rose and gold. One can imagine the
gentle Marquise kneeling here at her devotions.
Visitors are shown the bedroom of Mme. Sévigné, now transformed into a
historical little sanctuary. The furniture consists of a large
four-post bed, with a covering of gold and blue, embroidered, it is
said, by the Countess of Grignan. Under a glass case have been
treasured all the accessories of her toilet--an arsenal of feminine
coquetry: brushes, powder-boxes, patch-boxes, autograph letters,
account-books, her own ink-stand, books written in the clear,
delicate, legible handwriting of the Marquise herself.
The walls are hung with pictures of the family and intimate friends,
some of which are very remarkable. This room was called by Mme.
Sévigné the 'green room.' It still has a dainty atmosphere. Here Mme.
Sévigné passed a great part of her life. Under a large window is a
marble table where she is supposed to have written those letters which
one knows almost as well as the fables of Lafontaine. Mme. Sévigné
coloured the somewhat cold though pure language of the seventeenth
century, but not artificially. She animated it, conveyed warmth into
it, by putting into her writings much that was feminine, never
descending to the 'precious' or to be a blue-stocking. The books that
she loved, and her correspondence, did not take up so much of her time
that she had to overlook the details of her domain. Sometimes she had
a little fracas with her cook; often she would be called away to
listen to the complaints of Pilois, her gardener, a philosopher. She
knew how to feel strongly among people who could feel only their own
misfortunes and disgraces. She had a true and thoughtful soul. This
one can tell by her letters from Les Rochers, which come to us in all
their freshness, as if they had been written yesterday.
[Illustration: THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE]
[Illustration: IN THE INGLENOOK]