Day 72. Nantes Oct 17 2001.

A day of rest before the big push out of here.

It occurs to me how much I have left out in my accounts of Nantes and thought to record a little of it on this day of doing little.

Like how the day before last we went to the little Island of Versailles in the Erdre River and walked through a Japanese style garden in the setting sun, then through a Japanese style building filled with aquariums displaying the aquatic life of the Erdre.

We walked through slowly, enjoying the tranquility after a long day running around. We ate bananas and listened to a small French boy running frantically through the displays yelling “Vache, Vache!” as he tried to find the model cow that mooed every once in awhile. I don’t think he believed such a loud noise could come from such a small model and he was desperate to find the real cow that must be hidden somewhere in the large building. We ran into his embarrassed mother on the way out.

I see too that I have left out the fact that the street in from of our tent door seems to be a major meeting point for some of the male inmates of the campground. As far as we can determine they live full time in the little tents that surround our site. I found it hard to believe at first, most of the tents are, if anything, even smaller than ours and ours is none too big. They spend most of their time in big groups or in the washroom. At first it was disconcerting to always find them in the washroom but now I am convinced that they are simply longing for solid walls around them for some of the time. They seem to be French Arabs, so I am guessing that they are Algerian, a fact which is pure speculation on my part.

I notice as well that I have left out descriptions of most of the Dobree museum. When I see a place full of beauty I worry that I will run out of space and so describe it only generalities, then find myself with extra space left over. So I will describe a few treasures now. There was the pin in the jewelry collection that stood out, blue knot work in something like enamel. The sides were bordered in glimmering silver and the spaces between the knots filled with pearls and semi-precious stones. I cannot help but wonder what Heather sees when she looks at such a thing. I see a beautiful whole, a piece of jewelry but not much more. She must see the hours of painstaking work that created the piece, the art and the learning behind it.

Another big item in the Dobree museum that deserves description is the anniversary chest from the 17th century. A chest of drawers that folded out into three panels with stunningly elaborate drawings on the two folded out panels and a series of drawers in the center. The left panel held a painting of Constantine at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The right was a painting of St. Louis, King of France and his marriage to someone whose name we have both forgotten. Each drawer in the center was decorated with a beautiful painting depicting a pious event in the life of a French king. At the bottom was a small slide out table. The wood was a dark mahogany and the whole thing exuded tranquility and peacefulness that no mere object should have. It was very beautiful and had only recently been restored to its original condition. It had pride of place in its own exhibition, in an alcove near the stairs on the second floor.

The final thing left to describe in the Dobree was the rather unique collection of medieval sablieres, I don’t know the English translation for them. They are the pieces of wood that line and important transition part of a structure. The ones in the Dobree collection were intricately carved with faces, each grimacing in some bizarre fashion at the face next to it, sticking fingers that appeared out of nowhere up noses and into ears, stretching lips apart to make inaudible rude noises or to stretch out an impossible long tongue. Heather particularly enjoyed one carving, of the way a woman prepares her husbands dinner. It was a grotesque carving of a woman peeing into a pot while her husband waited hungrily in the next room. Some people are really sick.

Today itself has been relatively uneventful. The only big ticket item on the agenda was getting our laundry done. Doing laundry in France is expensive, in the way that buying new clothes at home would be expensive. We wash things by hand but then we are reliant on the weather to dry things and "weather" and "reliant" are words that mix like oil and water. My hands are calloused from incessant wringing and my biceps are stronger than they have ever been. Forget expensive gyms and personal trainers, forget buying a washing machine and dryer, simply combine the two and save money.

We are trying to clears things out of our tent in preparation for tomorrow. Everywhere we stop we accumulate things, especially pamphlets on the region, and they get cluttered around the inside of the tent. We are trying to be like the proverbial rolling stone, but a lot of little nooks and crannies offer places for moss to grow and when we try to shake it free we only create chaos for ourselves.

It will be hard to leave Nantes. For the last part of the trip we have had immediate, nearby, goals. Cherbourg to St. Michel’s, St. Michel’s to Rennes, Rennes to Nantes. But now our next stop is essentially Bordeaux. It is almost as though we are following a track that has disappeared. We are going to follow a line made by connecting the dots of open campgrounds. It will take us out of our way but it will be easier and more certain.
I think.

