A Moveable Feast

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

--Ernest Hemingway

As warmer days return and we move into our seventh month here in Normandy we'd like to consider the theme of richness in all its forms. And much in the tradition of Hemingway, we go forth as Americans under the charm of old-world ways. For here simply to wander the streets and know their history is a pleasure unto itself.



The excellence of French cuisine is much better experienced than related. But what bears description is the place this art-form occupies in the cultural heritage. France remains a nation with strong emotional and agricultural ties to its landscape. To tour the Normand countryside is to know an endless expanse of field with its speckled silhouettes of livestock and farmhouses. It's a landscape that's changed seemingly little since the birth of Impressionism in the late 19th century.

Over four hundred different cheeses originate from a country the size of Texas. Normandy is famous too for it's apples which show up in everything from pastries to Calvados, a delicious fermented cider. Consistently good wines are available for $5 at any market in town. With such an embarrassment of culinary riches, it's no surprise cafés seem to outnumber actual French citizens two-to-one. Make no mistakes, the French have no misgivings about idling away a good hour or two over a couple glasses of wine at a sunny sidewalk café. With the work-week firmly set at 35 hours, their seems little reason to fault them.

Despite the usual preponderance of cellphones and other gadgets, conversation remains overwhelmingly a face-to-face proposition here thanks in large part to the flourishing café culture. Most appropriate when you consider that the European literary salons that helped to spawn the Enlightenment originated in Paris. And so we raise a glass to this most French of social institutions.




With it's rich medieval history and long-strategic location on the Seine River, Rouen is home to a spectacular array of cultural and artistic diversity. Dubbed La Ville aux Cent Clochers (The City of A Hundred Belltowers) by Victor Hugo, the city functions as a living testimony to the superb architectural history of continental Europe. Within blocks, at times even within the same structure, one can trace the unfolding of technical and artistic progress from Romanesque to Gothic to Renaissance and beyond. One of our favorite buildings is l'Abbatiale St. Ouen (right).







It's vaulted arches and original 14th century stained glass set the scene for a celestial display of color and light in this masterpiece of late Gothic architectural design. To spend a few moments amongst it's luminous quiet is to know a very different conception of the sacred than the polluted and uninspiring notion with which we're too often confronted.

And one can hardly consider the imposing Cathédrale de Notre Dame without recalling Monet's multiple renderings, two of which hang in our own National Gallery in Washington D.C.

Several blocks away, a new church constructed on the site where Joan of Arc was burned cuts a flame-patterned outline against the city skyline. The mystery behind the improbable saga of La Pucelle d'Orleans continues to inspire debate amongst historians just as much as it fires the imagination of the public at large. Just how did an uneducated peasant girl from a rural area of eastern France manage to rise to a place of such historical significance? Whatever the case, her arrival on the scene corresponded with a major turn in fortunes for the English army during the Hundred Years War. The French would go on to consolidate their power on the continent while Joan of Arc was martyred at the hands of the English in Rouen's Vieux Marché in 1431.


To wind amongst this maze of medieval alleys fashioned into chic new shopping districts, one can't help but feel the pull of former times and worlds. It is a most formidable backdrop for anyone inclined to ponder the long and winding path that leads unfailingly home to you and I.














The city is no less blessed in the arts than it is architecturally or historically. Flaubert, Corneille, and Monet are just a few of the towering figures to have once cast their long shadows across the city's pavement. What a sublime treat to slip into one of the numerous bookshops or excellent museums on a lazy afternoon and slip under the spell of these great artists.


And lest you should think the city hopelessly lost in its past, know that a consistent cycle of traveling exhibitions never fails to bring new life to the city's museums. The ideas of each new exhibition are charged with an even greater weight given the context in which they emerge for public viewing. A society that values the arts does so by creating room for its liberal expansion into the daily life of its citizens. This is the very opposite of elitism. It's this necessity of space and time which encourages a more sustained and deep relationship between the work and the artist, between art and you. In the most broad terms, I tend to think the most basic notion of Art has a greater currency here because of the space it occupies. As the majority of our social institutions move toward an increasingly impersonal level of concern for the individual, this conception of art continues to strike me as entirely vital and necessary for the survival of sanity and pleasure in our modern world.

A piece from a recent exhibition of Tunisian artist Georges Koskas' work at Rouen's Musée des Beaux Arts. Highly recommended.

Photo from the Titouan Lamazou exhibition "Les Femmes du Monde" currently on view here in Rouen. Inspiring evidence for the role of art as alternative to the sterility of current international political solutions (or lack there of). Another artist we recommend highly.






"L'artise a besoin du regard des autres." (The artist needs the regard/concern of others.)

--Entrace of local gallery here in Rouen













"The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual."

--Albert Camus

In a time of such drastic uncertainty we do well to recall the richness that lies all about us. Let it be our duty to take up this richness not to possess and keep but to bring forth to a more radiant place amongst the society of family and friends. It is a feast to which all are invited.