En faisant mes courses à Rouen

My first trip to France was a six-month stay in Aix-en-Provence more than 50 years ago. My second was a nine-month stay in Rouen in 1972-73. Arriving in Rouen, I think that in my mind I was returning to Aix. It turned out that the two cities are in totally different worlds. They have one thing in common, however: beautiful and delicious food. Here are some photos of food that I've taken in Rouen over the past 20 years.

Le Lycée Corneille à Rouen

In 1972, the University of Illinois sent me to spend a school year in Rouen. I was given a job as an assistant d'anglais in a boys' boarding school called the Lycée Corneille (women went to the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc back then). Being an "assistant" meant that I helped the English teachers at the school, who were all French and had various levels of fluency and fairly thick accents in English, in any way that I could or that they requested. Two or three of the half-dozen of them asked me to hold conversation sessions in English with their students one hour a week. My job was supposed to be half-time, or about 20 hours a week, and I didn't make enough money to be able to travel much or even eat in restaurants, for example. I was 23 years old and I didn't want to ask my parents for financial support.

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It was up to me to find a place to live. Other assistants in other schools around Rouen and Le Havre were given rooms in their schools for which they may or may not have had to pay rent, but I wasn't offered that option. I got lucky, though. A woman who worked in the offices at the Lycée Corneille told me that her parent had a small apartment that they were remodeling and would rent it to me for a very good price (probably about $40 a month).

I jumped at the chance. It was only a 10 to 15 minute walk from the lycée. It was even closer to the place du Vieux-Marché where I could buy groceries. And it was just a 5-minute walk to the train station, in case I wanted to go to Paris or elsewhere. My apartment was in the building in photo #1. Photo #2 shows the statue of the 17th century playwright Pierre Corneille, for whom the lycée was named. Photo #3 shows a café/restaurant called Le Drugstore that was about half-way between my apartment and the lycée. I had many cups of coffee there, as well as the occasional "banana split" that the place was famous for back then. I might have even had a hamburger there now and then.

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At one point in history the lycée was known as the College Royal. Famous alumni have included the writers Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, André Maurois, Pierre Corneille, and Thomas Corneille; the painter Camille Corot; politicians Jean Lecanuet and Jean-Luc Mélenchon; and actors Jean Rochefort and Karine Viard. (You might have to look some of those up.) The English teachers at Corneille were fairly snooty, and several of them weren't happy to have an American teaching assistant because they thought their students ought to learn English with a British accent. Some of them made fun of my accent, but the students were very interested in things American.

It was all quite an experience, even though my living conditions were pretty primitive — no telephone or bathroom, and a WC shared with other tenants, but at least I had a refrigerator, a stove, hot water, a radio, and a rented TV. I took showers in the dorm at the lycée when the students were in class. At Christmastime I caught the flu and thought I was going to die. I somehow acquired a portable (manual) typewriter and did some typing for some of the professors to earn a little bit of extra money. Good bread was cheap, as was decent wine. I could afford a newspaper every day and a book from time to time. I learned a lot about cooking on a tight budget.

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The middle picture here shows the view I had on my way back to my apartment when I left school. I walked past the Tour Jeanne-d'Arc twice a day. I had a good year. I made friends and learned a lot of French. I co-authored a book with one of the lycée teachers and he got it published by Hachette in Paris.

La Tour Jeanne-d'Arc et le Musée Jeanne-d'Arc à Rouen

     

The last time I went to Rouen in Normandy was in 2010 — eleven year ago already. CHM and I had been on a road trip from the Loire Valley up into the Picardie region in northern France. We stopped in Rouen for lunch and for an appointment CHM had made there. The appointment was with a city official who took us for a tour of a famous tour, the Tour Jeanne-d'Arc. That's it on the left above.

We also stopped in at the old Musée Jeanne-d'Arc, which was housed in the ground floor of the building next door to the restaurant La Couronne, of Julia Child fame, on Rouen's place du Vieux-Marché. You can see it in the photo on the right above, on the right edge of the photo. I just learned that it was closed down in 2012 and replaced in 2015 by a new museum dedicated to Joan.

The Tour Jeanne-dArc is popularly thought to be the tower where Joan of Arc was held captive in the days and weeks before she was burned at the stake in Rouen, in the year 1431. The tower itself was the grosse tour or donjon (the main tower) of the old Château de Rouen, which was built by the French king Philippe-Auguste in the early 1200s and then torn down in the last years of the 1500s. Only this tower remains, and one of CHM's grandfather's paintings hangs on the wall there. We went to see it (just above).

  

The photo on the left here shows how the painting of Joan of Arc by CHM's grandfather is displayed in the tower. It's a painting on a very big canvas. CHM's grandfather was born in 1817 in Picardie and died in 1905 in Paris, about 20 years before CHM was born. The print of another of the grandfather's paintings is in the photo on the right just above. I'm not sure why I took a photo of it at the Musée Jeanne-d'Arc. Maybe CHM will be able to refresh my memory. With him, I had seen the original of that second painting a year earlier. It hangs in the chapel at the Château de Blois, just 40 kilometers north of Saint-Aignan. Below is a photo I took there in 2009. It's also a very large canvas.

Rouen en Normandie : Le Gros-Horloge

If your French is pretty good, you might notice that the word horloge in my title is masculine here but is feminine otherwise. Sometimes words change gender over the centuries, but proper names don't change as fast as other words.
For this specific clock, the word horloge has kept its masculine gender.

