Next door

On one of our walks around Lyon we came on a square which looked pretty haphazard. Looking more closely I saw that the buildings were narrow and oddly matched. Among many late 19th century CE and early 20th century buildings, a sliver of a much older building was left. Lyon’s history spans a long period, so it requires a better eye than mine to start to guess the age of a building from these little clues. The door was topped by a lovely crescent of stone and wood. Above that was a single slit of a window which gave light to what I thought was five floors of the structure. Worth walking up closer to see.

The arch over the door was done in well-dressed light and dark stone. The same stones had been used in the pillars and arch of the window slit centered above it. The rest of the facade was far rougher. What was this place? The keys carved into the wood above the door was my only clue. It could signify skill, and so this could be a medieval or renaissance guild house. But it was more likely that it signified the keys to heaven, and make this a small church or chapel. The fact that it was left unchanged for centuries while the houses around it underwent renovations made this interpretation the more likely. Maybe then the thing above the keys was a bishop’s mitre?

My eyes slid away to the tobacconist next door. I used to love these old style Tabac-Presse shops: you could get cigarettes, newspapers, bus tickets, and any old thing there. This one had a fine piece of advertisement painted on its shutters. Lyon is large enough to retain its minor talent: not just the buskers making music around the square but also good artists who wouldn’t be able to break into the bigger art world.