We had great adventures today in Rouen. The city of Rouen is located midway between Paris and the English Channel. It served as the capital of the Duchy of Normandy. Located on the Seine, it was once a major port. It is still a large industrial center. The allies bombed Rouen heavily, and most of the city is modern and not particularly attractive. But the center of the city has been carefully rebuilt and retains its historic character.
The most famous attraction in Rouen is the Cathedral. It has been famous for its size and the exquisite Gothic detail, but it is best known now because Claude Monet painted it a dozen times at different times of day and in different seasons to show the effects of changing light. But more on that later. Here is the facade showing one of the west towers and the main door. Keep this shot in mind for later.
From another angle John took this picture of the famous spire. Very artistic guy, isn't he?
The interior of the cathedral is amazing. It is so vast and yet light. Rouen has the highest nave of any medieval Gothic cathedral, and the tower at the crossing stretches higher still. Filling up that space, while we were there, was this trio of a pianist, a violinist, and a accordion player. They were practicing for a concert later that night. The music was more what you expect from a tango club than for a church, but it somehow worked perfectly.
As we listened to the music, we walked around the cathedral. In the ambulatory we found several tombs including this one. The inscription says that the heart of "Richard, King of England, called Lion Hearted" is interred there. (We learned later that the rest of his body is buried someplace in the Loire valley along with the other Plantagenets.)
By the time we were finished with the cathedral - even Vicki, who hates old churches, found it fascinating - we decided it was time for lunch. The Michelin guide recommended several places, and we found one of them in the Vieux Marche, the old market.
Rouen is famous for many reasons, but one of them was that it was in Rouen where Joan of Arc was tried and executed by the English. The picture below is not great, but it is shows what we were looking at when we had lunch. The cross marks the spot where Joan was burned alive. Next to it is a modern church dedicated to her. It is not particularly interesting inside, but the exterior of the church, completed in 1979, suggests a helmet and a lance.
We ate lunch at an outdoor table near the excavated site of where the judges would have sat to watch her die. Not perhaps the most appealing of thoughts, but neither was it our best meal in France. Always up for a culinary adventure, I ordered the regional specialty - Andy, you can skip the rest of this paragraph - calf's head in sauce. It came, fortunately, without the skull though if you looked carefully you could see little bits of hair on the skin. It was obviously real poor people food, and I can't say I thought it was very good.
After lunch, we stopped off at the tourist office. They had really cool audio guides and a map of the city indicating the stops we should make. Each stop had a number to punch into the audio guide. It took us some places where we otherwise would never have found. This was one of them.
Rouen, like most cities in western Europe, was devastated by the Black Death. It took no time at all to fill up all the space in the church yards. So people had to figure out what to do with the bodies. They created a new kind of cemetery. The central square here, shaded with large plane trees, would have one been filled with open pits. Bodies would have been thrown in the pits and covered with quicklime to make them deteriorate quickly. When the flesh had rotted off, the bones would have been collected and housed in small tombs in the building surrounding the courtyard.
All along side of the buildings are pictures of bones and skulls and other symbols of death and dying. Here is a close up.
There were once dozens of the "death houses" all over Europe, some larger than the one here in Rouen. But this is the only one remaining. All the other ones have been destroyed by fire or war or by the nineteenth century obsession with sanitation.
In doing some restoration work, historians uncovered this body of a mummified cat. They have found some of these in other historical sites and nobody is quite sure what the rationale was for going to all the effort to preserve a cat's body and entomb it in a wall.
We took a break from the tour and went to the Musee des Beaux Arts, the Rouen art museum. It is not a stunning collection, but it does have major holdings in 16th through 20th century art. John could not resist posing with one of the modern pieces.
The reason most tourists come to the museum is to see Monet's picture of the cathedral. Of the twelve painted, only one is here, but it's a pretty good one. Now see why I told you to remember the photo we snapped earlier of the facade?
After about 90 minutes, we reluctantly left the museum to continue our tour. The other great site in Rouen in is the clock and bell tower, the "Gros Hourlage". Here is one face of it - there is a similar one on the other side of the building. This intricate Renaissance time piece has recently been restored. The clock only shows the hours: there is no minute hand. But it has scenes of Roman deities at the bottom to show the day of the week, and the four circles in the corners indicate the phases of the moon. After hundreds of years the mechanism still works and still chimes the hour with reasonable accuracy. That's better reliability than your average Swatch, wouldn't you say?
Another major sight is the Palais de Justice, the law courts. These are still being restored and renovated. They were very badly damaged during World War II, and the walls are pockmarked with bullet holes. In the current restoration they have discovered that the law courts were built on the site of the old Jewish quarter and they have found remnants of what they think is a synagogue in the courtyard. So historians and preservationists are trying to figure out how to balance the competing historical and artistic interests here.
By seven o'clock, Vicki was ready to go home. We drove the 90 minutes or so back to Honfleur, and we got to the local branch of E. Leclerq just as it was about to close. For those of you who think of France as exquisite little cafes and boutiques in the Rive Gauche, there is another side of France and Leclerq is it. It is the biggest and cheapest of the "hyper" markets, and the closest thing to it in America is Wal-Mart. We picked up a few things and had a late supper. This was simple and cheap, but it was better than my lunch entree!
