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.

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.