Random observation. Today is 10-15-2020.
One of the most engaging paintings done by Monet during his visit to Belle Île in 1886 was a portrait of Francois Hippolyte ("Poly") Guillaume, a rosy-cheeked fisherman--born September 9, 1829--who worked as Monet's porter during Monet's visit.
Monet, who started his career as a caricaturist, was evidently attracted to Poly's very distinctive features.
Today, when describing the hierarchy that stratifies society, we classify individuals or households primarily on income. Thus, we talk about lower class, middle class, upper class, and what defines each class is its income.
Marx argued that society was stratified based on ones relationship to the means of production--that is, are you a capitalist--someone who owns the means of production or are you a worker, a wage-slave, a proletariat? That relationship translates directly into income. People in the upper class own the means of production ("we built it") and have the greatest wealth and income. People in the lower classes labor for the capitalists (or don't work at all.) Their income is the smallest amount that the capitalists can get away with paying them.
However, other factors also matter. When we think about where people fit in the social hierarchy, we also factor in things like how many years of education do you have? What schools did you attend? What kind of work do you do? How influential are you? Whom do you know? What is the source of your wealth? How long has your family been wealthy? Where do you live and in what kind of house? What possessions do you have and how do you behave?
Factors like these are remnants of social stratification in a world we have lost.
In the Ancien Regime, before the disruptions of the 19th century, the world was ordered not by class but by orders or Estates: clergy, nobility, everyone else. It was not quite a caste system but organizing society into the three estates was closer to a caste system than our modern way of ordering people by income.
Members of each of the three medieval orders were defined by their shared qualities, their life-style, and their responsibilities.
The Clergy, the first Estate or order, comprised roughly 2% of the population. Today, clergy are only .2% of the population (depending on how one counts)--so imagine having 10 times the number of clergy around, all Roman Catholic and all dressed in the distinctive garb of the first estate. The clergy played a far more pervasive role in the Ancien Regime then the somewhat toothless clergy we are familiar in our modern world.
The members of the first estate were characterized by a distinctive quality: spirituality. The outward signs of their spiritual character were the tonsure (the shaved head which symbolized the renunciation of the world,) the surplice and the alb. This clerical costume had been decreed by the Council of Trent "so as to show the inward worthiness and rectitude of their morals by the outward propriety of the costume."
The standards to enter a religious community were high--candidates had to be (in theory) righteous, godly and sober, sound in mind and body, born legitimate, and currently single. They had to be able to read and write and have sufficient income that they would not need to beg or earn their income in disreputable ways.
Markets are a delightful feature of French towns. We went to the following towns on this trip: Reims, Sedan, Verdun, Dijon, Vezelay, Beaune and found the markets in Reims, Verdun, Dijon and Beaune.
Image 1: The wonderful deco market of Reims. Of course, with 90% of the city destroyed, the covered market needed to be replaced.
Image 2 & 3: The covered market in Verdun. The day we were there they were having a flea market--a "vide grenier" in French or "empty attic"--and I bought an 18th century faience plate from one of the vendors.
Image 4 & 5: The covered market in Dijon was amazing and vast. Designed by Gustav Eiffel of Tower fame, it was built in four sections joined by skylights. The day we were there, the market was packed with shoppers and spilled out into the streets. You could find every delicacy there--cheese, fruits and vegetables, breads, wines, meats, sausages and tureens, olives, poultry and fish, spices, candy, pickles, flowers--you name it. We bought some spices and sausage. In the streets you could buy clothing, leather goods, textiles, books, toys, jewelry, musical instruments, bric-a-brac, watches.
Image 6 & 7: Beaune's market was also a huge local affair. Its stalls lined the streets of the town. In the center, the covered Halles was packed.
One of the things that I appreciate about the French is their attention to design details. Note the second to last picture of a display of honey and preserves. Even though this market stall was put up at the crack of dawn and would be taken down by 1:00 PM, the owner has carefully arranged his wares.
