Beasts of Paris

Beasts at Reims Cathedral

Being a moveable beast myself (wolf? cat? fox? griffon?) perhaps I am coming home to the land of beasts here in Paris. The splendid bestiary of the Musée de Cluny, a block away from our apartment, displays the apogee of the Gothic bestiary. The most native art form of France, the gothic style, featured beasts mostly imaginary. Gothic flamboyant, the lush architecture of the Cluny museum (which was formerly a pied-a-terre for the prosperous Abbé de Cluny from the provinces) is resplendent with beasts. (For maximum beastliness visit the Cathedral at Reims whose exterior features some 2,300 statues of which more than 1,000 are animals, real and imaginary. In addition, at Reims was discovered a labyrinth modeled after the lair of the Minotaur.) Inside of the Cluny Museum you have the most wonderful of beasts, woven into the Unicorn tapestries.

On a less intimate level, the Cathedral of Notre Dame not only features magnificent beasts on her portal of the Last Judgment, but keeps a full time exorcist on staff.

But let us travel back onto that Roman road that departs a few blocks from the center of France, at Notre Dame's parvis, and winds up the Montagne Ste. Genevieve, the rue Mouffetard that I have written of in previous posts. At the other end of rue Mouffetard is l'Eglise St. Médard, whose leafy spires I used to see daily through my window in my small apartment at the edge of the square. What a pretty sight. It calmed me, cornered as I was in a deux pièce with a kitchen whose walls you could touch as you stood in the middle.

St. Médard had been a chapel built in the 9th century along the Roman road that has become the rue Mouffetard. A church was erected on the site around the 14th century. During the 17th-18th centuries it was a gathering place for the Jansenists, a fierce and dissident cult that adamantly opposed the reigning Roman Catholic church, but had a membership of luminaries including the brilliant Blaise Pascal and the deacon Francois of Paris. Its fanatical members gathered around the grave of Francois and went into trances and convulsions to achieve the healing power of miracles. So the Jansenists had beasts to deal with. The king Louis XV found this sufficiently alarming to order them off the site in 1732, whereupon someone wrote on the church doorway,  
De par le Roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.  

By order of the king, it is forbidden to God to perform miracles in this place.

The beasts of heresy have always been chased, but never vanquished, in Paris.