hudebnik

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.

The 2021 movie "The Last Duel" is based on a non-fiction book about a judicial duel in 1386 Paris, at a time when judicial duels had fallen out of favor but weren't completely stricken from the law-books yet, to resolve the accusation by Sir Jean de Carrouges that a squire, Jacques Le Gris, had raped Carrouges's wife, Marguerite.

They say every man is the hero of his own story. The writers of "The Last Duel" took that literally, together with the principle that every court case has people with conflicting views of the same events. The movie is divided into three chapters: "the truth according to Jean de Carrouges", "the truth according to Jacques Le Gris", and "the truth according to Lady Marguerite", each presenting many of the same scenes from a different perspective. Naturally, Carrouges comes off as bold, brave, principled, decent, and wronged in his own account, less so in the other two accounts; Le Gris comes off as fun-loving, decent, and wronged in his own account, less so in the other two accounts; and Marguerite comes off as three-dimensional, decent, and wronged in her own account, and less so in the other two accounts. All this is interestingly done, and well-acted (by Matt Damon as Carrouges, Ben Driver as Le Gris, and Jodie Comer as Marguerite, as well as Ben Affleck as Count Pierre, to whom both Carrouges and Le Gris are in fealty, and Alex Lawther as the childish, 18-year-old King Charles VI). And one is intended to come away with the sense that Marguerite's account, the least supported by surviving court documents because they were written by men, is probably the most accurate. Also that men are pigs -- some actively malevolent, some clueless and sexist but not actively malevolent, some employing their monopoly on law and science to devalue and discredit women, etc. And that, then even more than now, a woman charging rape will be treated as a criminal herself, and she might be better off keeping silent about it. There's a line "better a mother who's alive than a mother who's right," or something like that.

As a period piece, it's a mixed bag. There are nice touches, like the doctor examining Marguerite's urine in a blown glass urinal, and the kirtle Marguerite wears in the rape scene (at her own home, not expecting guests, so it's an appropriate thing for her to be wearing) is a front-laced Gothic Fitted Dress (tm) with set-in sleeves. I'm no armor expert, but the armor looks to me only a few decades off (aside from the half-visored helmets, which are presumably inspired by jousting helmets that offered more protection on the left side than the right but which just look wacky). And heraldry experts I know say the heraldry is appropriately used, and quite close to the historical arms of Carrouges and Le Gris respectively. But as usual in movies set in the Middle Ages, the extras are better dressed than the named characters, who wear a variety of clothing ranging from the 13th century to the 16th. In one scene Marguerite wears a leather vest/bodice thing-like, and in another she goes to court wearing what might be described as a "frontless surcote", recalling perhaps a burlesque dancer. Most of the headgear dates from between 1420-1470, not 1386, and there are occasional excursions into Tudor. Indeed, Marguerite's forbiddingly old-fashioned and strait-laced mother-in-law (who lectures her about how when you get raped, you should pick yourself up and go on with life rather than whining like a baby) seems to be wearing an Elizabethan neck-ruff, at least 200 years fashion-forward.

Combat is depicted as horrible, brutal, and "by any means necessary" dirty. Again, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but there is lance-play, sword-play, axe-play, dagger-play, and unarmed wrestling, all of which are documented in combat manuals of the time; I think I even saw a moment of half-sword thrusting, although much of the armed combat is wild hacking and blocking.

shalmestere and I were both reminded of the 2018 movie "Ophelia", which likewise takes a story traditionally centered on its male characters (in that case "Hamlet") and re-tells it from the perspective of one of the women. Indeed, both movies have almost exactly the same closing scene, with the female protagonist playing with her toddler in a sunny field of flowers, so I have to suspect that it was an intentional quotation.

So see the movie as a sort of feminist manifesto, not as a period piece, and you'll enjoy it -- if you can stomach the rape and violence.

Specifically "Camelot 3000", a DC comic-book series originally published 25 years ago or so. I mention it because the hardbound edition recently appeared on our dining room table, thanks to my collection-development-librarian wife.

What do you call a guy who stands and fights against vastly superior numbers and weaponry? In fiction, you call him a hero. In real life, you call him a corpse.

Anyway, this is the story of a hero. See, the world is going to hell, being invaded by murderous extraterrestrial aliens, and the human race is losing steadily, apparently because after giving up on space exploration, it lost its will to do much of anything else either. And one day a guy in funny clothes who calls himself Arthur Pendragon and whose chief qualification is his willingness to stand and fight against vastly superior numbers and weaponry (and whose notion of "strategy" is "OK, everybody, on three...") shows up out of nowhere and offers to save the world, if its current political leaders will just hand over all their power to him and declare him King of Earth. The current political leaders, of course, are transparently corrupt, so they take this as nothing but an opportunity to scheme and back-stab one another (and Arthur). Turns out those political leaders are being played by another political leader, name of Morgan le Fay, who gets played a bit herself. Naturally, this being a comic book, Morgan (1600 years old but doesn't look a day over 25) wears a metal bikini most of the time.

An early portion of the book deals with the gathering of the Knights of the Round Table: the spirits of several characters from the original Camelot have been reincarnated in the bodies of somewhat-ordinary people around the world, and they have to be awoken, reminded of their true identities, and brought together to form a fighting team. For example, Guinevere has been reincarnated in the (hot) body of a female army general, so she has a more active role this time around. More interestingly, the Sir Tristan (of "and Isolde" fame) has been reincarnated in a (hot) woman's body, and (s)he spends much of the book demanding, without much success, to be treated as a man. When Isolde is also reincarnated as a woman, things get even more uncomfortable: Tristan still loves and desires her, but he's totally not gay, much less lesbian. This was controversial stuff 25 years ago, and in some parts of the U.S. it still is.

But what makes me really uncomfortable is the "Great Man" trope. See, the problem with Great Men is that, however Great they may be, they're still Men, and therefore susceptible to such human failings as overestimating their own Greatness. Especially when they see disaster looming, and imagine themselves the only thing standing in its way: they act "by any means necessary", putting their own Great judgment above petty things like laws, Constitutions, and basic human decency. The whole reason we have democracy, laws, Constitutions, and slow-moving government bureaucracies is to protect society from the whims of self-proclaimed Great Men.