On the first of several excursions that the Institut de Touraine has organized for its students, we visited the Chateaux de Cheverney and de Chambord. It rained in the Loire Valley today, but the castles were magnificent, and I finished the tour by committing one of the stupidest acts of my life.
The Chateau de Cheverney is probably most famous for being the castle on which Capitaine Haddock's ancestral home of Moulinsart is based, in Les Aventures de Tintin. Although the old stables and pigeon-cote house a special exhibit about the Herge connection, I did not have time to visit (sorry, Eli!). The Chateau de Cheverney is a baroque, Italian-influenced castle constructed in the early 17th century, on lands received from the French monarchy at the end of the 16th. The current edifice is built for comfort, and served no practical military function, as its predecessors had. As is typically baroque, the palace is built to conspicuously display power and wealth; as is typically Italian, the design is obsessively symmetrical, and in some rooms, false doors have been constructed in order to correspond to functioning doors. The pigeon-cote and stable outside are enormous: the capacity to keep dozens of horses and hundreds of pigeons signified wealth; the peasantry deeply resented the French nobility's pigeon prerogative, and according to Vovelle's La Chute de la monarchie, pigeon-cotes were some of the first targets of the French Revolution. Meanwhile, the facade of Cheverney was protected from the Revolutionary fervor, on account of the series of busts that decorate it. The busts were believed to depict the philosophes, champions of democracy and republicanism, although they really depicted various Roman emperors, monarchs' monarchs (hey, I can't tell the difference, either). The opposite mistake occurred at Notre Dame de Paris, where statues of saints were decapitated, because they were believed to be statues of French kings (the statues have since been repaired).
The interior of Cheverney was richly decorated: plenty of gold statues and ornamentation, and a fair amount of paintings of scenes from classical Greek mythology, including the kidnapping of Helen, the rescue of Andromeda, and Perseus's triumphant return with the head of Medusa (for some reason, Pegasus is featured behind Perseus). One room displays various arms and suits of armor, including armor forged in the last days it was still of practical use in combat. There are also a great deal of portraits, dating from the Renaissance (one produced by the workshop of Raphael) to the age of Louis XVI, even portraying that very man. 19th-century furnishings also decorate one wing of the house. On the ground floor is an object that garners far more attention than it deserves: a Louis-Quinze "regulator" clock, with hideously baroque bronze orientation by Caffieri, which displayed not only the second, minute, and hour, but also the day, date, and lunar phase. Thomas Jefferson had a similar device at Monticello, its display in the entrance hall and its mechanism extending into the basement, but at least he had the taste not to decorate it so ostentatiously.
We quickly stopped for lunch in the city of Blois, home of the Chateau Royal de Blois, the Church of St.-Vincent de Paul, the Maison de la Magie, and the most disgusting (and expensive) public toilets I have ever been forced to pay for. I munched the sandwich and banana M. Avertin packed for me, and toured the streets. Blois is far more of a tourist-trap than Tours, and makes one slightly uneasy with its spirit of showmanship. The heavily-restored chateau (complete with nightly "sound and light shows") reminds one of a overly made-up woman, and the Maison de la Magie ("Magic House") resorts to plastic mechanical dragon heads swaying and snapping to spooky music in order to attract visitors indoors. People shouldn't do that to their history. Still, the 17th-century Church of St.-Vincent de Paul, beneficiary of the generosity of Gaston d'Orleans (brother of Louis XIII) and his daughter, has a handsome and striking exterior, and contains the heart of its royal patron.
