The Fairy of Argouges and the Forbidden Word

The fief of Argouges is mentioned as early as the eighth century, and its name is said to come from an old word for the river. The family that held it was long one of the most powerful of the Bessin. History keeps the memory of a Vaultier d’Argouges, a confidant of William the Conqueror, whom the duke placed on the council of regency of Normandy when he embarked in 1066 to conquer England. In 1383, at the muster of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, a Guillaume d’Argouges appeared as a knight, accompanied by eight squires of his company.

During the Hundred Years’ War the manor was pillaged and partly destroyed ; an English garrison is said to have been massacred there by Du Guesclin. It was raised again at the end of the fifteenth century. From that time date the house of Caen stone, the great dovecote with its one thousand four hundred and seventy-four nesting holes and, in one hall, a chimney that tradition calls a gift of Francis I for his marriage of 1514.

The works stopped around 1530, before the great staircase was finished. The family parted with the estate in 1632, and the manor became a farm, which saved it from demolition : eleven monumental chimneys survive there. Listed in 1924, it was raised from its ruins from 1983 on.

The legend itself has been told in the country since the Middle Ages. A dragon was ravaging the valley, and the villagers came to implore the lord of Argouges. The knight set out to hunt and managed to strike the beast down in its lair of the Fosse-Soucy ; but the monster, dying, collapsed upon him and wounded him mortally. As he was about to give up the ghost, a fairy of great beauty appeared and offered to save him. She set but one condition : that he marry her, and that he never utter before her the word « death ».

They married, had fair children and lived happily. Years went by without the forbidden word escaping the lord. Then came the day when the couple were to appear at a tournament, at the castle of Bayeux. The lady lingered at her toilette ; the husband, chafing, at last let fall : « Fair lady, you would do well to go and fetch death, for you are very slow at your tasks. »

The word was scarcely said when the fairy gave a heart-rending cry and vanished, flying out through a window, leaving on the sill the print of her foot, which some call a hand. It is said that she returns, on certain nights of the full moon, to moan above the moat, repeating under her breath : « death, death. »

The marvellous mingles here with history, for the family d’Argouges really existed. Its crest bore a woman and a device read as « À la fée », to the fairy. Scholars think it was first a war cry, « À la fois », which popular tradition turned into fairy. The Bayeux scholar Frédéric Pluquet, in a book on the tales of the Bessin published in 1834, linked the story to a victory of Robert d’Argouges over an opponent of very great height, at the siege of Bayeux in 1106.

The tale belongs to a great family of legends. Like the fairy Melusine, the lady of Argouges is a lineage fairy : she marries a mortal on one condition, and the breaking of it makes her vanish. In it people have seen a reminder, for lords, of fidelity to the oath. Other houses of the same family claim the story : at Gratot, in the Manche, they show the foot of the fairy ; at Rânes, in the Orne, stands the tower of the Fairy.

The manor of Argouges, today private and closed to visitors, remains one of the finest witnesses of the Norman Middle Ages. On the sill of one of its windows, they say, the print is still there. The walker who follows the Aure, from the village church to the ruins of Saint-Pierre, goes along the moat and catches himself listening, under the branches, for whether the wind is not saying the forbidden word.