Day 63. Rennes.Oct 8 2001

Influenced by the beauty we had seen yesterday and not at all by our tired muscles, we decided to spend another day in Rennes. The city is, if anything, even more beautiful when everything in open.

The day dawned strangely calm and clear in spite of yesterday's storminess and we decided to give the local public transit system a try. We didn’t want to worry about our bikes once we got downtown but the walk in was daunting. Busing was interesting, however, as school had just been let out for lunch and the bus was packed to the gills. Fortunately we got on first.

As we drove towards the downtown area it began to rain again, hard, and we despaired of seeing Rennes in any other fashion. The bus dropped us off in front of city hall and we looked around for some shelters. Hidden at the far end of the Rue Brilhac and wedged tightly in among other buildings, was the façade of a church. We hurried towards it and disappeared into the darkness of its arches.

Inside we discovered the most amazing thing. Notre Dame des Miracles. We had thought to seek shelter in a small chapel but here instead was a giant edifice, dark and secretive, like a hidden grotto between the buildings of Rennes. It was so large that it was almost impossible to believe that it could possibly fit behind the small façade we had seen from the street. It had been built to commemorate the preservation of this part of the city during Rennes's great fire and a large painting depicting the Virgin Mary’s role in that preservation hung over the entrance way. To our right was a huge shrine to Mary, set back into the wall with arches overhanging everything, as if Mary was hidden in a cave. The carving and stonework had been done with great skill and reverence and the hundreds of flickering candles cast an ethereal atmosphere over everything. The walls, all the way to the ceiling, were plated with small marble strips, given in thanks for the Mother of Christ’s intervention in some individual matter. Most said merely “Merci.” The altar of the church rose from the centre and was sheltered by four Corinthian columns capped in gold supporting an arch. In the centre of the arch, overshadowing the congregation, was a bronze depiction of Heaven, a vast swirling cloud frozen in metal, with the faces of angels looking down benevolently. We found the atmosphere almost overpowering, as if the designers had wanted to show the weight of God’s omnipotence. Stepping out into the street was almost like emerging from beneath a great load.

From the church we went across to the bookstores and tried to find a replacement for the Hobbit when we finished it. You would think that finding an English book in a French bookstore would be a challenge but they proved to be exactly like English stores, the challenge wasn’t finding the book; it was finding the first book in a series. After an hour or so browsing the stores I came to the conclusion that perhaps France is not best experienced by looking for English books, so we left the store and found ourselves another church. We returned to the chopped up church of the day before. The church looked as though it had been a full cross sometime in the past but something had sliced it and left it merely and X. The church was St. Aubins and the interior soared above our heads. Where the last church had been heavy this was lofty and light poured in from the vast stained glass windows. The altar here was almost a replica of a cathedral and single gothic spire rose from it halfway to the roof.

We left there all churched out and we wandered instead through the medieval streets searching for food, but could find no fast food places. We were forced, eventually and against our will, to eat real food. It could not have done our bodies any good.

Finally we went to out main goal for the day, the Musee Des Beaux Art de Rennes.

After a brief tussle with the desk clerk, who seemed very angry that we had difficulty understanding his French, we entered the Musee.


First, as part of a museum series profiling Breton artists, we toured the exhibition of Ernest Guerin, an Art Neauveau painter and illuminator. His early work was marvelous, fragile and vibrantly colorful depictions of medieval scenes with a deep attention to detail. His series depicting the life and canonization of Joan of Arc was beautiful. His later works became very chaotic images of storms.

From his exhibit we went upstairs and entered a world of beauty. So many beautiful pieces gathered together in a small area until there was almost an overload. The first piece that really struck us was “Après Le Bain” a sculpture by Louis Henri Nicot, a voyeuristic statue of a woman tending her hair after a bath. The detail was uncanny and even the lines on her feet were incredibly well executed.

After the statue we entered the hall of the twentieth century art and modern art. Here we had the opportunity to compare an early Picasso with a later one. The early works proved that Picasso was a highly skilled artist. It is understandable that he wanted to explore new directions in his art but in comparison to his early work a painting like “Baigneuse,” a painting of a woman wholly distorted on a background consisting of a few lines, seemed almost a waste.



