Today Reims

Yesterday Linda and I decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to traipse to Reims. I wanted to see the cathedral, the purest of Gothic edifices; some even call it the most perfect Gothic cathedral ever built. Clovis, the first acknowledged king of France, was baptized there, bringing the Frankish kingdom into the realm of Christendom. Most Kings of France have been consecrated there, the last one in 1825 and the Germans, during their last Eastern offensive in September 1914, to demonstrate their “Schrecklichkeit”, almost destroyed it. France moved immediately after the end of the war to rebuild this symbol of nationhood, and international philanthropy by the likes of John D. Rockefeller helped finance the effort.

From Bastille the Gare de l’Est is only five stops away. The station has recently been redone, a very pleasant shopping center added, with direct access to lines 5 and 7 of the Métro.Ticketing is electronic, on touch-screen kiosks, or at pleasant well-lit counters. We encountered only nominal lines, and within minutes were sitting in the Train de Grande Vitesse (TGV) that left sharply on time. The 90 miles were covered in 45 minutes, and we arrived right into the center of town, the station opening onto a large park with a statue in the middle, and on the other side a wide pedestrian boulevard lined with an endless array of restaurants and cafés, terrace after terrace, for the repose of the weary traveller.

We directly proceeded to the cathedral, dominating the city. The towers are visible up to 30 miles away, casting their sacred glow over the Champagne plain. No wonder that the Germans, recently rebuffed on the Marne and consolidating their line on the Aisne, were tempted to exercise their marksmanship.

It is richly decorated, covered with close to 3,000 statues, of kings, bishops, saints and angels, many of whom are very damaged by weather and pollution. Now and ever, the cathedral has been a work in progress. The story of its construction, damage by diverse fires and wars, reconstructions, remodeling and preservation is endless. There seems to have been, over the centuries, a continuous cloud of scaffolding around the church. Today it is the left western tower where the activity is concentrated. In the adjoining museum, le Palais de Tau, next the archbishop’s palace, many of the original XII and XIII century statues, four to seven meters tall, are being kept in their eroded state, having been replaced by more or less modern reproductions. The artists now employ digitisation to “feel” the outlines of the sculptures. But because of the weather and time ravages, these outlines are not what they were originally, so the last inch or so has to be imaged (and imagined) before being recreated in stone anew. I find the originals, in their fuzzy state, to be very much more moving than their replacements.

It is such a powerful site! I have to admit that certain places have the accumulated strength of other people’s belief, efforts and faith. The continuous energy, the mobilization of the means to preserve, to recreate, the demands of the endless struggle against time and the elements. It reminds you of the unlikely places where trees and plants will take root, in nooks and crannies, in the slightest accumulation of dirt, the will to life.. It gets to you. Many other sites have this energy, the Parthenon in Athens, the Temple Wall in Jerusalem, well Jerusalem as a whole.

Linda was overpowered by the spirit of the place, and she decided to light a candle to, in a way, join the feeling of communal pleading.

And Reims is overpowering. The cathedral is the most vertical, pure straight lines and lances and arrows to heaven, such a pleading to a manifestation from above, under a silent grey sky-dome. The inside is austere and soaring and light. Many of the stained glass windows were destroyed, but many remain, and some are modern. In 1957 the Champagne wine industry donated a magnificent window about vintners and wine and vines. Chagall, in 1974, completed three windows in blues and reds with a strong happy Christ, more open-armed than crucified.  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21506908@N07/2108492950/

To see a Gothic cathedral, skip Notre Dame, overcrowded and overpublicized. There is not much in it left after the successive revolutions in Paris. Go to Reims, or Amiens, or Beauvais.

Thereafter we drifted into more mundane stuff: I had found a restaurant, “Les Crayeres” on the Pommery estate (http://www.lescrayeres.com/lechateau_4.html). We had a dreamy meal. No cuisine nouvelle, the good old techniques, lightened up and très réussies.

It takes its name from the deep wells dug since Gallo-Roman times to extract chalk from the subsoil, deep to 100 feet or more, and transformed by the wine industry into cellars to let Champagne bubbly mature and become. All the brands have connected these pits with miles and miles of galleries. We visited, after lunch, the Pommery caves, 116 steps down a long staircase, where, in the moist and cool depths of the earth a modern art exhibit was being prepared for opening that same afternoon. 22 million bottles of Champagne in that cellar alone. Quite a party!



Striking to me was that the industry seems to have been founded by women, once their husbands had stopped bothering them: Mme. Jeanne Pommery established the first underground cellars; and we have also Phillippe Clicquot’s widow, born in 1777, who became the moving spirit of the House of Clicquot, whose CEO is nowadays Mme. Cécile Bonnefond.

Well fortified and at peace, we walked back to the station and boarded a slower train back. We had to change at Epernay, and coasted along the River Marne towards Meaux (good mustard! and another cathedral) and Paris. I reminisced on those days in September 1914, when the German armies decided to retreat along these same grounds, from Epernay and Dormans towards the North, pursued by Sir John French and the exhausted British Expeditionary Force, and the French Third Army under Maunoury, reinforced by the troops out of Paris, travelling to the front in the famous taxicabs (600 of them, and some demanded their fares from the Minister of War). The Germans settled for three more years along the heights above the Aisne river, and trench warfare was invented.

We arrived back home, tired, happy and fulfilled.