Amiens is unlikely to appear in the top 10 of any objective lists of daytrips from Paris, but who ever said that a traveler had to be objective?
You know the joke about the researchers and the elephants? A German, a Frenchman, and a Jew go to Africa to study elephants. After spending some time observing the elephants, the three researchers define their projects. The German decides it would be important to study the hierarchical organization within the elephant herd. The Frenchman thinks it would be interesting to study the sex lives of elephants. And the Jew wants to study the relationship between the elephants and the Jews.
I didn’t expect to encounter many elephants when choosing Amiens, capital of the Picardy region, for an easy daytrip from Paris. I simply looked forward to a small-city stroll, a mild aura of discovery, tidbits about a former local celebrity named Jules Verne, an impressed gaze at a colossal cathedral, a pause in a riverside café, and a bite of a local sweet. In short, a daytrip I might recommend to travelers looking for an accessible break from the big city.
So I made a few appointments, did some bedtime research, suffered the personal embarrassment of rereading a brief and banal passage from my own 1993 guide to France (“Amiens has little to offer of interest other than a Cathedral Notre-Dame, but what a cathedral it is…”), and in the morning took the 70-minute train ride to Amiens from Paris’s North Station.
Elephants in Jules Verne
Unguided, a visit to a writer’s home can be a holy bore for the all but the most passionate or studious fan, and the house where Jules Verne lived from 1882 to 1900 is no exception. In the company of an informed narrator, however, a writer’s walls, furnishings and paraphernalia reveal the writing life and the juxtaposition of call-me-when-dinner’s-ready and the mapping of extraordinary voyages of the mind.
The narrator for my visit was Rachel Visse, whose presentation of Jules Verne (1828-1905) flowed so captivatingly and conversationally that I almost felt that she was flirting with me, and vice versa. But perhaps that’s because Verne also appealed to the writer, the traveler, and the teenage map-dreamer in me—though not necessarily the reader in me.
Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages—Voyage to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, etc.—were international best-sellers that made him a literary superstar by the time he moved to Amiens, his wife’s hometown, in 1871.
Nowadays, the scientific promise and fantasies of the latter half of the 19th century are less likely to trigger the dreams of 10-15-year-old boys (Verne’s core market) and other armchair travelers; the integrated circuit has tempered the general public’s fascination with mechanics, steam engines, and flying vessels; maps themselves are now less likely to spark the imagination.
Nevertheless, as a pioneer of science fiction and the most translated French writer of all time, Verne remains the rare French author whom Americans not only have heard about but whose works focus on neither philosophy nor infidelity.
Born in Nantes, a city downstream the Loire that renovated its own Jules Verne Museum last year in honor of the centennial of its native son’s death, Verne went to Paris to study law but was soon drawn to the theater. At the completion of his studies he decided to not follow his father’s footsteps into the courthouse but instead devoted himself to writing and increasingly became engrossed in the novelties of science and in global explorations.
These interests first came together in Five Weeks in a Balloon, published to enormous success in 1863 by Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Reflecting the important role played by Verne’s publisher and persuasive editor, Hetzel’s office, library and files are also now presented here along with the numerous reformatted editions of Verne’s work that he published for an avid public.
Verne’s own office and adjoining rooms speak volumes (at least with Rachel as interpreter) about the author’s passion for applied science and technology, of his tremendous, contractual output that brought forth 32 novels while living in this house, and of the international appeal of his work. Posters displayed in the attic demonstrate that Verne’s extraordinary and sometimes visionary adventures, played out by simplistic, driven characters, have been a natural attraction for filmmakers since the early days of cinema.
In tune with Verne’s colonial times, elephants make an occasional, exotic appearance in the novels. Examining those and other beasts one finds a writer who tried to find his personal balance between a belief in democracy and a desire for order, a writer who was naturally discreet concerning the sex lives of his characters, and a writer able to use the anti-Semitic caricature of the ugly, miserly, cheating Jew who is swept along on the comet on which the novel Hector Servadac takes place. Indeed, the house itself affirms Verne’s attachment to the late 19th-century bourgeoisie.
His celebrity status in Amiens and his sense of civic duty led him, among other things, to champion the construction of the metallic circus that can be seen down the road, which he inaugurated as the town’s celebrated citizen and as a member of the town council. I visited the circus but didn’t see any elephants there.
Elephants in the Cathedral
Nowadays Amiens (pop. 136,000) would be large enough to get lost in were it not for the fact that you need only look for the the Perret Tower, a 30-story blockhouse that was one of Europe’s first post-war skyscrapers, to find your way back to the train station or for the highest steeple to find your way to the cathedral and hence the historic center (and the tourist office).
