Les Flandres

Monday we left the rolling hills of Normandy and descended into the low plains of Picardy and Flanders. In Calais we were able to spy England for a short time before the fog started to settle in. Calais is just across from Dover and now largely caters to British tourists and shoppers who take the Chunnel and stock up on French goodies at the Carrefour, France's answer to Super Wal-Mart. 

The town square has a charming Hotel de Ville (city hall) and clock tower, along with a bronze sculpture called the "Burghers of Calais" by Auguste Rodin. In 1346, after their victory over the French at Crécy, the English laid siege to the town, reducing it to famine and eventually forcing its surrender. The members of the town council went out to meet the English and offered their lives in exchange for the city. Rodin created the sculpture in their honor in 1895. 

We ate our lunch in the car by the town center, since it was too cold to picnic. We then drove out to Dunkirk. It was too cold there too, but we visited the beach anyway. Dunkirk was where the British and France barely escaped annihilation after the German Blitzkrieg in 1940. The German columns moved so fast the British Expeditionary Force and much of the French army were cut off from the rest of France and had to be evacuated by sea. In the emergency the British navy were joined by fishing boats and yachts to take nearly a quarter of a million troops off the beach here, saving them to fight another day.

On Monday night, having had our first shopping experience in a French version of Wal-Mart, we ate in a French version of Golden Corral—Flunch. Tuesday morning we crossed into Belgium, which I must say is the great underrated European treasure. We spent the morning in Ghent, a delightful city with a medieval old town and lace and chocolate and the Ghent altarpiece, also known as the "Adoration of the Lamb of God."

Today was great day for it, since it was wet and drizzly, and it was probably the dampness that led Flemish painters like the Van Eyck brothers to experiment with other media besides the water- and egg-based paints of the day. But the same flax that allowed the Flemish to make fine linens furnished their artists with linseed oil which became the medium for their paints. Oil paint doesn’t run like water or tempera. It holds fast to canvas, dries slowly, and allows the artist to mix colors right on the canvas. Oil paint was what gave Flemish painters the ability to represent the extraordinary level of detail that made them famous throughout the world, and was a crucial part of the Renaissance revolution.

Here in St. Bavo's we saw the Van Eycks' altarpiece, or at least most of it. Designed and painted in the early 1400s, the altarpiece is a polyptych, a single work composed of several panels—in this case, twelve. Eight of the panels are hinged shutters, painted on both sides so that the work is dramatically different depending on whether the shutters are open or closed. The work, like much of the rest of Europe, is undergoing restoration, and the famous Adam and Eve representations, as well as the rear panels, were not on display. As with all Van Eyck's work the detail is dazzling (42 species of plants can be identified in the central panel). The church also features a replica of the work that actually opens and closes the way the original was meant to.

And this afternoon my sweet wife and my dear friend Vaughn once more indulged my taste for battlefields. This time it was Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington's name is on everything, and Napoleon's statue is only three feet high—Toto, I don't think we're in Paris anymore! It was wonderful to stand up on the Lion Mound and look out over the battlefield, to see the hotly contested Haie Sainte farmhouse, the lines where Marshall Ney charged the English Squares, and the quarter from which the Prussians arrived in the evening to turn the tide. Then it was wonderful to drive to a charming bed and breakfast in Halle, eat lentil soup and half a chicken, and go to bed. Tomorrow, Germany!