Two Norman Invasions

From our base in Lisieux, we made a few expeditions to other points in Normandy we wanted to explore. One of these was Bayeux!

It's a charming town, but for anyone interested in medieval history, it's most famous for its tapestry. The Bayeux tapestry records the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 (a very memorable date indeed) in embroidered pictures with simple Latin labels. Created not long after the Conquest, it's almost completely unique as a historical record. Because it tells its story through images, it offers all sorts details that written records don't bother with, and perhaps also the point of view of people who couldn't write and didn't rely on writing to remember their past.

Bayeux Cathedral

Because it's a piece of fabric that's almost a thousand years old (!), it's kept very carefully: hung up inside a glass temperature-controlled case in a dimly-lit room. Of course photos are forbidden! Here's a site where you can see some good ones of the whole thing, though. You can try scrolling through to get an idea of how the storytelling works. For an English explanation of what's going on, this page about a Victorian copy of the tapestry is the best I can find.

Anyway, I was ridiculously excited to see the thing. It's in its own museum without much else--besides some diorama castles and a reconstructed Viking ship and some creepy mannikins dressed as medieval Normans--but well worth the price of admission. The tapestry is thought to have been commissioned by Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and half-brother of William the Conqueror. In fact Odo was rather violent for a bishop and came along in the invasion, fighting in the battle of Hastings alongside William. The present cathedral of Bayeux has later Gothic elements alongside some Romanesque ones which date to Odo's day. It was exciting for me to see some of these typically Norman architectural elements, like the zig-zag pattern on the rounded arches, in a church in Normandy: previously I had only seen them on post-Conquest churches in England.

But interest in modern history also brings visitors to Bayeux, because it's the town closest to most of the Normandy beaches of the D-Day invasions. The museum in town about this is supposed to be good, but we ran out of time, and wanted to get out to actually see the beaches before sunset. So we drove out toward Omaha Beach:

Apparently on a clear day you can see England, but the coast was pretty profoundly grey when we got there. We also wanted to visit some of the cemeteries, but they were already closed for the evening. As you can see, they’re beautifully kept:

The drive there and back took us through more grey but beautifully countryside...

... as well as fields and fields devoted to growing the apples of Normandy. These in turn become its delicious cider and Calvados! 

Back in Lisieux, we had a rare dinner out at the "Au Vieux Normand" (approximately, "At the house or table of the old Norman guy") to enjoy some of these regional specialties. It was a sweet end to our stay in Lisieux and to exploring Normandy with our car, which we had to return at the end of the week.

Pélerinage thérésien II

Lisieux is a charming small country town, which was a welcome change of pace after three months in Paris. And it was nice to spend a few days walking in the footsteps of "la petite Therese."

Therese was a precocious child, teenager, and young adult. At the age of fifteen she was ready to enter the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux, but the local superior and bishop would not allow it. She was expected to wait until her twenty-first birthday instead. But eventually she was granted a special permission, and just before her sixteenth birthday she entered the monastery, receiving the religious name "Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face," which isn't as weird as it sounds. Really.

 Therese asking her father's permission in their garden.            Therese shown with the iconography of her religious name.    

It was in the monastery that Therese received her "little way" and in a very short time reached an extremely profound spiritual maturity. She was eventually put in charge of the novices, which was unheard of for a sister of her age. In spite of all, she always held a very low estimation of herself, insisting that she had no merits of her own, that her efforts were nothing, and that everything was a gift of God's grace. After her death in 1897 at the age of twenty four, and the posthumous publication of her spiritual autobiography, the Carmel in Lisieux became an extremely popular place of pilgrimage. So of course we had to visit.

On the flagpoles you can see the three banners depicting Therese and her parents, Louis and Zelie Martin, which are hung up all over town. The Carmelites in Lisieux have a welcome center for pilgrims, which includes the monastery church, the shrine containing Therese's tomb, a place for confession, a book shop, and a small museum. The museum was really neat, actually, since it offers a window onto the life of the monastery in Therese's time. Many of the things which she herself used are on display, like her habit and shoes and writing materials, as well as some of the more interesting tokens that have been sent to the monastery as signs of thanksgiving for the graces received through her intercession. On her deathbed Therese said that she expected to spend her heaven doing good on earth, and the hundreds of thousands of tokens sent to Lisieux are proof that she was right.

Therese's tomb, surrounded by flowers brought by pilgrims.

The original statue of Our Lady of the Smile.

