Église Notre-Dame de Bordeaux

This guide to Eglise Notre-Dame de Bordeaux opens with the carved doorway in front of you, where a kneeling woman hands a string of beads to a robed man, a scene Dominican legend places in the 1200s as the Virgin arming Saint Dominic against the heresies spreading through southern France. The Dominicans who built this church treated the rosary not as a trinket but as a countable, repeatable ritual, fifty Hail Marys worked bead by bead, and that devotion is why the little square outside still carries its name. Look for the same relief that gave place du Chapelet its own.