The castle of Madame de Savigny, the first blogger in history

Good morning, Francophiles.
In one piece with deer, our chief Francophile, Karen and I set off towards Chateau des Rochers. It was a preliminary tour, followed by a preliminary tour, with Zvi, and then an in-depth tour – with those of you who would like to walk with us.

I'm just asking. Not for me. For a friend. He's very attracted to his mother. Is there a name for that?
Sure. 'Oedipus complex'.
I have another question. Not for me. For a friend. She is very attracted to her father. Is there a name for it?
Sure. 'Electra complex'.
I have another question. Not for me. For my mother. She is very attracted to her daughter. Does it have a name?
Go ahead!!! Go write a book about this!!!!
That's it. There's already one like that..

On the left, friends, the cover of Nir Raczkowski's book, "Daughter, Beloved." The cover is already a wonderful work of art. A delicate lace tablecloth. Stained. Stained. Stained. What is the book about? About a book.

On the right, friends, the book of letters of the Marquise de Savignier. Love letters. To her daughter. Nir wrote his book about this book. The time has come to get to know. The Marquise of the House of Savignier.

We set off? We set off. It's 90 kilometers. An hour's drive. An hour? 350 years separate us. And a lot of writing talent. Hers. "We set off on a trip..."

Itinerary map

First, a general orientation:

And now the route and the points of interest:

1 Our castle.
2 Fairy Rocks (Dolmen).
3 The castle of the Marquise of Savigny, in La Roche, near Vitré.
4 Vitra. Vitra. Vitra. (We will dedicate a separate article to this place, which will be published soon).

The road, how could it not be? Beautiful.

La Roche Aux Fées (The Rock of the Fairies)

The “Wise” knows the place.

“On the magic wand on starlit nights
She is a true rider from legends to stories.”
(Yael Bar Zohar. Words and music: Ilan Leibowitz)

The New Stone Age. 5,000 to 2,200 years BC. The great leap forward was made. In fact, it is the last leap forward. The people who lived then were no different from our parents. They abandoned smallness and hunting in favor of agriculture, painting, writing.
We made the next leap. Flick-flack backwards. We abandoned agriculture, painting, writing. In favor of the keyboard, the smartphone, Facebook. We speak in 😊☹. But that was said before. Let's get back to the fairies.

Contrary to popular belief, they are not that small, nor are they always nice.

The main reason they are not nice is that we don't believe in them. "What's the big deal? Do you believe in us?" I ask. But there's no one to talk to. Obviously. They don't exist.

The fairies of Brittany They may be fairies, but they are first and foremost Breton. The Breton woman is not a sucker. The fairies of Brittany arose, and one night they dragged giant rocks, fifty tons each, and built a dolmen. This is the largest and most impressive dolmen in all of Europe.

“Now they will believe us,” they said to each other. We didn’t believe it. “Humans built this,” we said.
“Humans? These are rocks weighing 50 tons each,” the girls laughed. “Indeed, it is unknown how, but you do not exist,” we said.

In fact, it seems to me that this site is filled with even greater magic than the dolmen itself. A work of magic. Imagine: a neat parking lot. A handsome entrance building. Clean restrooms. A hall showing a film about the place. An English-speaking guide who explains and gives a brochure with a map. A link to an online application that accompanies the tour inside the dolmen. How much does it cost? “Free of charge,” replies the good fairy.

“Wake up, she doesn’t really exist,” Karen scolds me. So be it. I won’t fight with Karen over Faye.
“Ön lézék”” I whisper to the fairy in Hungarian, so that Karen won’t understand. “You exist.”
“I understood every word,” Karen replies in Hungarian.
A place of magic. I better get out of here before I turn into a fairy. Yes, there are fairies too. Otherwise how will they multiply? Miraculously?

“He’s gotten so old, even the hairs in his wig have turned gray.”

A brilliant line. Nir Raczkowski, “Daughter, Beloved.” There is aDigital format on the “Hebrew” website Hurry before it runs out. 20 NIS. Great book.

A Francophile told me, “Why don’t you write about the women of Brittany?” I went looking, and came across the figure of the Marquise of Sabinier. The first blogger in history. A serial letter writer. Most of them to her daughter, but not only. The letters were collected in a book. A detailed, exclusive picture of life in Paris, Provence, and yes, Brittany, in the 17th century, a brief moment before the Great Revolution.

I went searching the internet. First I found the letters in French. Then in English. Then in Hebrew. In Nir's book.
“I found it!!!” I announced to the Francophile. “Of course. In Nir’s book,” he answered me dryly, adding “I already wrote about it.” And he sent a link to an article about The itinerary in Paris following Madame de Savigny.

I went to check. Basa. The Marquise has gone. The article has gone. Or maybe not?
This is about Paris"Only about Paris...", I tried. What, the Marquise's name is in the tabu?
“Okay, write about her outside of Paris. Just don’t go anywhere near her.”Ile de France He warned, and just to be safe, he sent the map of the area he has exclusive rights over:

A few words about the Marquise de Savigny

Hundreds – according to another version, thousands – of Madame de Soubigny’s letters have survived. But first, a little about her:

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné; born 5.2.1626. died 18.4.1696. At the age of 18 she married Henri, Marquis of Sévigné in Brittany. When she was 25, the Marquis was killed in a duel over the heart of another woman. From him she inherited the title and his castle at La Roche, near Vitré. That is where we are traveling now.

