It’s over a week now that we are in Charleville-Mézières. Therefore we’ll take some time to pay attention to Charleville’s founder, in 1606, Charles 1er Gonzague. As always, stories about people like this are highly interesting – especially for those interested in history. See therefore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Gonzaga,_Duke_of_Mantua_and_Montferrat, in any language you prefer. We are probably not the only ones that have experienced a never ending reading session when ‘diving’ into Wikipedia.

Last Monday it was a milestone birthday for the female half of the two of us. We were visited by dear friends, completely by surprise, and our daughter and grandsons, a surprise as well – for their (grand)mother in this case. It was a great day…

…and the waitress even reacted properly after she became to know the occasion. Chapeau! The same happened in Paris a year ago.

We were asked to move away from our mooring on the 13th of July because we were supposedly too close to the fireworks, on display that night. So we moved backwards, next to a permanently moored ship (Thór) and another one that was also ‘chased away’. The open space is clearly visible here. Both other boats are still where they were before, because their owners were absent – or lying flat on their stomachs on the bottom of their vessels…

Of course this is more of the same, but we like the picture. The ship in the middle is called ‘Hielkje’, in case someone wonders. Charleville has its fireworks, related to France’s most important national yearly celebration ‘Le Quatorze Juillet’, already on the evening of the 12th. That’s odd, we thought, because to our knowledge the fireworks are executed during the evening of the 13th or on the 14th itself. So we visited the Tourist Office and were told that the other half of the present combined municipality of Charleville-Mézières (since 1966), being Mézières, has the military parade on the 14th. Ah, that’s why…

Later on that evening, about 10:30PM, the crowd gathered at the opposite bank and all public lighting was switched off. Only the next evening we learned what atrocity a single misguided person (expressed as civilized as possible) is able to inflict.

We had never been in the Mézières-part of Charleville-Mézières and combined our visit to the bicycle-shop with a walk into Mézières. Well, it was not all that interesting, to be frank. Having said that there’s always something – and what is more obvious than a church? We’re in France, aren’t we? So here is a picture of Mézières’ gothic/renaissance-style basilica Notre-Dame d’Esperance. And we were lucky too: a wedding was going to start, only the bridegroom was still lacking.

All visitors took their chance to have a picture with the bride – and waited more or less in line for their turn. Our attention was attracted by the mirror-imaged tattoos on the calves of one of the attending women. (We never saw the bridegroom arrive. Hopefully he did.)

When leaving Mézières (or entering, of course) the present préfecture-building, situated on the Meuse-bank, becomes visible. For préfecture see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefectures_in_France. It is the former ‘Palais de Tournelles’, related to the Dukes of Burgundy – and more. It’s too much to reproduce here, of course. For more it’s perhaps an idea to start reading this: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_royale_du_génie_de_Mézières because that’s what the palace eventually became. Before being the present use of it that is. There’s a connection with the guy on the 1st picture. Search and thou will find…

Back to the Charleville-part again. Here is, again perhaps, its lovely Place Ducale. This stunning square is built after Paris’ Place des Vosges. Just a tad smaller.

The square is entirely open, except for this two storey merry-go-round. We noticed more elderly people sitting around it than children inside. It is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, though, dating from 116 years back. A few times repainted is our guess.