hudebnik

Tuesday morning we awoke in our hotel room in Brussels. We took a 10-minute walk to Wittamer's, one of the classic old chocolateries of Belgium, then back to the hotel, packed everything up, checked out, and walked the 15 minutes or so to the main train station. Caught a train to the Amsterdam airport: it was somewhat delayed by a national strike in Belgium, then by a slower train ahead of it on the same tracks, then by an infestation of swans on the tracks. (Would I make that up?) But we still got there at 13:30, in plenty of time for our 17:05 plane to JFK.

As of 16:30, they hadn't started boarding yet, and takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 17:25. Mechanics were looking into "a technical issue" with the plane, with no confident estimate of when they'd be finished. As of 17:45, takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 19:00. As of 18:30, the flight was cancelled altogether, we would be automatically rebooked onto a later flight, we would get an e-mail with details, and if we wanted a hotel voucher to spend the night, we should go to transfer desk T4. We heard about all of this by individual airline employees walking around and telling small groups of people, because the microphone they would have used to announce it more broadly wasn't working. So by the time we got the word about transfer desk T4, there had already been a mass exodus in the direction of transfer desk T4, and we found ourselves at the end of about a hundred-yard-long line inside the terminal.

It occurred to me that the rush for hotel vouchers might well be accompanied by a rush for hotel rooms, so while standing in the line, I pulled out my phone and looked for nearby hotels. Found one, the "Citizen M", a 5-minute walk away from the terminal we were in. This sounded good because we had no idea what time our rebooked flight would be, so I made a reservation there. And since KLM was allegedly paying for it, I requested breakfast with our room (for an extra 19 € each).

I checked my mail a few times for word of a rebooking, then tried text-chatting with customer service to rebook interactively. The bot informed me that my flight had been canceled (news flash!) and pointed me to the exact same web page I had used to chat with it, but also offered the option of talking to a human. So I waited for that.

After an hour and a bit, and before getting a response from the chat, I reached the front of the line for hotel vouchers. There was a ring of about eight self-service kiosks, which the employees recommended you start with, resorting to another line for human customer service only if the self-service kiosk couldn't cope with your request. So I did that: the kiosk recognized that our flight had been cancelled, and offered us food-and-drink vouchers and a hotel voucher. For the hotel voucher, there were two choices: make the reservation for me, or I'll make it myself. Since I had already reserved a room, I picked the latter, and was given two food-and-drink vouchers and a "generic voucher" that isn't actually good for anything itself; you're supposed to show it to the human customer-service agents after standing in another line. But in the process of doing all this, the kiosk also informed us that we had been rebooked for a 7:15 flight to London Heathrow and a connection at an unspecified time from there to JFK. So much for breakfast.

We stood in another line for twenty minutes or so before getting to the human customer-service agents, who took our "generic voucher" in exchange for a voucher at the Park Plaza hotel. I pointed out that I had already made a reservation at Citizen M, which the agent acknowledged was much closer -- "basically the only hotel in walking distance of here". The prepaid vouchers were apparently available only for the Park Plaza, but the agent assured me that we could get reimbursed for the cost of a night's lodging at another hotel, and gave me instead a card with URL's to request such reimbursement in various languages. And she also printed off our boarding passes for the flights to Heathrow and thence to JFK, telling us we should be at the terminal 90 minutes before boarding, i.e. 5:45. We thanked her and walked into the night looking for the hotel.

Which wasn't difficult: Google Maps gave reasonable walking directions, and we weren't far from the front door of the terminal before we could see a big letter-M logo glowing in the distance. Checked in and went to our room.
Which was trippy and ultramodern: the first thing you see when you open the door is a shower stall on the "open plan", followed by a toilet, also on the "open plan", and once you've walked between them, you get to the bed. In fact, both shower stall and toilet have frosted-glass walls that close around them on a circular track, so they're not entirely "open". Next to the bed is an iPad that controls everything in the rooom: the television, the curtains, the blinds, the lights, the soundscape, the night-light (which has separate controls for brightness and color)...

