Posted on by Mark Covello

Notre Dame de Reims

The first half  of the trip was spent in Champagne.  Our son is a server and has begun some of the sommelier testing, so he had connections with and an attraction to many champagne houses.  And our tours of them were fascinating and, at times, glamorous.  Unfortunately, as much as I tried to open the aperture, I was unable to get reasonable exposures as you can see here.

We may never know what some of those are.  I did a little better outdoors

But I was not really prepared for photography on the tours.

 

I was also anxious to see some of the cathedrals.  Before we left I also thought I’d get a I’d get some shots of Would War I cemeteries and battlefields, but this was not the trip for that either. It would have been a good time to take a look at Cathedrals.  I never fully paid attention during high school history when they  got into the details of flying buttresses and gargoyles, but this was the heart  of cathedrals; Notre Dame de Paris, Chartres, Amiens,…  And I thought I could make up for my puerile phillistinery,  Notre Dame de Reims was both convenient and interesting,

 

having served as the coronation site for 25 of France’s kings, including Charles X, who was led to the cathedral by Joan of Arc.    Her statue can be found on the cathedral grounds.

 

 

I wanted to see the stained glass windows by Marc Chagall as well.  I had read about them and was surprised to find them more stark than I had expected them to be.

 

It would have been an architect’s dream.  There was a lot of information about the construction of the cathedral. And a beautiful model of it.

 

But I’m afraid my limited  plebeian taste and attention span has not improved with age.

I did become entranced with the smiling Angel of Reims.  As I was looking for her I also got some good photos of the outside of the cathedral.

Her story, at least according to wikipedia, was inspiring to someone whose glory was fading.  It seems her head came off following a German shelling in World War I ( September 19, 1914).  Her head broke into several pieces.  But they were collected by the abbot of the cathedral.  Following the war they were reassembled at the National museum of French monuments and she was added to the restored cathedral in 1926.  In some of the pictures I had seen she almost seemed to be giving a fist pump.

Imagine!  After observing the foolishness of mankind for almost 700 years and then suffering the insult of a barbarous assault, she could return triumphant.  Perhaps there is hope for us yet.  I had to get a look at her and take a number of photos to either get comfort from the failure to survive this long dark passage or to share in the glory of being revived for the endgame.

 

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