We rented a car this week-end and went to visit the city of Angers, which is about 100 km up the Loire river (when I saw how close it was, I immediately conceived the project of going there on a bike some day, maybe when the rain stops, in 6 months... anyone out there want to come with me? Annette?). The visit was motivated by a variety of reasons, strong among which is that Angers is where Magdalene's 'internet friend' Maggie lives with her family (we made friends with them when they came to visit us in Nantes a month ago, and were eager to see them again).

But we had wanted to visit Angers even before we met the McDowells, because the castle there (which, as you can see, is older and more beautiful than our castle in Nantes) houses an incredible tapestry representation of the Apocalypse; a huge tapestry (140 meters long and 850 square meters of surface area) with lovely naive and expressive representations. For each scene there is a witness (St. John, a handsome blonde curly-haired guy stuck on a church porch) and his facial expressions change in each scene: he seems shocked and upset when the angels kill the seven-headed dragon with their spears, for instance, and quite eager when an angel guides him off his porch to go get a closer look of the "great whore on the waters" as she gazes at herself in a mirror that reflects a green monster instead of her lovely chubby face. As if these were not sufficient reasons to go, there was also an exhibit of medieval illuminated manuscripts at the castle, which both Sean and I couldn't wait to see.

The manuscripts were incredible. Some were done in brilliant colors with gold decorations all over the page, but some were different from any illuminations I've seen before, they looked like watercolors with black ink outlines. When you see all these books, you realize that the illuminations were not just paintings in their own right, they belong to the art of the book, where each page, with its decorated writing and its illustrations placed just so, is a work of art and design, and then the book as a whole is also a work of art. It made me want to get back into book-binding and making children's books (since that seems to be where that art has found a home in our time).

Ok, enough French pedantry. You can see Maggie, who saved Magdalene by being her only friend in France on the picture above. They are so alike in their interests and reactions to France that they even look a little bit alike (though Maggie is very tall). Below, you can see that carousels are still part of every visit we make in France. This is a two story 'christmas carousel' (we have the same in Nantes) surrounded by little booths selling various trinkets and food. All the children had fun on it, even Simeon who would absolutely deny it if you asked him). The photo above the one of Magdalene and Maggie is one of many medieval houses remaining in Angers. They are crooked, leaning, and beautiful, with wooden carvings of sacred and profane things, very short front doors (some of them looked like even I would bump my head going in--people in the middle ages must have been very short, or else their defective architectural skills forced them to adopt the ritual of bending over when going into a house; it was probably rude not to).

Despite all this cheerful talk, we really had a terrible week-end. The children fought among themselves and with us all of Saturday (there was the obligatory car-seat fight between Magdalene and Simeon, then the gift shop fight between me and Simeon, then the 'you gave Magdalene 10 euros to go walking around Angers with her friend and you wouldn't buy me a 5 euro notebook at the museum' fight between me and Simeon, then Matthias ran away into the botanical garden where he had been told there were playgrounds, but where we didn't have time to stop, and then Miriam was hungry in the car on the way back and wailed almost the whole way. Maggie's family have only Maggie (16) and her brother Paul (14). They welcomed us to Angers and fed us and showed us around in the most generous way, but I was ashamed the whole time of being completely unable to handle our four children in their fights with each other and in my own fights with them. I felt like such a failure on Saturday night I was ready to split them up. I thought the only way to continue raising them was to take two of them and have Sean take the other two (I didn't really care which ones went where) so that there were only two sets of needs and desires to manage at a time. Unfortunately, I'm quite sure I'm deceiving myself that that would have made any difference.

So, that's it for now. Sean and the boys took advantage of the car on Sunday (and of the exceptional opening of some stores on Sunday as we approach Christmas) and went to IKEA to buy us a few christmas decorations. They were supposed to buy a tree (20 euros at IKEA, refunded if you bring the tree back in January) but they were out. We'll have to buy a tiny expensive tree on the place Viarme just up from Mimi's school, and then carry it down a few blocks to our house. How old fashioned.