Sées et sa cathédrale

I have to say I had never heard of the cathedral city of Sées (pronounced [say]; pop. 4,000) before I went there with my late friend Charles-Henry in June 2001, on our drive from Rouen to Vouvray. Walt and I went back in June 2006 with our friend Sue from California, when we were driving from Saint-Aignan to the Mont Saint-Michel. And I went back when I was in the Perche region with Evelyn, Lewis, and Marie-Jacques in August 2011.

L'église Notre-Dame de La Roche-Posay

Of the stained-glass windows in my blog post yesterday, the La Roche-Posay tourist office web site says:

...vitraux modernes, réalisés en 1948 et 1949 par Jacques Le Chevallier, maître verrier,

remplacent ceux détruits pendant les violents combats de juin 1940.

Here are some photos of the fortified church in La Roche Posay, which is called Notre-Dame. The church was built in the 11th century and later fortified during the 100 Years' War, in the 15th century. Thanks again to David G., who identified it for me yesterday.

In 2006, when Charles-Henry and I were driving down to Saint-Savin — where he, his brother, and their mother spent some time during World War II — we spent less than half an hour in Notre-Dame de la Roche-Posay. Our next stop would be at the restaurant above. Charles-Henry shed a few tears when he saw it. He said he had enjoyed many meals there with his mother and brother during their time in Saint-Savin. He and I had a good lunch there together.

Coquillages

Here's what the Petit Robert dictionary says about the French term coquillage:

Mollusque, généralement marin, pourvu d'une coquille; spécialement un tel mollusque comestible. Principaux coquillages comestibles : amande de mer, coquille Saint-Jacques, bernicle, bigorneau, buccin, bulot, clam, clovisse, cône, coque, couteau, huître, moule, murex, ormeau, palourde, patelle, pétoncle, pholade, praire, triton, trompette, vénus, vigneau.

In France, the name clam translates into palourde or praire, two common fruits de mer. There are so many coquillages eaten in France that it's hard to learn all their names. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Wandering around Paris with a camera

Looking north up the Canal Saint-Martin, which runs through the 10e et 11e arrondissements de Paris. It connects the Seine river to the Bassin de la Villette and the Canal de L'Ourcq north of the city.

Notre Dame cathedral's bell towers stand high above the neighborhood's seven-story buildings.

La gare de l'Est is the train station you leave from on the way to Strasbourg and other points east of Paris. Walt was there recently and said he was surprised to see that the station now has a big shopping center inside.

I can't determine exactly where I took this photo. All I know is that it it was near the place de l'Opéra.

Le Brabant is a hotel near the gare de l'Est. It's named for an ancient province that is now part of Belgium and has a population of more than seven million, more than a million of whom are francophones.

Zara is a Spanish chain of stores that sells clothing for children and adults, for men and for women. This store in Paris is on the rue de Rivoli at the base of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

More about Soufflot

Several times over the past few days and weeks, I've mentioned the rue Soufflot in Paris, and in the heart of the Latin Quarter. I worked in the neighborhood back in the early 1970s. The Panthéon is where the street starts, and it ends at the Luxembourg palace and gardens. Look closely at the photo on the left below (by enlarging it) and you'll see there's another rue Soufflot in France, in a very different location.

Walt and I took a trip to Burgundy in October 2014. We stayed in a gîte near a beautiful village called Noyers-sur-Serein, and also not very far from the famous wine town of Chablis. On that trip, we also spent an afternoon in and around another wine village called Irancy. I know I had vaguely heard of it before, so I wanted to go there, but there was something I didn't know: Irancy's main street is the rue Soufflot. Why? Because that's where the architect of the Panthéon in Paris originally came from. Both the street in the Latin Quarter and the street in the Latin Quarter are named for him. I had no idea that Irancy was Jacques-Germain Soufflot's family home. He was born there in 1713.

Here's what the village of Irancy looks like. It is built in a natural basin and all around the edges of the basin are vineyards. The wine made there is a Pinot Noir red. We bought six bottles from a winery on the rue Soufflot (not in Paris), drank one or two of them with meals at our gîte and brought the rest of them back to Saint-Aignan to enjoy over the Christmas and New Year's holidays. By the way, J-G Soufflot passed away, unfortunately, before construction of the Panthéon in Paris was completed.

“Our Lady of Paris”

 


One good reason to go up to the balcon du Panthéon is to see the cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris from up there. It's a better view of the cathedral than you get from the top of other Paris monuments — la tour Saint-Jacques, la tour Montparnasse, ou la Tour Eiffel, par exemple. By the way, another spot where you can see spectacular views of the city is the top of the towers of Notre-Dame itself.

