Chateaux II: Return to the Loire!

Back to the Loire Valley, but this time, with EDUCO! The rendez-vous was at 7:45 in the 6th arrondissement, so I got up around 6:00, and trotted off to catch the bus. I slept through most of the bus ride out; at noon, we arrived in the village of Amboise, home of both the royal chateau of the same name, and Clos Luce (Da Vinci's house, if you remember that entry). We had until 1:30 to stroll through the town and eat lunch. I had made a sandwich the night before, which I ate as a checked out the ramparts of Amboise, even managing to take a picture of its funny-shaped exterior, from below. Still during lunch hour, I took a stroll to Clos Luce's Da Vinci Park, taking the opportunity to examine several of the gadgets, and listen to several parts of the Leonardo-guided tour, that I hadn't before. Particularly interesting was an explanation of his study of the "human machinery," and of his recognition of the similarities between a cow's stomach and our own, and a frog's nervous system, and our own; at one time, he had ten cadavers, which he had dissected.

I met back with the rest of the EDUCO students (and had a bit of a discussion with our guide about Gothic Flamboyant architecture), and we all visited Clos Luce as a group. I hadn't noticed it the first time around, but there is a secret underground passageway leading from the chateau of Amboise to Clos Luce (it's closed to visitors), which Francois I used to furtively visit da Vinci. I also hadn't noticed that Marguerite de Navarre had her own bedroom at Clos Luce, for her visits to her brother's hired genius.

Most people don't know about Marguerite de Navarre (aka Marguerite d'Angouleme), and I think that it's only fair that I introduce this exceptional woman. Queen of Navarre, and older sister of Francois I of France, Marguerite was a highly-social, highly-astute woman, best remembered today for her great work of literature, the Heptameron (modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron), a collection of seventy "framed" stories. However, she was a true Renaissance woman, and seemed to be everywhere, meeting everyone there is to meet in the Renaissance (her friendship and fascination with da Vinci is a perfect example of this). Apparently a quick thinker, she wrote while traveling in her carriage. A purveyor of tolerance, she offered shelter to the much-persecuted Protestants. Her statue now stands in the Jardin Luxembourg, and you can see my photo of it on Facebook.

After trotting around the Parc da Vinci, where I played the tour guide for a few of my friends, we hopped back on the bus, and traveled to one of my favorite chateaux -- Chenonceau, the queens' chateau with the two magnificent gardens. Again, I noticed a few things I hadn't before, such as the massive mother-of-pearl cabinet offered as a wedding present to Henri II and Catherine de Medicis by the Republic of Venice, and the Flemish tapestry illustrating this happy event. Our guide seemed to recognize my general interest for all of the history surrounding us, and happily chatted with my friend Ade and me about the furniture, paintings, architecture, and tapestries. As I've mentioned before, there is absolutely nothing like visiting a chateau with a historian, nothing like it at all.

Next stop was wine-tasting at Pere Auguste, a family-owned winery that produces Touraine wine. The business is fairly small, and it was one of the owners who gave us a tour of the presses and fermenting tanks. I nearly had a moment of confusion, due to the identical pronunciation of the words for "rooster" (coq) and "grapeskin" (coque). There were fruitflies in the winery, which was a bit unnerving, but the wine was quite good. There were four qualities -- white, red, rose, and sparkling -- and I'll admit that I preferred the Rose, but wasn't too wild about the red. The wine cost 15 Euros for three bottles, which is a very good deal in France, and the winery made quite a good revenue that day from the American tourists!

Back on the road, we arrived at the countryside hotel where we were to spend the night. We had rented out an entire building, where we were three-to-a-room. There were only five male students who had come on the trip, however, so Nick and I jumped to grab a double together (there are a few more boys who didn't show up, but yes, EDUCO is almost all girls, and every current staff member is female). After about 10-15 minutes just to put our things away, and find out in which room the cute girls were staying, we headed over to the dinner room, where we had a far, far better meal than I think anyone had expected. The sole vegetarian got an omelet and courgettes to go with his fusilli, but it was a good omelet. After dinner, our guide led us in some French drinking songs, "Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde," and "Buvons un coup, buvons en deux."

Soon after dinner, the party started. I hadn't realized it, but many of my classmates had purchased wine in order to consume it that night, together. I couldn't contribute much, but my friends were more than happy to share. We had a pretty good time, sitting together in the middle of a field, and playing various games designed to divulge our sexual lives. I managed to teach Dead Monkey to the rest, which went over surprisingly well. I had a very good time, and didn't get trashed.

Next morning, up at seven. Not fun, after a night like that! Still, Nick and I stumbled over to the breakfast room, beating the rest of the bleary-eyed crowd. Before long, we hopped back on the bus, headed for Blois.

