Conflans and Auvers

CONFLANS

Conflans is a small town probably about 10 miles or so outside of Paris. We sailed there from Paris Saturday afternoon, and spent half the day there on Sunday. Sunday morning I got up and took a walk around the village, which turned off not to be very long as welks go, because as soon as you got off the main street beside the river the streets were stairs.

  It turned out that the stairs went up to the old church, and just included a couple of really nice photo opportunities. 

At the end of the little walk, I saw they were setting up a farmers market,

 so of course I went there to try to take some more pictures. 

The best thing over there was that there was a guy making a giant dish of paella. You can’t imagine how much I wanted that, and I hadn’t brought any money with me. Just as well, since they feed us like they were planning on selling our livers at the end of the trip.



After I got back to the ship, it was time to go on our morning excursion to Auvers. This was a lot of fun. Van Gogh lived in Auvers for 70 days til the end of his life. Although he tried to sell his paintings there, no one was interested in buying them. Additionally, he gave at least one of his paintings to his landlord, who eventually sold it for 30 francs, apparently because he didn’t much like it.

It was pretty cold when we first got there, but at least the sun was shining and it was more or less pleasant. Our guide Peggy, was quite knowledgeable and seemed to be very disposed to like Van Gogh.

There are a number of sites around town that he painted and there are framed signs in front of them to show what Van Gogh painted.

Our penultimate stop was at the church, up a bunch of steps which Zoe managed very well. Because today is Palm Sunday, they were starting the mass outside, and everybody had branches. They looked like boxwood, rather than palms, and everybody was carrying them into the church for mass. Only the priest had any palms. 






From there we moved on up to the cemetery which was another hike up a hill and which Zoe also managed quite well. 

Vincent and Theo Van Gogh are both buried at this cemetery, though they weren’t buried there to begin with, they were moved there at a later date.

  There were two other stones of interest, one of a painter, whose grave had a wonderful mosaic on it, and another one to a woman sculptor who was the companion to a male sculptor named Otto Freundlich who was taken to the camps and died in WWII.

Tonight we will dock at Vernon and will visit Giverny tomorrow.  


This is our tour guide, John Pierre, and me having a drink outside the bar above which Van Gogh lived.  This table is set up all the time as a photo opportunity.