Day 39: Saint-Maurice To Martigny

The Chapelle de Notre-Dame de Scex, built into the rock face above Saint-Maurice. I climbed 500 steps to reach it — you can see my backpack in the left-hand corner of the photo.

Station of the Cross on the steep path to the chapel.

Stained glass in the chapel porch.

Early morning view over Saint-Maurice and the Rhône valley.

Entrance to the Grotte des Fées — the Fairy Grotto — above Saint-Maurice. I arrived as soon as it opened and was the only visitor. You walk through a damp and dripping passageway to an underground waterfall and lake. I was not ecstatic about the experience, felt slightly claustrophobic, and did not see any fairies!

On leaving Saint-Maurice . . .

. . . I passed one of the new pillars commemorating the 1500th anniversary of the abbey's foundation — which I wrote about here.

The church at Evionnaz.

This window drew my attention . . .

. . . as did this house, with its colourful flower troughs and neatly-stacked logs of wood.

Purple shutters and limestone cliffs. Just after this village — and I'm not sure which village it was — I came across a waterfall called the Cascade de Pissevache which, if I'm not mistaken, means the Pissing Cow. The Swiss (and most other Europeans for that matter) are refreshingly direct and descriptively honest — unlike certain middle-class English folk, who have a penchant for circumlocution and do not call a spade a spade. (Naturally, I exclude myself from such namby-pambyism, since I share the no-nonsense, clear-minded Orwellian preference for unpretentious speech and saying what you mean in as few words as possible!)  

In Martigny I asked about pilgrim accommodation in the Paroisse Catholique, and was asked to come back at 6 pm — at which time a Christian couple took me in their car to a gîte adjoining a church in Martigny Bourg. The photo shows the lodging, which was free (though I left a small donation). Not bad, is it? I was the only pilgrim staying there that night. I relaxed, had a shower, wrote up my journal, and was more than content.

I also made a meal from ingredients I found in the kitchen store cupboards: tinned tomatoes, tinned tuna, tinned pork and dried pasta.  

My bed in the gîte. I fell asleep in a state of excitement at the prospect of the impending climb up to the Great Saint Bernard Pass.

I had three hours to spare in the afternoon while waiting for my hosts, so I went to the tourist office, sought out some of Martigny's Roman remains, then decided to visit an exhibition of Renoir's paintings being held at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda. (This is a superb museum, with a sculpture park in the grounds where you can find work by Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi and Eduardo Chillida among others, and a courtyard of mosaics by Marc Chagall.)

To find so many paintings by Renoir in one place, and to have time to look at them properly, completely bowled me over. I realised, not for the first time, how important it was to see that painting, or to hear that piece of music, in reality, in the flesh — an altogether different, and more precious and profound experience than flicking through reproductions in a book, buying a postcard or poster, or listening to a recording of some sonata or symphony. There is quite simply nothing to beat the visceral, emotional and spiritual impact of the original artefact or live performance, whether it be a painting, a sculpture, a musical work or any other artwork. I was overwhelmed by the exhibition, particularly by Renoir's landscapes. To spend time with these was a rare experience, and I relished it. The colours and textures of these amazing works were nothing like the pale imitations reproduced in thousands of books, postcards and computer images. (I've written before about this kind of aesthetic experience here, in relation to a Chagall exhibition at the Liverpool Tate.)

From top to bottom: L'Abreuvoir, Femme à l'Ombrelle dans un Jardin, Les Moissonneurs and Femme s'Essuyant la Jambe Droite. All these paintings were in the Renoir exhibition at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny.

Day 13: Saint-Thierry To Reims

Notre-Dame de Reims, the splendid Gothic cathedral of Reims, where the kings of France were crowned. It was badly damaged during World War One by German shelling, but restored and fully reopened in 1938. Since then there has been a constant programme of cleaning and restoration.

The south portal of the west front. No other European cathedral, apart from Chartres, has more carved figures. 

Detail from the south portal.