She had a son and a daughter. The son, Charles, is portrayed as a typical anti-hero. We will return to him. The daughter, Françoise, married the Count of Grignan, who was appointed governor immediately after the marriage. Provence. She moved into his castle, thereby breaking her mother's heart. We'll get to that later, too. In any case, the Marquise's letters to her daughter burst, explode, spraying everywhere, immense love for her daughter.

My correspondence with you constitutes the only happiness of my life.

She writes in one of her letters, and in fact: in similar words, in all of them. The letters span a period of about 25 years. She wrote almost every day, sometimes twice a day. In her efforts to interest her daughter in correspondence, she colorfully describes the life of the court of Louis XIV, King of the Sun, “The country is me” (Wait, Zvi, I just mentioned it. He’s already leaving!!!).

Wikipedia says that in Brittany she appreciated the simplicity of the peasants’ lives, to whose suffering she was sensitive. I didn’t see it that much, but I won’t argue with Wikipedia. The letters were published about thirty years after her death, by her granddaughter Pauline. The granddaughter destroyed her mother Françoise’s letters, and made copies, accurate or not – a matter of debate – of her grandmother’s letters. But, as Nir writes in the “Afterword” of his book, we must thank her granddaughter, who inherited the letters, for their publication at all.

Wait. The right place to read letters is where they were written. I am not allowed to go near Paris, Provence is too far away. We will go to her castle near Vitra. “Wise” knows the castle.

The castle of the Marquise de Savigny

Note: When you get off Route 88, you will see two signs. One for the castle, which takes you back to the right, the other for the Marquise's museum, which takes you straight north. The road looks blocked, but it is not. You can drive right to the door of the museum itself, which is dedicated entirely to the Marquise.

Now, as we sit leisurely on the manicured lawn, most of which has been turned into a golf course, and look up at the Marquise's castle, we can peruse her letters, and supplement them with what Nir wrote in his book, assuming that the mood was drawn from the letters from which he did not quote directly.
And maybe, friends, maybe we won't sit on the grass. Not with the Marquise present.

We will cross the golf course, with the restaurant behind us, and go to the garden behind the castle. There, right there, and perhaps we can already say: here, right here, Madame de Savignier walked, accompanied by one guard, armed with a rifle, for fear of the wolves. He must have walked behind her, keeping a respectful distance, and she was probably busy planning the next letter to her daughter. Because the garden was magnificent, it still is today, but her true place of happiness was next to her desk.

We, who are not obsessive writers, except for a few of us, would prefer to stroll in the garden. Perhaps there are more beautiful ones than this. But Madame de Savignier did not walk in them.

“Cold as a pumpkin boiled in snow”

Let’s go back to Charles, the son of the Marquise. Françoise’s eldest and only brother. We said anti-hero. Françoise took his mother’s love. His father, on the other hand, left him his mistress, Ninon de Lanclos. 20 years after he dueled for her good name (? In those days, mistresses also had a good name), and was killed, our Charles took his place in her bed. He didn’t duel, he was simply thrown out by her, claiming that he was “as cold as a pumpkin boiled in snow.”

His mother didn't have a good opinion of him either:

I drink from sin like water… I find nothing good in it.

She gossips about him in her letter to Françoise. And in another letter she surpasses herself:

He has a soul of mush, a body of wet paper, a heart of a pumpkin boiled in snow.

With Nir's sharp pen, Charles attributes to himself the apathy and superficiality that his mother instilled in him, and regrets that he was not like the cook and Ethel.
The story of the cook and Ethel, the chef (that's what we would say today, because there are no longer cooks, only chefs, just as there are no gardeners, only landscape architects) of Prince Conde, is one of the best of the Marquise's letters.

They agreed and heard:

The prince hosted Louis XIV at the Château de Chantilly. 14 tables were set for the guests. It turned out that the last two were a little short of roast. That is to say, not that there was none at all, but there was not much. “My honor has been mortally wounded. This is a disgrace that I cannot bear,” said Wattel. But perhaps he would have stood, had it not been for another incident. Fish was ordered for the next meal, from various suppliers. Wattel encountered the first one who arrived, with two buckets of fish. “Is that all?” Wattel asked. “Yes, sir,” replied the doubter. Wattel did not know that more and more fish were about to arrive. He thought that was it. He went up to his room, leaned his sword on the door, and fell on it. He was only stabbed twice. The third time he managed to pierce his heart.

“Poor Ethel, sacrificing yourself on the altar of perfection…” Charles envies him.

From her château at La Roche, near Vitré, the Marquise writes to Françoise, who is pregnant again:

About the chocolate you drink, what can we say and what can we say… The Marquise de Cotellogon drank so much chocolate when she was pregnant last year, that she gave birth to a son as black as a demon….

It turns out that chocolate was bad for Françoise too. Although she did not give birth to a black son, the newborn contracted smallpox and died at three weeks old.