I believe the only reason we didn't bring back crates of these jams was concern about space to carry the jars and the weight. We bought a gizmo--sort of a coulis pen with a fine point at one end--from a vendor that will allow us to use coulis, fruit syrup, to ornament desserts with scrolls and polka dots, French style.
I have taken these photos from La Depeche.fr because we were not in Toulouse for this year's Fête de la Musique. This is probably a good thing for my hearing, but I feel regret notwithstanding. ...And it was on a Saturday, too.
The Fête de la Musique has been celebrated every June 21 since 1982 in cities throughout France and throughout the world.This year La Fête de la Musique was observed, wiki tells us, in 460 cities in 110 countries. You would imagine that it would have caught on in the US, but I can't find any references.
The Fêtes began soon after Maurice Fleuret--a French composer who observed that "music is everywhere but the concert is nowhere"--became Director of Music and Dance in the French Ministry of Culture. Upon discovering that 50% of French children played a musical instrument, he dreamed up the Fête de la Musique as a way to bring music to the streets, bypassing the concert hall.
The rules are simple: Musicians perform for free, and free public concerts are organized by civic authorities.
In Toulouse, the streets are packed with people, food vendors and musicians. There is music for everyone: a solo blues guitarist, a classical quartet, and, on the Place du Capitole, a big concert that will last until the wee hours. In some ways the Fête de la Musique is particularly satisfying in Toulouse with its small size and musical talent.
Great fun.
More impressionist paintings of daily life. The paintings are by Monet, Renoir and Caillebotte.
There are picnics outside on the grass and picnics on tables (both by Monet.) There are dinners that look formal to us--white linen table clothes, napkins, servants. (Jean Monet is seen in the first two, as a baby in the first and about five or six in the second.) The first is by Monet, the second, of the dining room in his mother's house, is by Caillebotte (who was independently wealthy, one of Monet's benefactors.)
In Renoir's painting, a party of casually dressed young men and women have a party on a boat.
All pictures have bread and wine in them.
A couple days ago, I mentioned the distinctive style of architecture that we saw in Normandy, the long house, just one room deep.
It turns out that the style has a name, la lanterne--because, like a lantern, the style alows light from all sides--and royal connections.
In 1787, Philippe Louis Marc Antoine de Noailles, Prince of Poix, captain of the hounds and governor of Versailles, built a hunting pavillion, La Lanterne, just one room deep, on land at Versailles that Louis XV had given to his father. The principal building is sixty-five feet long and twenty feet wide; its thirty-six windows allow light through most of the day, hence its name. The ground floor has a sitting room, dining room and an office. Upstairs are five bedrooms with baths. Note the decorative pediment in the front. It has two wings (which form the U-shape in the google map view) which serve for the kitchen, service staff and security.
At the time of the Revolution, like everything else, La Lanterne was sold to raise money for the new French state, but it was repurchased by the Crown in 1818. It had American connections, too. The American millionaire playboy and publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Jr, lived there in the late 19th century, and American Ambassador to France, David K. E. Bruce, rented it in the 1950s.
In 1959, President Charles de Gaulle reserved La Lanterne as a secondary residence of the Prime Minister of France, and--redecorated in the early 1960s and outfitted with a swimming pool and tennis courts--it was used by them until 2007 when President Nicholas Sarkhozy appropriated it for himself. Because it is very private and secure (despite being so close to Versailes) François Hollande has retained it for his use as well.
Evidently one of the prime ministers who had lived there commented to Sarkhozy's Prime Minister that in losing La Lanterne he had lost the best part of the job.
I should mention that the Constitution of France specifies a unique governing arrangement; French citizens elect a President (currently François Hollande) but the President shares executive power with a Prime Minister (currently Jean-Marc Ayrault) whom he names. The Prime Minister directs the administration of the State--among other things, he is responsible for its Defense, the execution of its laws, and civil and military appointments--and he chairs over general meetings of the State Council (which may be analogous to our Cabinet, I think.)
1. & 2. Two google views of La Lanterne.
3. & 4. Two views of the central pavilion. Note the deer heads on the entrance gates. Those are original to the Prince de Poix and have recently been restored.
