Notre-Dame de nos jours

Amongst the most misused words in the English language, ‘miracle’ must come pretty high up the list. There are few miracles, but we’ve just seen one. Experienced fire crews and numerous amateur commentators, media pundits etc were all pretty sure that the Notre Dame conflagration would effectively destroy the building,leaving it at best a stone shell. Yet here we are, the morning after:

 

 

It could be a lot, lot worse. It is frankly amazing that the stone vaulted ceiling is still mostly there – a tribute to medieval masons and the laws of physics.

However it was caused – and the media did their very best to avoid even hinting at arson – the outpouring of genuine horror and sadness was actually very heartening. Lots of staunchly irreligious people could sense what a loss this could be – and nothing to do with ‘artworks’, ‘treasures’ and all that. Most visitors don’t go near that stuff, they’re there for the building and its implacable spiritual presence.

I spent time working in a Parisian hospital in the 80’s – free accommodation and free food. It is the only place that I’ve worked where I was asked how I wanted my steak done at lunch (it was always rare, whatever I asked for), and everyone had a glass or two of red wine before the afternoon’s work. Great days.

As such I went past Notre Dame frequently, and I often dropped in. It’s a curious mix of taking it for granted whilst ‘routinely marvelling’ at its wondrous features. Not unlike living in Manhattan or the Piazza Barberini, but with that added, yet incalculable supernatural dimension.

Despite the scrum of far eastern tourists snapping away at the back during mass, it is a profoundly spiritual building, as any church should be. The extra bit that the confirmed secularists get right is that it does represent the soul of France. The wider picture that affects all of us who embrace the concept (which is a real thing, whether you admit it or not), is that it is at the heart of Christendom, a word that the modern world tends to loathe. The French liked to style themselves as the ‘eldest daughter of the Church‘ (despite the vindictive behaviour of the French state over many years) and it’s reflected by the numerous comments on Twitter and elsewhere, in claiming that the apocalyptic images of the spire falling at the start of this Holy Week, constitute a message to the citizenry and to the Catholic Church in general. Maybe they do. It certainly felt that way.

The further miracle is the avowed determination to rebuild that was immediately evident. Good for Pinault and  Arnault. The misunderstanding is when people talk about the cathedral being irreplaceable. It’s handy that the shell – and more – is still standing, but if the building is considered in the context of its function and daily activity (not the tourism), then it is indeed replaceable. A vibrant church does not need 800 year old timber beams. That kind of thinking is in many ways unhelpful and a sideshow. To pretend it’s the same as the already ruined Palmyra, or that it’s all about the 800 year old stained glass (as various people that I know have been doing) is entirely missing the point.

I note that Peter Frankopan proposed to his wife in Notre Dame. I also proposed in Paris – in a less iconic setting, I admit. Everyone who has visited the cathedral remembers it in their own way.

La Descente du Saint-Esprit ~Heures d’Étienne Chevalier, by Jean Fouquet, c1450 (now at the Met in NYC)

I was there in Holy Week in 1986, and thought I’d go to confession. Many of the big churches have confessions in different languages. The sign above the confessional, somewhere down the south aisle, indicated that the priest was a typically brainy Jesuit – I think there were 11 or 12 languages offered by the one person. There were two people ahead of me, so I figured that it wouldn’t take terribly long. The first guy went in, half an hour passed. Another 10 minutes, then he came out looking somewhat worn by it. Had he committed murder perhaps? The next lady went in, this would be quicker. Forty minutes later she too virtually staggered out. In I went, with my modest list of offences. I was also given forty minutes of a mixture of soul baring, benign inquisition and almost psychoanalysis. This was nothing like what I was used to. I left the confessional as a cleansed soul and mind, if a little shaken.

