My blog is now fully illustrated, with captioned photographs on Facebook. I'd like to dedicate this post to my friend and housemate Misaki, without whom this feat would have been impossible!
This afternoon, I visited the Chateau de Chenonceau, as well as its accompanying wine cellars. Chenonceau dates from the early 16th century, and is the oldest chateau I have described, so far (although the Chateau de Tours is nearly 500 years older: stay tuned). It was constructed by nouveau riche bourgeois, Thomas Bohier and his wife Katherine Briçonnet, who demolished the preexisting structure, leaving only a tower, which dates from the middle ages. Why did they leave the tower? In order to lend their family and new home an air of respectability that comes from owning a very old building. For the same reason, the couple constructed a chapel; chapels and antiquity both lend dignity to a chateau. Bohier's only claim to fame is his construction of this chateau, the most popular of all in the Loire Valley, and second in France only to Versailles. He was fully aware of this, and he inscribed his ambitions above his mantelpiece; translated into English, he stated that if the chateau were ever finished, he would be remembered. It was, and he is.
Chenonceau is of immense historical interest because of its architecture. It was the first chateau with large gardens: however, it represents only a first step. The two gardens which flank Chenonceau are an ornament to the castle; they represent a separate, detachable element. Gardens at chateaux will only achieve their apogee with Versailles, where the gardens function an ineluctable component of. Secondly, Chenonceau's construction began just as the first gusts of Italian Renaissance architecture rustled through France, and and the chateau magnificently straddles the Medieval and Renaissance eras of building. Chenonceau's most striking feature, on the exterior, is its bridge-like gallery extending out over the River Cher.
Chenonceau is known as the "chateau des dames," or "ladies' castle," on account of the many famous women who made it their home. For instance, one bedroom is called the "room of the five queens," because over time, five different queens used it as their bedroom. However, by far its two most famous occupants of were Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici.
Diane de Poitiers had the distinction of having been the mistress of two consecutive French kings, Francois I and Henri II (she also had a husband). She was the favorite in particular of Henri, who installed her in Chenonceau, which had become royal property. She oversaw the planting of one garden during her stay, which still bears her name; however, when Henri died in a joust, she lost her protector, and was finally subject to her lover's husband, Catherine de Medici. Catherine admired Chenonceau, and so evicted Diane from the premises, exchanging for it a rather minor castle, and planted her own garden at Chenonceau, also still bearing her name. Luckily, Diane's husband was exorbitantly wealthy, and happily built for her a much larger chateau than the one Diane had received from Catherine de Medici. A happy ending for everyone involved, except maybe for poor old Henri, who only received a lance in the eye for his trouble.
Though Chenonceau's interior is still magnificent, it has suffered from centuries of wear and tear. Most obviously, its floors were once richly painted: but passing feet have so worn away the original design, that only in the edges and corners of rooms is any remnant visible of the bold blues and yellows that once decorated the floors.
The "bridge" of Chenonceau was constructed a half-century after the main "body" of the house. Its interior design is Renaissance-inspired neo-classical, contrasting to the very medieval facade. Along the walls are still-newer busts of famous personages: I think that I recognized Louis XIV, and maybe Descartes, but who were the others? I haven't the foggiest idea.
Chenonceau is a masterpiece of composite architecture., and nowhere is this more evident than in the ceiling of the staircase, otherwise an uninspiring place to look. Overhead the foot of the stairs, the style is Italian: symmetrical, geometric, elegant, and classically-inspired. At the landing, the style abruptly becomes very French: vaulted, thick-ribbed, Gothic, pointed; a form deliberately difficult to construct. (The French preferred difficult architecture, appreciating technique relatively more than the Italians.) As one turns 90 degrees to one's left, and mounts the stairs again, the overhanging ceiling reverts to the Italian style. Strange? Yes. Fascinating? Even more so.
Many of the furnishings of Chenonceau, such as the mantelpieces and the bridge interior, are "grotesque." What is "grotesque" art? Art that has been inspired by the observation of the ruins of antique Roman palaces. The Oxford English Dictionary explains the history of this word far better than I can: "The etymological sense of grottesca would be ‘painting appropriate to grottos’. The special sense is commonly explained by the statement that grotte, ‘grottoes’, was the popular name in Rome for the chambers of ancient buildings which had been revealed by excavations, and which contained those mural paintings that were the typical examples of ‘grotesque’... Although this seems to be only a late conjecture, without any actual evidence, it appears to be intrinsically plausible." Now, you may refer to hideous, decadent-looking pieces of furniture as "grotesque," and know that, by your choice of words, you are comparing them to the contents of Calligula's palace.
The most important of Chenonceau's artifacts are its archives, chronicling its day-by-day management and maintenance. These are the true treasures of Chenonceau, which the Revolution would have destroyed, had they not been cleverly hidden by Mme. Dupin, who successfully disguised the chateau's library as a storehouse for lumber. The Revolution wished to destroy all such documents, because they contained noble genealogies. According to Vovelle's Chute de la monarchie, "A gang of armed villagers would show up at the neighboring castle, compel it to hand over its archives, books, records of land-management, secular titles, and feudal possessions, burning everything in a joyous bonfire" (p. 130, my translation). In other words, historians owe a very deep dept to this courageous Mme. Dupin, without whom we would never have such detailed descriptions of daily life in a Renaissance-era chateau.
Nor does the history end in the 18th or 19th centuries. During World War I, the owner of Chenonceau turned his house into a makeshift hospital, where over 2,000 injured French soldiers received medical attention. In World War II, the chateau was poised on the very border between the forces of the Free French and what was officially Occupied France. A group of German soldiers, throughout the war, carefully watched the castle, ready to blow it to smithereens at a moment's notice.
It was an extremely hot bus-ride to the wine-cellars of Chenonceau, and the subterranean tunnels were extremely welcome. The official name of the wine produced by the cellars is Vouvray, a sparkling semi-dry white. The wine cellars feel much like a roomy mine-shaft, and there's a good historical reason for this: the cellars are really the old quarries from which the stone used to build the Loire Valley chateaux in total was extracted. A network of over 12km of Vouvray cellars tangle their way through the Touraine hillside, containing approximately 4 million bottles. That's a lot of wine, and some of it is still riddled manually (although most bottles are riddled automatically, or semi-automatically). The French word for "to riddle" is "remuer," which literally means "to wiggle," as an animal wiggles its limbs.
This weekend, I will be taking a long bus ride to northern France, for more chateaux. I highly recommend that you look at my Facebook photos of Chenonceau, in order to better understand what I have been describing.
~JD
"Dans cette vacance momentanee de l'autorite dont la bourgeoisie sent tout le danger, il y a place pour des hommes forts, et pendant que d'une main elle redige sa Constitution liberale, cette bourgeoisie se trouve des heros pour defendru un nouvel ordre qu'elle sent fragile: les exemples provinciaux ne manquent pas (le maire Lieutaud a Marseille); on en trouve l'expression, a l'echelon national, dans l'exceptionnelle popularite de La Fayette, en cette anee 1790" (Vovelle, Chute de la monarchie, p. 142).
Translation: "In this momentary absence of authority, by which the bourgeoisie felt endangered, there was room for strong men, and, with one hand drafting a liberal Constitution, the bourgeoisie found for itself heroes to defend the new order that it felt was fragile: there is no lack of provincial examples (Lieutad, mayor of Marseille); but one finds the expression of this sentiment, at the national level, in the exceptional popularity of Lafayette, in the year 1790."
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