The Carmelites live a cloistered common life of work and prayer, interceding with Christ to the Father in the Spirit for the sake of the whole world. Although she never left the confines of the cloister, Therese saw herself as a missionary, and offered much of her daily prayer and sacrifice for the sake of missionaries. In 1927 Pope Pius XI proclaimed her Patroness of Missions, and she was and continues to be a spiritual model for many missionaries, including Mother Theresa of Calcutta and her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity. As for the Carmelite sisters in Lisieux, among other works they now make cakes, called "scofa," which stands for "sugar, caramel, eggs [oeufs], flour, and almonds." The use of just a few pure ingredients with artful ingenuity is very, well, French. And the French also love puns, which must be behind the use of caramel, at Carmel, by Carmelites. The cake itself was absolutely delicious. We scofed it down.

While in Normandy we also had the chance to visit the birthplace of Therese in Alençon. The road from Lisieux to Alençon was so beautiful, winding through picturesque farmlands and small towns. E also had some research to do once we arrived, so the old Jesuit church, now home to the municipal library, was our first stop.

 

It was a lot of fun for me to finally see E in action, hidden behind a propped-up medieval tome, with white gloves and cloth paper weights and all. I tried to do some of my own work, too, but instead spent most of the time waiting for the floor of the library to open up onto an underground maze, where we would run and jump for our lives, saving E's manuscript from the bandits in chase who wanted to decipher its secrets in order to take over the world. 

In the late afternoon we went to visit the Martin family home in Alençon, which is as popular a destination for pilgrims as the Carmel in Lisieux.

A very sweet and excited French-African sister gave the two of us a tour of the house, telling us all about the family's life and spirituality. She showed us a video featuring excerpts from Zelie's correspondence. It was really encouraging to hear about how they lived their faith in the ordinary circumstances of their daily lives. In addition to caring for their large family, both of Therese's parents ran small businesses. Zelie managed a network of women making world-famous Alençon lace, and Louis kept a shop where he made and repaired clocks. And they were always going to church, or praying as a family at home, or making pilgrimage somewhere, and on and on. They interpreted every aspect of their lives through their faith. The house itself was beautiful, but small, and had all the expected signs of nineteenth-century life and piety ("a crucifix in every room," as they say). The tour ended in the parents' bedroom, which still has the bed where Therese entered the world and where Zelie left it. The room itself now opens onto a small baroque chapel that was built for pilgrims. The juxtaposition of the church and the bedroom, separated only by a wall of clear glass, drove home to me more than ever before the nature of Catholic sacramentality: spiritual realities incarnated in and communicated through the material, concrete, historical, fleshly reality of creation. I mean, this is the bed in which Therese was conceived and born - in a church. 

Before dinner we made a quick visit to the nearby Cathedral where Louis and Zelie were married and where Therese was baptized. 

On the drive back to Lisieux we stopped by Sees, whose giant and famous Cathedral can be seen from miles around.

By then the sun was setting, and it was well after dark before we made it back to the hotel. Our hotel on the outskirts of Lisieux was surrounded by a few really strange restaurants. We couldn't resist trying one Buffalo Grill, which boasted a world-famous country burger.

Yes, those are hash browns instead of hamburger buns. A taste of Texas in the French countryside, and it only cost me € 7.00 and a stomach ache.

Pélerinage thérésien I

After celebrating the Easter Triduum at Notre Dame des Victoires, we left Paris for good and headed out into the Norman countryside. We had decided to spend the first week of Easter on a Theresian pilgrimage - that's St. Therese of Lisieux - so after cleaning up and packing our bags, we went to pick up our rental car at the Carrousel du Louvre. The woman at the counter handed us the keys with a knowing smile, assuring us that we were going to like the car. She was right. So after loading it up, we were off. First stop, cows.

 Second stop, Lisieux. 

That's the Basilica of Therese of Lisieux in the background. In France she is known as "la petite Therese" to distinguish her from "la grande Therese," St. Teresa of Avila, a famous sixteenth-century Carmelite nun, spiritual writer, and reformer of the order. But there is nothing "petite" about the Basilica in Lisieux, or about devotion to Therese in France.

 

Crypt church of the Basilica.

Garden behind the Basilica, on a wooded hillside.

Therese is also called "little" because she called herself "little" very often in her spiritual autobiography, The History of a Soul, which she wrote at the request of her religious superiors. The book was published soon after her death and quickly became hugely popular. In it she recounts what has been known as her "little way," a way of confidence in and love of God, expressed through making simple sacrifices joyfully and doing daily tasks with great love. Here's a small excerpt:

"I have always wanted to become a saint. Unfortunately when I have compared myself with the saints, I have always found that there is the same difference between the saints and me as there is between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and a humble grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by. Instead of being discouraged, I told myself: God would not make me wish for something impossible and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint. It is impossible for me to grow bigger, so I put up with myself as I am, with all my countless faults. But I will look for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new."

