Sens and Sensibility: A Few Days on Another Planet
Some time ago I mentioned a long-unfulfilled urge to visit the cathedral at Sens, in France, whose striking tower…
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…glimpsed in the middle-distance catching the last of the setting sun, marks the true beginning of the rail journey south out of Paris, a sign that one has slipped past the gravitational pull of the French capital and into the deeper more ancient France that lies outside it. I’ll come to that. But why does it haunt me so? I think it is a symbol of sort of adventurous travel that you can’t find in Europe any more. I took this journey on late summer evenings (often just beginning my supper as we passed this point) many times in the days before TGVs, when continental rail travel was slower, more exciting, smellier, and much, much more foreign than it has since become. I recall an evening train heading for the Alps, with Chamonix as my destination (and E.L.Voynich’s novel ‘The Gadfly’ in my pocket – could I read that now?) many autumns ago, the great matt grey-green coaches far higher up and broader than British ones, swaying and clanging to a different rhythm, bounding down the track southwards, through vast yards of electric trains and cables, evidence of France’s huge investment in infrastructure, embarrassingly far ahead of our own.
Waking at midnight in Bourg-en-Bresse, miles from Paris but still only halfway to our destination, waking again for dawn by the lake at Annecy, a sight I never even knew existed, then, at the end of the main line, up on a little red rack-and-pinion train into the mountains themselves. Another time, on the single grey Italian coach waiting at Dover which was grandly called the ‘Rome Express’, shunted through the sepulchral tunnels of Paris’s now abandoned ‘Petite Ceinture’, a circular track which linked all the main stations, then at the Gare de Lyon slammed on to the back of the real express, and all the way to Rome without once changing. How much more foreign it all was. You were in the unknown. Nobody spoke English. You immediately lost contact with home. A telephone call was a carefully-planned exercise involving a specially obtained token, a cubicle in a café under the grumpy eye of the proprietor, and the operator, English newspapers rare and usually days old, the consumer goods (and the advertisements for them) all specifically French as ours were specifically English, needing to be learned and discovered with care. Once, a sort of extravaganza, travelling by the now forgotten Trans Europ Expresses, a late 1950s vision of Euro-luxury (one, the Mistral, which had a copper bar, ran down the Rhone past all the great vineyards of the region. I encountered it again, a sagging but still-comfortable relic, on the Havana to Santiago line in Cuba).
That world vanished some time in the 1980s when my attention was distracted by things further East. The old clangorous carriages, the lovely blue dining cars which were the best restaurants in the world because of the sense of motion and the view, disappeared. So did the dark and basic station hotels with their iron bedsteads and brown lino, and the incredibly cheap brasseries where we eked out our Francs and wondered, as we stared at the Thomas Cook Continental Timetable, how far and how deep we could get into France that night. Pretty far, and pretty deep, as it turns out and to places no longer reachable by train , for France has had its own Beechings and Marples.
But after a particularly satisfying visit to the Cathedral city of Chartres I suspected that a pilgrimage to Sens might be rewarding, though obviously not as astonishing as Chartres. Happening to be in Paris, I found the new Gare de Bercy (once the depot through which wine arrived by rail in the city) and, remembering to stamp my ticket on the platform ( failure to do this can be very costly and embarrassing) I swung aboard the morning train to Sens. Despite the fog, it was perfection. It awoke dozens of memories, not least as we rattled (in reasonably old-fashioned rolling stock) through the forest of Fontainebleau. It was a proper express journey, with Sens the first stop.
Here, alas was the imescapable modern world, plenty of people with piercings and tattoos, much as you would find at an English small-town station on an autumn morning, a small crowd of sub-Saharan Africans searching for who knows what. But the old world persisted. I’d chosen the quietest day of the week, and the many closed shops and absence of traffic emphasised the decay of the pretty old town, which has grown up round an island in the middle of the river Yonne, packed with swans (who owns them in France? Obviously not the Queen. Can you eat them there? I’ve never been offered swan), sometimes traversed by enormous barges bound for the sea via Paris and the Seine. It underlined the feeling I often get in France of public affluence and private decay. My walk to the Paris station had reminded me , as I slogged past an immense concrete ministry the size of a small town, just how Soviet France can be, bureaucratic, obsessed with gigantic projects, worshipping the state and forgetful and neglectful of the small and private.
Yet, shabby as much of it was, the town was also often handsome, with plenty of half-timbering and serene stone – it sits just at the northern limit of Burgundy, and you can feel the influence in details like the patterned roof tiles on the old Bishops’ Palace. It also possesses one of the most wildly architecturally extravagant town halls I have ever seen. This view does not really do it justice.
