The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (26 page)

Didier also said the church was plagued from the beginning by humidity and by water flowing downhill from Montmartre. Even today, water used by early morning street cleaners ends up beneath the church. Our visit occurred shortly after completion of a major restoration of François-Édouard Picot’s painting in the apse,
The Crowning of the Virgin.
It had suffered from water damage and problematic renovations, but now the robes of the Virgin and the other figures dazzle. Alas, the rest of the church looks even gloomier by contrast.

Flooding has cracked the walls, and the cracks are made worse by the vibrations of the Métro’s line 12, just below. The windows along the length of the church are unadorned, translucent white blocks trimmed in dark blue—to allow in maximum light. The nave has never known the beauty of decorative stained glass.

Didier pointed to the coffered ceiling, just like Santa Maria Maggiore’s. How was it that I had never noticed! Coffered wooden ceilings, with their neat geometrical forms, are typical of Italian Renaissance churches in Rome, but Notre-Dame-de-
Lorette has the only one in Paris. At first glance it looks like indented squares, rectangles, and crosses of deep blue and gold gilt. But if you look hard, you can make out the details: a dove for the Holy Spirit in the center and decorative rosettes symbolizing Mary as the “Mystical Rose.”

The more Didier talked, the more animated he became, moving his body, gesticulating with his hands, and smiling. “We’re in fifth-century Rome here!” he exclaimed. “This was once the most colorfully painted church in Paris!”

The tourists, eager to move on, shifted in their seats and whispered to each other. “Is he ever a talker,” a boy told his mother. She giggled.

The tour guide gave Didier polite but pointed hints to wrap it up. As soon as he finished, the group rushed out the door, and I followed. Only when I was a block away did I realize Didier wasn’t with us. No one in the group had thanked him, tipped him, or asked him to come along.

I returned to find him sitting alone on a bench while another group toured the church with its own guide. I apologized for having left him alone. “No problem,” said Didier. Then he said that he had something to show me.

He unlocked the large wooden door of the sacristy. It swung open to reveal a small room with wood paneling and a high arched ceiling. It had the familiar smell of sacristies elsewhere, a combination of dust, wood
polish, and incense. Before me was a surprise: an enormous stained-glass window, the only one in the church, showing the Virgin Mary in a red bodice, a blue skirt, and a white veil, ascending into heaven. It had been installed in the church in 1836, then destroyed when the oven of the shop on the corner exploded a century later, and painstakingly glued back
together again. The riotous colors of the window were backlit with daylight.

Didier revealed other secrets: the enameled volcanic stone on a side altar; the four of the fourteen Stations of the Cross that had been stolen years before and replaced with second-rate copies; paintings covered with adhesive tape in the Chapel of Baptism in a futile effort to prevent the paint from chipping.

We climbed over a barrier onto the main altar. He showed me that some of its marble and “jewels”—the diamonds, emeralds, and rubies—were false, made of painted plaster. Then he gestured to a narrow archway and unrolled a reproduction of a painting of the four apostles. Three stood in profile; the fourth, dark circles under his eyes, stared straight ahead. Didier said the original painting was under the archway, hidden by years of dirt, candle smoke, and soot. “You can’t see it—even I can’t,” he said. “Just know it’s there.”

The church’s problems seem overwhelming. For the last thirty years, wooden supports have propped up two crumbling arches. Water-damaged walls continue to shed pieces of frescoes despite repairs to the roof and the gutter system. The walls of the choir have large cracks. The facade of the building needs to be repointed.

France’s Observatory of Religious Heritage and SOS Paris list Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as one of the ten most threatened churches in Paris. In 2013, the World Monuments Fund, a New York–based nonprofit dedicated to preserving historic architecture and cultural heritage sites, put two Paris churches, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and Saint-Merri, on its list of sixty-seven endangered sites around the world. Its first goal was to raise money to restore Notre-Dame-de-Lorette’s cupola and the
Chapels of Marriage, Baptism, and Death. The estimate: 800,000 euros, without scaffolding, which could more than double the cost.

After taking Didier’s tour, I grew more attached to the church. It is poor; it is dirty; it is neglected. But it is mine. At a time when a shortage of priests and parishioners is forcing French churches to close, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is determined to stay open. Every morning one of its five priests celebrates Mass. Every afternoon, a priest is on duty to listen to, advise, and perhaps bless anyone who comes by. There are concerts every month, an annual Christmas sale, and activities for all ages—from catechism for children to group therapy for divorced Catholics.

One Sunday just before Christmas 2013, the church honored Didier, who was leaving his caretaking job. Father Thibault Verny called him to the altar to thank him for his work over the years. He gave Didier a one-year membership to the Louvre. Afterward, parishioners crowded around to congratulate him. We walked together to the church’s auxiliary building, a few blocks away, for a reception in his honor.

Then Didier and I were alone. “You know what’s going on?” he asked. “You know that this Mass was my good-bye?”

“But you still have the keys, don’t you?”

“No. I had to give them back.”

SOMETIME LATER, AS A GUEST
at an artists and writers retreat in Umbria, I learned that the hill town of Loreto—the site of the Virgin Mary’s flying house, the inspiration for my Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Church—was only a hundred miles away. I had to go.

