Chateaux and a Fact Break

The longest river in France

I've decided to begin a new feature of The Travel Journal:  The Fact of the Day.  We are already about seven or eight facts behind, so I have to catch up:

• Thursday's fact:  The Loire River (right outside our tilted skylights at the moment) is the longest river in France (about 1,000 km) but is generally non-navigable because of currents, floods, droughts and just being a weird river (that's probably two facts, so remember if I run out later).

• Friday's fact:  France has more roundabouts than any other country in Europe, including England.  As far as I can tell, we have been around most of them.  Very few stop lights in a week of traveling.

• Saturday's fact:  A “troglodyte” is a cave, carved into a chalk cliff, of which there are many hereabouts, for hermits to live in, hermits who had given up worldly things in order to live sparsely and meditate (some lived on top of pillars built for the purpose, but that's another story).  After the cave hermit fad died out, the troglodytes were used (and are used today) to grow mushrooms.  These are different from The Trogs, who recorded “Wild Thing" in 1966.

• Sunday's fact:  Most college students in France spend less than 1,000 USD a year for tuition, fees and books, and whatever room and board costs.  And the world hasn't ended.

• Monday's fact:  The first half dozen Kings of England after the Conquest were French, and some of them (Henry II, for instance), spoke no, or very little, English when they ascended the throne.

• Tuesday's fact:  In a French restaurant, the “entree” is not the main course, but the starter – the 'entry' or 'beginning.'  You knew this!  The main course is called the 'plat' (plate).

• Wednesday's fact:  A “perfect egg” (ouef parfait) is an egg that is as close to having a runny yolk – but doesn't – as is possible.  They are cooked about an hour – apparently, in some sort of sou-vie arrangement.  They taste terrible, especially without salt.  Hey!  Another bonus fact!

• Thursday's fact:  Just about everything we stop and see on this trip is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – even the view from certain places. 

Where you can find "entrees" and "plats"

Anyway.  Back to:

Thursday:

I really want to get into our Mont St Michel day, which was yesterday, but since this journal is written almost entirely by memory, I need to get Thursday down before it swirls into myth and memory.  It's currently early Saturday morning, at the beginning of The Invasion Weekend:  fundamental experiences of perhaps the two best known invasions in Western history, both of which took place across the same body of water, but in the opposite directions.  But that's still to be written, on another early morning in a hotel lobby.

I mentioned the difference between "can't wait to see this" days and "surprise!" days.  We had the itinerary for every stop on this tour many months ago, so nothing is really a surprise; the "Surprise! days are places we've never heard of .  Today (Thursday) was a day of three surprises, including two Chateaux (plural of Chateau.  There's a free fact!).  A "Chateau" in France is a defensive fort or castle, or a large manor house, or a French vineyard.  That covers a lot of ground.  We saw the vineyard chateau yesterday, as well as the fort/castle (above Sumaur) and today was the large manor house.  Think Downton Abbey.  Chenonceau is a magnificent affair, on the Cher River in the Loire Valley, which is world famous for its chateaux.  When I say “on the Cher River,” it's literally true; you can cross the river in this house and on its attached bridges.  That's one pretty cool thing about it.

Another cool thing about Chenonceau is that its history is mostly about powerful women.  Without going into the details, which our Chenonceau guide kept referring to as “soap opera” (more on her later), the wife of Henry II (of France, not the one in England) and his mistress each owned it at one time, had massive influence regarding its design, and what went on inside it.  The former was Catherine de Medici, of the Italian Medicis, married off to the future French king at 17, who went on to become mother of three kings and two queens, and then, when her husband died, becomes the Queen Mother and continues to guide France, sometimes from the shadows and sometimes in full view, through interesting times, as they say.  The Mistress was Diane de Porties, of aristocratic blood (as opposed to Catherine, whose Medici blood was strictly commercial), lady-in-waiting to a number of queens and queen mothers.  She and the future Henry II became man and mistress when he was 15 and she (a widow) was 35, and she was the very public love of Henry's life for all of that life, beginning, apparently, one year after his arranged marriage to Catherine when he was 14.  I'm not making any of this up.  Each of the two women designed, and had built, extensive gardens at the chateau, one on the left, and one on the right, as you approached the main entrance.

