NORMANDY 

Rouen-Musee de la Faience-Musee Flaubert

History and WWII

Cathedral

Gros Horloge and Place Vieux Marché

Palais de Justice Bourgtheroulde

St.Maclou-Aitre St.Maclou

Church Saint Ouen-Musée des Antiquités

Tour Jeanne-Musée Secq des Tournelles-musee des Beaux Arts

Musée de Faience-Musée Flaubert

It is only after a visit at the MUSEE DE LA FAIENCE in Rouen that we can understand France’s high reputation for the manufacture and decoration of china and earthenware. They were at the highest of their popularity during the reign of Louis XIV. The “Sun king” forbade the nobility and aristocracy to use gold and silver plates, which resulted in a massive success of Rouen’s flat earthenware. British faience and later, porcelain started the end of Rouen’s big success.
And now we have another excellent museum, thrilling for ceramic specialists as well as for neophytes. In the gracious rooms of the hotel d’Hocqueville are overflowed with its finest examples of faience in perfectly organized display windows, explained not only chronologically bit also by the different techniques and colours. Dozens of very rare specimens absolutely superb by their finesse.
Rouen plates, made of a mixture of local clays covered with a white thin-based enamel and finished off with colourful designs, decorated with maxims, plays on words, and expressions of love—speak volumes, revealing an intimate glimpse from their sideboards of the warm humanity of their owners.
Delft faience, China or Italian porcelain, the museum doesn’t exclude anything and shows the mutual influences between the European techniques and the Asian ones.
Aside from Sevres porcelain, the museum collection has such oddities as the terrestrial globe painted by Pierre Chapel in 1775 and a violin made by some Delft Stradivarius.
From the Vieux-Marché, the rue de Crosse and the continuing avenue Gustave Flaubert lead to the vast complex of the Hotel-Dieu, Rouen’s old hospital, where a room houses the MUSEE FLAUBERT.  Here lived Achille-Cleophas FLAUBERT, surgeon to the hospital and father of Gustave FLAUBERT who was born in this place in 1821.Some personal belongings and some stunning collection pieces like the hospital bed for 6 persons. The surgeon’s manuals may make your hair curl!! The poster outside says it all through the images of a brace and bit in a case of surgeon tools. I suppose that the effect of the environment in the early days of his life made Gustave measure the morbidity and pessimism you can feel and read in his novels and his hatred of bourgeois values. However, the real Flaubert fans should drive to Croisset, once an idyllic village near Rouen where father Flaubert bought a house with a large garden in 1844.  One of the rooms of that house is Gustave Flaubert’s where he had a view on the Seine and where he wrote most of his master works like “Madame Bovary”, “L’Education Sentimentale”, Bouvard et Pecuchet…
Flaubert is buried in the Rouen cemetery.
Next essay will end the Rouen visit. We have still the Jardin des Plantes, the Rouen Corniche and some minor but beautiful houses and walks.

Bibliography

A holiday history of France, by Ronald Hamilton (London-Hogarth press), Region Normandie, ses merveilles, ses cicatrices, by Louis Letellier (ed. Cloison, Rouen 1995), Routard 1998 (Hachette, Paris), Rouen, ville martyr, by Patrick Deware (Ed. Dargelle, 1998)-France today, by John Ardagh (Secker and Warburgh, London)The Identity of Normandy, by Fernand Braudel (Fontana Press, London)-Pierre Deux’s Normandy, by Dannenberg, Moulin and Le Vec (London, Phaidon)