Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd

Author:Sue Monk Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

We cross to the Left Bank at Pont Royal and walk along the Quai Voltaire, winding to Rue Bonaparte and coming finally to the church. Our group stands in a cluster on the sidewalk with our necks hinged back and our mouths parted, staring at the eleventh-century tower of St.-Germain-des-Prés. From the corner of my eye, I notice someone taking a photograph, not of the thousand-year-old belfry, but of us gaping up at it.

Trisha, our religious art scholar who lived for a time in Paris, informs us that the church was founded in 542 and was part of a flourishing abbey built on the site of a former temple to Isis. Supposedly a statue of black Isis was worshipped here as the Virgin Mary until 1514, when it was destroyed by the abbot.

My guidebook emphasizes the church’s Romanesque architecture, several sixth-century marble columns, the fire during the French Revolution, along with the bewildering detail that a king of Poland is buried inside. Nothing about a mysterious Black Madonna who descended from Isis.

Since returning from Greece, I’ve read everything I could about dark Madonnas. Only several hundred still exist in Europe, the majority here in France, where they call her Vierge Noire, the Black Virgin. Sometimes she’s referred to as the other Mary, a tantalizing reference to her pagan family tree.

Ann and I move along the ambulatory until we come to the small, circular chapel of St. Anne. I’ve been drawn to her since I discovered the prolific image of her holding her grown daughter Mary in her lap. There’s a legend that St. Anne’s body was brought to France by Mary Magdalene fifty years after her death and her bones were revered at Apt in Provence, but I can’t imagine anyone takes it seriously anymore.

We stare at the exquisite marble altar in her chapel. Someone has left a creased photograph on it of a dark-haired girl around three years old. I point it out to Ann, sure it’s someone’s grand-daughter. Anne is the patron saint of grandmothers. For an instant I try to imagine myself as a grandmother, a woman called Grandma, or Nana or Granny, but it feels foreign and other, like trying to imagine myself as an astronaut.

I look around for an image of St. Anne in the chapel, but there isn’t any. When painted as an older woman, she was often given a green cloak, like the mantle of spring, which is somehow unexpected. Her emblem is a door. Probably because she was the doorway for Mary, but my mind fidgets with the idea that she could represent other thresholds, too. A Grandmother door . . . the Old Woman door . . . some passage to the other side.

Ann photographs the picture of the little girl left here for St. Anne’s safekeeping, while I plop down on a bench and pull out the postcard I tucked inside the back cover of my journal. It depicts Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror. I first saw the painting in

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