Anyway, enough of that; these stories are worth some time to read about.  The chateau is very striking, mostly because of its position on the river.  The kitchen can be found inside the massive piers; food and supplies were delivered by boat.  The grand gallery – or both of them, one atop the other – stretches for much of the distance across the river, and in addition to being the place for lords and dandies to see and be seen across the centuries, was a hospital during WWII, caring for French casualties.  Since the river was the border between occupied France and Vichy France, the chateau was also a conduit for escape from the occupied side.  And so forth.

We had a local guide take us through the chateau; she was our least favorite guide of the trip so far, a trip of very exceptional guides.  Abbey and I have been leading tours for many years, and have learned to tell a story that our guests can follow, relate to, and take away with them, share with others, and consider for a long time.  We have also learned that the tour is about the story, not about us.  Our guide at Chenonceau ignored both of these rules, for the most part.  She was a tall, stylishly dressed woman from Brooklyn, who flitted from factoid to factoid, ignoring context, laughing at her own jokes, and noting again and again that she was an expert in 10th and 11th century architecture and not whatever she was talking about.  She was a hit with a lot of the group, probably because she was entertaining, and entertaining – a sarcastic, cynical, flamboyant entertaining – she was.  Abbey and I left feeling that we hadn't learned much of interest or of importance.  She also didn't seem to take kindly to questions or comments – another basic guiding no-no – but seemed to feel that we should have known the answer ourselves.

Well, enough of that.  Back to the bus.  We had lunch in another small medieval/Renaissance town with a chateau in the center - another half-sandwich each, and later a "religieuse” pastry, which was one of the items on the Cheese or Cake? Quiz.  It was very chocolate and very good.  Abbey started a painting, but didn't get past the sketching part before it was time to make our way (a fair distance) to the bus.  One of the things we had enjoyed doing in Europe – and hadn't had the chance to do it very much – was spend a half day at an outdoor cafe, me drinking coffee and Abbey painting.  But I'm not drinking coffee at the moment (but tea would work, as well) – maybe in Paris.

Our last stop was the Chateau de Villandry (right, with thunderclouds), also in the Loire Valley (all the great chateaux, apparently, are in the Loire Valley)(No, David, I don't really mean that, not after your pictures of Chantilly).  We drove in at the end of a thunderstorm, got out as the rain was ending, and drove out as the next one began; between, the sun was shining on the chateau and the gardens, and dark clouds were all around; a pretty melodramatic landscape.  We boarded the bus as the first drops were falling.

Apparently, the French king got involved (or maybe even started, I've forgotten) some wars in Italy in the 15th century, and the result was he came home really enthused about that thing they had there called the Renaissance.  Villandry, constructed in the early sixteenth century on the foundation of a medieval castle (named for a pigeon), and retaining one of its donjons or keeps (corner tower, visible in the pic above, on the right end), was the last great chateau of the French Renaissance period.  I found it interesting that it was constructed by the King's finance minister, as was the chateau this morning (different king).  That, I suppose, was where the money was.

This chateau is known especially for its extensive (very extensive) gardens; we had time to tour the gardens or the chateau, and (probably unsurprisingly) went for the house tour.  It helped that we were told that there are magnificent views of the gardens from most of the rooms in the chateau (this turned out to be true - e.g. pic above left).  We got audio tours with admission, and the rooms' decorations and furnishings were original (up to the eighteenth? nineteenth? centuries).  They were pretty much what you might expect from a Renaissance chateau:  grand simplicity; vibrant colors, and more than a hint of Arab influence.  We loved it.  And we got great pictures of the gardens, and the town beyond, from the old windows, some with wavy glass.  Then back to Saumar and dinner in the restaurant which is attached to the hotel.

• Friday's fact:  The next day (which is yesterday as I write this) we drove through Brittany to get to Normandy.  In Brittany, they call clogs “sabot.”  During the industrial revolution, power looms replaced hand weaving and put a lot of folks in Brittany out of work. They responded by throwing their clogs into the power looms, disabling them and establishing the term “sabotage.”  Or so I'm told.

NOTE:

This is - I am not making this up - an entirely different cat than any of the others in this journal, overseeing the Chateau de Villandry gift shop, which we had to wind our way through to get out.

Gingers.  They've taken over the world.

Bonus pics from Chateau de Villandry.  As always, click to embiggen.  As usual, apologies for this particular blog platform's inability to handle simple formatting: