TWO DAYS, FOUR TOWNS

TWO DAYS, FOUR TOWNS

I’m starting this post in Rouen, the town Joan of Arc put on the map for most Americans. It was the home of the Dukes of Normandy, who eventually became English royalty. Joan of Arc was pivotal in the 100 years war and burned at the stake for heresy, because she was turned over to the British.

The Cathedral here is another huge cathedral and has many interesting things, like an  organ that was built in 1530 or so,  It sits in a Renaissance balcony, but the symmetry of the balcony was spoiled when they decided to add ranks to the organ. On the outside or the church, which is roughly divided into thirds, there is, on the left, the old tower which was the original church.  Then the addition to it has the front doors and the tympanum, and the butter tower on the right finishes the symmetry.  in Normandy, as in Catholic Europe, Lent was a time of fasting which mean one didn't eat meat, butter, eggs, or olive oil. 

The people of Normandy can't live without their butter and agreed to pay a tax to basically buy their way out of giving up butter for Lend, and according to our guide, you can see how much they liked butter by the height of the tower built with the tax. 

In France about 1938 they started taking all the old windows out of churches knowing that there was bombing coming, and they hid them. After the war and as they rebuilt the various churches, they put the windows back in. In the main church, though, there are many windows of plain glass because they’d already been lost. In some cases they’ve replaced parts of the old windows with modern stained glass techniques. Obviously, windows are my favorite part of churches. In France the major churches and cathedrals are considered part of the country’s patrimony and therefore the government owns them. The church is allowed to rent them back for a nominal sum and is required to maintain them. Church membership in France was represented as 30 percent athiest, 30 percent catholic, and all the rest put together represents the remainder.

After the church tour we got a look at a very narrow street and some nice half-timbered houses.

Then we went to the church built on the Joan of Arc site. First we stopped outside and saw the square where she was burned.

Then we went into the church, which looks like an upside-down ship on the outside. Inside the church is mainly stained glass, saved from a church that was bombed to ruins during the war.

The church is very spare inside, and yet these old,

old windows are quite wonderful. Later in the trip when we were in the town of Lescouret we saw some windows in the English Notre Dame church that were by the same artist, but still in the church they were built for.

We had free time for shopping in Rouen, and we could go back to the ship and have lunch, then take the shuttle bus back to town to shop in the afternoon, or we could just stay. Full as we are all the time, you’d think we would have taken the opportunity to skip a meal, but not us. Of course Jean-Pierre made a particular place seem so desireable that we had to eat there. It was good, and there were only French people in there, except a couple of other people from our group, but the combinations were a bit strange. I had a Croque Al-1 (the name of the place) and instead of it being the fairly predictable grilled ham and cheese sandwich, it included ham, cheese, bacon and a fried egg, served open faced and absolutely had to eat it with a fork and knife, except that my plate was so full of french friies I kept knocking them off while I was trying to cut my food. Zoe had something I can’t remember, except that it came with a side of potatoes and a side of french fries.

We did a little window shopping, Zoe went back to the ship and I kept walking around Rouen, terrorizing shop keepers with my French and looking at all the jewelry. I finally came back to the ship on the 5 p.m. shuttle bus and then took another little walk around the area where the boat docked.

The next morning we had a city tour of Couterat. There’s not a tremendous amount of things to see in the little village but there is the Renaissance church built by the English and that contains the windows by the same person who made the windows in Rouen. (Of course, that’s not such an amazing thing, since these two towns are probably less than 20 miles apart.)

We had an

afternoon excursion to the Cliffs of Entretat, which isn’t particularly memorable except for a WWII memorial at a place that may or may not have been Eisenhower’s headquarters – I couldn’t quite hear) and then the beach which has some interesting rock formations at either end, and which was painted by Monet. They have a couple of Monet’s paintings on signs overlooking the beach so you can compare the area today with previous times.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on a little trip to Fecamp to tour the Benedictine Monastery where B&B and Benedictine are made. After the Revolution, there were few surviving monasteries or churches in France. The Benedictines had mostly left, and the recipe for the medicinal Benedictine was given by a former tax attorney for the abbey to the man who made it a household word. He was a collector in the way William Randolph Hearst was, and created a place that I suppose to him represented what the old monastery might have been, had it been an opulent chateau with the religious overtones of a church. He was ahead of his time and once he developed the drink, he registered or patented the shape of the bottle, the name DOM, the name Benedictine, and various other elements of the label. At the end of the tour we had some and it was extremely strong in my opinion.

On our way back to the ship, we stopped at an old oak tree which housed a tiny chapel.

After the revolution, they tried to burn this tree down, but the priest convinced them that it was a chapel to reason, and as such, part of the nation’s history, so they didn’t. It’s an interesting site, which our guide described as a Harry

Potter tree, and I think it was. It had quite a lot of shingles on the outside, for one thing, and had a good deal of metal propping it up, as well.

Dinner tonight was followed by the Crew show which was charming, as those events usually are.