Chagall, champagne and cloisters

Each morning we follow our noses and hunt down the best, the purest, the richest espresso in town, to kick-start our day. Today, this trek lands us in a busy little boulevard café in the very heart of the town of Reims (pronounced, would you believe: Rrrrahnce). Slap bang in front of us is a magnificent Gothic cathedral, draped in stone gargoyles, statues of ermine-robed kings and winged angels flying atop. 

The Reims cathedral, we discover, is where the kings of France, traditionally, were crowned. Almost all of them. And here, thanks to her successful sacking of Orleans, Joan of Arc was able to occupy pride of place while watching her mentor, Charles V11, accept his crown. A statue of a very tiny fleur-de-lis bedecked Jeanne d’Arc (Bec thinks she looks like a little man) stands in pride of place in an alcove lit on one side by a triptich of stunning stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall. 

Chagall, born a Russian Jew, was so immersed in bible rhetoric as a child that, as an adult, he could easily conjure up esoteric religious abstraction and colour brittle shards of that passive medium, glass, into something fluid, floating, moving with the sun. His windows are blue Van Gogh swirls in glass. Amazing. I blink back tears at the beauty of it. 

We spend most of today in Champagne territory. We see individual champagne bottles priced at 2,500€, grand vineyard mansions along the expensive Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, including Moet et Chandon and we visit the Mercier champagne vineyards. These champagne grapes are tiny, not fat and round, in tight clusters, and when he first brewed up this concoction--by accident, as is the way with most brilliant discoveries---Dom Perignon exclaimed to his brothers: “Oh, do come and see the stars!” 

These medieval monks had a wonderful life, supping and sipping this delicious harvest from their vineyards. Yet, they are not infallible. In Chalon-sur-Champagne, in the little courtyard behind the Notre Dame en Vaux Eglise, a group of monks from the middle ages smashed a set of the most exquisite cloisters ever built in France. Clearly their classical elegance was not to their taste. They chopped up the cloister statuary and buried it as foundation rubble for new mansions they were building atop. 

Gorgeous little statuettes and elegant colonnades were lost forever, forgotten forever, until, in the late 1960s, builders, involved in reconstruction in this back street, happened upon the debris of some unexplained, yet clearly significant objects. They went seeking an explanation. 

And thank god for archives and archivists. No one alive could offer any clarification for the existence of these objects d’art, so specialist historians were called in. They rooted deep in the dusty library archives and found ancient maps and drawings of what now are recognised as an extraordinarily beautiful set of medieval cloisters. With painstaking determination, archaeologists, historians and skilled craftsmen helped to reconstruct this unique collection of colonnades from chunks of rubble the size of dry stone rocks. Two delightful priests guard the collection, lovingly. “Unique”, they whisper to us in the hope that we understand. We do, and we can only agree. 

Tonight we sleep in another farm complex, setting out our dining table and chairs under heavily laden ripe damsons and apricot trees. These must be fruiting everywhere, as we ate these at lunch time, too, served atop sweet rich pastry from a wonderful Epernay patisserie. Tonight we eat them fresh with cheese: our dessert. We seem to be eating very close to the earth in Europe. So far our larder includes fresh tart apples that we’ve twisted from a Shropshire tree, day-old eggs fresh from home-grown chickens, along with the local honey, mead beer, and fruit of the fields in Pays de Champagne. 

Reims Cathedral

Joan of Arc in Reims

Swirls of blue in glass

Medieval cloisters rebuilt from rubble 

Under the damson trees