Here are a couple of links to interesting information. The first is a link to a 2016 article in the Figaro newspaper about the renovation work at the Pantheon that was completed back then, leading to the the organization of tours up on the "balcony" of the building.

And here's an article published by the Mairie de Paris and updated just a couple of days ago about the progress being made on the restoration of Notre-Dame, which is scheduled to be re-opened to the public in 2024.

Views of each from the other

 










This is a photo of the Panthéon that I took in July of 2013 from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. You can see that the Panthéon was undergoing restoration work at that time. The Tour Saint-Jacques had recently been restored as well, leading to the tower being opened up to the public for the first time in many decades.

This is a photo of the Tour Saint-Jacques that I took in July of 2016 from the balcon du Panthéon. The restoration work at the Panthéon had been completed and the "balcony" had been opened to the public for the first time in many decades. There were three hundred stairs to climb at the Tour Saint-Jacques. There were only 200 stairs to climb at the Panthéon. Because the building stands on much higher ground, on the balcon du Panthéon you are higher above sea level than at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

J'étais où ?

Can you guess where I was when I took this photo? No, I was not at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. There's Saint-Sulpice again. Look at this site to see photos of some of the wall paintings inside.

L'Église Saint-Sulpice...

...seen from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Saint-Sulpice is in the St-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. It is dedicated to Sulpice le Pieux, who was the archbishop of Bourges in the seventh century A.D. You can see another photo of the church here.

Storefronts in the Marais

That would be devantures in French. After I climbed to the top of the Tours Saint-Jacques, I took a slow walk around the neighborhood around it, which is called Le Marais (the marsh or swamp). It was built on reclaimed land. It was and still is a Jewish quarter, and it is now also considered a gay quarter.

  

Near and on the Tour Saint-Jacques

The photo on the left above is not part of the Tour Saint-Jacques, but is nearby on the place du Châtelet. I think I took it from ground level, as I did the three other photos, which show architectural details of the Tour Saint-Jacques itself.

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Yesterday we realized that our land-line phone had been out of service for nearly a week. I had only tried to make one call during that week, and it was to our friend Sue in California. I couldn't get her phone to ring. Then yesterday I tried to call a local number, and I couldn't get it to ring either. At that point, Walt realized we didn't have a dial tone. We think that the "micro" electrical outages we've been having for the past month might have been the cause.

Our phone is plugged into our fiber optic router, which we rent from the Orange telephone and internet provider. I contacted Orange, and within half an hour the phone started working again. The problem was that we had to enter an 18-character password full of required capital letters, lowercase letters, and various numbers to get the internet working again. And that had to be done on 7 or 8 computers and tablets. That pretty much kept us busy for most of the day. I just got the last computer connected this morning.

Pictures of, not from, the Tour Saint-Jacques

Here we are on Monday morning. Schools all over France open their doors to pupils today. And the weather is supposed to be "torrid" — that's the term the weather woman, Valérie Maurice, used a few minutes ago on Télé-Matin. Here in our region, le Centre-Val de Loire, temperatures in the north are supposed to be about 30C (86F) and in the south they'll hit 34C (about 93F). Saint-Aignan is smack in the centre of the région Centre. I doubt that many French schools, if any, are equipped with air-conditioning.

For a while now, I've been posting photos I took from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques in the center of Paris 10 years ago. Here are a few pictures of the tower itself. It was built at the beginning of the 16th century as the "new" bell tower for a 12th-century church that was torn down after the French Revolution, two centuries ago.

As always, you can enlarge these photos on your computer or tablet screen to see more detail. The Tour Saint-Jacques is about 175 feet tall. That's 300 steps to climb, with no elevator.

On another subject, we made another nine jars of tomato paste over the weekend, using tomatoes from our 2023 vegetable garden. That makes 14 jars in all — a total of three U.S. quarts (five British pints — nearly three liters). We put it up in hermetically sealed jars that we'll keep in our downstairs cellier pantry and use over the course of the winter.

P.S. A grape harvester just went by, followed by a tractor pulling a trailer. The 2023 grape harvest has started in the Loire Valley.

Looking south, north, and west...

...from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

On the left above, the view looking south. I can see the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, Notre-Dame cathedral, and the Panthéon. On the right, looking north, about all you see is the Pompidou Center.

Above left is a close shot of the Saint-Merri church, also north of the Saint-Jacques tower. And above right is the view toward the west out to the La Défense business quarter just outside Paris proper.