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A SAINT, A CHANTEUSE AND AN EMPEROR
Chatillon-Sur-Seine, Burgundy

Not so well known as a travel or tour destination, one small country town in France is the source if not the birth place of so many sides of French religious, cultural and political, and mythic history, from the Crusades to the 100 years war, Napolean and golden age of Paris night life. Located about forty-minutes drive north-west of Dijon in the upper corner of the Cote d’Or region bordering Champagne, Chatillon-Sur-Seine, which gets it’s name from the famed Paris river which bubbles from under a rock not far from this modest village and flows under a small bridge in the center of town.

Kiki of Montparnass, singer, actress. model and artist in her own right in Paris’ golden age of the 20’s following WWI, was born as Alice Prin in Chatillon-sur-Seine an illegitimate child, sent by her grandmother to Paris as a teenager where she began posing nude for famed painters and sculptors and made herself into the toast of the town, one of the early 20th century's most independent women and one of first movie stars of the French cinema.

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On the other end of the scale in Chatillon-sur-Seine, at the top of a hill over-looking the town which was bombed by the British in 1940 WWII can be found the Eglise Saint Vorles surrounded by the ruins of the old city fortress, and what remains of the religious school of the middle ages where St. Bernard of Clairvaux received his education from the priests of St. Vorles in the early 12th Century. St. Bernard was the son of Burgundy nobles who after joining the church became an auster cleric and author who forswear wealth and images, is closely associated with the Knights Templar (See Hughes de Payns Museum) regarded as the author of the Templars rules and was one of the principal forces instigating the Second Crusade. St. Bernard is also curiously connected to the Black Madonna or Vierge Noire. Bernard revered the Virgin Mary and claimed as a miracle that suffering from an infection a statue of the virgin bled milk from her breast and healed him (the Lactation Miracle). The details of the miracle vary between whether the milk hit his eye, his lips or over his body. A Black Virgin can be found inside the church in a niche, but is a replacement of the original which was burned in the 1700's. Because of his connection with the Templars, St. Bernard is sometimes proposed in connection with the mythic "Priory of Scion" made familiar from the "Da Vinci Code". He also plays a role in Dante's "Human Comedy". Another Black Virgin in the area can be found at the Notre Dame de Beune (See Old Virgins of Beune).

St. Bernard was the founder of the Cistercian Abbey of Fontenay, the oldest best preserved monastery in France is a few kilometers away (see Abbey Fontenay) and also the Abbey Clairvaux in Bar-sur-Aube. The graveyard cemetery behind the St. Vorles church dates from back to the middle ages, with Gothic monuments and gravestones perhaps a little worse for wear and just a litte spooky.

The church of Eglise St. Nicolas just below the old castle hill in the Rue Nicolas was built in the 11th Century, the present church was added to in the 13th and 14th with ornate Gothic vaulted nave ceiling and a series of medieval period stained-glass widows of the saints, the resurrection and a series of religious and medieval life images depicting costume and dress of the period. The church is also connected to the defeat of the Burgundy dukes at the Battle of Agincort by Henry V, the funeral of Philippe the Fair’s young bride Michelle de France in the 15th Century, and an unsuccessful peace negotiation with Napoleon in 1814-15 (See also Castellane on Route Napoleon and Waterloo Museums).

Chatillon-sur-Seine can be reached by car from Troyes or Dijon about an hour. The Montbard TGV station is 15 minutes. For an interesting stay nearby, La Roserie, a former hunting lodge countryside bed & breakfast dating from the 1700’s is located 20 kilometers away in Essoyes, Champagne where Renoir came to paint. © Bargain Travel Europe

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SEE ALSO:

FAMILY FUN AND CHAMPAGNE
Nigloland Theme Park

PARIS ELEGANCE ON A 3-STAR BUDGET
Paris Hotel Richmond Opera

ROMANCE CASTLES OF BURGUNDY WINE REGION
Château de Châteauneuf-en-Auxois

DIJON - BURGUNDY WINE, MUSTARD N' GARGOYLES

SWEET TOOTH ON THE RUN
OO-so Delicious Strasbourg

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