Montdidier: Parmentier's Home Town

Required Activities

• On the place Parmentier, between the hôtel de ville and the church of Saint-Pierre, find Albert Roze's bronze Parmentier of 1931 — 2.50 m and 800 kg — and walk round its pedestal to the allegory of Chemistry on it; the statue Victor Hugo mocked here in 1849, potato in hand and all in bronze, was the earlier one, destroyed in the bombardment of 10 August 1918

• In the church of Saint-Pierre, find the tomb of Raoul de Vexin, count of Amiens, Valois and Vexin, buried here when he died in 1074 — the man who put aside his second wife to marry Anne of Kiev, widow of Henri I of France, and was excommunicated with her for it in 1064

• In the church of Saint-Sépulcre, built between 1510 and 1519 and put back together after 1918, find the three things that survived: the 16th-century Entombment carved in polychrome stone, the font of the same century, and the six mid-17th-century Brussels tapestries hung in the nave

• Walk to the place de la République and find the pyramid-shaped war memorial of 1923, flanked by Albert Roze's pair of figures called Les deux générations — the same sculptor as the Parmentier, carving here for a town that had just been destroyed rather than for a famous son