It was now about 9 PM and we hadn't eaten much since noon, so I looked up the menu on the iPad and discovered there was no room service. So shalmestere and I agreed on some dim sum as a late-night snack, and I went back to the ground floor bar to order it. While waiting, I pulled out my phone and realized that a human had responded to my customer-service chat. I summarized the situation, and the agent said "Good news! You've been rebooked on the 8:00 AM flight from Brussels to Amsterdam, and the 10:00 AM flight from Amsterdam to JFK." This was the exact same pair of flights I'd been rebooked onto twice before, and it was decidedly not appropriate now given that we were in Amsterdam, not Brussels. I pointed this out, and asked whether we could have just the 10:00 flight from Amsterdam to JFK, without the Brussels-AMS leg (which sounded more pleasant than a 7:15 flight changing in London). The agent misunderstood me and said the 10:00 PM flight was cancelled too (I didn't think there even was a 10:00 PM flight!); when I clarified that I meant 10:00 AM the next day, the agent said that flight was also canceled or unavailable or something. So we agreed to stick to the 7:15-to-London plan. And finally the food arrived, I took it up to the room, we ate and fell into bed.

Wednesday morning I woke to my alarm at 4:30 AM. Turned on the night-light in orange-yellow to suggest sunrise, took a shower, and woke shalmestere to do the same. We got downstairs by 5:30, checked out (accepting the offer of a couple of pains au chocolat to-go, since we had paid for breakfast after all), walked back to the terminal, and went through security and passport-control again. The 7:15 flight to London boarded without mishap, although it didn't actually get off the ground until 8:00. Landed in London only ten minutes late, with about 45 minutes before our connection to New York would start boarding. Unfortunately, the connection to New York was on a different airline and from a different terminal, so we had to stand in line to catch a bus from one terminal to another. Fortunately, the bus stayed on the "inside-security-and-passport-control" side of the border, so we didn't have to do security and passport control again in the new terminal. Unfortunately, the boarding passes we had used for the flight to London were apparently insufficient to get us onto the NYC leg, so we had to stand in another line, with dozens of other people, to talk to one of the two Virgin Atlantic customer-service agents on duty at 9 AM. Eventually the agent issued us two new boarding passes, and we started running to find our gate, hoping it wouldn't be closed by the time we got there. And it wasn't, although the plane was mostly boarded.

Fairly uneventful flight from Heathrow to JFK. Retrieved bags, didn't have to go through customs or even show passports to anyone (just get our digital photos taken), caught a cab home, and collapsed in bed, 32 hours after boarding the train from Brussels to Amsterdam.

Sunday, 12 Oct: Mechelen. The train station is on a ring road around the town, mostly following the footprint of the medieval city walls, so we had a bit of a walk to get to the old town.

The first stop on that walk was one of the gate towers remaining from the medieval city walls, now looking rather incongruous in the middle of a traffic circle. Its upper story is now used to store sets and props for some kind of community theatre, but it still commands the main street.


Mechelen, like much of Belgium, is all about the old and the new living side-by-side. Of course, some of the old things are better preserved than others...




Like most medieval European towns, Mechelen was centered on the cathedral, in this case dedicated to St Rumpold (Sint-Romboutskathedraal). This particular cathedral is noted for its enormous bell tower, which visitors can climb up for a small fee. Each of its nine floors serves a different purpose: the entrance,
the crane that raises bells and construction materials to and from the upper stories,




the forge for on-site metalworking,
the bell chamber, the old carillon, the clock,



the new carillon, the place where they mixed mortar for the top story, and the scenic walk at the top.




In the 15th and 16th centuries, Mechelen was home to several of the richest merchants in the Low Countries, one of whom (Hieronymus van Busleyden) built a luxurious palace which is now restored as the Hof van Busleyden, home of a well-respected art museum. We arrived shortly before closing time, so we didn't actually go through the museum, but we visited the bookstore and admired the gardens and facade.

By this time we were pretty tired, so we caught a bus back to the train station and a train back to Brussels.

BTW, I've started uploading pictures and adding them to previous entries, starting October 1. Go back and take a look, if you wish.

As planned, took a morning train from Tournai to Brussels (most of the stops were Not Silly).

As soon as we got out of the station, shalmestere spotted a poster with medieval drolleries advertising a museum exhibit. She took a photo of it, but we were more immediately concerned with finding our hotel. Which we did without much trouble; it involved walking past some homeless people and the like, but it was a straight shot from the station.


Then looked at the photo again, looked up the museum (KBR -- the Royal Library of Belgium) online, concluded it was an exhibition of medieval manuscripts around the theme of music, and decided this was What We Should Do Today.
Walked back to the station and just a bit past it to the exhibition. Which was indeed awesome.
The KBR's permanent collection includes 279 medieval manuscripts from the Dukes of Burgundy, including most of the famous collection of Queen Marguerite of Austria, and many of them were on display. Some of the musical connections were a stretch — "this is a really cool manuscript, and if you look at the drolleries in the inner margin of the recto page, one of them is an animal playing a harp" — but an excellent collection.