I’ve been many times since. A few years ago I was at the first mass on Sunday – walking across the Pont des coeurs in a virtually empty cityscape. Mass was moderately busy and the tourists were few and far between. At the distribution of communion, two eucharistic ministers were assisting the priest, one on each side of the main aisle. A Japanese couple were queueing for communion, but it gradually became evident that they weren’t familiar with the process, and were almost certainly not Catholics. The girl was respectful, but the man attempted to take the host away, then reluctantly ate it as indicated by a plainly furious eucharistic minister. I thought he was going to punch him, he was so righteously angry. And he was right to be so, having been unwittingly dragged into a possible sacrilege. That was the spirit of Charles Martel, and I have to say was entirely appropriate and admirable. That is, I hope,the spirit which will be stirred by the events of the last 24 hours.

Both these vignettes are the real Notre-Dame in my mind. One of the greatest ever loci for focussing on man’s relationship with God. They are variations on themes that have been repeated over the last 800 years, from when the new cathedral was not far from open fields, and visible from tens of miles away across the plains.

The magnificent rivals such as the nearby Eglise Saint-Eustache will stand in perfectly well, while the reconstruction gets done properly. And just maybe some good will come from all this.

Paris in 1615. Notre-Dame dominating, yet no distance from open farmland

 

 

 

The grinning stupid authoritarian (GSA) phase

…the founder

When privileged-arch-fascist-climate-denier James Delingpole called his 2009 book Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn’t Work , he was onto something.

The UK had unhappily become the template for the next ten years in the polities of the complacent and morally confused West. All thanks to Tony Blair, and I should add, with the benefits of hindsight and his recent return to prominence, the selfish idiocy of John Major. His determination to continue as a dud Tory PM for a couple of years – despite a thriving economy – gave us the horrors that began in 1997.

So, we got Blair, slowly ruining that economy, along with his hated rival Gordon Brown, and visiting quite astonishing amounts of carnage on various foreign countries in the process. He is sort of reviled now, though he obviously finds it hard to take. Brexit has given him the opportunity that he craves to start lecturing us all again***.

In any event, I would say that Britain had begun to recover from his peculiar brand of smoothness, his labelling of opponents as morally bad people, and his oafish certainty. Theresa May’s dismal reign is essentially a hiatus in that recovery, I hope.

That depressing period is becoming a distant memory of course, as we actually got rid of Blair a whole 11 years ago, and whatever his demerits, his successor Brown was not a grinning authoritarian, and nor was Dave, after 2010.

….

Obama, a master of the amiable rictus, came in after a cunningly stage managed meteoric rise, in 2008, and exemplified the essential features of the GSA: a messianic view of his own powers and beliefs; the support of a mostly invertebrate and adulatory media; a hatred of  ‘old’ (and generally successful) norms in economics, morality, societal structure; a tendency to reward untalented cronies for fawning; an unthinking obsession with climate change; complacency about the electorate; a counterintuitive tendency to violence and the use of physical authority.

There are no doubt lots of other themes, but they’ll do for now.

The final common pathway of all this is the same – failure.

This failure though is one that only affects the public good, including the economy. The corollary of it is that the GSA will always end up personally enriched. That said, they rarely end up happy. This blog began in 2010 with exactly that observation.

Obama’s failures are many, although his extended media fan club hate to admit it. His irrefutable achievement was being the first African American president. The rest of it – not so much. Obamacare is tottering, he was the master of the multi-casualty drone strike, he destroyed his own party as for eight years it was all about him (another typical feature), the economy stagnated with absurd claims made to disguise failure, the church was targeted, terrorists were routinely appeased, and so on and on and on. Par for the course.

…

Macron has turned into an ongoing car crash (even as I write) at a quite incredible speed****. Clearly more intelligent and widely educated than both Blair and Obama, he nevertheless has proven to be amazingly out of touch and stupid. His de haut en bas style is ruining both him and France. It’s as if he’s making their mistakes at triple speed, just to catch up. What is funny is that he clearly didn’t see it coming – he thought the template worked. The inherent lack of principle is deliciously emphasised by him folding on his daft fuel tax – either climate changes exists and the proposed actions matter or it doesn’t (spoiler – it doesn’t).

