The highlights

Almost three weeks of touring around France has filled my brain and heart to capacity. Downloading it all may take a while but the most impressive sights will come first.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris –

We actually went to a Gregorian mass at Notre Dame on the Sunday morning that we were there. Needless to say… it was wow.

But on seeing it as a tourist… some background information must come first…. Ginny and I purchased the Paris Visitors Pass which let us into 70+ museums and sights without having to pay at the door and also without having to wait in line. What we found was that it also gave us a sense of impromptu touring. For example, we were in the general area of the Cluny Museum and it was open and we knew we could easily walk in, check it out, and if we found it boring, we could just leave without feeling bad about having paid the admission fee. This place was well worth every minute that we were there.

What I found most fascinating…. We walked into a room with dramatic lighting, seats (so you could sit a while) and a whole bunch of broken statues. By the way, all the museum statues in France are broken! But these statues were different – the bodies were in the front of the room and greatly reconstructed… and the heads were on pedestals on the side. Many of the heads were wearing crowns. The museum gave us a “map” so that we could match the heads with the bodies. OK….. so what was that all about?

Well… these were the original statues on the front of the Notre Dame Cathedral. They represented the kings of Israel and people from the bible. But during the French Revolution, anything “kingly” was beheaded and the French revolutionists did not know that the statues had nothing to do with the French royalty so they broke the heads off all these statues (guillotined them) and then busted them up. After the dust settled (literally), and long after the revolution, new statues were recreated and put back on the front of the cathedral.

But back then, some observer during the revolution was appalled to see it all happen and so he collected all the heads and buried them in salt and preserved them for hundreds of years. Just recently, in 1977, they were discovered in the basement of a Parisian bank. And now they sit in this museum.