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NORMANDY 

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Honfleur -Normandy's most precious jewel

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Normandy's most precious jewel

Honfleur's more thorough visit

Drive along the coast on the D 513, on a rural corniche heading to Honfleur. It’s here a typical Auge country, the postcard Normandy: green pastures, cows, steep gabled houses, pointed church clock towers…the zone where thick hedges grow and marked by a hills and valleys with sometimes quite steep slopes. Cows in buttercup field graze beneath orchards with the addition of the Channel waters beneath. Here is VILLERVILLE SUR MER, a modest town with as only interest the permanent exhibition “Mer et Desert”, sort of zoo-museum, an addition to the aquarium of Trouville. It has also a narrow beach where you can discover some older bunker at low tide and loo for mussels. Anyway, mussels are the specialty of the area. Remarkable is that this little town received artists like Isabey and Daubigny.

Pass Pennedepie and before entering Honfleur, make a little detour to the 17th century church of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. She is the patron of all sailors since the 11th century, who come here as pilgrims to put some ex-voto next to the Virgin, mostly in the shape of paintings, boats (the oldest dates from 1730-1750), small scale models. Tél. 02 31 89 14 12. It is a delightfully idiosyncratic little chapel of great vitality (built in 1600) with a busy little shop. The view is also a must. A grand panorama of the port of Le Havre and the estuary of the Seine which the Pont de Normandie impressively spans.

There used to be a farmhouse where all the poets and artists would comeand eat and have their say. It is set on the coastal hills just outside the picturesque port town of Honfleur: La Ferme Saint Siméon, a lovely 17th-century Normandy home with flowerboxes adorning every window. The cuisine was delicious and expensive. Now it’s ridiculously expensive and it has altered much. But don’t resist the temptation to have a coffee on its terrace, just for the looks.
HONFLEUR: the most picturesque and bustling port of the Normandy coast, if not from all France. A jewel! The cutest! With its quaint narrow quayside buildings, it is popular with the many artists like Baudelaire, Flaubert, Satie (who was born here), Boudin (also born here), Monet, Dufy and others. The painters were seduced by the changing light on the Seine estuary and the green pastures all around. It’s not a coincidence that there are 15 galleries in town.  Yachtsmen come to visit the restaurants, cafés, shops and galleries around the old port.  The old pool is in the centre of the town. Notice the important contrast between the twoquays which face each other: on the first one stand two floors wealthy houses of stones, on the second narrow houses of seven floors have been built with woody fronts protected by slates.
Honfleur is in fact a two side-faced town: a week -Honfleur with the fishermen and a weekend-Honfleur tourists, buses and invading groups. This is particularly annoying in the summer.
Despite all that, we can feel this dense atmosphere, this unique cachet, interior basins, old riggings and gears, fat fishing barges, old tile roofed houses, winding streets and lovers.
More about Honfleur in history in next essay.

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, La France des petits chemins: Normandie, by J. de la Valléé (ed. Cité presse, Paris 1998), Identity of France, by Fernand Braudel (London, Fontana Press), The French, by Theodore Zeldin (New York-Random House), Découverte de Honfleur, by André Hambourg (Revue du Pays d'Auge -July 1986), ) Erik Satie, by Pierre-Daniel Templier.