…the new boy

The newest GSA is Leo Varadkar. Poor Ireland, generally badly run by a host of chancers since de Valera threw in the towel, its unique identity has been slowly crushed and subsumed by the secular brutality of the EU superstate. Once it sold its soul by giving in to voting twice on the dreadful Lisbon Treaty, it became a perfect seed bed for a GSA – and Varadkar is an exemplar of the breed. Number one priority was sucking up to EU overlords** – there would be no  prospect of dissent. Number two was going to town on legalising abortion – a far more controversial topic to this day than was ever admitted – which inevitably was joined with lots of church bashing. Number three is kicking Theresa May about, which everyone finds easy these days. It plays to the time honoured anti-English gallery in the Republic, itself a form of ‘toxic nationalism’.

There is no happy ending here. These menaces always cause untold avoidable harm. They bask in the approval of  most of the media and the young, until everyone begins to realise that this maybe isn’t so great after all, by which point lives have been lost, economies ruined, society broken further.

At the moment though, we can always eventually throw the bastards out. Far better would be to spot them in advance and never vote them in, in the first place.

*

 

**This terrific Brendan O’Neill piece on Varadkar’s poison came out a couple of days after this blog post. Essential reading

***and Dominic Lawson rips into Blair’s outrageous solipsistic posturing. He refuses to go away, naturally

****here’s Gavin Mortimer on Macron’s extremely rapid fall from grace

French election special ~ The W126 Mercedes SEC: men of taste and distinction

It’s always nice to have an excuse to go on about the awesome and beautiful SEC series of Mercedes coupes from the 1980’s. In fact the two previous posts on the topic (here and here) have been among the most popular things on this blog in the last 7 years. It’s partly the aesthetics, courtesy of the genius of Bruno Sacco (1, 2), and partly the sheer joy of zooming around in one, although they’re almost primitive by today’s standards. Such simplicity is is appealing in itself – and easier to fix when there’s a problem. I had a well used 560 SEC as a taster, I now have a 500 SEC, and it’s a keeper.

When you find out that it’s the favoured car of Clint Eastwood and the late Ayrton Senna amongst others – who could buy any car they liked – then you realise it must have a special allure, or pace the female readers, a certain manliness. It’s the antithesis of a highly capable yet boring and ugly modern car – the Nissan Juke, say.

L’homme lui-même

Which brings me to today’s post. It takes a gallic sang froid to walk into the nearest Mercedes dealership to your appartement on the Champs-Élysées and order the absolute top of the range 560 SEC, with pretty much all the extras. The buyer in question, back in 1988, was Pierre de Bénouville, a prewar  literary critic who became a general and a hero of the French Resistance. Here’s a sample of his New York Times obituary:

…like many French rightists, he was a patriotic nationalist and a bitter foe of the Germans,” and he rejected the occupied government’s call to capitulation and collaboration and went into the underground. An ardent supporter of Charles de Gaulle, to whom he was close in his later political career, he was also a member of the Free French Forces during the war and organized French forces in Algeria. In 1944 he was promoted to brigadier general in the French Army because of his achievements as the commander of a unit of Moroccan sharpshooters on the Italian front. He went on to be a major general. A high-ranking member of the Legion of Honor, he received other decorations, including the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the Resistance.

Impressive n’est-ce pas? Although he was a ‘rightist’, whatever that is, he was a long term pal of Mitterand (not necessarily a recommendation) and his post-war career was of a fiercely patriotic and successful establishment fixture. His views on the EU are not known to me, but as a Gaullist he was probably for it, as long as the French were in charge, and against the Brits. A couple of other obituaries make interesting reading (Guardian and Telegraph).

Tomorrow is the highly consequential French general election. What a patriotic and brave high achiever like de Bénouville would make of the lightweight effete Blair manqué Emmanuel Macron is a tricky one. His own career path has some similarities to that of Marine Le Pen’s dodgy father. My guess is he would emotionally sympathise with Le Pen but pragmatically vote for Macron, to keep le projet Union européenne alive.

So here, from the outstanding Mercedes Enthusiast magazine, is the full feature on de Bénouville’s exceptional W126 coupe. I’ve provided it as a jpeg and a pdf for any SEC geeks out there.

