La Branche Verte

Just over sixty years ago the so-called "Branche Verte" was  a conspicuous landmark on the D878  between La Prévière and Juigné-des-Moutiers, on the edge of the forest, a short distance from the Royalist memorial site, the tomb of the "Émigré de La Préviere".  An ancient beech tree boasted a single branch which, as though by miracle, sprouted new leaves in early March, when the rest of the tree, and all those around it, were still bare: "It grew green prematurely before all the other trees in the Forest of  Cornillé" .

Postcard of about 1900 (Wikimedia)

Perhaps unsurprisingly here, on the borders between Anjou and Brittany, this unusual natural phenomenon was associated with a "place of memory". Local tradition had it that during the Revolution a young girl had been hanged from the tree. In some versions her attackers - whether Republican soldiers or Chouans  -  raped her before hanging her by the hair; in others she hanged herself to escape  her persecutors.

Michel Lagree and Jehanne Roche in their survey of memorial sites, tell us that the local folklorist Joseph Chapron, writing in the 1930s, referred to a second "tombe à la Fille", now lost, which was located nearby.  According to Chapron, the woods of La Rochette once sheltered several graves from the 1790s which have since disappeared.  This one was said to have belonged to a young girl who was "encountered by an armed troop and martyred by the bandits."[quoted Lagree (2003), p.69].  The Republican Alfred Genoux, author of La sylve castelbriantaise 1934, specified that the girl had murdered to prevent her from betraying whereabouts of the Chouan chief  Fresnais de Beaumont  (later seized and guillotined in Châteaubriant).  The local journalist and historian Louis Bessière, on the other hand,  preferred to blame Republican troops for her death [Lagree, p.69; and  Reading below]

The "Tombe à la Fille"

It is the suffering, finally, of this young woman of 1796 which has been erected into a sacred phenomenon.

Françoise Gründ, ethnoscénographe, speaking in 2011

The "Tombe à la Fille" in 2007 (photo posted on X by Paul Chopelin)

Again associated with a sainte-bleue, the "Tombe à  la Fille" in the  Forest of Teillay, is still an active - indeed oddly thriving - place of pilgrimage.  Attention was drawn to its existence in a notice which appeared in the AHRF in 1952, shortly after Lefebvre's article on Perrine Dugué, and the two sites are often considered together in the academic literature. The name of the girl involved is given as Marie Martin (occasionally Marguérite or Thérèse), her age "about 19".  She is also often referred to as  "Sainte-Pataude", "pataud" being a pejorative term for "patriot" in the local patois.  It is not known why she was killed; in some versions she is said to have revealed a rebel hideout; in others, perhaps more plausibly, she is said to have refused to betray her master.

There is only one surviving contemporary account, a report of September 1797, written by the Directory's Commissaire in nearby Bourg-des-Comptes (identified as a lawyer from Bain, Paul François Martin).  This document dates events to the beginning of Year IV, that is late 1795, about six months prior to the death of Perrine Dugué. The writer specifies only that the young woman had "showed her aversion" to the Chouans. In 1833 the Orléanist journal L'Auxilliaire Bréton briefly included the case in a catalogue of royalist  atrocities in the region. Otherwise, nothing was written down before the 1870s and we are reliant on oral tradition. The fullest modern account is in Michel Lagree and Jehanne Roche's Tombes de mémoire, published in 1993.

A half-forgotten history...

Marie Martin is universally agreed to have been a native of Tresboeuf, a commune a dozen or so kilometres to the east of the district capital of Bain-en-Bretagne and ten kilometres from Teillay.  Her father is known to have died in 1791. She is often said to have been living at a local farm, perhaps with an uncle, or alternatively "en chambre" in Teillay itself. 

The house in Tresboeuf where
 Marie Martin perhaps lodged

An archived version of the Teillay commune website has a different version. It states that Marie was lodging at at the time of her death not in Teillay but in the centre of Tresboeuf, with a merchant named Jean Martin (no known relation); he is said elsewhere to have been a "livestock dealer".  His house, on the place de l'Église, still stands and is now the agence de poste.  Martin had fallen foul of the Chouans through his acquisition of biens nationaux.  

This information doesn't quite make sense geographically - Marie was surely more likely to have been living in Teillay close by  the forest where she was left for dead.  However, according to Michel Lagree, several purchasers of  biens nationaux in Tresboeuf did indeed have the surname Martin; the insurgents reserved for such beneficiaries "their most ferocious hatred and cruellest treatment"(Lagree (1978) nt.37)

Perrine Dugué - the saint with tricolour wings

Woodcut by Pierre-François Godard, engraved in Alençon and dated 1796.
From a popular edition of the Complaintes en l'honneur de Perrine Dugué. [Wikimedia] 
Posted by J.P. Morteveille, Vice President of the Amis de Ste-Suzanne/Musée de l'auditoire.
 