I don't know if the architectural term, la lanterne--referring to a long house, just one room deep, allowing light through most of the day--comes from this hunting lodge, or if the lodge was named for the architectural style.
Update: I should mention that I have visited neither Versailles nor La Lanterne. These views are entirely thanks to the internet. Next summer...
A stone dovecot--the name in French is "colombier" --have a special significance in France. They were regulated by the state through the 18th century, and only nobles or clergy had the right to build one. Lesser men, though they needed to have at least 36 acres of land, had to settle for a "pigeonnier" constructed of wood.
The size of the colombier depended on the size of your estate, roughly one nest per acre. So if you, a modern tourist, see a colombier, you know immediately 1) this was once part of a noble/clerical estate, and depending on its size, 2) how big that estate was.
The colombier at Abbaye de Mortemer dates to the 18th century and has pigeonholes for nearly 1000 pairs. Of course, we already know that this was a monastery, so it had the right to build a colombier, and its size allows us to do a rough estimate of the size of the land attached to the Abbaye: 1000 pairs, approximately 1000 acres.
I am surprised to discover that I didn't take a photo of the exterior so I had to borrow photos from google earth, thank you, photographer, Michel Chéron...though he calls it a "pigeonnier" which, strictly speaking, it was not. I suppose no one really cares about these rank distinctions today.
1) The exterior
2) The placement of the colombier (to the left) with the 17th century refectory and the 12th century cellier in the background. This general area of the monastery grounds contained not only the colombier, but also the mill, the farm buildings and a forge.
3) The interior of the colombier. I took this shot and the next one. So clean. So charming. When we were there, we listened to a recording describing the history of the monastery.
4) Looking up at the pigeonholes. There was a ladder, and if, say, the abbot, wanted squab for dinner or eggs for breakfast, a young monk could scramble up the ladder and grab a bird or two.
Try to imagine this space with 2000 birds nesting in it, the flutter, the dust, the cooing.It must have been amazingly alive.
And, of course, the quantity of bird poop, that natural fertilizer, must have been formidable. I'm sure a regular farm chore was scooping it up and putting it on the fields.
Update: Some of my sources have said that the dovecote dates to the 13th century, others to the 18th century, and yet another (the one that I would probably adopt) proposes that the foundation is 13th century with 18th century additions.
From the air, the pretty geometry of Abbaye St George de Boscherville's gardens is apparent. On the lower left, the black-roofed church is visible (note its Latin Cross shape.) In the center left (that is, to the left of the fountain in the circle) the geometric patterns of the various gardens are visible: vegetable, herb, "potager" (soup), berries. To the right of the fountain, (down the middle) the orchard indicated by the green dots of nut, apple, plum and pear trees. On the right, up a set of stairs, the vineyards, and at the far right, up another set of stairs, a labyrinth and a folly. The vineyards, we were informed, produce wine of inferior quality, suitable only for mass.
The project of recreating the gardens is not yet completed. Work is done by volunteers and interns who evidently easily find full-time employment in other gardens when they finish here.
On one side of the church, the cloister has been recreated using an arbor. The actual cloister (and most of the buildings of the monastery) disappeared during the bad years between 1791 and 1820. I thought this was a very clever solution to the loss of the quintessential monastic element. Inside the "cloister," archeological excavations have turned up evidence of earlier sanctuaries, a small Gallic shrine from the first century BC, and a Christian funeral chapel from the VII century.
On the other side of the church, in the area once reserved for the Abbot's private garden, a small scent garden has been planted, a place for quiet prayer and meditation. The air is sweetly fragrant there in all seasons.
I don't know the English translations for all the flowers, but here are some of the flowers planted there:
In winter: witch-hazel, butterbur and fragrant sweet box.
spring: Hyacinth, narcissus, wisteria
summer: Lily, Honeysuckle, Roses
Autumn: Eleagnus (silverberry?), mahonia
plus lilacs, viburnum, osmanthus.