Vive la France, mais vive la différence!

C’est magnifique

and….

Christmas

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What I love about this fantastic miniature is – apart from the extraordinary skill and aesthetic sensitivity – the fact that the scene it depicts, a Christmas mass is essentially the same, 700 years later, as is happening right now, all over the planet. Technically it’s a different form, in the 14th century it would have been the pre-Tridentine Roman rite, but it’s basically the same, in all honesty.

This part of Les Tres Riches Heures is regarded as definitely being by the Limbourg Brothers. The delicate tracery and expressions on the faces fit with that – there’s a bit of chat and consternation in the congregation. Followed by a great version of In The Bleak Midwinter (genuinely)

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Les Tres Riches Heures (12): December

When you’ve built the tallest medieval fortified structure in Europe, for its time, you would expect it to tower over the landscape and the trees. The Chateau de Vincennes does exactly that in the last of the twelve month cycle. It’s still there today, though without the many smaller towers you see in the painting (and in the model below).

That’s a proper walled garden

The chateau took a battering over the centuries, and housed a community of English nuns and the imprisoned Marquis de Sade, though not at the same time. It was further damaged by a rentamob once the French Revolution was well underway. The Duc de Berry’s interest in it is that he was born in the chateau, 676 years ago last week.

The remaining donjon, still pretty tall

Vincennes was a heavily forested area near Paris  – now part of the Parisian urban sprawl – and as you might expect, there was a lot of hunting, in this case a wild boar hunt, with dogs, a potentially risky business. Oddly enough, still no snow, that seemed to wait till after Christmas in medieval France, judging by the Tres Riches Heures. By this point in the series – about 1440 – the duke was dead, the Limbourg brothers were dead, and the probable artist was the Master of Shadows, which is a cool name, in real life Barthélemy d’Eyck, which is still not bad.

Decembre

Les Tres Riches Heures (11): November

So many pigs. I think there’s at least 18, and unusually for Les Tres Riches Heures, the only building is a small nondescript generic castle. The peasant in the foreground is dislodging acorns by throwing his stick at them – a technique still employed by conker hunters to this day. Apparently a pig can scoff 10kg of acorns a day. Over to a fascinating jamon iberico website:

Many centuries ago, the rulers of western Spain decreed that each town and village should maintain pastures studded with oak trees, called the dehesa, for the long term stability of the region. This forest/pasture continues to serve many purposes. The holm and cork oaks provided firewood for the people, shade for the plants and livestock, cork products, and acorns (bellota) during fall and winter. During the spring and summer cattle and sheep graze the fields. During the fall and winter, when the acorns are falling from the trees, the pigs are released to fatten up. This ancient human-maintained ecosystem survives intact to this day.

It’s generally held that the painter of this one is Jean Colombe, not the Limbourg Brothers, and it’s certainly less exquisitely crafted, though still terrific. The landscape seen through the trees is an early example of the classic ‘blue landscape‘ later reaching its apogee with the enigmatic and wonderful Joachim Patinir.

Novembre

 

Les Tres Riches Heures (10): October

October’s a busy month: ploughing (weighed down with a rock), sowing the next crop, archery, bird scaring, various people messing around by the river. They’re ploughing and sowing round here too, at the moment, in my corner of Nordeuropa.

The obvious unseasonal element in the picture though, is a huge badass castle, only this one wasn’t owned by Jean de Berry. It’s the original Louvre Palace in Paris, which did indeed stand where the current building stands, and it’s a remarkably accurate representation. Visitors to the lowest floor of the current Louvre might recognise the enormous rounded bases of the towers, which have been well preserved. The palace was built by Charles V, who happened to be Jean de Berry’s big brother, so it’s still a family affair. Amusingly, he was known as Charles the Wise, whose enemy in life was Charles the Bad, and who was succeeded as king by his son, Charles the Mad. We should bring back these handy adjectives for our own royals (Charles the Twit?).