	Here's a page from the famous "Brussels" black-paper basse-danse manuscript, from which much of our knowledge of early basse-danse choreography (and a little knowledge of musical ornamentation) comes. I suspect this is actually a facsimile: the real manuscript is in this library, but I've been told it's extremely fragile (the dyes that turn paper black aren't good for its longevity), and what's in the display case is in excellent condition.
	Neumatic chant notation from the 8th century Antiphonary of Mont Blandin
	Neumatic chant notation from the 12th century Sacramentarium of Stavelot Abbey
	Marginal picture of a transverse-flute player (?)
	Marginal picture of a man pushing another man in a wheelbarrow (from Breviary of Louis de Male, 14c)
	A treatise on music, with drawings of musical instruments (14th century, Park Abbey). Includes a straight trumpet ("tuba" or "basoun"), a horn ("corn&o" or "horn"), a harp ("cithara" or "harp"), something that might be a citole, two recorders ("fistula" or "floyt"), and a snare drum ("tympanum" or [indecipherable]).
	Shepherds playing bagpipe, entertaining the hounds and the sheep
	An opening from (one of) the Chansonnier of Queen Marguerite of Austria
	A young 15th-century nobleman being shown the error of his lascivious ways (including music, hounds, everything that makes life fun)
	A 15th-century representation of the Guidonian hand
	A banquet scene, with alta capella playing from the gallery, from the Histoire de Charles Martel (1465)
	Another banquet scene, with alta capella playing from the gallery, from the Chroniques de Hainaut (1465)
	A tournament with an alta capella playing from the gallery (15c)
	A royal procession, with holy relics and an alta capella at the front, from Fleur des histoires, 15c
	Not a "manuscript", technically, but a four-part piece printed on a tablecloth for Marie of Hungary, 1548.

Back to the room. I took a bag of dirty socks and shirts to a nearby laundromat and, while waiting for the wash cycle, hunted for nearby grocery stores. Didn’t find much, but got some yogurt for breakfast-in-the-room. And we both have enough clean clothes to get through the end of the vacation, even if our flight is delayed.

Mardi, 7 Oct

Breakfast: pain au beurre, pain au fromage, pain au chocolat, yogurt aux fraises

Lunch: big salad, with a few bites of shalmestere's Thai beef tartare

Dinner: take-out canneloni, reheated in the room

Mercredi, 8 Oct

Breakfast: pain au beurre, pain au fromage, yogurt aux fraises

Brunch: tartine de saumon, avocat, et fromage chevre

Dinner: take-out quiche, reheated in the room (+ chocolate tart)

Jeudi, 9 Oct

Breakfast: pain au beurre, pain au fromage, pain au chocolate, yogurt aux fraises

Lunch: "chicken cheddar" burrito in Lille train station

Mid-afternoon: gaufre, chocolat chaud (gaufre bonne, chocolat meh)

Dinner: Pâte carbonara, with a few bites of shalmestere's carbonnade flamande

I had read in the guidebooks about the "medieval town" of Provins, its Medieval Faire every summer, its shows of jousting, siege engines, and falconry, its restaurants providing medieval costumes and strolling minstrels... all in all it sounded like a RenFaire-style tourist trap, so I had some misgivings. But it also seemed that all this medievaloid tourism was built atop a good supply of actual medieval survivals, so we got on a train to Provins yesterday morning.

Provins is classed as "Paris suburbs" (l'Île de France), analogous to taking a commuter train like the LIRR, Metro North, or NJ Transit rather than Amtrak. And the governing body for l'Île de France has evidently decided to treat the whole area as a single transit zone, so we didn't need to buy tickets at all, just wave our Paris Metro passes in front of a reader and walk through a gate. That said, there were a bunch of stops, one of which was a spur where the train had to reverse direction, so it took about 1:20 each way. A pleasant and restful train ride through the countryside.

Half a dozen of the Provins medieval attractions are all covered by a "Pass Provins", which one is supposed to buy at the Office de Tourisme, so that seemed like a logical first stop. Unfortunately, somebody in the Provins town government thought it a good idea to put the Office de Tourisme and the train station at exactly opposite ends of town. Fortunately, there's a city bus that runs between the two. Unfortunately, the attractions nearest the Office de Tourisme and farthest from the train station were the ones I thought best to visit last. Fortunately, Google maps showed an Office de Tourisme annexe just outside the train station. Unfortunately, it was fermé. Fortunately, there were clear signs pointing past it to Office de Tourisme, so we (and a dozen other tourists) followed those signs, hoping there was another on the near side of town. (Spoiler: there wasn't.)

