It’s 10:00pm on a Monday evening in Paris and I’m finishing the remains of a bottle of serviceable Cote du Rhone that set me back 13 euros, and would have set me back probably cost 60 bucks in the States. I suspect the French would consider it plonk, but it’s good enough for drinking on a Monday night.
Flying east of Paris on the TGV at a speed faster than a jetliner at take-off, one can imagine one’s self in the foothills of Sacramento. Fields of mustard, geometric and sun-shine yellow, break up the soft green fuzz of spring grass. What history have those fields seen? Did Clovis once look out on them from horseback; did the Romans pause for a moment here, convinced of their place in the infinite, then move on? Did the blue-cloaked soldiers who went to fight the First World War look out from their train windows and wonder if they would ever see these fields again? Such are the thoughts that occupy the mind on a train doing 150 miles per hour, heading east to Reims.
Reims, now having seen it, needs not be seen again. It’s a nice enough locale, steeped in history recent and ancient. Our first stop was the Museum of the Surrender. The room where the Armistice was signed is kept as it was in 1945. The chairs occupied by victor and defeated are still in their place. The chair where Jodl -- who would die kicking after Nuremberg -- sat his fat Nazi ass and brought to a close the apoplectic seizure that defined the first half of the 20th Century has its back to the window and is closest to the viewer. No one was at the museum when we visited. It was just us and the ghosts of the past. Perhaps as penance, Jodl still sits in that chair, pen in hand, and signs the same Armistice each night. I like to think that the man who brought so much misery to France now is condemned to spend eternity there.
What ghosts walk the corridors of Notre Dame of Reims are known but to God. This is another spot visited by history ancient and recent. The destruction of the cathedral in World War I was just a heartbeat in the history of the holy edifice. Here the Kings of France, certain of their place in the infinite, were crowned. Here they took their place in the march of France’s history -- lived and died -- and became notes in a book and names on a wall. Then the Germans, rudely, levelled the place. I’m sure they had their reasons at the time, but it seems unseemly to shell a cathedral that’s been functioning as a house of worship since only four centuries after Christ. Pockmarks left by the shell fragments are still visible on the older columns. They should be left there as a remind that once rational men went insane and that history endlessly repeats itself for those who don’t learn from it.
The rest of Riems, sadly, is without note unless one is a fan of mass-produced bubbly. If Napa has become the Disneyland of Wine, then Riems is the EuroDisney of Champaign. So be it: the little city has paid a high enough price for whatever claim to fame it wants.
It’s good to drink red wine at 11:00pm on a Monday night in Paris. It’s good to sit at a cafe and eat gristly steak and sip coffee when most good people in Seattle are considering bed. The French are tragically beautiful and rapidly becoming sui generis in an increasingly homogenized world. I hope these people, certain of their place in the infinite, continue to be as they are. I’d like to think that when Notre Dame is 2,000 years old that cafes will line narrow streets and Frenchmen and Frenchwomen will still sit at them, cigarettes smoldering, and watch their beautiful counterparts parade by in the latest fashions (worn oh-so-casually, of course).
France does not need the world, but the world does need France.
(nb: a few more reports are forthcoming, including Lyon!)
-- Mike Beebe