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Seen from just beneath the spire, it is even wilder:
But it was the Cathedral I had come to see. Why *are* French cathedrals so different from their English cousins? They even smell different. The buildings are not that dissimilar and are clearly of the same family. The towns and cities in which they stand have much in common. My guess is that we were lucky with our Reformation, severe as it was a mild thing compared with the furious ‘deChristianisation’ visited on the churches of France by the Jacobins during the revolution. This was a systematic desecration not just directed against graven images, but designed to drive the very spirit of belief out of the buildings. Sometimes prostitutes were hoisted on to the high altar (in scenes rather reminiscent of the climactic riot in Simon Raven’s novel ‘Places Where they Sing’, discussed here some time ago).Perhaps it succeeded. Loudspeakers inside the Sens cathedral played fine church music. But it only served to emphasise the fact that here was no choir school, no choir practice, no regular daily matins and evensong. This was a museum where a bit of worship was permitted, not a living church.
There is some beautiful glass including a window dedicated to the greatest of English martyrs, Thomas a Becket of Canterbury ( Or ‘Canterbory’, as the French spelling was in the days when we both had our own names for the famous cities of other countries. (There’s an elaborate running joke on Dorothy Sayers’s great detective story, perhaps her greatest, ‘The Nine Tailors’ about the French referring to Lincoln as ‘Laincolonne’ . Did they really?
Becket (there’s also a statue supposed to be him) was in exile here for two years, a memory they treasure. Other glass , as in Chartres and just as beautiful, tells the stories of Saints, or recounts parables – there is a ‘Prodigal Son’ almost as good as the one at Chartres. I wished I’d had binoculars, and an account of the rather horrible story of St Eustace, now generally thought to be untrue, in which he ends up being roasted to death inside a pagan idol, along with his family.
There were not that many visitors. Perhaps if I’d waited long enough I could have found myself, like M.R. James’s character Dennistoun in the deserted cathedral of St Bertrand of Comminges, listening out for the strange and alarming noises that great old buildings produce to scare us on darkening winter afternoons.
One, an enjoyably single-minded Swede, had come entirely to visit the very odd and unexpected tomb of the father of Louis XVI, a Dauphin (heir to the French throne, (He was the son of Louis XV and also the father of the post-revolutionary restored monarchs Louis XVIII and Charles X)) who died before he became King and who might, by his personal goodness, have changed the course of French history had he ascended the throne. The Swede thought so, and he had obviously gone into the matter a great deal. It is an extraordinary allegorical sculpture, in the high style of the late 18th century , depicting religion,, immortality, science and the arts. Westminster Abbey has lots of this sort of thing, though not often as stylish or exuberant. But in France it was all smashed, with this one exception, hidden at the crucial moment and brought out again in safer times.
The melancholy crypt of the Basilica of St Denis in Paris is a monument to the desecration of the graves of the French monarchy. From then on France’s glory was to be secular, a thing I notice more and more about France. The astonishing gloomy Pantheon, near which I stayed for a few days in Paris recently, started life as a hilltop church dedicated to Genevieve, Patron saint of Paris. But the revolution converted it into a windowless stone box full of the corpses of the great, whose macabre and rational tombs one may visit. I cannot work out how it still happens to have a cross on top of its dome. I prefer Paris’s other great atheistical burial place, the great military hospital of the Invalides, where Bonaparte is entombed as if he were a god fallen to earth, (as if? I am not so sure it is that modest) with the lesser sarcophagi of his brothers nearby. At least it has plenty of windows, and for added interest there is the tomb of Marshal Foch, a rather fine affair, topped with a sculpture of the great soldier’s recumbent body borne on the shoulders of bronze soldiers (and adorned with English Poppy wreaths) , and the weird modernist box in which the very interesting Marshal Lyautey is entombed. It has an Arabic inscription on it . Can anyone tell me what it means?
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These are useful reminders for silly people that France is a martial nation and could easily have bested us in combat if things had turned out very slightly differently.
The St Denis basilica, now surrounded by one of the most Islamic districts of Paris, is one of the most beautifully desolate things I have ever seen. It reminds of how unsuccessful were the attempts to revive both religion and monarchy in 19th century France, of the utter, irrevocable loss of a world that may well not have been as wicked and cruel as we like to think, or as wicked and cruel as what succeeded it.
But in Sens, somehow, a remnant of that lost world has survived. So has one of the loveliest pieces of sculpture I have ever seen, a 16th century altarpiece, now in austere white stone but once, I think, richly painted, of Christ’s passion, stuck behind an iron grille in a locked side chapel (dedicated to Saint Martial, whoever he was) and so hard to see, but full of grace and truth. One of its panels, showing three men (their faces full of fury and contempt) forcing the Crown of Thorns on to Christ’s head, is by itself worth the journey. Rodin (whose works are wonderfully displayed in Paris in a museum largely made up of gardens) could not have done it better, superb as he is at portraying pain and grief.
There is no real purpose in what I have written here, except that, as it interested me, I thought it might interest you. It is why I travel, really. I love many things about France (including a restaurant devoted almost entirely to the cooking and eating of ducks, but not swans, which I visited last week, and which also provides the best apple pie with Armagnac that I have ever eaten) . But above all I enjoy the feeling of being in a parallel world, or even planet, similar to but yet utterly different from the one I inhabit.
It demonstrates, among other things, that ideas and beliefs have huge material consequences, and so that thought and argument are worthwhile.