She was often with me (or me with her), sometimes, even every day, when I was living in the city of the coronations.
During the long august evenings, on the square, her shadow was a never ending shape, drowning the tourists in a sacred darkness.
Her archivolts were taking off like a rocket like remembering to the Apollo crew, that far more before them, she went to the skies.
The heavenly army which was surrounding her with winged smiles was guarding.
I was in good hands…
She made me live moments of such an intense and inner joy that describing them would be futile. Each time I was moved deeply, gasping for breath, the head still full of the bright sun light which was going through the tall ground floor windows of the ambulatory.
I can remember myself, hiding, listening to Vivaldi’s mandolins concertos with my headphones when the light was flooding the nave, sitting, the hand on a pillar’s base, I was vibrating like a birch’s leaf shaken by a warm summer wind.
She was also with me in my grieving moments.
She was my refuge, my armour, my shell, the one who understood my distress and was protecting me. I even sometimes made wet her paving with my tears in the shadowy light of a lateral chapel of the transept.
I can remember when I was a kid, from the 8th floor where I was having catechism classes, I could see through the window this big dark mass dominating the city from her almost 800 years old, she was attracting me like a magnet, so close, so far.
I was swearing to myself that one day I will work at her feet.
The future was going to agree with me…
Years later, after I made several models, thoroughly studied her and did hundreds visits, I was succeeding to the National Heritage Body exam, at the same time I was a student at the Reims school of arts in the Libergier avenue, which does a direct straight line with her axe.
My dream was reality!
I introduced her to hundreds, more probably thousands people who came just for her, talking about her without betraying, like you could talk about a close friend. Never I have reduced her to a list of dates and numbers, always I spoke with passion, with all my heart.
She is my inspiration forever, and because of her I have discovered that behind stones and her stories there is much more…
Because of being with her almost every day, some things I was used to see before and were familiar were now like having their own tuning, like everything had a meaning, like a message with a double reading, an invisible stone ink. Here, just before my eyes, for all these years, after a long occult learning, still on the go by the way, I was starting to see the sacred symbolism becoming an evidence.
No hazard, all was like a music score, orchestrated, ruled with symbolic numbers, rhythms, colours, pictures.
This personal progression brought me to the door of the lodge…
I had started, without knowing it, to carve my own ashlar, the first chisel blows of a long work I knew was going to end the day of my last hour. This symbolism I started to catch a glimpse of, was slowly unveiling itself, putting the human condition at the center of my life, helping me like the chisel helps the sculptor to carve the facets of this stone which makes me a man.
She is 20 000km far from me now, I have never missed her that much. Her two towers and her smiling angels are filling my memory and not my skies anymore, her summer coolness and winter warmth only gives me chills only in my dreams, but she is here, anchored like a boat on the quay, deep inside of me.
Reims Cathedral