The town really is wonderfully picturesque, with lots of charming half-timbered houses, and the weather was perfect. We stopped at the 12th-century church of St. Ayoul, a young monk who, on an expedition to transport some precious relics from another abbey to his own, was set upon by brigands (or monks from a rival sect? I wasn't sure of the translation), his tongue cut out, his eyes pierced, and his head cut off. He's now a patron saint of eye problems, as well as of the town of Provins. The facade of his church is decorated in the same style as Chartres, with large figures wearing bliauts backed up by a chorus of angels, some of them playing psalteries or vielles. But it's much smaller than Chartres, so these figures are only a few feet over the visitor's head, easier to see. The interior is largely 17th-18th-century, but had some interesting pictures and historical plaques.

A block away was the 14th-century (I guess) Tour de Notre Dame and its clock, forming an arch over a narrow street; the clock wasn't quite that old, but it and its street were pretty.

We continued following signs to Office de Tourisme and Cité medievale, along the main commercial street of town. We walked around the outside of another 12th/13th-century church (on the Rue des Oignons), closed for extensive repairs, then we stopped at one shop for chocolates and another for a delicious sit-down lunch. Then passed the Hôtel-Dieu founded by Count Thibaut the Great in the 11th century and headed up a steep hill towards the Lycée Saint-Thibaut, the Eglise Collegiale de Saint-Quiriace, and the remains of the castle of the Counts of Champaign.


In the 11th-14th centuries, the nearly-autonomous Counts of Champaign gave their protection to six annual merchant fairs: two in Provins, two in Troyes, one in Lagny-sur-Marne, and one in Bar-sur-Aube, spaced throughout the year and each lasting six weeks, so a majority of the year there was a fair in one town or another. These were wholesale, to-the-trade fairs, with apparently legal limits on what could be sold in smaller quantities. The fairs provided a lot of revenue and wordfame, while the Counts reciprocated with legal protection and safe passage for the merchants coming from all over Europe and beyond.

The Eglise Collegiale is a large, imposing structure near the highest point of town, started in the 12th century, but with the decline of the Fairs in the 14th century, it ran out of money, so the "nave" end (towards the right in the first three photos below) is actually shorter than the "altar" end. The fourth photo below is taken from what should have been part of the nave. We walked around inside the church for a while, then went on with the walk.
Musée de Provins et du Provinois, which allegedly has a bunch of interesting archaeological finds, was a block or two farther along the road. Unfortunately, it had no public bathroom, and indeed had a sign at the desk saying the nearest public toilettes were at the Place du Châtel, another two or three blocks down the road, so we went on, promising to come back to the museum.

The Place du Châtel appears to be Ground Zero for RenFaire-style tourism (especially restaurants), and we saw a troop of elementary-school children parading around the square in their newly-borrowed costumes. After visiting les toilettes, we saw a sign advertising a biscuiterie medieval and walked another block down the road to see what it was about. It did indeed sell a variety of cookies and cakes based on medieval recipes (including Hildegarde's "cakes of joy", presumably adapted to modern tastes by adding sweetening), as well as a hot-chocolate mix "d'une recette du XIVeme siecle" (I pointed out to shalmestere that, in fairness, it didn't say a European recipe from the 14th century, which would be startling). And indeed, the chalkboard behind the counter described it as Chocolat chaud Azteque, so shalmestere ordered a cup. It was thick, dark, dairy-free, and unsweetened (albeit served with a couple of packets of sugar); no chili peppers, as the Aztecs would have included. Not particularly flavorful, perhaps because the dark chocolate was diluted by the corn starch thickening.


Next stop: the Tithe Barn, a large 12th-century building originally used for storing either merchants' wares or merchants themselves. We still hadn't acquired a Pass Provins, so we paid for this a la carte -- 5 euros apiece. The ground and basement floors are filled with life-sized dioramas of various kinds of merchants and craftsmen, in sometimes-dubious costumes, with an audio guide in your favorite language interviewing each one in turn about his or her business. It was a little hokey, but they managed to get across a fair amount of information. The upper floor is apparently open only to group tours: we saw the troop of elementary-school children heading up there.

Turned around and headed back towards the museum and the adjacent castle keep (the "Caesar Tower"). We randomly chose to visit the keep first, for another 5 euros apiece. This was impressive, and provided panoramic views of the town and countryside from the top. Also, for the engineering geeks in my audience, pictures of the roof infrastructure and support system for bronze bells. And we got a lot of stair-climbing exercise.