Clouds are rolling in tonight, endangering our fresh laundry. Even as we pull in the clothes the clouds break and a storm dumps down. For the first time lightning lights the sky. At first we wait for the flash with a kind of wonder, but it soon draws neared, until the clap of thunder seems to come a split second before the flash and all the lights in the city blink out in sympathy.

Then we pull the comforting hoods of our sleeping bags over our heads and bury ourselves in warmth and security and a smell we will have to wash out soon.

Next Entry: Day 73. St. Etienne Du Bois
Previous Entry: Day 71. Nantes

Day 71. Nantes Oct 16 2001.

The heart of Nantes, the living breathing pulse of the city, is not actually in the heart of Nantes. Instead it is just the merest smidge to the west. Not in the old quarter, or the Cathedral or the Museum of Fine Arts or even the castle of the Dukes of Brittany. Not even in the quays along the Loire, the much touted quays that were empty and deserted. Instead it's in a district north of the Loire and just immediately west of the Rue des 50 Ostages.

We biked downtown this morning determined to spend one more day exploring Nantes. We headed for the quays, for all the brochures named them as the “Heart of the City” or as “A Place of Beauty that awakes in Every Heart the Desire to Travel.” How could we stay away? But the Quays proved to be a disappointment. They were empty, ugly, the only thing of interest an aging warship trying to be a museum but that was more rust than anything else. We turned back in disappointment and saw a great dome rising over the rooftops of downtown.

Nothing with a dome had appeared in the city guides, only spires and turrets. We cycled towards it with cautious enthusiasm. We were well rewarded.

Notre Dame De Bon Port rose from the surrounding buildings like the sun peering over the horizon after the long night. It was a square building, not the cross shape of all the others churches we had encountered. We pushed our way in hesitantly and stood in awe. Great painting hung on the four pillars that supported the dome. Equally great paintings graced the arches of the barrel vaults between the pillars. The dome rose high above us, disappearing into an arch of blue with gold stars. It was easily the most elaborate church we had yet seen. Golden frescoes glittered everywhere and a bevy of saints cast down their stern gazes on those below. A scattering of art students sat among the chairs and on the niches in the walls, sketching frantically in charcoal under the watchful eye of their professor, looking up at us nervously as we approached, as if afraid of any comments we might cast their way or perhaps worried at the damage the addition of two bodies would do to their composition. We left the church feeling strangely satisfied, as if everything that had been missing from the cathedral had been found here.

For the next hour we proceeded to get deliberately lost, randomly choosing streets in this crowded vivacious corner of the city. The buildings pressed in close overhead, filled with bakeries and hairstylists and strange shops selling curiosities. Statues leaped out at us from many sides, surprising us with smiles or scowls or anything in between.

Our goal was the Palace of the family Dobree, now an archeological museum and the collection the family had accrued through years in the tea trade.
But since it didn't open for another hour we meandered happily. Eventually we found it, a long rectangular palace with gargoyles of bears that looked down in curiosity and lizards that clambered up the walls.

What a collection the Dobree family had amassed! Everything you could imagine. Gilded and chased medieval chests, the former property of Saints and Bishops, ancient processional crosses, a roomful of antique weapons, swords, polearms, armour.
There was a sword that had belonged to the dauphin of France and one of the Black Prince of England. A crossbow decorated in Ivy and a flintlock so large it must have taken two men to hold. I looked at the narwhal tusk in the collection sadly, for in its time it was believed to be proof of the existence of the unicorns. Science and discovery have created many wonderful things in their way but they leave behind them a trail of broken dreams.

Then we found it, the true heart of Nantes, the thing that gave this quarter of the city more life, more verve that anywhere else. The case that had held the heart of Ann of Brittany. In many ways Nantes had not forgotten Ann, nor the period when they, through her, had held the future of a unified France in their hands. When she had died she had been buried, as custom dictated, with all the other kings and queens of France. But, to quote, "her heart had loved Nantes so well that she had commanded her heart to be plucked from her dead body and buried in her home city". The golden case that had held her heart was empty now, poured out during the revolution, but her essence seemed to pervade it.

