Textures

Building panel, Saint-Julien-les-Metz

Saint-Julien-lès-Metz

The archives of the Department of the Moselle surmount the village of Saint-Julien-lès-Metz, just north of Metz, across the river Seille. Below the archives, to the west, sits one of the several major forts surrounding Metz. To the north and east lie rolling fields. And downhill to the south of the archives lies the village itself. After our visit to the archives for the exhibition on the expulsions of World War II, Susie and I walked the back to our hotel, a route of about 3.5 kilometers. Saint-Julien-lès-Metz is a well-heeled village, with nice villas and condominiums. Here are a couple of the villas that we passed during our walk. They're not spectacular, just well-to-do, well-kept, and very French, to my eye.Toward the top of the village, the visitor finds numerous apartment buildings, which I figure are condominiums. These are modern and look up-scale. Here's an example. Almost all the dwellings of modern Saint-Julien probably date from the 2oth Century. A painting in the Metz art museum shows a view, dated 1833, of Metz from Saint Julien. The city's surrounded by fields instead of houses. Here's a view, roughly from the same direction but not as high up, taken during our visit in November of 2010. You can still see the cathedral, but buildings now completely fill in the landscape.

Things That Do Not Translate Well

It turns out that a "wad" was a place the river, in this case the Seille, could be forded. The word "wad" actually has the same root as the modern English word "wade" and is unrelated to "wadi," which comes from Arabic. The word "Billy" is a version of an old Metz family name, Bugley.

Parts of the street are quite picturesque.

Place Saint-Louis

The city walls torn down in the late 19th Century to be replaced by boulevards were not the first set of walls to disappear. As the Roman city of Divodurum Mediomatricorum, Metz had a set of walls that lasted a nearly a thousand years. But by the 12th century the city was growing, overflowing its walls, and needed both more space and more funds. So the city's leaders partially demolished the east-side walls and brought in bankers from Italy, who then built houses in an Italian style on the foundations of the old walls. The buildings' low roofs and screen walls, some topped with crenellations, evoked the architecture of fortresses in places like Siena and San Giminiano. Under the arcaded vaults on the ground floor, the bankers--by the 14th Century there were 60 of them--conducted their business. The square around which these buildings stood became known as the Place des Changes.

The square and the buildings still exist, although some the facades of some of the buildings were updated in the Renaissance. From the middle ages into the 20th Century, the square housed Metz's biggest markets for grain, fruits and vegetables. The arcades now house shops and restaurants, and some of the city's most chic shops are on streets just off the square.

The square was renamed in the early 17th Century when the curate of a nearby church installed a statue as part of a fountain the middle of the square. A history of the square notes that even then the fountain was hindrance to traffic. In any case, the statue was taken by everyone to be that of King Louis IX, Saint Louis, and the square was renamed the Place Saint-Louis in his honor. In fact, as was eventually recognized some 250 years later, the curate was off by a few Louis: the statue was not that of Louis IX but rather of Louis XIII. So in 1867 a new statue was commissioned, and this statue--the fountain being long gone--was installed.

For more about the Place Saint-Louis, see the Web sites (in French) of the neighborhood association and the City of Metz. Wikipedia's entry for the Place Saint-Louis has interesting photos showing the square before and after its updating in 2007, which banished the parking of cars in favor of pedestrian space.

La Place des Charrons

Not far from some large modern buildings, we stumbled across the Place des Charrons, one of the human-scale places in Metz. At the place's south entrance stands a famous renaissance house, the Hotel de Burtaigne. Built at the start of the 16th Century, the Hotel de Burtaigne (a corruption of Bretagne, the name of an 18th-Century owner), served in 1552 as the headquarters of the Duc de Guise in his successful defense of siege of Metz. The square, enlarged to its present dimensions in the middle of the 18th Century, feels particularly neighborhoody. To my eyes, it's so picturesque that it could have served as the set for "An American in Paris." I half expected to see Jerry Mulligan skipping across the square carrying a loaf of bread.