The next stop was to be the museum, but it was now 5:30, the museum's closing time, which we decided was OK -- we'd gotten our money's worth from the town. In fact, the paid attractions we'd actually visited had cost less a la carte than the Pass Provins would have cost. Sat on a bench for a few minutes enjoying the breeze (and resting our legs after all the stairs in the keep), then headed down the hill,

through a tower in the city walls, towards the Office de Tourisme (which we were finally somewhat near) to catch a bus back to the train station. That went smoothly, we caught the next train back to Paris, grabbed some take-out to reheat in the room, and collapsed.

Today, mercredi: the Louvre.

Tomorrow, jeudi: we take a couple of trains to Tournai, just over the Belgian border. One night in Tournai.

Vendredi: from Tournai to Bruxelles, where we check into a hotel for a few more nights.

Samedi: day-trip to Leuven for an exhibition that includes the Leuven Chansonnier, discovered only fifteen or twenty years ago (we got an early glimpse at its contents through our Early Notation teacher, and we have a facsimile of the whole book at home).

Dimanche, lundi: day-trips to Mechelen and/or Ghent.

Mercredi: train from Brussels to the Amsterdam airport, then fly to New York. Assuming there are air traffic controllers in the US to guide our plane in. No idea what customs will be like: they've dropped the de minimis exemption, so we may be asked the value of every item we've bought, in which country, so they can calculate how much import tariff to charge on it. All of which will happen at 2 AM Paris time, so we presumably won't be at a peak of cognitive efficiency.

After day-trips by train the previous two days, we decided to stay in Paris today, doing things like the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, etc. Of course, all of those require tickets -- gratis in the case of the churches, but still advance reservations. So I looked on-line, and got tickets to the Louvre for Wednesday afternoon. For Notre Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, nothing was available before we leave Paris. Which isn't the end of the world: we got to both of them in 2002, examined the St. Louis shirt as closely as we could through the glass display case, venerated the Crown of Thorns from a few inches away....

So we're not sure what we're doing today: the weather is nice, so probably something outdoors. Or we might day-trip to Chartres, which is a good deal closer than Rouen.

UPDATE: Delayed getting to the train station, just missed our intended train (although we hadn't had time to buy tickets for it anyway, so no money down the drain), decided not to spend three hours round trip on the train for three or four hours in Chartres. Went to les Arenes de Luteces, which we remembered from 23 years ago as a grassy Roman-era amphitheatre where the locals sit and eat lunch. Since then, the center of the amphitheatre seems to have been excavated, leveled, and sand-paved into a sports-and-performance space; we sat in "the stands" snacking, surrounded by art students drawing the surrounding buildings. Got a good hearty lunch at a neighborhood brasserie, then glace Berthillon, then returned to the room to decompress and recharge. After dark, went out for dinner at a crêperie.

Got up sorta-early, had breakfast in our room, took the subway to the train station, and took the train an hour and a half (non-stop) to Rouen, in Normandy.


The closest tourist sight to the train station is the Donjon, a 13th-century round tower that is all that remains of the castle where Jean Darc was imprisoned for a while (months?). The lower 2/3 of the tower is well-preserved, and the top third has been reconstructed, including a pointed roof similar to what it probably had in the 13th-15th centuries (it was replaced in the 16th with a flat roof on which they could mount cannons).

The interior, as the guy at the desk hastened to point out, is not medieval: we don't really know what it looked like in the Middle Ages, but it was repurposed as a German garrison in WWII, and we know pretty accurately what that looked like. The current set-dressing includes occasional bits of 15th-century armor next to 1940's German military uniforms, German typewriters, and printed propaganda. It's open to the public only on weekends; during the week it's an "escape room".

The Musée des Antiquities and the Musée du Ceramique are both closed for renovations, so we skipped them. The Musée des Beaux Arts is open, but we didn't prioritize it.


Our next stop was the Place du Vieux Marché, with a tall cross on the alleged spot where Jean Darc was burned for heresy. The square is surrounded by restaurants, including one claiming to be the oldest in France (operating since 13something). Much of the square is taken up by l'Eglise Sainte Jean d'Arc, built in a swooping, modernist style in 1979 but incorporating a bunch of 16th-century stained-glass windows from a previous church destroyed in WWII. Adjacent to it are the ruins of the Eglise Sant-Sauveur. You can see the floor plan of a classic European Catholic church, with apparent remnants of buttresses, but nothing is more than about a foot above ground.


