[Photo Credit: Yoyo6507, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
When Julia’s brother Avery joined her in Paris in the autumn of 1898, they had the pleasure of visiting together some of the sites she had seen on her arrival two years before. This included Rouen’s famed cathedral, with its three mismatched towers. The early Gothic Tour Saint-Romain (left) was completed in the 12th century and named for the 7th-century Bishop Romain, said to have tamed a dragon that was menacing the city. The flamboyant Gothic Tour de Beurre (“The Butter Tower”), completed in 1506, received its unusual name from its revenue source: donations given in gratitude for a papal dispensation allowing parishioners to consume milk and butter during Lent. The cathedral’s central lantern tower—with its wrought-iron spire almost 500 feet high—was among the tallest structures in Europe when it was completed in 1882 (after a fire destroyed a lower lantern and spire).
Though Julia admired Rouen Cathedral (the first one she had ever visited), she found its west façade visually confusing, writing to her cousins: ”To me that central tower & the sides & choir seem one of the most beautiful things I have seen – one most lovingly remembered – & indeed, in afternoon lights, the whole church inside and out, except the façade seemed very very fine – It was our favorite place, and every day found us there several times.”
[Julia Morgan Papers, Special Collections and Archives,
California Polytechnic State University, 010-2-D-17-12]
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