Upstairs in the museum we found the jewels of the Dobree family. Riveting pieces that defy description.We also found trinkets brought back from China aboard La Fils de France, the Dobree ship. Prominent among the collection was a gilded tea box encircled by two golden dragons on a field of red.
After what seemed like hours we left the palace to explore the museum of archeology across the courtyard. It was stuffed with weapons and tools of the Merovingians, Carolingians and Viking invaders. There was even a huge collection of Egyptian artifacts. It was as if everything that couldn't fit in the Museum of Fine Arts was spread out before us. Swords so rusted that you could scarcely discern their shape, intricate jewellery with detail so delicate it would take magnifying lens to properly appreciated, even a collection of Roman keys that belonged to doors long since turned to dust. Before we were halfway through the collection our minds had gone numb. Our brains became saturated and we leaked knowledge out of both sides of our heads as we walked. We left the palace of the Dobrees and the Museum of Archeology very happy.

We cycled back through town finding the opera as if by chance, actually in fact by chance, only a block or two from the museum.
We found also the largest bookstore and music store in Nantes, swarming with excited students. We looked inside but found no books in English and so instead went to a smaller shop we had passed yesterday and bought Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I am very far behind with this journal, however, so it is hard to imagine when we will find time to read.
We bought ourselves food and cycled to the beautiful Jadin des plantes. A walk in the garden always seems best to help us settle our food and to bring what we had seen in the day into context. We walked beside the patterned lawns and found an aviary filled with small birds fluttering excitedly from perch to perch, almost in the same excited and random way we had flittered from exhibit to exhibit among the museums.
We found also a penned herd of deer tucked away in the far corner. The male was very harsh to the does, chasing them away from any food they found but when his attention was distracted the does did the same thing to each other. When the cat is away the mice go back to war.
We cycled home tiredly, full of beautiful images of jewels and riches and palaces. It was interesting settling back into walls of fabric on a floor of covered earth with hardly enough room to toss and turn after seeing the days splendor. Still, we aren’t too badly off. At least we’re here and get to snoop through the treasures of people long dead.


Next Entry: Day 72. Nantes
Previous Entry: Heather's Picasso

Day 70. Nantes. Oct 15 2001.

We woke up today to a beautiful blue sky, no rain clouds in sight. I turned to Heather and said “look, blue sky” and rain clouds rolled in and opened up. Never, ever, ever, comment favorably about the weather!

But after a day inside yesterday we were definitely going to explore Nantes. First on our list: La Musee des Beaux Arts and the Picasso Exhibition. We had not expected the school children! We walked the distance to the museum and even followed one of the classes as they marched resolutely to the entrance. But the museum was still closed when we got there and stairs were crowded with youngsters so we decided to walk around the building first.

To the side we found broken stone sculptures, as if they had been cast out the back door to crumble and rot as mold and greenery ate them away. One was a mother and child, her arms shattered by an ancient calamity, so her babe hung precariously on her knee. The other was an angel, buffeted in the wind, his arm severed at the shoulder in a ragged stump. We returned to the front to find that the children had not dispersed but that the doors were open. We waded through a sea of young faces to buy our tickets.

Our first stop was the main display, Picasso La Peinture Seule, a series of works that had not been displayed since just after his death, the works from the final decade of his life. Picassos’ work, for me at least, is a strange mixture of perfection and grabage. His was a lifelong struggle to find beauty without form, an ideal that he reaches only rarely, one painting out of every hundred. To convey the feeling of a thing, a place, a person, without recourse to the fragile shell that makes its form, is to understand it as well as its creator, and that is a gift handed out parsimoniously.

It seems like Picasso found that ideal once, in a painting from his youth, and spent the rest of his life trying to find it again, his few successes only spurring him to try all the more desperately. Perhaps that accounts for his prolific collection. So many works, so few successes, but those spectacular.

Even more interesting than the works of Picasso was watching the desperation of the teachers as they tried to explain to their classes of eight year olds what his work meant, why he was such a force in the art world and what, exactly, that man in that painting was doing to those women. To their credit the teachers were a lot less flustered than any adult in North America would be in such a situation. They told the children that the couples were making love and left it at that. Our museums would, I think, just ban those paintings.

We left the main floor and climbed to the displays above, surrounding the museums central court. Here we found classics paintings mixed with an exhibit called The Uninterrupted Dialogue. The classics paintings were good. I enjoyed a scene of the eruption of Vesuvius; in fact I enjoyed all the ones that referred to classical myth or history. There was a piece called “The Aftermath of Lucretia’s Rape” where Rome was about to become a Republic that I enjoyed. Also memorable was a composition that was an allegory for the Parisian school of fine arts.

