Zumstegs on the Go

Easy day today, so I’ll just make a few comments and post some pictures.

First accomplishment was to find a bricolage (hardware store) and buy a toilet seat, as the one in the main bathroom had broken. Found the store not too far away, found the plumbing section, found the toilet seats, found…Gasp! $55 for the cheapest decent one. Mary had warned us, but that still surprised us!

Then we walked in Saint-Mammès (pronounced “San mammae”, accent on the last syllable). Laurie and I have always really liked the paintings of the Impressionist Alfred Sisley, so we were pleased to learn (at the houseboat recital) that Sisley had lived and painted here. We knew he lived for some years in the neighboring town of Moret-sur-Loing and planned to spend some time there, but today we came back to Saint-Mammès because the town has a Sisley walk, showing the locations of some of his paintings. Here’s an example:

A poor picture of a Sisley painting.

Walk into the courtyard of a building on the main street of Saint-Mammès, turn around, and here’s what you see.

Saint-Mammès is a beautiful village, where the Loing River and Canal du Loing enter the Seine. As a result, it has for many years been a gathering place for the working boats on the Seine. 

Boats on the Seine.

Rue du Seine in Saint-Mammès, which looks out on the Seine River.

Later we walked along another section of Canal du Loing, as it enters Saint-Mammès. We watched a boat lock through, and found a plaque pointing out that Sisley had painted this very lock.

Later we walked along a part of the Canal du Loing and came to this lock. With views like this, any questions as to why we enjoy walking on the canal? 

Weather has turned great – sunny and comfortably warm. We’re planning a trip to Paris later this week. Can’t wait!

Really. Sunday, we were invited to a piano and voice recital on a houseboat in the beautiful small town of Saint-Mammès. Here’s a picture of the boat, from across the river:

The recital was piano and songs from the Belle Epoque (Beautiful Age), which is generally considered to be from around 1870 to the start of World War 1. The music was excellent and the setting unique. Only problem was that when we felt moved, we weren’t sure whether is was by the music or the wake of a passing boat.

We didn’t do anything special today; just took a drive in the country. Here are some pictures from our drive.

This is the Canal du Loing, near us. Any questions about why we like to walk along the canals?

We came across this Renaissance chateau out in the middle of nowhere.

Beautiful, eh? The bright yellow field is rape-seed, grown widely in France for its oil. The countryside around us looks like this for miles and miles. We can get in the car and just drive and drive on the narrowest roads we can find, and enjoy it thoroughly.

Most towns have their own, very old, Church. This is in Nonville (note: that translates as “No town.” Why would anyone name a town “No Town?”). The plaque over the door has the name of the Church and the year of its first construction: 1623.

The Church in Treuzy. No date on this Church, but some definite Romanesque features, which puts it in the 11th or 12th centuries. It’s probably been rebuilt several times since then, but to the original design, so the Romanesque remains.

The weather has been, simply said, awful. Europe is suffering through the coolest and wettest Spring in the last 25 years. Last Friday was the coldest May 24th ever recorded in Paris, and they started recording temperatures in the mid-1800s. In the two weeks we’ve been here, we have had one beautifully sunny (if cool: about 62 degrees F), two sunny mornings, and the rest rain.

This is an advantage of an extended stay. Yeah the weather’s lousy, but we can shrug and say that it will, sooner or later, improve. If I had planned and paid for a two-week stay in France in May, I would have been an unhappy camper. Any two week vacation in Paris in May this year would have netted you two or three days of non-rainy weather. 

Even in the bad weather, we’ve been out every day, driving around the beautiful countryside, seeing small villages, walking when we can. We figure that, no matter how much we worry about the weather, our worrying and fretting and complaining doesn’t change the flight of one single drop of rain, so why do it? We say, “Well, it’s lousy weather, but if we have to be in lousy weather, it’s nice to be in lousy weather in France.”

Next week the forecast calls for improvement: partly cloudy, no rain, temps into the high-60s and low-70s, starting Saturday. We’re planning our first foray into Paris Saturday; we have just not wanted to do that until we had some assurance that we wouldn’t be slogging around in a downpour.