The illustrations:
1) the view from the air
2) the illusion of a cloister
3) a section of the scent garden
4) Another artist's recreation of the Abbaye. The church in yellow remains. Virtually all of the buildings in pink have been destroyed. The church survived because, bigger than the existing town church, it was taken over as the parish church in the early 19th century.
The discovery of the Counts of Tripoli (and their connection to the Counts of Toulouse) has astonished me. The idea of a bunch of French nobles battling their way to the Holy Land and setting themselves up as Count of Tripoli, Prince of Galilee and King of Jerusalem boggles my mind. It is equal parts tragic, comical, exotic and astonishing, this imposition of feudal structures on the exotic middle East.
I've been looking at it a little more today:
Here's a brief history of the Counts of Tripoli:
Raymond IV of Toulouse becomes Raymond I, Count of Tripoli (1042–1105); he is the one, you may remember, who usurped the lands and titles of the Count of Toulouse from his niece, Phiippa. He left on the first crusade in 1096, and among other things he raised the seige of Tripoli before his death in 1105. He is considered the first Count of Tripoli.
His oldest son, Bertrand, Count of Toulouse, (d.1112), became Count of Tripoli in 1108 . He's the one who duked it out sovereignity of Toulouse with his cousin, Philippa. He left for the Holy Land in 1108 and was styled Count of Tripoli after the death of his father.
The son of Bertrand, Pons, (1098 - 1137), became Count of Tripoli when Bertrand died in 1112 and reigned until 1137. He must have been born in France and travelled with his father to the Holy Land. He married Marie, a daughter of the King of France, who was the widow of Tancred of Galilee, (AKA Tancred of Hautville in Normandy) a marriage which reconciled the Norman and Provençal knights. Pons, count or not, was taken prisoner when Tripoli was invaded by the sultan of Damascus in 1137, and later executed with most of the other Frankish prisoners.
Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, (c. 1115 – 1152), son of Pons and Marie of France, was Count of Tripoli from 1137 - 1152. The date of his birth suggests that he was born in the Holy Land. His wife was Hodierna of Rethel, daughter of the King of Jerusalem (a title which Raymond IV had evidently refused so it went to a Norman knight instead.) Pons established the Knight's Hospitallier as a force in Tripoli and was assassinated outside the gates of Tripoli in 1152.
Raymond III (1140 – September/October 1187) was Count of Tripoli from 1152-1187. This Count died without heirs, and the County of Tripoli passed from the descendents of the Counts of Toulouse to the family of the Princes of Antioch. (Interestingly, the character of Raymond III has a role today in some popular video games and was played by Jeremy Irons in the film, "Kingdom of Heaven.")
Over the next 100 years, the Catholics of Antioch and Tripoli had to fight with the Mongols, slaughtering in from the northeast, the Mamluks of Egypt plus a trade war between the Embriacos of Genoa and the Venetians.(I kid you not.) Tripoli was the longest to survive.
The end of the Catholic county of Tripoli finally came in 1289 when the Mamluks conquered Tripoli--evidently encouraged by the Genoese--razed it to the ground and enslaved its remaining inhabitants. The last Count of Tripoli, Bohemond VII, died without heirs in 1287. His sister, Lucia, became titular Countess of Tripoli and vanished from wikipedia. Somehow, the title of Count of Tripoli was passed to the Kings of Cyprus, possibly through the marriage of Lucia's granddaughter, Marguerite. Anyhow, bizarre!
The 200-year fascination with the Holy Land, the Crusades, is dated to the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, by the way.
image 1: shows the map of the Holy Land between the first and second crusade.
image 2: the seal of Raymond II, count of Tripoli. Some 40 years after this branch of the house of Toulouse settled down in the Holy Land, the count still uses recognizable insignia.
image 3: The seal of Raymond VI, last independent Count of Toulouse, dating to 1228.
image 4: Another seal. Note the profile on the left of the seal. That's the Chateau Narbonnais. Compare this to the seal of Raymond III.
image 5: Lucia, titular Countess of Tripoli, serves tea to the a clergyman (is that her kinsman, the Pope?) during the siege of Tripoli.