The Unexpected Comedy of French Cathedral Towns: A Novelist’s Research Adventure

Julia Langbein, author of the new novel *Dear Monica Lewinsky*, recently took two research trips to French cathedral towns. What she discovered wasn’t just architectural grandeur—it was the absurd, very human comedy playing out in the shadows of towering Gothic spires.

Langbein, who holds a PhD in art history and has a background in comedy, needed to see the cathedrals of Amiens and Bourges for scenes in her book. Her novel follows a character named Jean Dornan, who had an affair with her medieval art professor during the summer of 1998—the same summer Monica Lewinsky was publicly vilified. In the book, Lewinsky appears as a spectral figure, a patron saint of those who suffer public shaming.

Her first trip, to Amiens with her visiting parents, was a failure. “All I could think about was whether they were tired or hungry,” Langbein says. “I couldn’t absorb anything for the book.” So a few months later, she went alone to Bourges, a town south of Paris. There, she wandered past half-timbered houses, ate cheap duck, and felt guilty for enjoying herself. But something clicked.

“These cathedral towns are funny worlds,” she says. “You have cobblers and cafés awkwardly nestled up to these overwhelming monuments to God.” Inside the Bourges Cathedral, she watched tourists shuffle aimlessly, unsure how to behave. Then in the crypt, she found a stone carving of a human butt—and watched someone poke it. “Upstairs, people didn’t know what to do. Downstairs, they knew exactly what to do.”

Langbein says the trip taught her that travel doesn’t need to be justified. “You don’t have to explain a research trip. And you don’t have to explain travel.”