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| Monet's Water (Japanese) Garden |
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| Monet's Home |
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| Inside One of Monet's Studios |
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| The Town of Vernon |
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| The Cathedral of Vernon (built 1100-1400) |
This morning in the rain we visited the gardens and home of Claude Monet. Come to find out he was one "very active" fellow having children by multiple women (his favorite being Alice). Through the art of marketing his agent was able to convince people in New York that he was a famous artist whose work they must own. Once people in New York started buying his work, people in France took notice and too thought he was noteworthy. He used his new-found money to purchase the estate, and to bribe the mayor to allow him to divert the city's water supply to provide water features through his gardens (much to the anger of all the local farmers he needed that water for their cattle and crops). He also paved the local road as he was tired of the dust on his roses caused by the carriages going by on the dirt road.
This afternoon we did a walking tour of Vernon. This charming city of 25,000 was really devastated by the war. The Germans air-bombed it and leveled major parts of the town in an attempt to scare most the residents away, and they succeeded. More damaging than the bombing were the fires that followed that turned major portions of the city into ashes. With most the men gone, there was no one there to fight the fires. Many of the old wood houses (circa 1400) still remain, but sections that were rebuilt were made from concrete from fear that wood buildings could once again burn. The cathedral was built over 400 years, starting in the 1100's with the alter section and moving west. Each section had taller ceilings as engineering improved to allow higher and broader structures (gotta love them flying buttresses). At one time all the heads were removed from the statuary on the outside of all buildings as a state requirement so many of the angels and saints are headless.