I'd like to retract every negative statement I made about the royal chateau of Blois in my last entry on the town (published about six weeks ago). Although I maintain that the town feels like a tourist trap, and that the Maison de la Magie just across the way is a cheesy swindle, the only fault I have with Blois is that photography is forbidden, and my only quarrel with our tour of the chateau is that it was too quick. The chateau is absolutely fantastic, architecturally, because there are four distinct historical building periods discernible to the naked eye, even to me. Standing in the central courtyard, one look at the red-brick 15th-century Italian-style Gothic flamboyant wing constructed under Louis XII, turn ninety degrees to see the amazing 16th-century Renaissance wing ordered by Francois I, and turn another ninety degrees to see the unfinished 17th-century Classical wing ordered by Gaston, duc d'Orleans. When Gaston was in the midst of construction, his brother, Louis XIII, had a son; suddenly, Gaston was no longer heir to the throne of France. His allowance being cut off in such an abrupt fashion, he lacked the funds to complete his architectural plans, let alone demolish the older sections of the castle, as he had planned. For this reason, the conglomeration exists as it does today. Blois has been fabulously and meticulously restored with paintings, tapestries, and furniture, almost as well as Langeais. The castle is the site of a famous murder, that of Henri II's brother, who during the wars of religion was supported by the ultra-catholic faction; with the support of the first estate and a large section of the third, he was likely to become king. Henri disposed of him, summoning him to his (Henri's) presence, where he (the duc) would be without his customary bodyguard. Months later, in a fabulous boomerang effect, Henri II was himself assassinated. This event was followed by the War of the Three Henris (I'm not kidding about this), leaving, finally, Henri IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, and author of the Edict of Nantes, as king, in the last decade of the 16th century. Naturally, Henri IV was assassinated only a few years afterward... You can also see the secret cabinets, concealed in the wall, where Catherine de Medicis hid important documents of state, etc. (no, not poison).

Next up was another castle I had not visited, the Chateau de Beauregard. To be honest, it's nothing more than a hunting lodge, owned by Henri II's secretary of state. The building itself is not terribly interesting, historically, nor particularly beautiful; the grounds are abundant, but none too interesting. The floor and walls of the upstairs gallery, however, are the real treasure trove of the chateau. The floor is finely decorated with delft porcelain tiles, depicting a 16th-century army on the march, each row of tiles depicting a soldier bearing different arms. The walls, meanwhile, are covered with dozens of portraits, depicting the principal actors in French politics, reign-by-reign, from the time of the Hundred Years' War until the time of Louis XIV, the sun king. Our guide gave us a rapid explanation, explaining who was who. Many of the historical personages were not even French; Francois I was situated beside Suleiman the Magnificent, and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire.

Following the tour was one of the most sumptuous and gourmet meals I believe I have ever had, and certainly the nicest I have had in the last few year. We sat in the Orangerie, and enjoyed plate after plate of fine French food -- couscous, tomato, quiche, salad, wine, cheese, good bread, decent red wine, strawberries in wine, etc. There was good company too (I sat with some very cool people, including all four of the other male students on the trip), and though several unforeseen events did occur, they served more as conversational topics than as anything capable of ruining a meal. The first was the fat spider I spotted floating in my wine, after I had taken no more than a couple of sips. The second was the fact that, unlike at the hotel where we stayed the night, the Orangerie had not prepared a vegetarian meal in advance for me, so they just threw together an omelet (surprise, surprise), but at least they didn't complain. When David found a lock of hair in his salad, we assumed that it was meant for me, who had had the temerity to mention the spider.

The waitress had kindly brought our whole table a new jug of wine after the arachnid incident, and so I drank a little bit more than I should have; I still felt a buzz when we arrived at Chambord, the great pleasure-house of Francois I. The chateau is so vast that in my two visits, I still haven't seen everything, but I did notice a few points of interested that I had missed on my first round. The first was the office, complete with furniture, where Louis XIV had dictated the repeal of the Edict of Nantes (he signed it at Fountainbleu). I had also missed the beds of Louis and of the king of Poland, and one of the three titanic ceramic stoves installed by the Marechal of Saxe (all three men were proprietors, at one time or another). I also visited the rooms dedicated to the Compte de Chambord, so-called Henri V, reading about the man on whose shoulders so much royalist hope rested, the "miracle child" born after the assassination of his father.

We sadly had very little time to visit the chateaux, but the trip was amazing. I dozed for part of the bus ride back to Paris, and also played Contact with the other students. Now I'm back, class has begun at La Sorbonne, and I'm (finally) making some French friends. Hope all is well with you.

~JD

"Enfin le regime egalitaire -- qui serait l'acte de tolerance --les deux confessions placees sur le meme pied, le culte de l'une et l'autre librement exerce partout cote a cote, la participation a la vie publique assuree a tous -- cette solution n'est pas plus realisable, les esprits et les moeurs s'y opposant; et c'est l'explication majeure des difficultes rencontrees par Henri IV pour retablir la paix a l'interiuer de son royaume"[By the end, the establishment of an egalitarian regime -- in other words, an act of tolerance, the two sects placed on equal footing, both cults freely exercised everywhere, side-by-side, participation in public life guaranteed for all -- this solution was no longer possible, with feelings and mores in such opposition; and this is the major explanation of the difficulties encountered by Henri IV in bringing peace to the interior of his kingdom] (Robert Mandou, Introduction a la France moderne, 173-174).

Cheverney and Chambord

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).