Cluny

This morning I hesitantly asked the monkeys if they were up for seeing a museum.  Surprisingly, they were quite enthusiastic.  I hadn’t even pulled out my, “it’s close to home” or “it has the Unicorn tapestries that you have been wanting to see.”!! 

Out we went on our scooters (because I learned that museum staff are usually willing to put the scooters in the bag check area, and the boys are so much happier riding their scooters.)

Before we went, I read up on some of the pieces of art using the Rick Steves book that my mom left.  That way, I could talk about them to the boys and maybe buy myself some time.

It happens that there are some statues in the museum that used to be on Notre Dame. During the revolution, people beheaded the statues and beat them up pretty well because they thought they were statues of past French kings.  Turns out, they were biblical kings.  A man took the defaced statues and buried them in his yard to save them, and they were only recently unearthed (the 70’s I think).  This story fascinated the boys, and after I told them,(and Owen repeated the story twice to be sure that he got it straight), Jack yelled out,  “When we leave this church, we are on a mission to find the fake statues at Notre Dame!”  There are replicas on the real Notre Dame.  It was fun to see the boys so enthusiastic!

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries were the main reason that we went to this museum.  I read about them in Tracy Chcvilier’s book, and the boys read a Magic Tree House book about the tapestries too.   There are six massive wall-hangings, each representing one of the five senses and another one representing desire.  The boys had fun trying to figure out which was which – and since Jack studied the five senses in his class last year, he felt very studious listing them off before we looked at the tapestries. 

The following tapestry was Owen’s favorite. It represents smell (The Lady is weaving a wreath out of flowers for the unicorn) When I asked him why it was his favorite tapestry, he said, “because they have shields like they are getting ready for war.” 

This one was Jack’s favorite.  It represents taste (the Lady is feeding some candy to the unicorn.)

After spending some time in the room with the tapestries, the monkeys were uninterested in seeing anything else.  We made a brief stop to look at some medieval shields and some swords, but then we were outta there…

I would have like to look at the rest of the medieval items, but I didn’t want to ruin the excitement that Owen and Jack were feeling for the place. 

Jack, “Mom, this is the best church we have been to so far!”  (Since this museum was from the middle ages, most of the art work was still dedicated to religious stories, especially the crucifixion -so I think Jack doesn’t differentiate between churches and most museums…)

Now if we could get out of our current schedule of 11pm bedtimes and 10 am wake-ups, we could actually get into Notre Dame without waiting in line for hours…