We walked onward to the Gros Horloge, a 14th-century clock embedded in a Renaissance arch over the middle of the street, and then on to the Cathedral, which is breathtaking despite the substantial weather-and-pollution damage to the stones on the facade over the centuries. Walked around the interior for a while, where we saw four funerary effigies: one for Rollo, the Viking warlord who came to Normandy, liked it, stayed, and founded the Duchy of Normandy; one for his son William the Long, called the Sword of Normandy; one for Henry the Young King, who was crowned King of England, Duke of Normandy, etc. at the age of 15 but whose father Henry II never gave him any actual power; and one for the heart of Richard Coeurdelion (whose body is buried in Anjou). There's reason to believe all those remains are actually there, although the funerary effigies are much more recent.




One of the visually striking things about Rouen is the enormous number of half-timbered buildings, many of whose first floors (second floors, in American terminology) have larger footprints than their ground floors. And since the owners of all these half-timbered buildings have proudly painted the timbers in contrasting colors (indeed, in some cases they've painted timbers in contrasting colors onto walls that were never half-timbered at all), you can see just how far out of true the walls and floors have grown over the centuries. It must be a real challenge arranging furniture in one of these buildings.

Anyway, on one of the narrow streets, lined with half-timbered buildings, behind the Cathedral is the Historial Jean d'Arc, which is less a museum than a multi-media presentation about the Maid of Orleans. They've centered the presentation around the 1456 trial that revisited her 1431 trial, overturned its conclusions, and declared her innocent post mortem. The narrator portrays the chief judge and inquisitor in the 1456 trial, interviewing a variety of witnesses to Jean's childhood, her two years of military action, and her first trial. It's a lot of material to cover, taking over an hour, so (presumably to push tourists through with greater bandwidth) they've pipelined it, with each "scene" of the rehabilitation trial taking place in a different room. In the last room or two they point out how every French political movement since the 15th century, left right or other, has claimed Jean d'Arc for itself, including both the Nazi-imposed Vichy government of WWII (which was, after all, defending France from yet another attack by the English) and its opponents (who pointed out that Vichy, like the French authorities who condemned Joan, were effectively puppets of a foreign occupation force).

She really didn't do anything particularly "saintly", as far as I can tell: she was a charismatic leader who joined the nationalistic resistance against an occupation (which technically had law on its side, since the previous King of France had agreed in writing that the Crown of France would go to the offspring of the union of Henry V and Catherine of Valois), achieved some military victories, and was captured. IIRC, she was initially captured by the Burgundians (allied with the English), sold to the English, and handed over to the local French authorities (variously civil and ecclesiastical) who were presumably under a lot of pressure from the English occupiers to make an example of her. 25 years later, with the English kicked out, the authorities were presumably under equally much pressure to rehabilitate the girl who had helped put the current King on the throne, particularly since she was conveniently dead and wouldn't cause any trouble.


Anyway, from there, we found a gelateria, had some lovely gelato, then visited the Eglise Saint-Maclou, which had closed a few minutes before but was striking from the outside. Next, the huge Abbey Church of Saint-Ouen, of which we couldn't see much of the interior because an organ concert was going on. Most of the Abbey buildings were leveled in the 17th or 18th centuries, one of them was renovated in Baroque style and became the Hôtel de Ville, and only the church building itself remains. We walked around the abbey gardens for a few minutes, then grabbed a quick Thai dinner and walked to the train station to catch our train back to Paris.

Google Fit says I (and presumably shalmestere) did about 16,500 steps today. Whew.

Following up on this entry...

We talked to several third-party ticket-sellers, one of whom said "yes, our package ticket includes entry to the Tres Riches Heures exhibition," so we bought some tickets. I was skeptical, since the Chateau had made very clear that all its tickets for the remaining three days of the exhibition were sold out, but we figured there was a chance we'd get in, and if not, we'd see a 15th/19th-century palace full of artwork, including some other books of hours.

So we took the train to Chantilly this morning, went straight to the exhibition (in a separate building a few hundred meters from the Chateau proper), and asked (a) whether our tickets included entry to the exhibition (no), and (b) whether there was a way to get on stand-by in case of cancellations (also no). So, in hope of making the day not a total waste, we went back into the Chateau and visited "Un Autre Historie des Livres des Heures," a display of other books of hours in the permanent collection that were not part of the Tres Riches Heures exhibition. Mostly 16th and 17th century, an aesthetic that doesn't really appeal to either of us, but there were a few 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th-century Heures.

The building did indeed start as a 15th-century castle. In the 16th or 17th century, some owner added an extra building as an entrance hall. Then during the French Revolution, the original building was completely destroyed, leaving only the entrance hall. In the late 19th century, the Duc d'Aumale rebuilt the original castle, to late-19th-century standards, and filled it with a collection of art said to be second within France only to the Louvre's.


