Le Printemps du Rouen

After our week-long excursion in the Norman countryside we settled for three weeks in the city of Rouen, where E had work to do in the regional archives and the municipal library. The city has a charming medieval center, a few small museums, and a lot of really neat Gothic architecture.

I was most excited to get to see the cathedral that Monet made famous with a beautiful series of paintings.

E was excited to see it as well, because all the dukes of Normandy used to be buried there. Most of their remains have been moved to other places, but the heart - and only the heart - of Richard the Lionheart(!) is still buried there.

Rouen is probably most famous as the place where St. Joan of Arc was tried, condemned, and burned to death in the first third of the fifteenth century.

The tower of the fortress where Joan of Arc was imprisoned and its great view of the city.

Our apartment was only a block away from the central marketplace where she was executed. It now houses a tragically hideous modern church that looks like a mix between a huge water-slide and an enormous dead fish. We did not take a picture of it.

Unlike at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, I was allowed to go with E into the libraries in Rouen. So on most days we walked together to the library in the morning, worked through the day, and made detours around the city on the way home in the evening. Our trips to the departmental archives always took us across the river into the more industrial part of the city.

The Bronx? No thanks. 

But on our way back from the archives we usually managed to find something medieval, like this massive monastery church.

 St. Ouen.

Our time in Rouen coincided with the city's annual three-week spring holiday, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. It meant that nothing was happening at the local theatre, orchestra, or opera (sigh), but it also meant that the art museums were free to enter and, most importantly, that everything was in bloom (sigh again).

There isn't much else to tell about our days in Rouen, since there was really very little to do there. E seemed to get a lot out of her time in the archive and library. I madly cranked out an article to send off to a journal for review. And we both had our patience tried by the tiny, tiny apartment we rented. We're definitely looking forward to returning to our 300-square-foot palace in Harlem.