Here’s one I made earlier

Octobre

 

 

Les Tres Riches Heures (9): September

Often there is a parallel between what the Limbourgs are depicting in their monthly cycle and what goes on in the countryside of my part of northern Europe. Not this month, due to our dearth of viniculture (actually there is a tiny bit). As always with Jean de Berry, he’s happy to show the rhythm of the seasons but what he really seems to like is showing off his real estate. In this case the Château de Saumur, which is satisyingly still with us.

Saumur is a big wine growing area on the Loire. The chateau sits more above the town the in the painting, but it depends a bit on the angle from which you’re viewing it. The building is remarkably unchanged, really

The Château de Saumur now

This is one painting in the series where the historians are pretty sure that given the stylistic differences, the upper two thirds was a Limbourg job, while the bottom third was completed much later by Colombe. It fits, to my untrained eye.  Art historian François Cali described this scene  as “These extravagant towers are a dream landscape with constellations of canopies, pinnacles, gables and arrows, with their crockets fluttering against the light”, but as you can see from the above picture, the painting is hardly exaggerated, the architects for Henry II of England and Philip II of France who  owned the building in the decades preceding the painting weren’t hanging back. It was actually begun more than 400 years earlier – built to last.

The painting has two nice further details: bottom left is an exhausted looking pregnant lady, and in the middle foreground is possibly the first depiction of that well known artistic motif, the ‘builder’s bum’.

Septembre

Les Tres Riches Heures (8): August

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If Jean de Berry was lounging around the Hôtel de Nesle in Paris, and fancied a spot of falconry, then it would have been an 11 hour walk, according to Google Maps, or probably a 5-6 hour trip on a horse or in a carriage, to get to his Chateau d’Etampes, featured in August in the Tres Riches Heures. This was quite a building for its day, TE Lawrence was a visitor who (on this excellent website) is quoted as calling it  “perhaps the most astonishing production of the late twelfth century”.  It had all sorts of defensive innovations and was well built, so its central keep is still standing, if a bit worn. It got hammered in the Hundred Years War, as did much of northern France.

 

 

 

…now

 

Then…

I’m not aware that falconry is really a seasonal pursuit. These days in the UK it’s claimed to be a winter sport for reasons that aren’t clear to me, but there’s the Duc de Berry at it in high summer, and  its ancestral home is mainly in the decidedly non-seasonal Middle East.  More conventionally, there’s a hot sweaty harvest going on in the background, which brings to mind a drowsily persuasive masterpiece by Bruegel in his own series of seasonal paintings, The Corn Harvest

Bruegel the elder, The Corn Harvest, 1565. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In a way, the Limbourg’s painting gets August right: no-one wants to work too hard, just the essentials, lots of lazing around (see the swimmers), and a general air of self indulgence before the weather begins to turn.

Août

 

 

 

 

Les Tres Riches Heures (7): July

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In some ways Jean, Duc de Berry was the Donald Trump of his day. Wealth (much of it inherited), a degree of egotism, political influence and houses – plenty of palatial homes that he couldn’t possibly get much use from. Previous posts (eg 1, 2, 3) have outlined some pretty impressive domiciles, some of which are still standing, sort of. Hot running water 700 years ago is the equivalent of a helipad on the roof. Possibly.

Drawn after the Limbourgs’ picture

July is no different, except the Chateau du Clain at Poitiers hasn’t survived at all. The image of it in the July panel is the best we’ve got. The triangular plan with round corner towers was an established ‘defensive’ style, with in this case what might be a lake serving as a moat. Poitiers is not far from Paris, but travel was a bit trickier then. Jean de Berry moving from enormous chateau to enormous chateau on horseback, with his court retinue, around north west France is roughly equivalent to Trump zooming around the Eastern Seaboard in his private jet. The distances weren’t great but the journeys must have been arduous.

The Clain at Poitiers today

The yellow markers in this image (borrowed from an excellent post on Les Tres Riches Heures) correspond to the Limbourgs’ depictions of Jean de Berry’s estates.

The Jean de Berry package tour (yellow markers)

The main interest otherwise is the usual agricultural stuff – in this case sheep shearing and harvesting hay, laboriously with sickles, not scythes (try it some time).

Juillet