A statue of Pierre l’Hermit/Peter the Hermit overlooks a parking lot behind the cathedral. He is posed as rabble-rouser inciting the Christians of Europe to drop the tools of the everyday and band together for a higher cause: wresting control of the Holy Land from the Muslims. Echoing Pope Urban II, he preached Dieu le Veux(Deus vult, God wills it) as he played the revivalist Pied Piper and led a growing group of paupers on a long march south. Urban II promoted a more organized campaign led by European (mostly French) feudal leaders, whose conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 would become known as the First Crusade. Roving bands and local leaders in the Rhineland had in the meantime perverted the argument in 1096 by carrying out Europe’s first massive slaughter of Jews.
The presence of the statue of Peter the Hermit could now be seen as inflammatory were it not so historical—Peter had been a priest in Amiens before he took to the road—and were it not for the fact that Christianity doesn’t have much public ambition in France these days. (Back home some fringe group would be petitioning to move the statue to the front of the courthouse before a compromise would be found and the good citizens of the state would unite to pass a constitutional amendment denying same-sex marriage.)
If the First Crusade managed to keep its primary focus on Jerusalem, the Fourth, which peaked with warfare from 1202 to 1204, became a free-for-all of spiritually-challenged destructive profiteering as the Crusaders mistook Constantinople for Jerusalem and confirmed the schism between the Latin and Orthodox Churches. When it comes to the use of force, it appears that Deus vult can also be translated as “Whatever it takes.”
Amiens indirectly benefited from that Crusade when a canon of the cathedral returned with what was said to be the front portion of the skull of Saint John the Baptist. A Romanesque cathedral stood here at the time, but its damage by fire in 1218 was the perfect excuse to join the spiritual arms race with the construction of a new, modern (i.e. Gothic) edifice. The saint’s skull played its part as a fund-raising tool since the presence of such a major relic meant major traffic of pilgrims.
Begun in 1220, Notre-Dame d’Amiens followed in the footsteps of the increasingly vast and high cathedrals then under construction, such as Our Ladies of Chartres (1195) and of Reims (1211). Amiens’ cathedral would eventually be able to boast the largest interior of all the medieval mastodons of France, twice as voluminous as Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1163).
Its sheer size and the quality and drama of its sculptural work allow for an impressive visit even without a guide. Should your timing coincide with a guided tour, however, you should certainly join.
Along with its architectural prowess, the cathedral reveals a treasure chest of biblical, spiritual, political, and local anecdotes in stone, wood, and glass, all in tip-top condition thanks to restoration work of the 1990s. My guide for the afternoon, Marina Raby, a transplant from the south who has allowed her passion for local history to take root in Amiens, brought my attention to some of Our Lady’s most remarkable details, from the cartoon drama of Hell on the central door to the crying angel behind the choir by way of the central labyrinth, assorted tombs, and a gilded virgin. With Marina’s help, I read in the 16th-century woodwork enclosing the north side of the choir the events surrounding the beheading of John the Baptist, a story that echoes woodwork on the south side recounting the beheading in 300 of Saint Firmin, Amiens’ first bishop.
The cathedral’s recent restoration brought to light the extent to which the sculptural work on the facade was painted in the Middle Ages. Bringing modern technology to old stones, a free sound-and-light show (after sunset from mid-June to mid-September and again in December) projects a semblance of the original colors onto the facade.
Since the last train back to Paris leaves at 8:09pm most days, in summer you’ll have to miss either the show or the train. The projection begins at 7pm during its December run, when Amiens’ Christmas market may add a bit of an attraction, so those willing to venture north at that time of year can catch part of the show before hurrying off to the station.
Elephants in Paradise
It began to sprinkle as Marina led me through the Saint Leu Quarter, where houses huddle along branches of the River Somme and crisscrossing canals. Former quarter of tanners, millers, dyers and other water-dependant trades of the medieval town, Saint Leu is now a kempt residential zone, significantly restored since I visited 15 years ago. Seen from along the riverbank, the cathedral spreads like a fortress on the hill above the old town. If I hadn’t been approaching the day so dutifully I would have suggested to Marina that we stop at one of the cafés along the river. But as I was late for my next appointment we hurried through a heavy drizzle past the cafés and over the bridge to Les Hortillonnages.
Les Hortillonnages is a zone of “floating” gardens split by narrow waterways and survey lines into a thousand parcels. For centuries the land was given over to crops to be brought to market. Now it is largely devoted to private pleasure gardens and family picnicking, and leisurely visitors are invited to tour the zone on a guided tour on flat-bottom boats.
