Rosa 'Sombreuil' - Blood or Wine?
Saturday, May 28, 2016
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| Rosa 'Sombreuil' May 24 2016 |
I found this interesting account by an author who calls
herself Madame Guillotine. I hope she will not mind me lifting her essay on to
this blog which follows my account of Rosa ‘Sombreul’ in our garden.
For years Rosa ‘Sombreuil’
listed in Peter Beales – Classic Roses as a Tea Rose hybridized by Robert
France in 1850 struggled in our garden. Teas are not to be confused with the later Hybrid Teas. Tea
Roses were popular during the latter half of the 19th century.
Because Teas had Chinensis in them they were not all that hardy and some like this
one not an easy one to grow in Vancouver. I was lucky to get three blooms in
one season and the shrub never grew more than two feet high even though it was located in my sunny back lane.
In my Kitsilano garden it is thriving and by the end of
May I have had 12 blooms already.
I could never find out exactly why this white rose had
the name. In French the word suggests shade. But I finally found out why the name means shade in French.
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Marie-Maurille de Sombreuil
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One of the most haunting and bizarre stories to come down to
us from the French Revolution is that of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, the
daughter of the former Governor of the Invalides, Charles François de Virot,
Marquis de Sombreuil.
Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was born Jeanne Jacques Marie Anne
Françoise de Virot at the château de Leychoisier on the 14th February 1768 and
was known within her family as Marie-Maurille. Her life was unremarkable and
probably no different to that of any other aristocratic girl of the time until
the 16th of August 1792 when her beloved father was imprisoned in the Abbaye
along with other members of the nobility who had sided with the royal family
during the fall of the Tuileries. Marie-Maurille courageously demanded to share
her father’s imprisonment and so was at his side on the 2nd September when a
makeshift tribunal and mob arrived at the Abbaye as part of the infamous Prison
Massacres.
When the Marquis de Sombreuil was called before the
tribunal, his brave daughter went with him and implored their captors and the
‘judges’ to be lenient, reminding them of her father’s many years of faithful
service and old age. Finally she informed them that if they wished to harm the
Marquis, then they would have to kill her also.
It is at this point that accounts of what happened next
vary. The legend goes that the jeering guards, who were seated upon a pile of
corpses belonging to those that they had already slaughtered, then filled a
glass with the blood of their victims and handed it to Mademoiselle de
Sombreuil, telling her that her father would be spared if she drank the ghastly
beverage.
‘One of the ruffians, touched by her resolution, called
out that they should be allowed to pass if the girl would drink to the health
of the nation. The whole court was swimming with blood, and the glass he held
out to her was full of something red. Marie would not shudder. She drank, and
with the applause of the assassins ringing in her ears, she passed with her
father over the threshold of the fatal gates, into such freedom and safety as
Paris could then afford. Never again could she see a glass of red wine without
a shudder, and it was generally believed that it was actually a glass of blood
that she had swallowed, though she always averred that this was an
exaggeration, and that it had been only her impression before tasting it that
so horrible a draught was offered to her.‘
Mademoiselle de Sombreuil herself always insisted that
the bloodstained glass contained nothing more sinister than red wine and there
is no reason to disbelieve her, although the story of an aristocratic young
woman being forced to drink human blood in order to save her elderly parent is
an enticing one. If you like that sort of thing.
Unfortunately for the heroic Mademoiselle de Sombreuil,
her father and younger brother, Stanislas (1768-1794) were again arrested a
year later and she would share their imprisonment at Port-Libre and
Sainte-Pélagie before the Marquis and Stanislas were guillotined on the 17th
June 1794.
