Sunday in the shadow of Jeanne d'Arc

When I need to get out of town for the day, sometimes I just log on to the SNCF (train system) website and see what runs me under 25 euros round trip. There's plenty to see in France within two hours of Paris, especially with the TGV. With cut-rate "Prem's" tickets and my Carte 12-25 youth discount, it's pretty easy to hop on almost anywhere, sometimes even at the last minute.

I wasn't looking for Rouen. Rouen found me.

Assemblage

When I was a professor, I told students who were falling behind that their first priority was to keep up with the current reading and assignments; they could fill in the rest as they got time. Today, as I'm a student again, I think it's time I took my own advice. So instead of beginning in December, I'll begin with this Sunday, when Amy and I nipped out of Paris for a day trip in scenic Reims, Champagne.

Yes, that Champagne.

Reims, perhaps the most famous city in the Champagne region, has two main claims to fame: the proprietary beverage which, like Bordeaux or Côtes du Rhône, according to strict regulation, can only be called champagne if produced in that region; and the cathedral, where many French kings have been crowned. The TGV books it from Gare de l'Est to downtown Reims in a scant 45 minutes for 20-30 euros round trip at the student rate, depending on how far ahead one buys the tickets. Amy and I booked less than 48 hours in advance, more or less on a whim.

Millenia of history, minutes on the TGV. Welcome to modern Europe.

Or, myrrh et encens

Mes nounours, we are approaching Christmas. C’est-à-dire: the gold standard of kitsch, against which lesser kitschy holidays (and let’s face it, they’re all kitschy) must be unfavorably measured.

I love it. 

Before and after the mercifully brief spell of Catholic fervor that invaded me in my teens, Christmas had, and has, no taint of spiritual significance. This is a time to disregard good taste and return to the blithe freedom from self-restraint we had at five, when we insisted on wearing Superman capes and tiaras and sparkly shoes to the grocery store. One need deny oneself nothing, from the mawkish to the outlandish to the cloying.

Accordingly, my childhood love for Christmas was founded on my inexhaustible capacity for the saccharine. 

I mean that literally as well as figuratively. Even among Americans, who crave sweeter sweets and more of them than most of the world’s population, my current capacity for all things sucré rivals the average twelve-year-old’s—as those of you who have seen me eat an ice cream sundae can attest. Imagine, then, dear readers, how hungrily I ate up as a child every syrupy morsel of the American Holiday Season™: those silly polar bear ads, the stop-motion animation atrocities and the holiday music on 99.9 FM that started just after Thanksgiving. And—of course!—the sweets, especially the endless cookies and fudge and hot chocolate we made at home. I was mad, mad for it all.

Of course, even my starry eyes eventually opened, and even the girl who once sucked happily on sugar cubes must someday close the lid of that C&H box. 

But when Amy suggested we go to a Christmas market, that little Princess Superman within me awoke with a cry of joy. A Christmas market! I imagined it as the Platonic ideal of Christmas: quaint kitsch, carols, traditional food and hot drinks, delicate lights and ornaments, pines and pitched rooftops frosted with snow like unblemished, delicate cakes. In short, the stuff of European Christmases promised to me by endless carols and storybooks. 

Thus, on Saturday, we found ourselves shuttling along on a TGV toward Strasbourg, chattering in broken, enthusiastic French, in hopes of discovering our fairytale Christmas.

Fair warning: this is a long post. Cuddle up with a cup of something warm and stay a while.

À la recherche de Marcel Proust

Yes, petits, I have done it. That most misguided form of literary worship, the pilgrimage. 

We forget sometimes that writers' experiences are not in themselves unusual; it's the prowess, the vitality with which they describe the ordinary that consecrates their particular experience as notable. The reality will undoubtedly be a letdown: a narrowing to concrete form what was before a beautiful amorphous visualization, imbued with our experiences, and thus the emotions and associations by which we connected to that author in the first place. For me, volumes II-IV of Proust will always be interwoven with where and when I read them for the first time: in Victoria and Vancouver, Canada, at age seventeen, to the soundtrack of an Elly Ameling album of Schubert lieder I had uploaded from a CD I borrowed from the library. Like Proust's narrator, who falls in love with Gilberte the moment he sees her among the blooming hawthorns in the garden at her family's estate, I fell in love with not only Proust's work but the milieu in which I encountered it.

But how could I be within an hour and a half of Combray and not see it?

So I  bought my ticket at the SNCF boutique and set off Saturday for my pilgrimage. I present the results, narrated with pictorial assistance.