A lyrical hymn to the irrecoverable past, Robin Fedden’s memoir Chantemesle takes its title from the house in which he grew up, itself named after a tiny hamlet in the Île de France. Over the years, Chantemesle has been haunted by a succession of artists. It rises above a silver bend in the Seine, its back pressed against vast, grotesque outcrops of chalk scars wrapped in scrub, created by eruptions of the last Ice Age.
For centuries this valley was the haunt of painters, including Poussin, and the strange violence of the scars against the languid river and the lush green of the plains attracted Monet, Bonnard and Pissarro. Later, the English Impressionist Conder was invited by Arthur Blunt, then owner of the house, to paint in the summerhouse. Soon after the devastation of the First World War, Robin’s water-colourist father, Romilly Fedden, bought Blunt’s house and settled down to paint there in his turn. This part of France had managed to preserve its historic tranquillity, and the child grew up watching leaf-patterned light playing on the ceiling.
It was with a sense of partial, almost dreamlike recognition that we both read Chantemesle, a record of the aesthetic and emotional awakening of a young boy during the 1920s. A perfect fairytale, it features an enchanted forest and a floating island; everything in it is infused with a profound sense of magic and awe, of undiluted good and evil, and events seem to unfold outside time. Years before, Elisabeth had visited the region in the company of her husband, also a painter. Now the two of us determined on a literary pilgrimage. We set out with that tantalizing sense of nostalgia for something we had not experienced and might never discover. For we knew that memory can alter as well as preserve and, with the passage of time and a shift in perspective, the remembered often becomes something quite other.
Proust, Fournier, Waugh and Lehmann all turned the pain and incomprehension o
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Subscribe now or Sign inA lyrical hymn to the irrecoverable past, Robin Fedden’s memoir Chantemesle takes its title from the house in which he grew up, itself named after a tiny hamlet in the Île de France. Over the years, Chantemesle has been haunted by a succession of artists. It rises above a silver bend in the Seine, its back pressed against vast, grotesque outcrops of chalk scars wrapped in scrub, created by eruptions of the last Ice Age.
For centuries this valley was the haunt of painters, including Poussin, and the strange violence of the scars against the languid river and the lush green of the plains attracted Monet, Bonnard and Pissarro. Later, the English Impressionist Conder was invited by Arthur Blunt, then owner of the house, to paint in the summerhouse. Soon after the devastation of the First World War, Robin’s water-colourist father, Romilly Fedden, bought Blunt’s house and settled down to paint there in his turn. This part of France had managed to preserve its historic tranquillity, and the child grew up watching leaf-patterned light playing on the ceiling. It was with a sense of partial, almost dreamlike recognition that we both read Chantemesle, a record of the aesthetic and emotional awakening of a young boy during the 1920s. A perfect fairytale, it features an enchanted forest and a floating island; everything in it is infused with a profound sense of magic and awe, of undiluted good and evil, and events seem to unfold outside time. Years before, Elisabeth had visited the region in the company of her husband, also a painter. Now the two of us determined on a literary pilgrimage. We set out with that tantalizing sense of nostalgia for something we had not experienced and might never discover. For we knew that memory can alter as well as preserve and, with the passage of time and a shift in perspective, the remembered often becomes something quite other. Proust, Fournier, Waugh and Lehmann all turned the pain and incomprehension of youth into luminous prose, and Fedden does the same in Chantemesle. Although a memoir, it is presented as fiction, which is how both of us first read it, and its hypnotic blend of truth, poetry and subterfuge awoke in us a yearning to walk the chalk hills, to see the willowy river curtain which alternately hides and reveals, to glide round Chantemesle’s lake of Chinese lanterns, and marvel at the turreted dwelling of the family’s neighbour, Madame de Chérence. The book is structured around a succession of houses in the hamlet. Today Chantemesle itself is privately owned and not open to the public, though as a special privilege we were invited in. Even so it is little changed from the house that Fedden knew, having been abandoned for some years before its recent purchase. As soft and bright as the chalk cliffs at its back, with turquoise-painted window frames, it is surrounded by lilacs; bees still hum in and out of its rooms and those formed by box hedges in the garden, and a plaque at the front of the house reads: ‘It was with the landscape that I grew and learnt.’ Once inside, breathing in the scent of lilac, roses and lavender, we turned the dry pages of the visitors’ book to learn that it had been a popular gathering spot not only for painters, but also for Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Beach (writer and owner of the famous Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Company), and for the local aristocracy. Monet and his daughter were often there. Back outside, we spotted Les Nenuphars, which stands concealed in lush vegetation on a small island in the river facing Chantemesle. Its former owners, the Firmins, were the Feddens’ closest neighbours. Having been invited to tea one day at Chantemesle, the determined Mademoiselle Firmin consumed nearly an entire cake before putting on her bathing costume and wandering out into the river, her pockets full of stones. Robin was puzzled to hear someone say her death was ‘the best thing that could have happened’. At the time, ‘reality was not in such tragedies, but in the passage of hours, days and seasons across the Chantemesle landscape’; however, he later published a thoughtful, compassionate book on suicide at a time when there was little sympathy towards it. We could imagine, nestled among the chalk outcrops, the natural cliff dwelling of Battouflet, the blind old man ‘familiar with every copse and cave’. It is he who initiates Robin into the area’s mysterious plant lore, birdsong and the ever-changing weather. And driving into the uplands, we came suddenly upon the ancient village and château of Chérence, set in open fields with forest nearby. But here the memoir begins to play its tricks, since it says that Chérence and its enchanted wood lay across the river. For Robin, Chérence is ‘the most satisfactory house’. Like his own, it spills into nature and its elderly chatelaine, a red-wigged smoker of cigarillos, emerges only at night in her wheelchair, guided by a male servant. Her granddaughter, Clotilde, shares with Robin the strange riches of the house: sea-birds’ eggs, antique walking sticks and conch shells, photographs of forgotten elders. Outside, iron aviaries where exotic birds were once held prisoner rust away in the undergrowth. Robin is unable to keep away despite misgivings, prey to the magic of Clotilde’s imagination and to confused images of fertility, ruin and loss. For it is here that his own imagination is awakened, as well as his fear. Les Grand Prés was the home of Clovis, the wilful wrecker of Robin’s bliss. A ‘pure example of Empire style’, it reeks of decadence and the new money with which it was built. Clovis himself represents modernity’s will to destruction. He is dangerously hostile to foreigners and violent by nature, pointlessly killing a small rabbit in the garden and ruining also, and more significantly, Robin’s first experience of love. Robin is introduced to Michèle by her aunt, whom he encounters on the hillside collecting wild orchids, trowel in hand. His eventual sexual initiation in the forest with Michèle is a ritual that highlights the blurred boundaries between himself and the natural world and echoes Ovid in Pound’s poem: ‘The tree has entered my hands. The sap has ascended my arms.’ But the lure of Clovis’s wealth and his unwillingness to leave the couple alone at last enable him to appropriate the relationship that the gentler boy has nurtured. Time is the enemy in Chantemesle, and ‘true paradises are paradises we have lost’. Underpinning this tender evocation of youth, the beauties of nature and the discovery of love is a lonely mourning for the past. The child Robin emerges from the tight green cocoon of the natural world, his complacency first disturbed by the existence of other children, then by sexual awareness. As he grows older, he no longer takes his bearings from church spires but from the church clock, and the hour chiming from all the churches on the upland sounds the death knell for his lost innocence. In later life, Fedden came to feel that he had betrayed his childhood paradise. He left it first for Paris, where his innocent vision became clouded with ‘the cataract of habit’. When he returned to Chantemesle, he no longer felt part of the landscape that had formed him and was separated from his early bliss. Unable to stay, he eventually became a wanderer whose travel books – Syria, A Quest in the Pyrenees, The Enchanted Mountains – reveal the same receptivity and imagination honed by blind Battouflet: pebbles that glisten like gems, light as dense as honey, cats’ cradles of cobwebs. Yet he always retained a sense of the value of the past, and in the years after the Second World War worked for the National Trust in England. Chantemesle, written in his fifties, was his way of preserving his own lost inheritance It was hard for us, too, to leave the landscape of such a well-loved book. We never got lost in the Forest of Chérence, nor did we find that everything was exactly as Fedden had described it: the lake of Chinese lanterns never existed, according to locals. But we found his paradise.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Jill Foulston and Elisabeth Russell Taylor 2011
About the contributor
Jill Foulston, a former editor at Penguin and Virago, has published two anthologies of women’s writing. Elisabeth Russell Taylor is the author of six novels and two volumes of short stories. Her subjects have included Proust and Alain-Fournier.