A royal organ in Lammerville

The heritage of the Terroir de Caux is full of curiosities! The church of Lammerville shelters an example, an organ having belonged to… a Queen of France! How did it arrive in Normandy and more precisely in this village of the Pays de Caux? This is what I will tell you in these lines…

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Marie Leszcynska

Queen of France

In the series celebrities and the Terroir of Caux, I ask Marie Leszcynska, Queen of France!

Daughter of the King of Poland, she became Queen of France by marrying in 1725 King Louis XV.From this union will be born no less than ten children, including the dauphin Louis of France, who will not reign since he died before his father, but who will be the father of the last 3 kings of France, Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. An effaced figure of the court, because very quickly overshadowed by the King’s mistress the Marquise de Pompadour, Marie Leszcynska was also the last Queen of France to die with her crown.

Lammerville

The church of Notre-Dame

So you’re going to tell me, what does this have to do with Terroir de Caux? I’m coming to that…and for that I’m taking you to Lammerville and more particularly tothe church of Notre-Dame, a very beautiful building, the major part of which today comes from a 16th century re-edification. Among the furnishings of this church remains a very beautiful salon organ which is known to have belonged to the Queen.

How did it come to Lammerville? The story retains some mystery. But if we are to believe the writings recounted by Pierre Molkhou in the book Lammerville, La Mémoire en Héritage, two plausible hypotheses explain its presence.

Two hypotheses...

The first is that the organ was given to the parish by the Heurtault family, one of whose relatives, lady-in-waiting to the Queen, is said to have received it as a gift before donating it to the church in Lammerville. This family was indeed very generous to the commune during the course of history, since it had already offered the high altar before the Revolution and then financed part of the replacement of the bells in 1826.

In Lammerville

since 1794

Another tradition would have it that this organ was acquired from a secondhand dealer in the Rouen region who would have bought it in the Paris region.

We know that Marie Leszcynska had commissioned this organ shortly before choosing as her director of conscience the Abbé Louis Nicolas Maudoux, parish priest of Savigny-sur-Orge, near Versailles, thus in the Paris region.

Would the priest have received the organ as a thank you for his services?

Was it kept in his church before it was looted during the Revolution and led to its sale as national property, to the secondhand dealers?

Bought by the Heurtault family, or directly by the Fabrique, always it is that it integrated the Lammerville church in 1794… following an organ installation in the church of Bacqueville-en-Caux.

Whatever the case, both stories are captivating…and endow the commune with a royal heritage!

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