After 9/11 I was stuck in France for ten days. Instead of staying in Paris at the Four Seasons, a prominent Saudi watering hole, I took my associate and drove to Bayeux. The tapestry was a significant token of western advances and managed to assuage the mutilation of friends and colleagues in New York. The town of Bayeux is quaint bu wonderfully Norman.
The tapestry was displayed in a simple museum. What amazed me was despite my Latin being then some forty years old, as I walked about the display I could readily read most of the tapestry. It was less a recognition of my lasting Latin aptitude than it was of the limited Latin of its makers.
But it was a truly unique emblem of western civilization. The telling of a story of Norman success against Saxon indulgence.
Hopefully the Brits do not damage this wonderful emblem of an evolving civilization.
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