September 9 -- Notre Dame de Rouen

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A better look a the hôtel de ville.

The prev was a better look at the gargoyle, but I also wanted to show you the excrescences on the pointy thing at right.  They remind me of clouds/wind in Chinese decorative art.

So different from the USA -- new, older, old, all together.  This particular old structure has a stone plaque saying it once was the church of St. Lo.

There are lots of shops with expensive clothes for (very) little kids, in French towns that are visited by lots of tourists.

Interesting juxtaposition -- overalls and t with bear, next to very grownup geeky vest, etc.

(Can't help wondering what's up with a dead-rat soft toy........)

Again -- something I might expect to see on a young toddler next to something I'd expect to see on a much older person.  I'm glad the bunny is still alive........

Walking toward Notre Dame de Rouen. This is a cathedral that Monet painted, over and over, in different lights. (If you click through on the Monet link, be sure to scroll down.... Surely wish we'd been able to visit the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Next time......)

Note scaffolding.  This cathedral was heavily damaged in the war.  There are many displays inside showing the direction from which the bombs came, with photographs of the destruction, etc.

There is shrapnel, still, in some of the piers that hold up the roof, and shrapnel in statues, now inside, which used to be outside.

Many new statues replace older ones.

This is a very large structure.

Sunshine through stained glass.

A Korean priest visited Rouen, and left paintings in homage to Monet.

The basic ceiling is very high, and the tower is much higher.

Hmmm.  Who is this?

Oh my.  Richard, king of England, called Lion Heart, died 1199.

We saw that his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, married her first husband in Bordeaux. Here is her son (by her second husband, Henry II of England)............

This is the family about which A Lion in Winter was made.

Gives me the shivers, being right near the remains of someone so well known despite all those centuries.

(Ed note -- or not -- Wikipedia says his remains have been missing "since at least the French revolution"....  I find it a bit odd that the tomb survives.  Harder to destroy than 800-yr-old remains....  And ... it seems he was pretty much of a jerk, rather than a good guy.  Not a surprise, I guess, given the whole "God's annointed" thing.  One shouldn't expect a king from that era to behave any better than professional sports figures behave today, I suppose.  Ah well.  How heavily our beliefs about something affect our reactions to it!!!)



Walking away from Richard, coeur de lion.....

Wow.  Here's a tour de force in stone.............

One of the things I am having the most trouble assimilating is the juxtaposition of so much Really Old Stuff with Life Goes On.

In the USA, we don't live next door to anything that was built long enough ago that it was destroyed in 1514.  And again in 1822.  And "unbalanced" by bombs in 194?.

I had been thinking "Well, they'll get the cathedral fixed up, eventually." and, without realizing it, I was thinking "and it will stay that way."

I am coming to realize that it will not stay that way.

That the way of everything, even cathedrals, is that it will burn, or decay, or be bombed.  It will not "stay that way."  It will, perhaps, be rebuilt.  Or not (like St. Lo's church......)........

I'm having trouble getting my head around the combination of so many things, common everywhere in Europe (say), that are so old, but are part of daily life and are in continuing use/revision/reconstruction.......

It seems to me that living next door to these concepts has got to have an impact on one's world view................

Or not, I suppose..............

Imagining living next door to them is having an impact on mine.




Leaving the cathedral; looking back at the front.  Here are some of the people making it possible for people 100 or 1000 or ?? years in the future to see (and use) this building.

See my daughter's take on this lovely day here.



In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, here is a link to the post that comes after this one.

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