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!

Arc de Triomphe

Chateau de Vincennes

Or, We Went to a Medieval Thing and I Was Very Excited, Secular Architecture Division.

Did you know there's a castle in Paris? I didn't, until a friend mentioned it to us. But there is!

Really it is just outside the city bounds, on the edge of a huge park which used to be its hunting grounds--because, you know, it's not a good castle unless it has nice woods for hunting.

The bois (woods) outside the post-medieval outer wall.

The keep, in the first picture, is the oldest surviving bit, dating mostly to the fourteenth century. It was mostly built by Charles V, who lived there a lot. In later centuries it was used as a prison--along with the Bastille, it had become (in)famous by the time of the Revolution as a place for the king to stick his political enemies without a trial. Incidentally castles were often used as prisons, in the middle ages as well as afterward: this is reflected in the French word for a castle keep, a 'donjon', where we get 'dungeon.'

Yikes. On the other hand, my associations with the castle of Vincennes have more to do with happy medieval peasants, probably because it appears in some famous illuminations like this one:

Image from Wikipedia.

The image is from the Tres riches heures du Duc de Berry, a late-medieval book of hours. Books of hours were prayer books for noble men and women which usually had a shorter version of the liturgy of the hours alongside other prayers, Bible excerpts, and a calendar, giving the dates of various feasts (here's a nice discussion of what goes in books of hours). This is an illustration for the December page of the calendar; you can see astronomical/astrological stuff up at the top. Calendars were often illustrated with a depiction of some kind of task typically done in that month--for December, the task is usually 'slaughtering pigs.' Sorry it's a little bloody--if only Vincennes were in the January picture. The traditional labor of January, as is still well known, is:

Image from Wikipedia, which has the full set.

Partying.

Back to Vincennes--the earliest castle on the site was built in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth, Saint Louis housed his relic of the Crown of Thorns there before moving it on to the Sainte-Chapelle in central Paris. The castle of his lifetime is completely gone now, but the chapel that Charles V started building on the grounds is modeled after the Sainte-Chapelle:

But Revolutionaries broke all the stained glass. You can see how important the stained glass and interior painting are to the look of the Sainte-Chapelle; it's not just the shape!

The chateau itself struck me as a really practical building from a defensive perspective...

In the middle ages there was no entrance to the keep on the ground floor. You had to go up a tiny winding stairway in a tower in the guardhouse (above me, in the picture to the left) and then cross the wooden walkway pictured. On the right is the moat from the battlements.

And we found it interesting to see how Charles V used the chateau as a center for administration. For instance, he had the first public clock in France installed in the castle.

The original bell is preserved today in the chapel; a copy is in its place in the tower. You can see it hasn't got a clock face--but the bell was rung by a clockwork-driven mechanism, not by hand. So this clock basically still worked in the same way that church bells worked throughout the middle ages, as the main way for most people to reckon time. Imagine how different your feeling of time passing would be if you couldn't check the hour except by estimating from the sun (though probably you would get better at estimating quickly), and if you had to wait for bells to know the exact hour...

For Charles, and for many other people, the bell was also there to tell him the times of the prayers in the liturgy of the hours. We were amazed at the tiny size of the chapel inside the castle where Charles listened to these prayers. Actually, everything inside was tiny. Here's his study/library:

I had to climb into the fireplace to take the photo on the right. For scale, think that the door is about the size of a normal modern door. That's where the king of France administered his kingdom from! The picture on the left is of the center of the ceiling in this room; there were also representations of the four Evangelists at the four corners of the room. There's hardly any decoration, but a little got in--and they are labelled in French! Charles seems to have been pretty into reading in the vernacular; he commissioned the translation of a bunch of stuff into French, including some Aristotle. The rooms are barren now, so the best views are outside:

 

In conclusion: a castle that you can get to on the Métro! It's a little obscure, but great fun to see a different aspect of medieval Paris.