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 said elsewhere said 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.