The detail in the women representing Gothic Art and the Art of the Renaissance, respectively, was magnificent and they seemed to shimmer with an internal light. The artist had done a smaller study of them, along with some priests from the main image, and they seemed almost alive.



Paul Delaroche was the artist.
But by far my favorite, and I think Heather’s as well, was “Jeune Fille” by Hippolyte Flandrin. It was a painting of a young woman with downcast eyes, coy and seductive. It was enthralling.
One other painting in the museum really stood out for me, in both a positive and negative fashion. “The Deluge” was an amazing painting, capturing the desperation of those last left alive during the biblical flood. An amazing painting that captured the suffering and the anguish. It also raised the question “How can God claim to be compassionate and yet do this?” A truly awe inspiring piece.

But it was also part of the Museums “Uninterrupted Dialogue” show. The show was meant to show older works reinterpreted through modern eyes and was quite successful. The old must constantly be re-evaluated in the context of the new or it becomes irrelevant. But the “artist” who reinterpreted "The Deluge" had draped the painting with netting filled with stuffed animals, almost totally obscuring the original painting. We only saw the original in a photograph hung next to the work.

Covering and obscuring the work of another artist, in the interests of promoting your own work, seems like one of the most obscene acts an artist can commit. The modern "artist" had a screed posted with the works denouncing the use of nude women in the painting, ignoring the naked men alongside them I suppose. She claimed to be obscuring the original in the name of feminists everywhere, doing more damage than good from my perspective.

We left the musem and went to the nearby Jardin Des Plants, a beautifully manicured garden, to discuss art and feminist theory and feelings without form. We meandered through patterned lawns, past trees and monuments to Jules Verne, and left finding our thoughts in close accord.


We went through the St. Peter gate and entered the St. Peter and St. Paul Cathedral I had seen the other day.
The inside of the cathedral soared above us, great gothic columns supporting a high ceiling. It was most impressive but cold and empty. The only art was on two tombs, those of the financial supporters of the cathedral. One was surrounded by beauty, justice, virtue and temperance in the shapes of women. But one of the sculptures, we could not figure out which, had a man's face carved in the back of her head. His beard flowing where her hair should be.


Interesting.
Overall the Cathedral and, to a lesser extent, the museum, had left us both feeling a little cold and unsatisfied, as if we had seen a beautiful body with the soul departed. The heart of Nantes seemed to have little heart.
Perhaps there are unforeseen consequences when you cover a river. The River Edre had once cut through the part of Nantes that we visited today, until in had been encased in an underground canal. A river can give a city energy and vitality might encase that power so that it can never be used.
We wandered the streets of downtown, looking for a bookstore. We went into the church of Ste. Croix and found it filled with the homeless and destitute drinking in the pews.


We went into the Palace of the Dukes and found its inside beautiful and closed to the public. It’s history inaccessible.
We walked the forever back to our campsite and found the insides of a tent small consolation after the bleakness of the gloomy day.

Next Entry: Heather's Picasso
Previous Entry: Day 69. Nantes

Day 68. Nantes. Oct 13 2001.

Today we followed the Erdre River into le Pays De La Loire.

We woke early, to fog once more. We got together our gear in a ritual that happens almost by rote now. Heather packs her panniers while still in the tent, getting everything ready before mounting it on its racks. I mount my panniers on the bike and stuff things into them as they surface. Heather, in frustration, has dubbed her bike Jinx, reflecting its cursed nature. Initially I dubbed my bike Herbert, but in view of his red coloring and the fact that he has never yet broken down, I renamed him Fidel.

In addition to being foggy this morning was also very hazy and a strong smell of smoke hung in the air. The French like to burn their garbage as they work and we frequently pass small pyres burning beside farms or on construction sites. It always casts a foul smell for kilometers and it makes it harder to breath.

