Futility of warfare
- rnv178
- Jun 2, 2022
- 4 min read
We have now discovered the meaning of an Italian shower. Sounds grand? We thought so, as the shower was a major selling point for our hotel’s room. The reality is that the shower’s water had nowhere to go, save to soak and turn the bathroom floor into a swimming pool. Without the speedy use of towels to form an improvised barrier, the Italian shower would have flowed into the bedroom. Come to think of it, there was a faint background whiff of damp when we first entered.
I had been kept awake for much of the night by a mosquito. The annoying buzz you can clearly hear but when you never see the bug. For a moment I thought to take it like a man and allow the beastie to patrol up and down my exposed right arm, munching and slobbering as it went. After all, if multitudinous news bulletins were to be believed, insects were having a hard time and would be extinct within a human generation. Why not let the mozzie have a go?
My self-control did not last long, so within minutes I was thrashing this way and that, trying to squash an insect I could not see in the darkness. I smacked, it dodged, survived, and carried on buzzing. The result was me covered from head to toe by my sheet for the rest of the night and looking to be a ghoulish cadaver.
The beginning of a long journey is invariably difficult, as your system needs to acclimatise. Add two years of pandemic, with travel being a concept not a reality, and there was plenty of adjustment ahead. It was probably why I made such a performance of breakfast, however scenic the occasion. The hotel has a dining room to die for, wood panelled, quiet, apart from three British businessmen talking in loud voices about their difficulties in making it across the Channel. I stopped their chit-chat easily, by cursing loudly when I burned my fingers on the metal spoon left in the self-service tureen of scrambled egg. I next dropped two forks onto the carpeted floor while trying to help myself to ham and cheese and then crowned everything by tripping over, and disconnecting, the electric flex that powered the buffet. These disasters happened within two minutes of each other and heralded a difficult day ahead.
Today’s journey was to the city of Troyes, once known as Augustobona Tricassium by the Romans. It is in the Champagne region of France and is clearly a tourist-trap thanks to its cobbled streets and half-timbered houses. It has a most impressive cathedral, the Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, in which we could find not a single speck of dust. It was clean and polished beyond belief. Its bells played the opening bar of Three Blind Mice hourly, which doubtless had a religious meaning that escaped us, but even an atheist could not fail to be impressed by Troyes cathedral. The city is also the origin of the troy ounce, used for the weighing of precious metals such as gold, platinum, silver, and palladium. A troy ounce is not the same as an imperial ounce and is slightly heavier, by roughly 10%. It is widely used to this day and was the basis for the mediaeval system of coinage used by King Henry II of England in the 12th Century.
High on our list of sights to see in Troyes was the Apothecaries’ Garden in the city’s Hotel Dieu. Its full name is the Hôtel-Dieu-le-Comte de Troyes.
The building is huge, an architectural treasure, and forms a large letter “U” around a garden filled with medical plants. I now know that something called Tanacetum vulgare is just the job if I have flatulence and that six gingko trees presented to the Japanese town of Hiroshima were the only survivors of the atom bomb that was dropped there on 6 August 1945. The Apothecaries’ Garden is divided into various sections – digestion, circulation and respiration, perception, and what they call “functions of the organism”. This latter section is where you go should you need something herbal to help you pee, move, or get up to mischief. We could have spent far longer in that garden than we did, although it helps being medical.
Troyes is a sad place, too, as so much warfare has taken place in the area, and over many years and centuries. There is a stele on display in the centre of town of an exhausted young man,
L’Énergie Fauchée (“Energy in short supply”), a stone copy of an original plaster work by a Léon Messiaen in 1915. The original is kept at the Museum of Fine Arts in the town. The stele made us stop and think for quite a while, as it highlights so well the futility and worthlessness of warfare. The sculptor, Léon Messiaen, was wounded three times in the First World War, eventually meeting an untimely end in September 1918, at the age of 33 years. He was blown up by a shell.
***
Stayed at:
Le Champ des Oiseaux, 20 rue Linard Gonthier, 10000 Troyes
Tel: +33(0)325805850
Email: message@champdesoiseaux.com
Dinner at:
La Barge
La péniche, Quai la Fontaine, 10000 Troyes
Tel: +33(0)325730654; +33(0)658863832
Email: labargeclub@gmail.com
Comments