Yesterday, feeling a bit better, we visited Laon, a hill city in Picardy which is one of my favourite places, period. I first went there to study several early chant manuscripts in the summer of 1977, a three-month tour through Europe which informed much of my teaching of Gregorian chant in the following decades.
Laon is a medieval fortified hill city. Many of its narrow shortcuts have been retained as cobbled footpaths, even as more recent buildings squeeze them as much as the law will allow. Since my first visit, I have always walked up the hundreds of steps to visit either the library or cathedral. But yesterday, my knees suggested that I take the relatively new cable car instead, so off we went. That car was only installed relatively recently. To make a long story short, let's just say that if you are tramping around trying to learn where in the world the cable car begins, the last thing you want to see is that you are on a road that is well under the track, and the station is still nowhere in sight. We followed the track (back downhill) and finally found the mid-point station.
The promised car came, as it does every 5 minutes, and the €1.20 round-trip ticket was well worth it.
I have done several earlier blogs on Laon, so I won't repeat myself here. The lovely square towers can be seen from quite a distance, and in the 1200s they surely would have been seen by pilgrims even more easily than now.
There is a small cloister to the right of the cathedral which is peaceful. It used to have more doors granting access to the main building and to other buildings, but all that now remains is one small portion.
It was about 1:00 and time to start thinking about lunch. One or two places had been recommended to us, but tourist season is gearing up, and the café restaurant facing Notre Dame was filled to capacity (with tourists and their books and maps) and the posted carte (menu in English, but that word has a different meaning in France) was simply too generic. So we started walking. We stopped to enjoy this old passageway.
I then noticed this single room above the narrow passageway and immediately wanted to try THIS restaurant. Sadly, the room is available only upon special reservation, but the normal restaurant below was just fine.
After some sightseeing around the medieval city wall and trying (without success) to visit the historic church of a former abbaye, Janice went to a museum and I returned to the cathedral.
The following superscription inviting one into the chapel of the Holy Sacrament caught my attention. This is a quotation from Victimae paschali laudes, the sequence for Easter, something few visitors likely recall. The disciples ask "Mary" (though there were three in one account) to report what they had seen 'in the way' or on their trip to and from the tomb where Jesus had been buried. Her answer (from the sequence) is quoted above this doorway:
I saw the sepulcre of the living Christ
And the glory of his resurrection.
The 11th-century melody, sometimes attributed to Wipo of Burgundy, has been running through my mind ever since.
Sometimes I like to imagine that I am a monk, before eye glasses were invented. What might the cathedral have looked like without glasses? I am nearsighted, so I would have seen the edge of the choir stall clearly, and then things would have become increasingly blurred.
I hope to give an illustrated lecture on Laon someday, likely to unsuspecting seniors somewhere, unable to escape. In any case, I like the way several pillars try to convince the eye that the stone ceiling is being fully supported. Each of the ceiling's ribs can be followed visually right down to the floor. Of course it is largely decoration, but convincing nevertheless.
At the end of the day, we returned to the train station and had a juice and a beer, a fantastic Afflighem, which reminded me of a medieval monastic writer with the surname Afflighemensis (from Afflighem). Those monks clearly knew both their music and beer. The train was not at all crowded, and the 90-minute ride was over in no time.
Today I did some shopping, and then returned to the library where I can enjoy the terrific bouquet of flowers the Bloughs gave to us on our 50th! The little library never smelled so good.
All for now, with love from us both,
Evan
P.S. In case I forgot to tell you, some of my photos have been uploaded to my flickr account at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/evankreider/
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