A Lot of Dead People and an Ending (Plus Some Chocolate)

Me and Blanche,
together at last

 Ah, Paris. As wonderful as ever. No, more wonderful now that we can afford a room with a bathroom that is not down a flight of winding stairs and as filthy as ever a bathroom could be (as in our first visit to Paris). 

We have kept up the Blanche vigil, which isn't too difficult in Paris, as she lived here from her marriage to her death, 52 years later. I'd heard there was a statue of Blanche in the Luxembourg Gardens, not far from our hotel (we are 5th Arrondissment types). And indeed there was! Around the pool in the center of the garden stood a series of 20 statues of  Illustrious Women of France dating from the 1800s, and among them was my Blanche. 

(not) Roland's Olifant

We walked then to the Bibliotheque National. I'd read that the horn of Roland was there. The poem "Song of Roland" makes an appearance in The Queen's Granddaughter, when the company visits Roncesvalles. This is the town where the big battle between Charlemagne's forces and the Basques (appearing as the Muslims in the poem) took place. In the poem, Roland blows a trumpet made of unicorn horn to alert Charlemagne's soldiers to the upcoming battle. He calls the horn "olifant," which I had thought was a sweet name he gave it because he loved it. Turns out all those horns were called "olifant," either because they are made of elephant tusks or because they look like elephant trunks or tusks. Anyway, we asked several museum officials about the horn and got them all excited about hunting for it. At last we discovered that yes, the museum did have Roland's olifant -- sort of. The signage indicated that it might not actually have been his but it was a lot LIKE his; that was close enough for me!

Blanche teaches Louis

After that -- 5 miles of walking -- I rested while Phil went out to the nearby Pantheon, where many famous dead people lie. He saw Foucault's Pendulum and the tombs of Rousseau, Voltaire, Zola, and Victor Hugo  -- and to my great shock, found a wall painting of Blanche teaching lessons to the son who would become King Louis/St. Louis. Truly, Blanche is everywhere.

We ate well, as one does in Paris, and strolled along the Seine till dinner was somewhat digested. Then we prepared for our final day. We did not want to go home.

We had decided, on this trip to Paris, to see only small and undervisited places. Our final morning, we started out at the Basilica of St. Denis, the earliest Gothic cathedral, from the 12th century -- another Blanche site! (Sorry if you're getting tired of her, but I'm just not.) Turns out St. Denis, where the abbot Suger was the bff of Blanche's husband Louis VIII, is the resting  place of very nearly all the French kings and queens you've ever heard of. Not Blanche, unfortunately -- but most of the others.

original windows

There were a few original windows from Suger's times, though the majority had been redone (with inferior blues, of course) in the 19th century. And much of the church was a crypt. There were dozens of statues created in the 17th century of the various monarchs. Some of the monarchs were actually buried beneath their effigies; others rested in lower sections of the building.

Down in the crypt, there was the "Bourbon Burial Chamber," which appeared to be a whole bunch of stone caskets just tossed there -- all of them containing Bourbon kings and queens. It seemed kind of disrespectful.

Then we found a weird little section that looked like nothing much, except it happened to contain the remains of Louis XIV.

And nearby lay a whole bunch of Blanche relatives -- a daughter, a son, and many grandchildren. Quite unexpected -- and more than a little sad. Blanche's sainted son and daughter (Louis IX and Isabelle) were also in there somewhere. 

Louis IX died during the Eighth Crusade in Tunis, probably of dysentery. His body was boiled in the process of Mos Teutonicus, created to enable bodies of those who died on crusade to be repatriated. The body was dismembered and the body parts boiled in water, wine, milk, or vinegar for several hours. The heart and intestines were removed to allow for proper transfer of the bones. Any residue was scraped from the bones, leaving a completely clean skeleton.

Louis's bones were taken back to St. Denis, though his silver effigy there was destroyed in the 1500s. Apparently during the Revolution and then during Napoleon's time, most of the tombs of the monarchs in St. Denis were opened and the bodies dumped into mass graves and then covered with lime. Bodies were retrieved later on, as much as they could be (lime is pretty destructive), and they were put back into Saint Denis. But it was hard to tell who was whom at that point.

One of Blanche's sons and a grandson

Blanche died in 1252 and was buried at Maubusson Abbey, a Cistercian nunnery that she founded herself. But it was sacked during the Wars of Religion, and her body disappeared. Supposedly her heart was taken to the Abbey of the Lys outside Paris, which is now a ruin. No one knows what happened to it. So St. Denis was our final attempt at tracing Blanche's life, and the lives of her descendants.

Jacques Prevert collage

We took the metro up to Montmartre to give Phil a taste of modernism. He walked into a concrete pillar while looking at his phone, but very little harm was done. We stopped in the Musee Montmartre, which was the atelier of Renoir among other artists. It also had a huge exhibition of Jacques Prevert works -- he was a surrealist collager, a Symbolist poet, and a screenwriter for one of the finest films ever made, Children of Paradise. The exhibit was bizarre and fascinating. The greatest artists of the time, including Picasso, Chagall, and Braque, illustrated Prevert's books of poetry, and his own collages were fabulous.

On our way back we stopped at Les Deux Magots, where James Joyce, Hemingway, and other dead white male notables drank. We drank too. The waiters gave us extra olives because we were sad, sad  Americans. 

And for dinner, Phil ate delicious caramelized blood sausage (it has a much nicer name in French) and I ate the chocolate mousse from heaven. 

Tomorrow, back to Wassaic and reality (if we're lucky -- our flight is already delayed 3 hours). Alas.