Rouen is the finest medieval city in northern France that most visitors overlook. FFGR Normandy corrects this oversight with a full day's programme calibrated to the city's real depth.
Rouen is ninety minutes from Paris by TGV and, for the FFGR Normandy client, rather less than that by Maybach from Deauville. It has more medieval half-timbered buildings than any other city in France; the cathedral that Monet painted thirty times under different lights; a square where, in 1431, a nineteen-year-old girl from Domrémy was burned at the instruction of a bishop in the pay of the English; and the apartment where Gustave Flaubert was born. It is a city of density — of time and of stone.
The cathedral and its light
Monet painted the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen from a room above a shop directly opposite the west façade, in the winter and spring of 1892–1893. He painted it in morning light, in haze, in full noon sun, and in the last grey of afternoon — thirty canvases from the same standpoint, the subject the same, the painting entirely different each time. To stand in front of the cathedral with this knowledge is to understand something about light that a physics class cannot teach.
The Gros-Horloge and the medieval quarter
The Rue du Gros-Horloge is the pedestrian axis of old Rouen: cobbled, flanked by timbered houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, dominated by the astronomical clock of 1527 — one of the oldest working clocks in France. Our walking programme begins here, moves through the Aitre Saint-Maclou (a plague cemetery now used by a school of fine arts), past the church of Saint-Ouen, and arrives in the square where Joan was burned. The circuit takes ninety minutes at an unhurried pace.
The Flaubert museum
Gustave Flaubert was born in the Hôtel-Dieu hospital where his father was chief surgeon. The family apartment — preserved on the upper floor — contains the desk where he read, the correspondence of Emma Bovary's creator, and a medical collection that explains the world he grew up watching. It is visited, when it is visited at all, by those who have read Madame Bovary carefully and wish to understand the man behind it. FFGR Normandy recommends the Flaubert museum as the final stop, after the cathedral and before lunch.
- ◆Distance from Deauville: 90 km — 1h by Maybach
- ◆Distance from Paris: 135 km — 1h45
- ◆Cathedral + Gros-Horloge circuit: 2 hours
- ◆Flaubert museum: 1 hour
- ◆Lunch: Les Nymphéas (1 Michelin star) or Gill (2 Michelin stars) — reservation by FFGR concierge
- ◆Full day: arrive 10:00, depart 18:00
« Every city has a key. Rouen's is the light that falls on its stones at four in the afternoon in January. »