Christians, come and listen/ To the story of Perrine Dupré [sic]/Aged only seventeen /

This pretty young girl /Has been reduced to a memory.

On the heath near Blandouet/ On her way to Saint-Suzanne/ 

A villain stopped her/ Eagar for mischief/He wanted to abuse her

Seized by fear/ She said to him in tears/ You treacherous and evil heart!/ 

I would a hundred times rather die/ Than lose my poor soul/ By consenting to your desire

Immediately the wretch/ Knocked her to the ground with great blows/ 

Cracking open her skull/ Like an enraged beast,/Then crushing her under his horse's hooves.

In the spot where he left her/ Where she is buried/ God has created an oracle/

 To show her sanctity/ She often performs miracles/ For those who visit her

By praying to her with devotion/ She will obtain relief/ For all our afflictions and sorrows/

Let us pray to God on her tomb/He will show acceptance of our prayers/ By a new miracle.

In his article of 2012 on the "martyrs" of the Revolution,  which I translated in a previous post, Jean-Clément Martin draws attention to the spontaneous veneration of "patriot saints" which grew up alongside Catholic and Counter-Revolutionary commemorations in the frontier zones of war-torn Brittany.  An odd phenomenon this, which provides an intriguing insight into popular beliefs, and challenges the conventionally accepted boundaries between religious sentiment and allegiance to the Revolution.

The most celebrated examples concern two young women, Perrine Dugué and Marie Martin, both probably murdered by the Chouans. Of the two, Perrine Dugué, the so-called "Saint with tricolour wings", is the better documented. Sources for her life include not only several contemporary reports, but also three printed Complaintes or popular ballads rediscovered by Léon de La Sicotière in the 1890s.  

Father Menoux - Jesuit preacher and missionary (January)

The Jesuit priest Father Joseph Menoux is remembered today, if at all, chiefly as an adversary of Voltaire. He warrants barely a footnote in the great sea of Voltaire studies or, at best, a repetition of Voltaire's own dismissive caricatures.  I decided to try and discover a little more about Menoux's life. It  proved to be an interesting exercise, and one which supplies something of an alternative perspective on the world of the Enlightenment writers. 

Early life

Sadly, there not a single anecdote or petty detail enlivens the perfunctory outline of Menoux's early life supplied in the biographical dictionaries.  We learn only that he was born in Besançon on 14th October 1695 - making him not quite a year younger than Voltaire  -, that he belonged to an "excellent famille de robe", and that he was always destined for an ecclesiastical career.  He began his studies with the Jesuits at the age of fourteen and remained in the order; we can assume that he attended the Jesuit college in Besançon, the imposing buildings of which still survive today.   He entered the Novitiate on 8th September 1711 and, having taught in a number of colleges, was singled out by his eloquence for a career as a preacher. 

The Jesuit college in Besançon  - now College Victor-Hugo
https://structurae.net/en/structures/college-victor-hugo 

The preacher

In 18th-century Catholic France a talented preacher could command a great deal of prestige.  Jesuits like Bourdaloue, and more recently, Charles Porée (d.1741), star of the Parisian house, attracted huge crowds.  They rubbed shoulders with the highest echelons of society, and attracted attention from the  Enlightenment world of culture and letters - to which the Jesuits themselves contributed through their Journal de Trévoux edited from the Maison professe in Paris.

Rococo dreams

To enjoy for Christmas....

These gorgeous, beautifully re-imagined, rococo interiors are by Vicente García de Paredes, a Spanish artist who settled in Paris in 1884 where he specialised in 18th-century genre scenes.  His watercolours were very popular at the time and were widely reproduced, notably in Le Monde Illustré. They appear regularly at auction.

"Her Best Hand" - sold by Sotheby's in 2018

"The Raconteur" - sold by Christie's in 2015

The posthumous history of King Stanislas

Cenotaph of King Stanislas, Église Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours, Nancy

Death and autopsy

It had taken King Stanislas eighteen long days to die.  

Immediately following his death, he was laid out on his bed, with his face and hands uncovered, surrounded by candles.  Six canons from Lunéville sang prayers around the body. The doors to the apartment remained open and people were free to enter.

