A Quiet Place (S2: E3)

Hey everyone, I just wanted to take a moment to give an update on the show. I apologize for having gone dark for a little while, and I can’t blame anyone for being a little peeved with the absence. Anyway, I’m still alive (and thanks to everyone who reached out and asked exactly that!) and I still plan to continue the show. To be completely honest, I just simply got overwhelmed with what has been an incredibly busy period of time for me over here, and even though most of what I’m dealing with is very positive, with so much going on I have allowed social media, the site and the show to all go quiet for a few weeks. Believe me, I have been flagellating myself for letting my first love, this podcast, fall behind. It is my fervent hope that I have now come through this particularly busy time in my schedule, that I will get caught up and things will become smooth sailing once again. For what it’s worth, I’m going to go back to an every-other-week format for the foreseeable future - rather than every 10 days - so I can hit a regular timetable for you, as you deserve. I’d love to keep up a 7 or 10 day rotation, but until I can retire from day job and do nothing but this, well… For what it’s worth, it would also be nice to have proper library access back here in the UK. I feel like a kid who got to see the candy store, just to have the heavy door of COVID slammed in his face. Just like the other 7 billion of us, I’m looking forward to a vaccine, and normal life, and all of the goodness and promise of a New Year that is not 2020 just around the corner.

Moving on from that… this week, we're story-heavy as we manage to cover a 400 year period in our opening alone! I chose to do things this way this week because this was an opportunity to really highlight just how the mythology of France and the origin stories of the country really come into play all the way to the modern day. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen that happen; you may recall that early in Season One when I talked about Childebert that one of the major finds in his tomb were a number of jewel-encrusted golden bees. This symbol of the Merovingians was discovered by Napoleon, and when he needed a symbol to display to the world that he was a new Emperor, rooted in the history of the French but not beholden to the Bourbon’s fleur-de-lys, the symbol of these first Kings made a triumphant return.

However, the case of Dagobert is different, not in the sense that the symbols didn’t begin with the Merovingians, but in the sense that the particular symbol that Dagobert is about to oversee the construction of lasted from his reign all the way to the present day. Unlike the bees, which were buried and rediscovered centuries later - over a millennia, in fact - the cathedral of Saint Denis has been at the heart of Paris in some shape or fashion ever since it was “rediscovered” by Dagobert during that fortunate 7th century hunting trip. In fact, the monument continues to recreate itself to this very day, with work having been slated to recreate the north spire of the cathedral starting just this year - work that could well take more than a decade to complete.

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