I’d imagined this as the kind of site that a foreign journalist, intent on advising travelers to a scantly known town, will visit suspecting that it won’t be special enough to mention with much conviction. He sees it to have seen it, to cross it off his list, as he might in visiting the elephant-deprived circus building championed by Jules Verne or in tasting the town sweet, a honey-flour-almond paste macaroon that hits the sweet spot but that falls flat when just yesterday he enjoyed Paris’s delicate, flavored sandwich-cookie variety: I did it, you needn’t, now let’s move on.
The drizzle had turned into a downpour by the time we arrived, and I thought that it would do no harm for my scheduled boat ride to be rained out; I could then head back to those cafés by the river. But shortly the rain stopped, the darker clouds moved on, the boatmen wiped the seats of their flat-bottom boats, and a woman at the reception desk told me, “That’s Monsieur Pelossof out by the boat. He’s waiting for you.”
Nisso Pelossof is the founding president of the Association for the Protection and Safeguard of the Site and the Environment of the Hortillonnages. In case that doesn’t sound important enough, the association has printed a brochure in English declaring that “The Association is entirely responsible for the beaconing of the rieux.” That means that they alone have the authority over signage on the 55 narrow waterways that cut through the 740 acre site. And I was afraid that it also meant that instead of the peaceably dull ride I otherwise expected I would spend the next 45 minutes nodding in feigned interest at the honorable founding president’s lengthy official discourse about community service, historical significance, top soil, and inadequate subsidies.
Nisso Pelossof, a spry, tan, older gent with thick white hair, greeted me at the dock with an enthusiastic handshake. He wore white khakis, a checked blue short sleeve shirt, a sleeveless fisherman’s vest, and a blue watchband.
He introduced me to our young boatman and welcomed me aboard. No sooner did the young man, standing at the stern, push us off from the side than Nisso noticed that I’d glimpsed the crude Nazi numbers tattooed on his arm, and he said, “I went through hell, now I live in paradise.”
It was undoubtedly a well-oiled line, subtle as a herd of elephants, but it had the immediate effect of taking me directly from a daytrip to foreign encounter.
During the course of our 45-minute glide along the waterways, Nisso alternated the story of his own route with indications of flora and fauna, anecdotes about family planting, weeding, and picnicking, and comments on communal union and disunion.
There was his deportation from the Greek island of Rhodes in 1944 at the age of 23… and there was a parcel planted with wildflowers; there was the decimation of his family at Auschwitz… and there was a mallard; there was his transfer from Auschwitz to Mathausan and then to Ebenzee… and there was a man with a hoe beside a woman with a bucket; there was Nisso’s decision not to return “in shame” to Rhodes… and there were some irises; there was the convoy going to France, there were wily struggles of a former deportee in Paris in 1946, there was Nisso the young photographer… and there was a lettuce field; there was his marriage to a French Catholic girl and their move to Amiens to open a photographic studio… and there was the birthing of the association he founded in 1975; there were his daughter taking over the photography studio… and there was a crested grebe by the rushes; there was his son the philosophy professor… and there was the parcel of a man who wouldn’t join the association; there was the death of his wife… and there was a crested grebe by the rushes; there was the writing of his autobiography (to be published next year)… and there were subsidies to purchase the electric-powered engine for these boats; and rounding a bend, as Nisso held my wrist to prepare me, there was the cathedral, as it might have appeared to a 16th-century traveler approaching the city.
Then the elephant looked me in the eye and said:
“I think that you and I have something in common.”
“I’m Jewish if that’s what you’re referring to.”
“Oh, are you?” he said. “No, I was referring to the fact that you seem to appreciate a good story.”
© 2006, Gary Lee Kraut
Post-note: Nisso Pelossof passed away in 2011 at the age of 90.
Practical Information
Amiens Tourist Office
6 bis rue Dusevel
80010 Amiens Cedex 1
Tel. 03 22 71 60 50
Trains leave Paris’s Gare du Nord (North Station) about once an hour. A 9, 10, even 11am departure allows for a full day in the city with a return to Paris for dinner.
Maison de Jules Verne
2 rue Charles-Dubois
80000 Amiens
Tel. 03 22 45 45 75
Open Oct. 15-April 14 Mon., Wed., Thurs., Fri. 10am-12:30pm and 2-6pm; Sat. and Sun. 2-6pm; closed Tues.
Open April 15-Oct. 14 Mon., Wed., Thurs., Fri. 10am-12:30pm and 2-6:30pm; Tues. 2-6:30pm; Sat. and Sun. 11am-6:30pm.
Les Hortillonnages
54 boulevard Beauvillé
80000 Amiens
Tel. 03 22 92 12 18
E-mail. aspsseh@wanadoo.fr
The boatmen give some indications about flora and fauna. An English-speaking boatman may be available. Request when purchasing your ticket.