Un miracle de saint Laumer

The saint named Laumer, also spelled Lomer or Lhomer, was born near Chartres sometime in the first half of the 6th century A.D. As a young man, he went went to live in a monastery in Saint-Mesmin, on the Loire near Orléans. After a few years, he was called to Chartres where some say he was the provost of the local church (this was long before the famous cathedral was built).

Later still, he left Chartres and became a hermit in a place called Corbion, known today as Moutiers-au-Perche, just north of the town of Nogent-le-Rotrou and just east of Mortagne-au-Perche. There he founded a monastery — that's the meaning of Moutiers — in the year 575 A.D. and performed many miracles. Laumer died in the year 593.

More than 300 years later, the monastery Laumer had founded was attacked by invading Norsemen — the Perche is an old province located between Normandy to the north and the Loire Valley (Blois and Tours) to the south. The monks of Corbion moved south and made their way to Blois, carrying the relics of St. Laumer. There, in the early 900s A.D., they founded a new monastery dedicated to the saint's memory.

That monastery included a cloister as well achurch, which was destroyed by fire in about 1120. A new church was built starting in the year 1138. Construction of this abbey church, also dedicated to Saint-Laumer, continued for a century or more. The church stands still today in Blois, on the banks of the Loire, despite attacks by Protestants at the end of the 16th-century Renaissance and by revolutionaries in the 1790s. After the French Revolution, the name of the church was changed to Saint-Nicolas.

Bombing by Allied forces at the end of World War II heavily damaged the neighborhood around the Saint-Laumer Saint-Nicolas church, but the church itself was spared. All its stained glass windows were blown out, however. The window shown here was designed and fabricated in the 1950s and finally put up in the church in 1960s. It is said to show St. Laumer performing a miracle by exorcising a demon that had possessed a man back in the 6th century. I took this photo of it on July 5, 2019.

Un vigneron dans un vitrail

Don't you think? To me it looks like a vigneron — a person who grows grapes and makes wine. That's pronounced [vee-nyuh-RÕ], with the French nasal O vowel in the last syllable. We see vignerons working out in the vineyard all the time, but I've never seen one barefooted. Those are bunches of huge grapes. And vitrail [vee-TRY-yuh] is the French for "stained-glass window."

This stained-glass window was designed and fabricated in the 1950s by the artists of the atelier de Pierre Gaudin.

« Une atmosphère féerique »

Sunlight filtered through stained glass inside the St. Nicholas church in Blois       

La chapelle Saint-Laumer dans l'église Saint-Nicolas de Blois

The abbey or monastery that was founded in Blois in the year 924 was dedicated to a saint named Laumer (or Lomer). The Benedictine monks who founded it were fleeing Vikings who had invaded what is now called Normandy, to the north. The existing church in Blois is sometimes called « l'église Saint-Nicolas Saint-Laumer ». It's a long story.

The photos in this post show closer-in to farther-out views of the chapelle Saint-Laumer inside the église Saint-Nicolas and its vitraux (stained-glass windows). On the French Patrimoine-Histoire web site I read:

La chapelle Saint-Laumer est la chapelle des fonts baptismaux. Les vitraux contemporains de l'atelier Pierre Gaudin, plongés dans une architecture romane, créent une atmosphère assez féerique.

("The St. Laumer chapel houses the church's baptismal fonts. Twentieth-century stained-glass windows designed and fabricated by the artist Pierre Gaudin and his collaborators, set in this Romanesque architectural environment, create a magical atmosphere.")

So the ancient name of the Saint-Nicolas church is Saint-Laumer. The Benedictine monks arriving from the north built or were granted the right to occupy an earlier church on the site, but that building was destroyed by fire in the early years of the 12th century. The existing church, as usual modified and expanded over the centuries — the soaring spires for example, date back only to the 19th century — was built later, in the 12th and 13th centuries. I read somewhere that the name of the church was changed to Saint-Nicolas in honor of another Blois church, one that did not survive the 18th-century French Revolution.

Writing the detailed history of a building like this church is a much more daunting task than writing the biography of a human being. The church has stood for nearly 10 centuries and gone through many changes and "improvements" over time. People in different epochs and eras have modified it to suit their tastes and needs. Such is the world. I took these photos last Friday, 05 July 2019.