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Le Gros-Horlage is installed in an arch over a pedestrian streeet that links the place du Vieux-Marché to the cathédrale.
Of the clock, the Michelin Guide to Normandy says: “In addition to the single hand which gives the hours,
there is the central section telling the phases of the moon and the lower inset indicating the weeks.”

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Le Gros-Horloge is is one of the oldest clocks in France, dating back to the year 1389.

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The horloge seems to have been refurbished sometime between the days when I took pictures #1 (2003) and #6 (2006).

Stained glass at the Église Ste-Jeanne-d'Arc in Rouen

I believe that these are the only photos I have ever taken of the stained-glass windows in the Église Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc in Rouen. The church was built in the 1970s, when I spent a lot of time in Rouen, so I must have seen it when it was under construction — but I don't remember it much. The stained-glass window panels installed in Saint-Jeanne-d'Arc had been taken down out of their frames in a nearby Renaissance-era church at the begining of the Second World War and hidden away for safe-keeping.

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The old church, Saint-Vincent, ended up being destroyed by Allied bombings in 1944, so only these window panels survived. They were mounted in window frames in the new church so they could be admired by the public. They weren't easy to photograph successfully in 1999 when I was there. The church was only 20 years old then.

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The photos above show how the windows are displayed in the new church. Lean back from your monitor
or hold your tablet at arms' length to get an idea of how you would see them in the church.
The image below might give you an idea of what the glass looks like up close.

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L'Église Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc à Rouen

Rouen's main market square is called la place du Vieux-Marché. It's not far from the cathedral. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake here in the year 1431. In the 1970s a modern church (not to mention a new covered market hall) was built here and dedicated to her memory.

Inside the church there are Renaissance-era stained-glass windows that were saved during World War II because the glass was taken down and packed up for safe-keeping. The church where they were originally on display was called Saint-Vincent, and it was obliterated by Allied bombardments at the end of the war.

There's a better photo of the church here than the one I got on a snowy day in Februrary 2003. I used to do much of my grocery shopping in the shops and market stalls of the Vieux Marché when I lived in Rouen in 1972-73.

Just across the square from the church of St-Joan are these old buildings. The one on the left, adorned with red flowers, is the restaurant where in November 1948 (a few months before I was born) Julia Child had her first meal ever in France back in the late 1940s. It's called La Couronne and I've had the pleasure of dining there several times in my life.

Février 2003 dans les rues de Rouen

Walt and I had come to France from California in December 2002, and in four days' time we had found the house where we've been living for the past 18 years. In February 2003 I flew back to France to sign the final papers on the purchase agreement and to measure the rooms in the house so we'd know what furniture we would want to send over here when we actually made our move.

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I flew to Paris and took the train to Rouen to spend a few days with friends there and recover from jet lag. The snowy weather was a surprise — Walt and I had been living in the San Francisco for 15 years, and it never snows there.

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My friend Jeanine said she would be glad go to Saint-Aignan with me to see the house we were buying. We drove down here in her car and I got my business done. While I was measuring the rooms in the house, it started snowing in Saint-Aignan too.

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Maisons rouennaises

I was just reading a web page that says Rouen has more maisons à colombages than any other city in France —

more than Troyes or Strasbourg, for example. Here's a link to the article, which also says that

700 houses of this style and vintage were destroyed during the Second World War.

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Saint-Maclou close up

The spire atop Saint-Maclou's lantern tower overlooks a neighborhood full of half-timbered houses.

Standing close to the Saint-Maclou church in Rouen and looking skyward

The west front of Saint-Maclou in a 2003 photo

A 2016 photo of Saint-Maclou's west front that I found on a photo blog called Miles and Love

Here's a 1999 photo that CHM took — compare it to this one that I took in 2005.

Zooming in on the Église Saint-Maclou in Rouen (Normandy)

This is a series of photos of the third major church in Rouen that were taken in different years, in different seasons, and

with two different Canon cameras. From top to bottom the zoom increases and comes to focus on the Église Saint-Maclou.

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Saint-Maclou is the church with just one white steeple that you see on the right in the photo above.

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In this slightly closer view, you can see how close Saint-Maclou is to the much larger Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen.

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Closer still ... Saint-Maclou was built in the Gothic-Flamboyant style between the years 1437 and 1517,
says the Michelin Guide, pointing out that only the spire over the belfry is modern.

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The French Wikipédia article about Saint-Maclou says that the church suffered major damage
during World War II when two bombs hit it in 1944.

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After 20 years of restoration work, religious services resumed in the church in 1965.
Restoration work is ongoing still.

Saint-Ouen : huit images

French Wikipédia includes an article titled Liste des édifices religieux de Rouen. It lists 25 existing Catholic churces; 16 Catholic churches that once existed but no longer exist; 22 Catholic chapels; 10 Protestant churches; 2 mosques; 1 synsgogue; and 5 “miscellaneous” churches or temples. That comes to 80 or 81 places of worship in all (I lost count).

Here are some exterior shots of is one of Rouen's most adimred churches, l'église abbatiale Saint-Ouen. The Michelin Guide for Normandy calls it “one of the jewels of High Gothic architecture” and says it is “remarkable for its proportions and the purity of its lines.”

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Don't worry, by the way. I only have two more Rouen churches that I plan to blog about...