My favorite painting was “Tanneguy Du Chastel Sauvant Le Dauphin" by Charles August Cantes, depicting a knight in obviously ceremonial armor carrying the heir to France’s throne to safety as a mob breaks into the palace. The expressions and the clothing clearly convey the haste and surprise of the moment while the detail is amazing. The are so many more to mention, to describe them would be to write a catalog.

Here I saw my first genuine examples of Athenina red figure and black figure pottery

and Roman remains from when Rennes was the Roman city of Condate. Even Egyption antiquities graced the museum and the mummified baby crocodile, with it's sarcophagus for a lizard no bigger than my thumb, must rank among some of the weirdest examples of human eccentricity.

I regret that I can not pour out all that is in my memory onto the page but any description would be inadequate. How different to see paintings in a book and in life, where the cracks show and the texture of the artist’s strokes are as important as the image itself. We left feeling strangely full, as though we had gorged ourselves to sickness at a huge banquet.

We made but one more stop, like a drink to help us digest. We toured the gardens at Le Thabor in the centre of the city.

Previously the property of Benedicting monks and graciously opened to the public by them in the 18th century, it was a perfect example of a manicured garden. From the cascading fountains on the Rue de Paris to the artifical “Caves of Hell” and the botanical gardens created during the Revolution the garden was a history of Rennes in grass and trees and it provided a nice tranquil end to a full day.

From there we walked home again, stopping to pick up food and examine a French video rental store where you inserted your credit card and typed in your selection on a keypad and waited for your video to come to you. Altogether it had been a very busy day, especially when we had expected to do very little in Rennes. The museum already ranks as a highlight of the trip. It was very exciting to see pieces we had both studied in school hanging live in front of us. The real article is as different from a picture as the sea from a lake. Rennes, as a city, has much to be proud of.



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Day 62. Rennes. Oct 7 2001.

Woke up this morning, got my gear together and went to brush my teeth and have my typical morning shower. Oh, wait! There was no shower, no water even. What a dismal way to wake up. Although without a shower you don’t feel so bizarre pulling on yesterdays sticky bike shirt.

Today we encountered some of that enemy of which I wrote yesterday. The wind today was like a hurricane and though on the map the distance seemed short, in actuality it felt like a hundred kilometers.

It began rather nicely I must admit, with a long bike in a sheltered hollow between a hillside and a forest. An enormous bird, perhaps an owl of some sort, swooped low down over my head and disappeared into the forest. Soon we came to a place where the road cut through the heart of a hill and as we pass through the hill the wind began to pick up and it never slackened the rest of the day.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Rennes we were beat and were dreading the search we have in every city, the search for our camping spaces. Happily Rennes seemed to think it was a bit of tourist town and the way to the campground was very well marked, and much nearer than we had expected, though as exhausted as we were, we still complained. The campground was set in the Parc des Gayeulles, a vast parkland in the northeastern corner of the city. The parc had a pool at the entrance, a model farm for school children, two lakes, one for model boats, a skating rink, soc…sorry…football fields, a campground and an acre of forested land crisscrossed by walking paths. It was a beautiful complex to have in the heart of a city. All right, not in the heart, perhaps the upper left shoulder blade.

We found a spot for our tent well sheltered in a hollow created by some trees. Heather found to her dismay that night that she had placed her sleeping bag directly over a rabbit hole, making it difficult to sleep. Her dismay was nothing compared to the rabbit's.

We took a short break and listened to the wind howl in and the rain come down in torrents. More through luck than anything else winds that had been hurricane force outside our hollow were merely gentle breezes for us and the rain only spasmodic drops.

After our break we hit the tourist trail and marched into town so bundled in our raingear that only tips of our noses emerged to prove that we were human and not escaped storm troopers from Star Wars.

