A Little Note From Paris

On The Eve Of The Annual Pentecost Pilgrimage To Chartres

Joan of Arc statue, Paris

I promised I wouldn’t write again, but just a little postcard from Paris before bedtime. I passed that equestrian statue of Joan of Arc today, and thought how much better she looks not being molested by migrants, as she recently was by migrant types in a soccer riot:

I’m not even French, but looking at that beautiful statue of the saint who is a national icon, I burned with anger at those barbarians who defiled her.

But it was a great day, walking around Paris. Tallied up 9.27 miles, but it didn’t feel like it. Normally I walk around Paris with nothing in my ear, but it seemed like just the time to continue listening to Alistair Horne’s history Seven Ages Of Paris, as I walked through the places he talks about in the narrative. Today’s walk took me from the post-Napoleon period, through till the 1848 revolution.

Gotta tell you, those barbaric young men above have nothing on the Parisian crowds of ages past. One of the thing that keeps coming up in Horne’s book is how utterly savage the Paris mobs always were. And too, the aristocracy. People were beastly to each other as a matter of course. Just stone-cold rotten. Dirt-poor people, drunkards, shat on by the rich. And the rich — dissolute, adulterous, vicious, all the things.

And yet — and yet! — as I listened to the tales of their rottenness, I also heard, as I have been since the first pages of the book, of feats of astonishing accomplishment, on the battlefield, in art, in architecture, in city planning, in music, and all the rest.

It all happened at the same time! You can’t separate the good from the bad, and neither negates the other. The wheat and the tares grow together.

Civilization is such an incredible accomplishment. I was thinking today, walking down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, of something a Hungarian friend told me this week over wine. She used to be a foreign correspondent. She said, “I think we are all just too bored. We don’t know how good we have it here. We Hungarians complain all the time, but let me tell you, I’ve been to some horrible places as a journalist, and we live in paradise by comparison.”

I stopped by L’Optique Odéon, my source for my trademark Lesca frames, to get my battered and scratched lenses replaced. While they worked on them, I repaired to a nearby oyster bar (Régis had not yet opened for the evening) for a dozen Marennes-Olérons. This place serves them with three dense and delicious sausages:

Sat next to a young guy from Phoenix, the owner of a restaurant there, who is taking his two chefs and their wives on a tour of Europe, to eat. What a good boss he is!

I met a friend for dinner at Le Bistro du Périgord, but before then, stopped into the medieval church of St-Severin to pray. Look:

I prayed for friends there. I went to a side chapel and asked St. Therese of Lisieux to accompany someone dear to me who might be about to start on a spiritual journey. Look at the saint’s eyes; she was in her early twenties when this photo was taken, but she can see into eternity:

The meal we had was fantastic: for me, salad with warm goat cheese, magret de canard, and some kind of dessert with whipped cream, pistachio, and fresh figs. Washed down with a half-bottle of Bordeaux. I tell you what, I sure do feel like I’m as rich as a Bourbon.

To bed now. Gotta be outside Saint-Sulpice church at six a.m., for the opening mass at seven of the three-day walking pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres. I’m not walking the whole way — I’m too damn old to camp — but I’ll be interviewing the young pilgrims about why they came, and accompanying them for a couple of miles, talking to them. I can’t wait!

Sitting in the darkness of St-Severin, I thanked the good Lord for giving us France. Tomorrow, I’m going to go by the church of St Etienne du Mont and pay my respects to the shrine of St. Genèvieve of Paris, whom I consider one of my patrons. Right after I finished writing The Benedict Option, I commissioned this diptych of the abbot St. Benedict of Nursia, and his predecessor by a century, the abbess St. Genèvieve of Paris both of whom I asked for prayers during the writing of the book. The iconographer is Fabrizio Diomedi, the gifted Italian who creates iconography for the monks of Norcia:

Saints, churches, liturgies, pilgrimages, the glory of the Gothic — it’s going to be a good three days here in Paris and Chartres. Wish you were here. This country is so troubled, and always has been — but it has produced an embarrassment of riches that have blessed the whole world. France must be loved. France must be defended! She belongs to the world — but above all, she belongs to the French, who created her, suffered for her, nurtured her. All the love the rest of us have for her doesn’t matter if they don’t love her themselves — and love her enough to fight for her, especially against their own elites.

I cannot for the life of me understand why the Bishop of Chartres, who will be delivering the homily at the Latin mass at the end of the pilgrimage on Pentecost Monday, has to be so sniffy about the traditionalist pilgrims. It’s an amazing thing that, as Amy Welborn said the other day, the Latin mass movement has been almost entirely from the grassroots.

One more thing. On the walk home after dinner, I passed the building of the Institut Catholique, which is in a former Carmelite convent. Back in 2012, Amy Welborn took me there to see the spot where over 100 priests and bishops were murdered by French revolutionaries, one by one. Historian Christopher Hibbert recalls what happened:

The same afternoon another small gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard, several of them reading their office. The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed. The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. “I am the man you are looking for,” he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest. At that moment an officer of the National Guard appeared and managed to get the priests away to the nearby church where they gave each other absolution. While they were saying prayers for the dying, the armed gang broke through the door and dragged the priests out in pairs to slaughter them in the garden. After several had been killed a man with an air of authority arrived at the church calling out, “Don’t kill them so quickly. We are meant to try them.” Thereafter each priest was summoned before a makeshift tribunal before being executed. He was asked if he was now prepared to take the constitutional oath and when he said that he was not — as all of them did — he was taken away to be killed. Some bodies were removed in carts, the rest thrown down a well from which their broken skeletons were recovered seventy years later.

— Christopher Hibbert, “The French Revolution”

Back in 2012, I took the image above in the Garden of the Carmelites, behind the church in Paris. The monument to those martyrs — killed on September 2, 1792 — is the simple plaque behind the church’s back door. It reads, in Latin, “Here they fell.” As each priest was marched to the bottom of that staircase, he was executed amid shouts of, “Long live the Nation!”

That place on earth is where over 100 bishops and priests were murdered for their faith, in an orgy of bloodletting that you cannot quite imagine happening in a garden as peaceful as that one is today. But it happened. This entire gorgeous city, the most beautiful one on earth in my view, has often been a field of blood. Like all the earth with us humans in it. We can’t avoid suffering — but we can allow it to be redeemed. Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte, Therese of Lisieux, Maximilien Robespierre, Jean Vianney, Louis Quatorze, Charles de Gaulle and Marshal Pétain — all were sons and daughters of France. You can’t have one without the other.

Anyway, I hate the French Revolution, but how can anybody watch this famous scene from Casablanca without feeling just a little bit French? It begins with German officers in Rick’s singing “The Watch On The Rhine,” a German military song. The anti-Nazi patriot Victor Laszlo is not having it: