Today, Clément Lassus-Minvielle invites us to “descend a few steps to go back the story” in the Maison Philippe-le-Bon at 18, rue Sainte-Anne, in order to discover in this new episode historical secrets of the Dijon city center a private chapel in the courtyard of the former Thomas Berbisey hotel.
After having spent a garden and several rooms, we enter a courtyard with a Gothic style dating from the very beginning of the 16th century, between 1505 and 1510. On one of the wooden pillars, we see Jesus with Saint Thomas, which recalls the name of the owner: Thomas Berbisey. Below is represented the Garden of Eden with the snake in the face of a woman surrounding the trunk. Adam and Eve, naked, are today absent, undoubtedly “balanced in the fireplace” in the 17th century, when the sisters of the Congregation of Sainte-Marthe settled here.
A chapel that tells several stories
The chapel itself shows the owner’s fortune. Indeed, the acquisition of a small private oratory, not to mention that you have to pay an affective priest to come and do private ceremonies, “requires a lot of money”. The pontifical stamp on the left wall shows that the chapel was really assigned to worship. On the central pillar, unique in Dijon, the torso column decorated with a wicker basket, thistle and grape clusters, symbolizes the force of the conjugal union. It is a “tribute to the couple who lived there” and whose initials are seen at the top of the column: T for Thomas Berbisey, and M for Marguerite Bonvillain, both connected by a wedding cord. The family coat of arms, “a white sheep grazing in front of an azure background”, was scratched, probably during the French Revolution.
At the top is told “a terrible episode of Dijon”: this chapel was probably made after 1513, when some Dijon bourgeois represented by the sheep, damaged during the revolution, were sent against a ransom in Switzerland (the sheep is incarcerated with a ball around the neck) after they besieged us. The bourgeois were delivered in 1517 without paying. The dragons around the illustrative sets guarantee history, as a protection.