Anyway, we went on to explore the rest of the late Duke's art collection. Everything was organized according to the standards of the late 19th century, and according to the Duke's will, it has to stay that way, so one would find a lot of boring 18th- and 19th-century portraiture on the same wall with
a Holbein, a Memling, and a couple of anonymous 14th- and 15th-century pieces. At one point the Duke came across a couple of cut-out leaves from another 15th-century Book of Hours (the Heures du Chevalier Etienne, IIRC), bought them, and went on a personal quest to find as many as possible of the remaining leaves, which are now all separately mounted in a small, darkened room called "le Sanctuarie", along with two Raphaels and some other things I don't remember. Of course, all of this was in a late-19th-century prince's palace, which (as shalmestere put it) "feels like being in Donald Trump's home": lots of gold, lots of fancy/tacky ornaments, really not our style. But it was sorta interesting finding the occasional piece of pre-1500 art amid the rest.

By this time we were tired and hungry. We went back to the exhibition hall and asked again whether we could get in, and were told "no, but if you come back at 4:00, we might be able to get you in." It was about 1:30, so we walked down the street towards centre-ville looking for lunch. One or two places were way more expensive than what we wanted to spend on lunch, and most others were "complete" and about to stop serving for a couple of hours between lunch and dinner. The tenth place we stopped, "The English Place", didn't look very promising, but it was open, and we were starving. And in fact it wasn't very good, but at least we had something in our stomachs before walking back to the exhibition hall to see whether the 4:00 plan would work. We asked somebody at the door, and he said "Perhaps at 4:30," and then added "But you could just buy a ticket at the shop."

"Wait, what? Vraiement? Mais n'est pas complete?"

"No, not now."

So we went to the exhibition gift shop, prepared to get yet another contradictory story, but shalmestere went to the counter and said "Deux adultes, s'il vous plais", as though it were no big deal, and they handed her two tickets to the Tres Riches Heures exhibition, valid for the rest of today, for 3 euros apiece. The day was looking up.

And five minutes later we were in the exhibition hall. Or rather, standing in line behind lots of other people trying to get into the exhibition hall, most of whom were listening to a tour-guide rather than moving. I could understand why they're so careful about not letting too many people into the hall at once. Anyway, before we'd gotten anywhere near the Books of Hours, we heard the tour-guide saying something about the "Codex Chantilly, un manuscrit de musique medieval," and our ears perked up. We're familiar with the Chantilly Codex -- we have a facsimile of it at home, and have often played music from it -- and had been idly wondering whether we'd be able to see it too along with the Books of Hours, and here it was, open to a page of Solage.

Oh, and in the next cabinet was the marriage contract of Jean and Jeanne, Duc et Duchesse de Berry, complete with wax seal on the strings threaded through the bottom margin. No, they weren't fingerloop-braided.



Also the personal seal of the Duc de Berry, with a bear and a swan. The day was decidedly looking up.




The exhibition would have been impressive enough if it had only included the 26 unbound calendar pages from Jean Duc de Berry's Tres Riches Heures, mounted in windows so people could see both sides. More impressive, they had also borrowed (or already had in the permanent collection) the Grandes Heures, the Belles Heures, the Petits Heures, the Tres Belles Heures de Notre Dame, the Psalter, and a couple of other related books, all of which Duc Jean had also commissioned and owned. As the wall caption points out, it's probably the first time all of these Heures have been in the same room since Jean died in 1416. But to fill things out, they supported this with probably fifty other illustrated books from the same era, showing the artists who had influenced the Limbourg Brothers, the artists who were influenced by the Limbourg Brothers, the artists who finished the Limbourg Brothers' unfinished work, etc. Wow.


We stopped again at the exhibition shop to get an exhibition catalogue (which alas is not available in English), then walked hurriedly to the train station to catch a train back to Paris. There was only one ticket kiosk in the station, and it wasn't working, so there was an enormous line in front of the desk of the one ticket-selling agent. The train arrived before we were anywhere near the front of the line, and the next one was two hours later, so we boarded without tickets and figured we would pay whatever extra charge there was on-board. But nobody ever came to check our tickets, so we got off in Paris without paying, took the subway to our neighborhood, got some dinner (much better and more substantial than lunch!), got some groceries, and returned to our tiny AirBnB.

