The Corot Quest

We go back in time now to somewhere around 1912. An Englishwoman  in Paris has a crush on a pastoral landscape by the early impressionist superstar Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (Kor-OH). It is titled L'Etang, the pond, with woods, water, cows, a guy fishing on the bank. She is Evelyn, she's of an age to have been at the Sorbonne, and, per family legend, a habitue of the art scene. Someone, we don't know who, did her in an exquisite little sketch. She is, however, about to marry.

Her mom, Julia, as a wedding gift for her girl and new husband, is copying the painting onto a bedboard.

Now, in these times there are no color photos, no faxes, no pictures in magazines - to reproduce this painting she had to go where it was and sit in front of it with her brushes, oils, and that piece of plank. 

She might sketch it and make notes as to the color scheme. She was of a family educated and of an artistic bent likely to frequent Paris, and to to know the piece. London and Paris were, even then, as close as San Francisco and L.A. and people in her class got around. There were renowned actors in the family, and Julia did a pretty accomplished copy of that landscape.

The young couple slept in that bed, lived and died. The bedboard passed down and down again, to an English-born engineer in Canada, thence to his daughter, who befriended me, and one day wondered where the original of that bedboard copy had come to. 

I undertook the mission. She sent me photos of the bedboard, I ID'd the painting online, and, tentatively, traced it to a place in the Département de Basse Normandie in France; Le Musée des Beaux-Artes et d'Histoire. 

So I went there. Knocked back some Calvados and had a crepe. The museum didn't open until Wednesday afternoon so I spent a day kicking around Saint Lô breathing the northern air.

The docents recognized me from my recon mission the day before and wouldn't let me pay the entrance fee, walked me to the right room. Sure enough, there it was, blam. The real thing. A big feeling. I took some cell phone snaps and caught the train out.

Didn't have to abseil through the skylight into a multibillionaire's mountain fortress, disable the laser-web security system, roll the painting into a tube, evade the vicious dogs and rabid security staff, and rappel down the mountain with a shattered femur and severe frostbite. 

What I did do was track the original of a painting through four generations and three countries to bring them together. Or, in a less grandiose mode, download some pics from the web, burn some vacation time on France, email some cell-phone snaps back to Vancouver. Took a ride on a choo-choo train. 

Detail, original:

Detail, bedboard:

The Capital of Ruins

Saint Lô, Normandy. Samuel Becket called the place "The Capital of Ruins."

There are monuments all over town - a leaping Poilu caught in the peculiar expression of the Gloire de La France and the realization that he's just been shot; a memorial to Foreign Legion, another to those who died for France in Indochina and Korea - there's the gate to the old military prison dedicated to the victims of Nazi Oppression. Two French flags there, and two US. No British or Canadian. I wonder what that's about? One to those who fell in the Résistance.

But the one carved into the cliff face overlooking the main intersection, that one goes out to the victims of the bombardment that destroyed St. Lô on June 6, 1944.

That was us. We did that. US General Omar Bradley decided to eradicate the town to deny its use to the Germans, and not to warn the civilians in order to maintain surprise. Destruction is generally given at 95%. An "unknown number" of locals were killed. That technique is described as "carpet" bombing, or, in the larger view, "strategic."

There's this contrast. The city center is built on high ground buttressed by medieval stone retaining walls and towers, but the town itself is all new construction - some of it looks like a mall in Marin - in traditional Norman architectural style but nothing older than 1944. 

So, to look at it, it seems that the commune of Saint Lô, Département de Normandie, memorialized the perfidy of the Nazi regime and the brutality of ours in about equal part. They don't seem to hold it against me personally.

If you've walked in a New England town in early fall, you'd pick up some of that feel in the air and the ground and the people. Built on hills, maples and evergreens, fieldstone walls. These walls go back to the twelve hundreds though, and were defensive ramparts against marauders. They didn't work too well against 8-inch naval guns and B17's.

I'm enjoying the town. It is interesting and pleasant. The people of Normandy have a reputation of being rather like down-easterners; taciturn and slow to warm, but good friends when they do. I find them more volatile. If I approach them with my usual laconic anti-socialism (if I want to buy something I just point at it), they are closed and may show resentment; but as soon as I meet their eye and speak to them in my wretched French, even just to say "merci," they light right up, very warm smiles. More so than Parisiens. It's as if they expect you to snub them and love you if you don't. It's not that they come on simple or pathetic, they don't. They just respond quickly to certain stimuli. 

There's a museum I'm here to see, then I've got to catch the train. I changed departure times twice to meet the hours of that museum - the skinny young guy in the guichet ("ticket window type thingie place deal") ratted me out to the girl who did the final change, in French, telling her that I "had already changed my ticket twice." He thought I was too rudimentary to catch his drift, but I picked up on "deja," changé," "billet, and "fois." Smart-ass little punk.

The country between Paris and Saint Lô is something like the American mid-west, flat, deciduous woods, fields; but the architecture is more like California, pale yellow stucco. They keep a tight rein on their their look, everything's built to the old style - but where the pre-war buildings were plaster over field stone, now it's over cinder-block. You get some American mall design on downtown commercial street fronts, but where you live, residential building, you don't play around with Norman tradition. Rich or poor, your house remembers when you sailed down from the fiords and found this better land to raise your brood and keep your kine. Every soft green field rolling by your train window has been cultivated since before Caesar divided Gaul. Peasants learned to shrug off the contempt of their masters here, until the aristocracy learned to shrug off their heads. These are a free people. As far as any governed people go.