"We live in an age of inventions. We need no longer climb laboriously up flights of stairs; in well-to-do houses there are lifts. And I was determined to find a lift to carry me to Jesus, for I was far too small to climb the steep stairs of perfection. So I sought in holy Scripture some idea of what this life I wanted would be, and I read these words: "Whosoever is a little one, come to me." It is your arms, Jesus, that are the lift to carry me to heaven. And so there is no need for me to grow up: I must stay little and become less and less."

Devotion to Therese spread so quickly that she was canonized only 28 years after her death. And in 1997 she was proclaimed a doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II. Therese is the youngest doctor of the Church, one of only four women, and had pretty much no formal training in theology or philosophy (she's just that awesome).

Therese lived in Lisieux for most of her life, but of course the Basilica wasn't there at the time. We visited the Cathedrale Sainte-Pierre, where she attended mass with her family before entering the Carmelite monastery.

 

The church was dressed for Easter. 

Therese's father donated this altar to the church.

 The church was built in the 12th-13th centuries; it's earlier-Gothic than many we've seen.

Therese's parents, Louis and Zelie Martin, have also been recognized as blessed, and will soon be canonized--the first modern married couple to be so recognized. Of their nine children, four died in infancy or early childhood, and all the others became nuns ("you will know the tree by its fruit"). Zelie died when Therese was only four, and Louis then moved the family from Alençon to Lisieux, to be nearer to relatives.

We visited the house where they lived in Lisieux, "Les Buissonets."

Here we are in Therese's bedroom next to the statue which has come to be known as Our Lady of the Smile. When Therese was very sick as a child, her father wrote to the priests of Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris to have a novena of masses said for her recovery. Afterward, while she and her sisters were praying together in her bedroom, Therese gazed up at the statue and had a vision of a beautiful woman smiling down on her. From that point she began to recover from her fever. Later she and her father traveled to Paris to give thanks at the shrine of Our Lady of Victories, where we often prayed ourselves. The statue in Therese's bedroom is absolutely beautiful, and the whole house is full of flowers. Therese would have liked that. She called herself "the little flower," since she thought that although she could never be like the great saints, lilies and roses and all, she could still be a small wildflower, like the ones that spring up between the cracks of stones.

Therese entered the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux while still a teenager, and died there before her twenty-fifth birthday. We made a visit there, too, and to the home where she was born in Alençon, but that's a story for another day.

Things are looking a little different out here.

Those are cows. And a bright red Beetle. We did not expect either. Life in Normandy is full of surprises! Stay tuned for more details.

Au revoir, Paris

A week ago in Paris, blue skies, green leaves, and a few flowers were just beginning to appear...

These are on our balcony!

Parisians flocked to the parks to sit and chat, smoke a cigarette, and sometimes (in the case of these small people) to learn to fence!

In the Place des Vosges, where Victor Hugo lived.

Obviously this was all far too idyllic for us. So we've left Paris and headed farther north, where it's still cold and grey.

We didn't plan it like that on purpose. But I had finished most of what I hoped to accomplish at the Bibliothèque nationale and our lease was running out, so at the end of March, we packed our bags and headed off into the great unknown--in this case, Normandy. For the next three months, we'll be traveling all over in pursuit of archives and adventure. Well, mostly archives.

Still, we leave with many good memories of our tiny, tiny apartment; the assortment of nearby bakeries which we have strictly ranked by quality, proximity, and pastry type; and a lot of good walks through the city...

We found this plaque inside Sainte Trinité church commemorating the composer Olivier Messiaen who was titular organist here on one such walk.

On one last trip to the Louvre, we ran across a heretofore-undiscovered medieval gallery...

On the left is a deposition from the cross that I found really peaceful. On the right, the angel is weighing the souls of the dead in judgment, which is a fairly common motif in medieval art: what's unusual is that here the Virgin Mary is tipping the balance in favor of this pious soul!

I already mentioned the pastries. Here's the evidence of one marzipan pig filled with dense, dark chocolate cake from the nearby market street, and one trip to a Lenôtre, which we had wanted to visit because T's best man in our wedding is the grandson of the founder of this pastry brand. We just window-shopped there, but this was impressive enough because it was already decked out with elaborate chocolates for Easter. The French phrase for window-shopping literally translates as "window-licking," did you know?

Of course, mostly we will miss the little bits of a normal life that we eventually established here: our neighborhood church, our daily routine, quick walks to anywhere in the central city any afternoon we felt like it. Au revoir, Paris. À bientôt!