Our final stop for the day was the magnificent Chateau de Chambord, a building with richly baroque architecture and a fascinating history of construction and use. The first steps were taken by Francois I in 1519 shortly after the 25-year-old king had reconquered Milan. Francois used Chambord exclusively to throw lavish parties exclusively for his close friends (numbering around 2,000) rather than the entire court (~ 15,000); however, his seven visits to Chambord never amounted to more than 2 months' residence. Soon after the reign of Francois, the wars of religion occupied the French royalty, and although the castle passed through several hands, the next owner to lavish enough attention on the building to at least finish the roofs and complete the building of the retaining wall was Gaston d'Orleans (see above). The Duke was visited at his royal residence by the young Louis XIV, who understood Chambord for what it was: a symbol of wealth, prestige, and above all, power. Although Louis XIV eventually constructed Versailles, the baroque paragon, his capital in 1682, before Versailles there was Chambord, built for magnificence rather than comfort. When Louis had succeeded in raising the level of ostentatious palaces to a new high, he gave Chambord to the Polish king-in-exile, Stanislas Leszczynski. The chateau proved to be too cold for Stanislas to make his actual residence (the bigger the castle, the harder to heat), and Chambord passed, in turn, to the enormously rich Marechal de Saxe, and from him on to others, with very little time spent in the castle itself. Still, many of these short-term owners made alterations to chateau and its grounds, each leaving his own mark, before passing on, or losing, the white elephant.
Chambord's last famous owner was Henri d'Artois, the Compte de Chambord, heir to the French throne, who received the chateau when he was under two weeks old. By then, the palace had begun to fall into disrepair; in fact, it had only escaped destruction in the French Revolution because the Revolutionary government continued to postpone the demolition of this heirloom of the ancien regime. The Compte ordered the castle's restoration, but never lived there: he had repaired it for the same reason that the Revolutionary government had desired its destruction: it remained an opulent, showy reminder of the French monarchy.
Chambord is full of stories, literally beginning with its blueprints. The famous double-helical staircase that pierces through the very center of the keep was based upon a plan drawn up by Leonardo da Vinci, whom Francois commissioned. Although da Vinci's plan differed in some respects from the eventual product (he had actually planned for a square column, rather than a round one, and four staircases, rather than two), the staircase is still attributed to him, and the building remains the only one built on a design attributed to da Vinci. The identity of the real architect of Chambord, in fact, remains a mystery: officially, all 2,000 builders ultimately reported to Francois I. But could the king really have designed the castle itself? Francois I was a funny mixture of gallantry, erudition, and immaturity. He loved snowball fights, for instance, and it was because of the scar on his face which he received after being hit with a snowball containing a sharp piece of metal that he grew a beard (his paintings always depict him wearing a beard). He loved to read, and could and did ride his horse with his nose in a book. Once, when a boar was running loose in Chambord, it ran into the room where he and a number of members of the court happened to be at the moment. Everyone else pressed against the walls, Francois calmly approached the beast, and killed it with one stroke of his sword (there is a painting depicting the scene, published in the guidebook, but I cannot find it online). Could this enigmatic figure have also been an amateur architect? He is famously quoted as saying what amounts in English to "if you want something done right, do it yourself."
The second floor of Chambord's keep is where Moliere and Lully first performed the former's first play, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. Lulli was so worried that the play would be a disaster, that he insisted on taking on several minor roles, as well as playing the violin, in the performance. A year later, the same space was used for the enactment of Moliere's second play, his celebrated Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Before the debut, Louis and his court grumbled that surely M. Molliere thought they must be fools to appreciate a play with such poor subject-matter, but by the end of the second performance, they acknowledged his genius.
I was spellbound by the story of Chambord, its owners, and its architecture, and forgot to remind myself to avoid doing anything stupid. Although I was paying strict attention to the professor of civilization when he was expounding upon the significance of Cheverney's large windows, or about Francois I's beard, I was less attentive when he told us the time of departure. Thinking I was arriving nearly 10 minutes early for the bus's 5:45 departure, as I approached, I saw a bus that looked like ours pull out, and begin to drive away. I had the presence of mind to run after it, and due to a far greater stroke of luck than I think I will ever receive again in my life, it stopped. We were supposed to reconnoiter at 5:15. I do not know how miserable I would have been if the bus had left me, alone in the rain, at Chambord. I will never, ever, be so absolutely boneheaded to allow such a thing to happen again. I promise, Mom.
Stay cool, everyone! Coming in the next post: lousy contemporary art, a famous cathedral, another castle, socialist workers' revolts, and more!
~JD
"Entre l'elite eclairee et ceux qui n'ont aux Lumieres qu'un acces parfois tres indirect, on discerne un indeniable mouvement de propagation" [Between the enlightened elite, and those who had only occasional indirect access to the ideas of the Enlightenment, on detects an undeniable movement of propagation] (Vovell, Chute de la monarchie, p. 83).
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