Regrets Éterneles: Elegy in a Norman Churchyard Pt. 2
The churchyard is punctuated by a single mausoleum belonging to the Famille Pierre Lelauet. It is uncomfortably proportioned, at once too high and too wide, scabarous looking with its blotches of orange lichen. Hewn of grey granite, a smirking cherub sits above the entrance, flanked by two pillars while a rusted iron door, decorated with roses, seals the crypt. Through the door’s iron grille a small altar is just visible. In front of the mausoleum, half obscuring the door, a bay tree has grown, lurching to the left but confidently spreading its branches. Laurus Nobilis. A diminutive Daphne with no one to garland.
‘De profundis’ announce a matched pair of contemporary granite headstones. A quote from the psalms: ‘out of the depths have I cried to thee oh Lord’. Another refrain: ‘Regrets. Regrets Éterneles.’ It echoes round the churchyard’s statuary and calls to mind Sigmund Freud’s comment on the death of his grown-up daughter Sophie – ‘and we shall remain inconsolable’. Eternal regret. The direct translation in English is ‘greatly missed’ but this does not capture the sentiment. Regret in French resonates in a different way to its English equivalent. I regret to inform you. In French, regret can also mean sorry. To be sorry, forever, that someone has died. To sorrow for it, always. The churchyard is full of the architecture of this ‘forever’ of mourning. The weeds and the plastic bag, the cracked headstones or those missing altogether, prove our almost terror almost true, what will survive of us is?
Turning left, parallel to the road and in sight of the perspex bus shelter so modern it startles me, we find the grave of Alice Leroy. It is adorned with a black and white image, possibly of a nun (perhaps Alice herself though in this part of the world nuns tend to be buried with their sisters), possibly of the Virgin Mary, possibly of some minor local saint. A Madonna-a-Like whose roadside shrines can still be found here if you care to look. I walk on past the grave of Louis Malenfant and his wife Mme Malenfant née Leversoue. I am stopped in my tracks as I tack together a translation. Mr and Mrs Badchild. I imagine Mme Leversoue, re-folding her wedding clothes, going to town to change her documentation and wonder what she thought of her new name.
Past the white wrought iron gates and the delft blue agapanthus, inappropriately picturesque, past Leon Malieu Mort pour France age 22. On to the War Memorial for 1914-18, for 1939-45, where the Leroux family suffer a double loss. On past the Garden of Remembrance which is entirely empty and feels like an unkind metaphor and makes me think of the grave with the plastic bag. Field poppies and ivy strain vegetal fingers to touch from each edge of the churchyard wall. I tuck close into the church doubling back on myself and feeling the sweat crawl lazily down my spine as swifts trace urgent loops in the blue sky and perch, inquiring, on the statuary. What does grief look like in the animal world?
Four tomb boxes with no inscriptions huddle beneath the stained glass and their dilapidation, their anonymity makes them seem furtive and outcast. Empty. Turning I see another family tomb and notice what I had overlooked before. The names of family members who died in childhood picked out in gold on the raised tomb edges. Les Enfants Jean-Marie Jouet, 12.05.1958. Yves Jouet 08.08-27.12 1947. It is his birthday. Happy Birthday I say quietly, feeling absurd, feeling morbid, but also defiant for why write his name if it not meant to be said. Why do any of it at all. A cry out of the depths. Across the road the wind moves, unobtrusive, through fields of maize and the drying husks mutter to themselves.
Regrets. Regrets Éterneles.