Rennes proved to be, despite the awful weather, a truly delightful city, though it was Sunday and most everything was closed or being used for a church service. Rennes seemed to epitomize a French city. We walked down tiny medieval streets with half-timbered houses towering in crooked fashion above us and a truly medieval river of water running down the centre gutter of cobblestones.

We walked through wide boulevards sealed off to traffic with haute couture shops displaying the latest fashions on either side. There was so much to see that we came nowhere close to seeing it all. We walked through the square that housed the city hall and opera, looking as though they were parts of the same building split apart, city hall in a crescent, the opera in a half circle, as though to let the public through.

Rennes had been a relatively important city even in the era of Roman domination and would become the official seat of the Parliament of Brittany in 1562, giving the area the ability to remonstrate against the king. But it was virtually destroyed in a massive fire in 1720. It was very charming, though all the construction detracted a little. The Hall of Commerce was an enormous building that we first mistook for a railway station. The women’s abbey for Benedictine nuns was a strange building with the letters

MAGDATATNEDLFAYETTE

 written across the front, making no sense at all to us plebs and since it wasn’t open we never found out what it meant. The pool, however, was very obviously the public pool and it was stunningly beautiful. The front sported the face of Neptune

and ceramic mosaics of running water cascaded down virtually every wall. With the amount of rain that was pouring down it was hard to believe the mosaics weren’t real.

In fact it was raining so hard that our feet were soaked through and water was even making its way through the waterproof fabric of our rain jackets. After checking in on one cathedral that, for some reason, seemed to be chopped in half, and finding it full of a congregation at mass,

we decided to begin the long walk home.

And long it seemed. We were wet and very miserable. The rain was coming down like someone had left on a faucet. But Rennes was well worth the walk. Heather in particular enjoyed looking through the windows of the very expensive shops downtown and perusing their collections of Venus Flytraps and carnivorous Pitcher Plants. She also enjoyed looking at the prominent displays of high fashion lingerie adorning certain shops. I can’t say I hurried her along.

I enjoyed the overall feeling of the city. The architecture seemed to convey the atmosphere of so many times, from the cramped spaces of the middle ages to the wide open avenues of the republic. It was great to walk down streets with names like Rue Victor Hugo and to have street signs with little blurbs identifying the person and the reason they deserved to have a street named after them, It is really hard to convey Rennes in words because it was more the atmosphere of the city that made it so distinct and yet so French and even if I describe every building and every sculpture it would still be lacking the feel.

Finally we got back to the campground and found it in shambles. A virtual gale had had blown through and destroyed some of the more permanent sites, those with a trailer and a tent attached. Although it does beg the question of why anyone would put a fridge, a stove, a sink and an entire kitchen cabinet set, not to mention wooden floors, in a structure as flimsy as a tent. We hurried through the campground to check on our tent and found it, to our surprise, as well as relief, to be perfectly fine, completely sheltered in it’s little hollow.

People here often live in trailers all year round or set them up as summer residences so that every campground we go to is half filled with trailers even though the place is completely deserted.

On our way out (a little backtracking) we had explored the park a little. The goats in the model farm ran over to us excitedly as we passed and they bit at the fence angrily when we didn’t feed them or provide them with shelter. The poor creatures were soaked even worse than we.

We also stopped at the little animal enclosure to watch the animals. We couldn’t identify the species exactly but the closest thing at home would be antelope. The males of this species had far bigger horns, however, a rack that reminded us of miniature deer. They were very fleet and graceful and didn’t seem to mind the rain one bit. They did keep looking at all the people standing forlornly in the rain, watching us as if we might not be all that right in the head. I think they may have been right.

That night we had the worst windstorm yet, and I hope ever. We watched a little, stunned, from the shelter of our hollow where we felt only the smallest of breezes, as the trees bent before wind that sounded like a train, as tent fabric tore and things went flying across the campground.

Fortunately we had learned from the last windstorm and we plugged our ears up tight with earplugs and slept like…well, people exhausted from a really long day of doing touristy things. I don’t know for certain but I think even the rabbit under Heather was grateful for the tent that night.

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