The passage through the countryside was…typical. It doesn’t change all that much from day to day. We tried to follow the Erdre River but the road into Nantes was all over the place. We stopped for groceries at Suce sur Erdre and then something terrible happened. Heather saw a sign for McDonalds

McDonalds has come to symbolize all the food we are missing from home and I had promised to stop at the next one we saw. Chapelle sur Erdre (the town where the McDonalds actually was) was a beautiful town, despite hosting a fast food joint. We biked into town in search of The House of Grease and passed by their beautifully ornate church. A bride in white and her groom were parading down the street towards their vintage wedding car as we passed. Crowds of people had flooded into the street following the wedding and now stopped to chat and catch up with old friends and family heedless of the traffic trying to get by. I think all weddings most share that phenomenon in common. The bride looked radiantly happy but you could hardly see the groom, lost among the crowd. Another wedding phenomenon I suppose. I wonder if she was keeping her maiden name.

We passed through the entire town with no sign of our goal and I had given up when we saw it looming to our left. We quickly deviated from our course and were soon munching away happily. Such a treat did not come cheaply however, both in material and physical cost. One meal at McDonalds broke our budget for the day and my stomach was soon turning over. Fast Food is food one must build up immunity to.

We hurried on to Nantes. Nantes surprised us as we cycled in. It had a skyscraper. The first we had seen, outside of hideously ugly apartment blocks that were everywhere and equally ugly water towers. Based on the towering building and our newly revised formula for such things we determined Nantes' size to be pretty big. It was also nice, at least from our entry point. The tramways looked extensive and had either well maintained grass or cobblestones between the tracks. The trains themselves universally looked crisp and new.

We hurried on the campground where I was violently ill in the filthiest washrooms we had yet encountered, perhaps one of the low points of my life. The campground itself wasn’t too bad so we reluctantly decided to stay. We set up our tent and headed out to explore the town. We were also looking for an internet café to communicate with everyone back home. Nantes, like Rennes, has lanes set aside for cyclists so we cruised easily into downtown alongside the trams. We cycled along the boardwalk that parallels the river Erdre as it comes into the city. At first we had little appreciation for the city because we were trying, and failing, to find an internet café. But the boardwalk was beautiful. It was cobblestone, separated into lanes for pedestrians and cyclist by marble strips. There were stones inlaid with directional signs embedded in the boardwalk and boats were moored everywhere.

The Isle de Versailles was a lush island in the river, laid out in a Japanese style, with well cared for pines and oaks and a river running in a series of waterfalls down to the Erdre. Off in the distance we could just see the tip of the Cathedral of Nantes peering over the rooftops. Finally, close to where the Erdre disappeared into a tunnel beneath the streets of Nantes, we found our internet stop.

We wrote a long letter to our friends back home and read their messages avidly. Before we knew it two hours had passed and we had once again gone over budget. We left the café feeling very homesick and missing friends and family. It’s hard to hear about events back home because you want to be there to share in all the joys and sorrows. When they say that they miss you a feeling like you're being selfish washes over you. This trip is all about us, exclusively for us and it is hard to reconcile that with being a loving member of a community.

The walk home was very nice, we didn’t feel like biking, but we were both a little down and Heather was feeling more ill than yesterday.

We walked to the memorial at the head of the Road of the 50 Hostages.

These were among those executed in retaliation for the death of a Nazi officer on the streets of Nantes during World War II. The memorial was elegant and simple. Very evocative. I can understand how hard it must be to forget the atrocities the Germans committed in that war. The idea of the European community must be very difficult for many, especially the older generation. It would mean unifying with those who had been responsible for the worst war the world had seen, or at least their descendants. At home we don’t have to live with the consequences of wars. None of our cities have been devastated; few of our people have been executed. It would be nice if things stayed that way. Walking back on the far bank of the Erdre we passed a wall of names of those from Nantes who had died in conflict, “died for patriotism” as the wall itself said. Few things have killed as much as “patriotism.” But at least we get pretty statues out of it.

Returning we saw the Isles de Versailles from the other side. There is a beautiful and strange building on one corner, all square and tipped up on one corner, which we should investigate in the next few days. There is so much to see here! The river had massive boats on it, two stories of open glass dining rooms and observation decks. We had seen the brochure for them and I had assumed they would be like those I’d seen in Paris, small boat what ply the Seine with their cargo of tourists. But these dwarf my memories.

Back at camp French students were taking advantage of the weekend to party, banging drums and singing loudly. I’m glad it’s the off season.

Next Entry: Letter from Nantes
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