I arrived to find a sixteenth-century domed basilica with soaring ceilings and two dozen chapels. It made Notre-Dame-de-Lorette seem pitiful by contrast. At the center of the basilica stands a huge, lavishly carved marble structure designed by Donato Bramante, the Italian Renaissance architect. Each of the four sides tells a story: the birth of Mary; the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel; the birth of Jesus; and, by far the most dramatic scene, angels carrying off Mary’s house. Inside Bramante’s structure is the “house” itself.

The house has one room and measures about twenty-eight feet by thirteen. Local Italian brick sits atop a base of stones from Nazareth. An elaborate altar of colored marble and gold gilt, added later, holds a statue of Mary and the infant Jesus. A nearby museum exhibits dozens of artworks—paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and tapestries of varying quality and spanning several centuries—that depict Mary’s house in midair.

I expected the site to be saturated with tourists. Luckily, I had just missed a delegation of thousands of young people who had walked through the night on an annual pilgrimage from the nearby town of Macerata. They had been thrilled to get a phone call of encouragement from Pope Francis; he told them life was made for doing “great things” and asked them to pray for him. (The museum includes a special bedroom reserved for the pope, should he come to visit.) In the gift shop, I loaded up with Madonna of Loreto postcards, holy cards, medals, devotional prayer books, and statuettes to take home to friends on the rue des Martyrs.

I resisted the temptation to buy Madonna of Loreto snow globes.

A STREET FIT FOR A POPE

. . .

Is it true, great Father, that the story is told somewhere in the Lives of the Saints of a holy saint martyred for his faith who, when his head was cut off at last, stood up, picked up his head, and, “courteously kissing it,” walked a long way, carrying it in his hands. Is that true or not, honored Father?

—F
YODOR
D
OSTOYEVSKY
,
The Brothers Karamazov

Your Holiness, it will be a miracle if my letter reaches you. But miracles happen, no?

—M
Y LETTER TO POPE FRANCIS INVITING HIM
TO THE RUE DES
M
ARTYRS

O
NE DAY, POPE FRANCIS WILL COME TO PARIS. AND WHEN
he does, he will have to visit the rue des Martyrs. There is a small crypt under a defunct chapel that he will want to see.

The crypt is just off the top of the rue des Martyrs at No. 11 rue Yvonne-le-Tac, named after a female leader of the French Resistance. Called the Martyrium, the crypt is thought to be the site of the beheading of Saint Denis and his two companions.
Before surrendering to death, the legend goes, Denis carried his head several miles to the north. And that’s the site that has been celebrated over the centuries. There, in what is now the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, the showpiece Saint-Denis Basilica was built. Considered the first Gothic church, it is a medieval flight of fancy and a symbol of religious excess, with glorious stained-glass windows and hundreds of figures carved into the stone facade. All the kings and queens of France from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries were buried there. Meanwhile, the Martyrium, where Denis was decapitated, has little star appeal. If Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, who saved the city from Attila the Hun in the fifth century, had not lobbied for a chapel here, the site might have been forgotten.

I haven’t found evidence that Pope Francis has a particular devotion to Saint Denis. But he is a Jesuit—the first Jesuit to become pope. The Martyrium is the place where Ignatius Loyola and his compatriots took their vows before he created the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. Besides, France is often referred to as the “eldest daughter of the church” because of its unbroken religious union with Rome since early Christianity. Pope Francis could put the crypt on the map. After I learned about the Martyrium, I decided that I needed to invite him to the rue des Martyrs.

Here is the backstory of the Jesuits and the Martyrium: Ignatius Loyola was born in 1491 to a rich and noble Basque family. But he was less a nobleman than a street fighter, gambler, and ladies’ man. He was rumored to have fathered a child out of wedlock. “Until the age of twenty-six, he was a man given over to the vanities of the world,” Ignatius said in his autobiography, which he wrote in the third person.

As an officer in the Spanish army fighting the French, Ignatius was seriously wounded in battle. After enduring many painful operations, he spent his convalescence reading the only books available: stories about Jesus and the saints. Powerfully moved by the stories, Ignatius put down his sword to become a religious pilgrim. He confessed his sins and threw himself on God’s mercy. He experienced dramatic mood swings, one day thinking about suicide, the next day reveling in mystical union with God. He prayed, fasted, begged, and flagellated himself. He let his hair and fingernails grow. He eventually found peace in giving up those practices.

He moved to Paris in 1528 to further his religious education, learn Latin, and earn a master of arts degree. He also banded together with six other young men, who became his closest companions. Together, they pledged to separate themselves from the world, to follow Jesus in poverty and chastity, and to go to Jerusalem to convert Muslim Turks. If they could not make it to Jerusalem, they would go to Rome to meet the pope and do whatever they could to promote “the greater glory of God and the good of souls,” Ignatius wrote.

They decided to take their vows in the chapel attached to the Martyrium, perhaps because of its location: well outside the Paris city limits at that time and hidden from spies of the Inquisition, who were eager to uncover any deviation from a strict interpretation of Catholicism. In 1534, on the feast day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, the men walked up the path that would become the rue des Martyrs.

Pierre Favre, a Frenchman and one of Ignatius Loyola’s band of six, had been ordained a priest only a few weeks before. He celebrated Mass for the group, and one after another they pro
claimed their vows. A nun in the adjoining convent was so moved by what she witnessed that she gave the men keys to the chapel. “Hindsight surely allows us to see in the event of that August day the cornerstone of the future Society of Jesus,” wrote Reverend John W. O’Malley, a Jesuit scholar. Six years later, the pope approved the creation of the Jesuit order.