Last year we spent two weeks in Spain. The Madrid hotel where I booked our first-few-nights' lodging turned out to be a hotel by the same name in a different city, and no rooms were available in the correct hotel, so we paid twice for those nights' lodging. We reserved a hotel room in Granada for two nights, and only later discovered that entry to the Alhambra, Granada's principal attraction, wasn't available those days. But it was available a few days later, so (by forfeiting a non-refundable night at another hotel and paying for another night at this one) we managed to come back to Granada, tour the Alhambra, and go on with the rest of the plan. And for our second-to-last night in Spain, we planned to see the fabric-and-textiles museum in Burgos, for which reservations were wide-open 36 hours before, and completely unavailable by the time we got to Burgos. But we still got to a lot of awesome stuff, and promised ourselves we would come back for another two weeks to see things in the other half of Spain.

That was then.

A few months ago, we read that the early-15th-century Tres Riches Heures was being unbound for maintenance and rebinding, and it would be on display (side-by-side with several other famous illustrated books by the Limbourg Brothers, which haven't all been in the same room in 500 years or so) at the Chateau de Chantilly, through October 5. We also heard that the Leuven Chansonnier (15th-century songbook, discovered only about ten years ago) would be on display in Leuven starting October 10. This sounded like a good combination, so we made plans to visit France and Belgium from October 1-14, enough time to get to both special exhibits and see a bunch of other cool stuff in between. So we're in Paris now.

Turns out the Tres Riches Heures exhibition was extremely popular, so in addition to the timed-entry tickets during the day (which were basically all sold out) they added evening hours on four days near the end of the exhibition. And they sold out too. And we are not among the people to whom they were sold. We can still go to Chantilly and see the rest of the palace, the rest of the museum, the rest of the town, everything except the main exhibition around which we scheduled the trip.

If I were a rational, intelligent person I would have reserved a visit to the Limbourg Brothers exhibition first, before even buying plane tickets (since its availability might determine when to schedule those tickets, and it would be an order of magnitude cheaper than plane tickets).

On the brighter side, the exhibition in Leuven does not have separate entry to the exhibition in question -- if you get into the museum, you get into all its exhibitions -- and we've successfully reserved a time slot on Oct. 11, so in case something goes wrong we have two more days to try to get to it.

And we will still get to a lot of other awesome stuff, I presume.


Although today doesn't bode well. We planned to visit three museums. The Hôtel de Sens, which we visited first because it opens at 8 AM according to the Web site, turns out to actually open at 11:00 (the gardens open at 8:00).

The Musée de Cluny, when we arrived, had a staff member putting a sign out front saying "We will open later than usual today because of a social protest." (And what do the French have to protest? Their President mostly obeys the law, acts like an adult most of the time, and hasn't dismantled half of the government in eight months.) She told us she didn't know exactly what time they'd be opening, but she guessed 11:00, so we walked around the neighborhood until 11:00. It wasn't open then either, so we got lunch in the neighborhood, came back around 1:00, and it still wasn't open.



So we walked across the Île de la Cité, where Notre Dame is still being repaired from the fire a few years ago.


Then went on to the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, which (remarkably) was open, although we were pretty tired and frustrated by the time we got there. Anyway, we saw the medieval rooms, got some pictures (including a bunch of molds for presumably-pewter badges)

collapsed on a bench for a while, went to get ice cream, and returned to our rented studio-apartment to crash.

A few months ago shalmestere read that several of the Limbourg Brothers books of hours would be on display together, one of them unbound for restoration and rebinding, at Chantilly (near Paris), exhibition closing 5 October. And that the recently-discovered Leuven Chansonnier would be on display in Leuven (near Brussels), exhibition opening 10 October. And we hadn't been to France or Belgium in a number of years, so we scheduled a two-week trip to France and Belgium, Oct. 1-14, which will also include a bunch of Paris stuff and day-trips to Provins, Senlis, Rouen, Tournai, and Mechelen.

Coincidentally, the US government is scheduled to largely shut down around midnight, Sept. 30. We're taking a red-eye flight, so by the witching hour we'll already be outside US airspace, somewhere over the Atlantic, on an Air France plane, so it may not affect our trip much, but getting back into the US could be trickier than usual. And who knows what customs and immigration rules will have changed by two weeks from now? Will people have to provide passwords to their social-media accounts in order to demonstrate their good moral character (e.g. having never criticized Donald Trump) and enter the country?

UPDATE: Checking in, and the list of "prohibited goods" according to AirFrance (English translation) includes "Pointed, edged or blunt tools and objects". Can you think of any object that isn't either "pointed, edged, or blunt"? The French (presumably original) is "Instruments et objets pointus, tranchants ou contondants", of which Google Translate translates "contondants" as "blunt objects".