The following day, Monday 24th February, at six in the morning, the body was transported into the "chambre de la balustrade" (which room was this?  I'm not sure). Here it was exposed on a lit de parade, again surrounded by candles.  The clergy and Court officials were seated nearby with careful attention to rank: on the right was an armchair to accommodate the Cardinal de Choiseul-Beaupré, Stanislas's Grand Almoner, with stools for his confessor Father Louskina and the other palace chaplains; on the left were folding chairs for the First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and principal officers of the Royal Household.  Beyond the balustrade two altars had been set up, draped in black, where masses could be said. Six members of the regular clergy sang psalms continuously.

The death of King Stanisłas

"Tout ce qui est humain ne fait espérer de bon"
(All that is human gives no hope for good)

King Stanislas to Marie Leszczyńska, 3rd February 1766 
[probably the last words he ever wrote in his own hand]

The death of Stanislas.  From an illustration by Ksawery Pillati for the collection "Images of Polish princes and kings" (1888). [Wikimedia]

On Wednesday 5th February 1766, at about half-past-seven in the morning, the aged Stanisłas Leszczyński, former King of Poland, now Duke of Lorraine, was alone in his chamber at Lunéville when he accidentally fell into the open fire and sustained serious burns.  Despite the best endeavours of his doctors, he suffered terrible agonies and died eighteen days later.  Both at the time and subsequently, there were rumours of negligence on the part of Stanislas's attendants.  However, since there were no eye-witnesses, what happened can never be known with absolute certainty.

An urban vision: Saint-Dié-des-Vosges

Saint-Dié was rebuilt without delay on the best conceived of plans, with the wide, clean, spacious, strictly aligned streets that we see today. The layout reproduces the regular beauty of Nancy and, with its modern pavements and  continually flowing fountains, makes this one of the most attractive town in the Vosges.  

Charles Charton, Les Vosges pittoresques et historiques (1841), p.225. 

A search for traces of  King Stanislas in Lorraine takes us, rather unexpectedly, to Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, ninety kilometres to the south-east of Nancy.  Under Stanislas's benevolent gaze, following a devastating fire in 1757,  this little town deep in the Vosges Mountains became the site of a noteworthy essay in Enlightenment urban planning.

Château de la Favorite - heritage in danger

Une Favorite - "a woman who costs a lot, but gives great pleasure"

This photo and the those below are from Wikimedia, taken in 2011 

This sad little building, just a stone's throw away from the Château in Lunéville, is the "Petit  Château" or "Château de la Favorite",  once the residence of Leopold's youngest son, Charles-Alexander. Like the palace itself, it is the work of the renowned 18th-century architect Germain Boffrand.  In 1999 the property was sold off by the municipality, and, since that time, "it has not ceased to deteriorate" . 

Stanislas - Grandfather

Here are some notes from another of Pierre Boyé's evocative studies, this time concerning King Stanislas's relationship with his grandchildren, the offspring of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska.  Boyé's article was originally published in the Mémoires of the Lorraine Archaeological Society in 1922 where it prefaces a collection relevant documents, and letters from Stanislas's copious correspondence.  

Births

"If ever anyone, after the marriage of a cherished child, was eager to become a grandparent",  writes Pierre Boyé, "that person was was Stanislas". Clearly, apart from any personal considerations there were huge political and  dynastic interests at stake. 

The marriage between Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska took place on 5th September 1725.  At this time Stanislas, and his consort Catherine Opalińska were resident at Chambord.  "Astonishing notes" from the duc de Bourbon and Cardinal de Rohan made Stanislas privy to the intimate secrets of the royal wedding night.  After months of false alarms and anxiety, in March 1727 he was finally able to announce with joy his daughter's first pregnancy.  His correspondents were treated to bulletins on the most private details of her condition  - Pierre Boyé found himself "embarrassed to follow the King of Poland into such territory"(p.219-220).

On 7th May he reported that she has felt the first movements of her "precious fruit"; on 25th that she has her first milk.  On 1st June he announces that a pastoral instruction had been issued, by order of Louis XV, to implore divine mercy for a safe delivery.

On morning of 14th August 1727, Marie Leszczynska  gave birth to twin girls, Louise-Élisabeth and Henriette. A courier hurried with the news to Dyé-sur-Loire where the Polish royal couple were taking refuge from the malaria-ridden swamps of Chambord.  On the 23rd, Stanislas visited his new granddaughters in Versailles, and pronounced himself enraptured by the two "little dolls".

Madame Louise-Élisabeth of France and her twin sister Henriette.
Attributed to Pierre Gobert. Château de Versailles (Wikimedia)