What Nancy Wrote About Rouen

In Rouen on September 5, I had an accident with the rental van. Did you ever try to find parking for a modern van in medieval streets? Me neither.

How do delivery vans manage in Rouen? They park half on the sidewalk, half on the street. How do you get around them? You drift left into the next lane which sadly is full of cars, so you turn back into your own lane. And there you have it, a thud and a shudder, a shout from behind and from your very own mouth, blue language. A very bad day so far!

Our rear-view mirrors kissed, that was all. No damage to his, not a scratch. To mine, a long crack and a smallish hole. A few blocks later, the perfect parking place.

We walked downhill past the tower where Joan of Arc was held by the English after they caught her, a place with very little light. I remembered my former reading about her. She refused to wear skirts as ordered, because the soldiers got rowdy with her if they thought she was really female. But if, to protect herself, she wore pants and threatened them with curses, they thought she was a witch. The girl couldn't win, that was clear, and she was burned soon after, in 1431. The French got her sainted a few years later, Rouen became a pilgrimage site and has been making money off her ever since. See how bad my mood was?

Anyway, a cross marks the spot. The newish Eglise Jeanne d'Arc (closed) is surrounded by a cheery neo-medieval covered market with the smallest merry-go-round I've ever seen (closed) and a Punch-and-Judy (closed).

The old city center mainly survived WWII (the rest of Rouen was flattened). It's full of delightful half-timbered old houses, retail on the ground floor, living above. The corner posts lean wildly after all these years. A pleasure to behold, a spark to the imagination. An improvement to my mood.

We walked down the rue d'horloge with its very fancy 16th century clock that still works. Its one hand is tipped by a gold lamb, and there are fine carvings all around. What? You need a clock with two hands?

The Cathedral. Monet painted the light at different hours of the day, staying in rented rooms above what is now the Tourist Information Center. When I was last in Rouen (2004) its facade was covered with scaffolding, repairing war damage. Now in 2014 the gorgeous stone tracery pleases the eye, though on the side of the church there are holes (from bullets?) remaining. We had ice cream in the plaza and walked through the church, which lost almost all its old stained glass and is bright inside. 

Back to l'Eglise Jeanne d'Arc, which had opened after lunch, along with the carousel. We sat inside admiring the architecture and stained glass. The windows survived the war to be installed in a new church, because they were taken out of their frames and stored someplace. The old church was bombed down to the foundations, making way for this new wonderful building. 

When I wrote the draft of this entry, we were camping in the Valley of the Somme. WWI came through there like a plague, such that every few kilometers (or less) there is another cemetery of war dead. Simple gravestones shoulder to shoulder to shoulder to shoulder.

WWI swept away the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czarist Russia, and the entire power structure of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of perfectly good people died or were damaged. Next, the lower orders (we may call them) rose up to seize the day for better and worse. The Twenties, the Thirties. WWII finished off the old ways of thinking, making our own contemporary lives possible.

I do think that without the clearances of war, the new edifices of thought that we know so well wouldn't have had room to flourish. Think of all the various individual-rights movements. In the arts, think of abstract expressionism, deconstruction (our favorite movement) and today's art chaos. They would have all turned out totally different and we would be different. In a way, we're living upside-down as regards the past.

This is OK with me, as without contemporary thinking, I'd likely be one of those 19th-century literary old maids living in the cracks on other people's charity. I prefer to deal with today - even when it means providing an outrageous rear-view mirror for a rented van.