Detail from the north portal of the west front. The figure on the right is the famous 'Smile of Reims', restored after war damage.

This serenely smiling angel has become a potent symbol for the French, representing the triumph of hope over despair, of reconciliation over conflict, of peace over war.  

Inside the main west door are more carved figures enclosing a rose window of stained glass.

This portrait of Joan of Arc in stained glass is by the English artist Greg Tricker.

For me, the crowning glory of the cathedral's interior is Marc Chagall's triptych of stained glass windows created for the eastern apse. They are just so full of colour, swirling energy and life.

Chagall's central window.

Chagall At The Liverpool Tate

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love. MARC CHAGALL

Last September we went to the UK's first major Chagall exhibition in fifteen years at the Liverpool Tate. We were overwhelmed by the colour and vibrancy of the paintings, and their visceral and emotional immediacy, and how they exceeded one hundredfold the reproductions we'd been admiring in books and on postcards and via computer images for so long. There's simply no substitute for the real-life exhibit or performance, whether it be a painting, sculptural work or piece of music. We stood before The Poet Reclining . . .

. . .  and The Promenade . . .

. . . and wondered, and were amazed, and felt extremely happy.

I've been reading Chagall's poetic, impressionistic, concisely-written 1922 memoir, My Life. It's wonderful. This, from the early pages, about his childhood town (his shtetl, he was a Russian Jew) of Vitebsk (now in Belarus):

In those days there was still no cinema. People went home or to the shop. That's what I remember . . . I say nothing of the sky and stars of my childhood. They are my stars, my sweet stars; they accompany me to school and wait for me in the street till I return. Poor things, forgive me. I have left you alone up there at such a dizzy height! My sad, my joyful town! As a boy, I would watch you from our doorstep, childlike. To a child's eyes you were so dear. When the fence blocked my view, I would climb on to a little wooden post. If I still could not see you, I would climb up on to the roof. Why not? Grandfather used to climb there too. And I would gaze at you as long as I liked.

In Paris, between 1911 and 1914, Chagall discovered a lumière-liberté: light, colour, freedom, the sun, the joy of living! But he would always remain true to his Russian-Jewish homeland. He learnt from Fauvism and Cubism, but did not follow them. He has been called the father of Expressionism; he anticipated Surrealism. His varied pictures show aspects of all these movements, but Chagall never identified with any one school or style. His paintings are unique. They are naïve, narrational, mystical, lyrical, colourful, inward, visionary, subjective, anti-naturalist, anti-formalist, anti-intellectual, poetic, primitive, nostalgic, ambiguous, dreamlike, transcendent.     

Picasso painted with his belly and me, I paint with my heart. MARC CHAGALL

Day Tripper

To Liverpool to see the Chagall exhibition at the Tate. But first we just had to visit the most famous club in the world, the Cavern Club in Mathew Street. The Beatles played here nearly 300 times. It was dark, and rather forlorn, and the ghosts of the Fab Four and all those other great Liverpudlian groups from the 1960s were long gone. A lone singer sang and strummed guitar very loudly from a tiny stage under the rebuilt brick arches. A scattering of camera-wielding German and Japanese tourists sang along. 'I wanna hold your ha-aa-aaaand...'  

In the north-west corner of Albert Dock, not far from the  Merseyside Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum...

... lies the Liverpool Tate.

View of  Liverpool —  one of England's most architecturally vibrant cities — from a top-floor window in the Tate. The classically-inspired buildings at Pier Head, which you can see in the centre of the photo, are the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building: now known as 'The Three Graces'. The modern structure on the left is the Museum of Liverpool, opened in 2011. The black, wedge-shaped building on the right, made of granite and reflective glass, is part of the brand-new and highly controversial Mann Island development. These modernist blocks will house shops, offices, apartments and leisure outlets. The Latitude Building's resemblance to a coffin has been noted by many...

... though we thought that the Longitude Building, from this angle, looked like the prow of a large ship...