“Float in my boat, in the slow current
Away from my nest, oh, how foolish!”
(From her letter to Françoise, from her castle in Brittany, after arriving in Nantes on a cruise on the Loire)

The Breton Guerrilla War

Between September 1675 and February 1676, the Marquise resides in her castle in Brittany. The region is not calm. From Rennes in the north to Nantes In the south, the masses, peasants and urbanites, rose up. Charles reports, from Nir's pen:

The king's greed and exactingness have truly crossed all limits. He is completely impoverishing our poor province. Brittany is not Burgundy Rich in fields and vineyards, not Normandy fattened with cattle, or Provence growing orchards and olive trees. My beloved land is semi-wild, thickly forested, sky-gray and cliff-black…

Louis XIV taxed everything. Stamp duty, tin tax, tobacco tax, and finally –

The height of the scandal, threatened to impose a tax on salt, the treasure of the poor of Brittany, the only gift given to us by the stormy ocean, which devours our fishing boats to its depths.

In Rennes, the governor went out onto the balcony of his palace to calm the angry residents, who pelted him with rotten apples. A rumor also spread that his wife, Madame de Chaulnes, had been taken hostage by the mob. This rumor was immediately proven false, but isn't the rumor enough?

We, by the way, have the same anecdote. A student of the “Kollel” is invited to his rabbi. “It’s amazing that you’re committing adultery with another man’s wife,” says the rabbi. “But that’s not true!!!” exclaims the student. “What??? It’s not enough that they say it, it also has to be true???” exclaims the rabbi.

From quiet Provence, the king summons Forban and Vannes, two nobles, to command an army of mercenaries. 4,000 savage warriors raid Brittany. They burn villages, cut down church steeples, loot, rape and kill. In Rennes they hang poor people who have done nothing. Impale them on a torture wheel. The rotten apple throwers have long since fled to the forests. There, in small bands, wearing red bonnets, they wage a guerrilla war against the king's soldiers.

Marie de Rabat-Chantal, the Marquise of Savigny, writes to her daughter a short sentence that could barely be considered pity for the unfortunate:

The rebels in Bern have long since fled. So the good will suffer because of the wicked.

But immediately her nobility is revealed:

I find all is well and good, as long as the four thousand soldiers at Rennes, under the command of Messrs. Forbes and Vance, do not interfere with my strolling through my groves, which have grown to be wonderfully beautiful and fertile.

I think she shouldn’t be judged too harshly. She is a product of her time. Her castle was one world, what was outside it was another. Nir thinks so too: “The horrors that took place a few miles from La Rochelle were like those that took place in Denmark,” he writes.

Let's get back to the family relationship. What did we have here? Nir deciphers it sharply, and presents it with delicacy.
But before that, something brilliant from Nir's pen, which he inserts into Charles' words to his sister Françoise:

Imagine you're writing a letter here on this desk and in a moment it appears, as it is, on a table in Paris...

Laughing at us, as if from a safe distance of 350 years back in time.

The family relationship: Everything is seemingly clear from the letters themselves. The Marquise is completely immersed in a mad love for her daughter Françoise. She despises her son Charles. Charles is jealous of his sister for her mother's love, he would like something from her for himself, even though he does not value himself as much as she does.

But Nir thinks differently.

Françoise says to Charles:

Of the two of us, you're the one she truly loved.

And what about the love letters she writes to Françoise? Letters that are more than letters from a mother to her daughter, they are letters from a lover to his beloved?
Nir then put the following terrible words into Françoise's mouth:

Oh, the letters… they weren’t a way for her to convey love. No, they were love itself… I wasn’t the subject of this love at all, I was just its object… If it weren’t for writing and distance, there would be nothing…

The Marquise was in love with her white neck. But not with her daughter. With her own writing.

By the way, Charles and Françoise both died of smallpox. Which reminds me that sometimes, in our innocent nostalgia for times gone by, we forget that even kings and saviors, whose lives were filled with almost unimaginable luxury, and whom we envy, their best doctors couldn't prevent them from a simple toothache, let alone death by plague.

I don't know about you, but I need to get some air. We'll pass through the Marquise's museum, and continue to Levitra, not before gazing admiringly at the statue of Madame de Savigny in the museum:

Visiting Château de Rocher

Before we move on to Levitra, which we will be writing about soon, a few more words about the Château de Rocher. It is a lovely little palace that is definitely worth a visit. You will find a chapel built by the Marquise de Savigny in 1671, a series of furnished rooms, and even a beautiful dress from the period.

So if you too are intrigued by the character of the Marquise, it is highly recommended that you go visit the castle (there are guided tours of the castle itself).

More information about tickets, tours and more can be found On this site.

Did you like the article? Want to live in my castle?

Want to discover for yourself Roche Castle and quite a few other attractions located in a variety of Hiking routes in Brittany We published? You are welcome to stay at Danny's castle and make it a base for your star trips. You can find more information about the castle in the article Manoir de la Chausée – live in an Israeli castle in Brittany.

And who knows, maybe you'll be lucky enough to meet the Francophile there and travel with us in Brittany 🙂