For sale: a unique piece of Occitan history

​A couple of times a year, I cycle, run or walk past the Château de Magrin. It stands on a mount above La Voie Romaine between Puylaurens and Lavaur in the department of the Tarn. Depending on my mode of locomotion, a number of thoughts cross my mind while I pass beneath its walls. 

​'La Voie Romaine is an old road, but there is no evidence to link it to the Romans in particular…What we can see of this château today mostly dates from the 16th century onwards, but the site was fortified as long ago as the 12th and maybe much earlier…Magrin contains the first and only museum in France dedicated to the blue dye called pastel, or woad, which made this region so rich in the 16th and 17th centuries...'

​What prompts me to write about Magrin today is an article I spotted recently in the local press. The Château de Magrin and its pastel museum are for sale for €527,000! Sotheby’s has the exclusive selling rights, and naturally the photos on its website are far better than mine. Sotheby’s text is less impressive, and the English version confuses cocoa with cocagne which is a shame because cocagnes are particularly important in this story.

​Among the reasons the Château de Magrin is classified as a Monument Historique is that it contains a rare example of a building where cocagnes were dried. This was an early stage in the process of transforming green leaves from the pastel plant into powdered blue dye. The first stage involved grinding the leaves into a paste, and in another part of the château you will find the stones of a pastel mill rescued from a neighbouring commune.

​I have a cocagne on my desk, next to a mug of cocoa (Sotheby’s has put ideas into my head). My cocagne looks like one of those fat balls people hang out in their gardens for the birds, only darker. If I sniff it, there is the faintest aroma of dried foliage.

​My clearest memory from the time I went inside the château several years ago is a bush in its gardens. With a sense of irony, or perhaps to illustrate his guided tour, the previous owner planted an indigo tree. This was one of the key factors in pastel’s demise. Although dye made from indigo leaves could not match the glorious blues of pastel, it enjoyed overwhelming commercial advantages. Its cultivation was much simpler and therefore cheaper; its pigment was far easier for the dyers to work with; its transport was much more economic because it was a stronger, more concentrated product than pastel. 

​If you want to know more about the pastel business without splashing out on a château and a museum dedicated to the subject, you might like to read three previous articles I have written about the subject:
​
hotel-dassezat-a-masterpiece-of-renaissance-architecture.html

the-secret-of-pastel-or-how-to-turn-a-green-plant-into-blue-and-gold.html
​
wearing-woad.html

You will also find a long section about pastel in my book  ‘Lauragais: Steeped in history, soaked in blood’.
Lauragais

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