Note: this was Saturday, May 19 – little late posting this because of the delay in getting connected.

We tried to walk around today, really we did. But though the temperature wasn’t too bad – somewhere around 55 – the 30 mph wind and rain did us in. So we just took a drive through the country-side and visited a couple small towns. We ended in the town of Larchant, which rewarded us with a most unusual church to visit.

I think most Americans, when they think about France, think,”Paris, big city.” Paris is, indeed, a big city and there are other big cities in France, but much of France is beautifully rural. Our drive today took us through miles and miles of farmlands, and a number of villages. The views were just beautiful: many fields are planted in rape-seed – grown for its oil – which are now in bloom. These fields are a brilliant yellow. Many fields are a deep green (don’t know what’s planted there), and others are fallow: plowed but not planted. So the vistas are miles and miles of bright yellow, deep green and dark brown fields, interspersed with small copses of trees.

France is a country of villages. I’d guess that if I drew a circle on the map 15 miles across and centered on Montigny, that circle would capture more than 150 villages with less than 1,500 people in each. These villages have existed forever and, if they now have traffic signs and cars, mostly they look as they have for hundreds of years.

In our drive, I saw a sign pointing to Larchant. We have an excellent book on France titled the “France – A Phaidon Cultural Guide” which details every small cultural detail of the slightest interest throughout France. I had read the entry for Larchant, as it is not too far from us, and remembered that it’s thought that a Saint Mathurin was born there in the third century. Whether he was born there or not, in the Middle Ages a church was built on top of his funerary chapel and became a pilgrimage destination. As Laurie and I are fascinated with pilgrimages (not that we’ve ever been on one), I pointed the car toward Larchant.

The Phaidon guide said about the church in Larchant that the tower had fallen down in the 17th century (right – more or less four hundred years ago). It didn’t mention that the entire church had pretty much fallen into ruins and that, in 1983, a twenty-year effort to restore it began. (Phaidon was published in 1975, before the restoration started.) Much of the church, including the tower, was too far gone to restore, but about a third of the nave, the transept and the choir have all been restored (less part of the roof, which has a wood ceiling now where once it was stone). This church was really big for such a small town (the power of a pilgrimage), and the restored part is, simply stated, beautiful. As much as possible, original materials were recovered from the rubble of the ruins and used, and where that was not possible, stone matching the original stone was quarried and worked as a thousand years ago. Stained glass windows, long gone, were restored with modern stained glass, in modern patterns.

I have no idea how much it cost to restore the Iglise Saint-Mathurin, but I am glad it was done. The church is light and beautiful and gives a sense of how it must have been when a pilgrim arrived after walking hundreds of miles.

By the way, Saint Mathurin is said to have been a healer of madness. We offered up a few prayers for folks we know dealing with that dark problem. Who knows? Maybe Saint Mathurin still has a bit of power to help. And given the rain here, we may need some of that help ourselves soon.

I’ll tell you a bit about our “home” in France, Montigny sur Loing. We’re about an hour south of Paris, by train or car (but who in their right mind would drive in Paris?). The town is about 2,800 people, though the daily population is some less than that, as many houses seem to be weekend homes and are closed up during the week.

Montigny has two restaurants, open only for lunch, two small general stores, and a boulangerie that our French friends pronounce to be far above average. My French has progressed to having an excellent grasp of all I need in the boulangerie, so my daily morning task is to walk down the street to the boulangerie and order a couple baguettes and a loaf of bread each morning.

The houses in Montigny range from “old French” to new and quite modern to very nice. Here are some pictures of houses in the town; see if you can guess which is chez Zumsteg:

This place is unbelievably quiet! At night there is simply no noise! (For the audiophiles among readers, our bedroom is 35db at night, with the window open.)

We’ve walked all over Montigny. It’s just what we wanted: a small, old, quite pretty French village. Wouldn’t mind a restaurant, though…