Jeanne d’Arc was burnt at the stake in 1431 in the Place du Vieux Marché in Rouen, a martyr at the age of 19. Her death is something for which many French people have still not forgiven the English.
The site is marked with a 22-metre cross next to which stands the startling Jeanne d’Arc church with a low-slung canopy which covers the church and part of the market as well. It was built just over 30 years ago. The interior roof is tent-like and supported by an unadorned pillar and the whole church is brilliantly illuminated by the jewel-bright colours of 15 panels of Renaissance stained glass. The bronze statue of St. Joan is attractive although it is hard to reconcile its description of Joan as a gentle, innocent woman with her feisty warrior-like rebellious reputation.
Rouen is one of France’s busiest river ports with a well-preserved medieval centre and narrow streets leading off its squares and main thoroughfares. Many of the buildings surviving since the 13th century have been beautifully restored and the timber-fronted houses, some six stories tall but barely two metres wide, jutting out on carved corbels and leaning alarmingly, are a great attraction to photographers.
The most popular street is the rue du Gros-Horloge and it is always thronged with visitors, many waiting for the famous clock to strike the hour when they stare up at the clock which confirms not only the time but the week and the phase of the moon.
Rouen Cathedral with its magnificent facades, towers and carved doors, was famously painted in all weather by Monet and is surrounded by shops which were once medieval houses. Its scale and grandeur stuns one into silence as inside the sun filters through the stained glass. It is truly a worthy monument to a great city.
The Musée des Beaux Arts houses many works by famous local and French artists, among them Monet’s luminous studies of the Cathedral and studies by Sisley, Dufy, Corot, Pissaro and Poussin, along with a few 19th century studies of Jeanne d’Arc. This great city produced not only artists but men of letters whose fame is worldwide, men like Maupassant, Flaubert and Corneille to name but a few.
Away from the museums, galleries and churches (and don’t forget to visit the Gothic St. Ouen church behind which lies the cemetery where Joan heard her death sentence and where she was eventually rehabilitated 25 years later) normal life continues for the people of Normandy. The vegetable and cheese market is a gourmand’s delight, but don’t be too temped to buy cheese. Many of them increase in smell as they ripen and if you pack them, as I did once, you may never lose the smell from your clothes no matter how well wrapped they are.
Jeanne of Arc was called “a witch, soothsayer, false prophet, idolator, scandalmonger and rebel”. She was only one of these – a rebel – in the days when female rebellion scandalised both church and laity. Cutting her hair and wearing trousers was enough to make her hated and feared, but today she is venerated as a real French heroine, her town Rouen, guarding her memory, as the Seine guards Rouen.
Mari Nicholson - Award Winning travel writer and historian, member of British Guild of Travel Writers.Travelwriters.co.uk, and Society of Women Writers and ...
