But that was not to be. I had to get in the car and get onto Route 76. We passed town after small town: first the gas stations, then the fast food joints, then the massive shopping centres and car lots, followed briskly by boarded-up stores, decrepit concrete housing, motels with all-you-eat buffets, dead city-centres – only to have the entire thing repeated in reverse. From town to town we sped, cornfields and wheatfields on each side extending to the vast flat horizon; the road, in front of us, mercilessly without any features. There we were, plains to the left of us, plains to the right of us, plains in front of us … on rode the six hundred, theirs not to- ah. Er. Um. Sorry there, forgot myself for a second. So there we were, driving among farms and pasture lands and prairies …
No Toto, we were not in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Kansas, but in the flatlands of middle France. It’s remarkable how similar, in some basic details, middle France and middle America are. The average Parisian, who has far more sense than drive in the middle part of France, would never admit to it, but there it was. But for the fact that each village boasted a XIIth century church – and, believe me, that gets pretty old hat pretty soon – many towns and villages in the middle of the country (the part that does not see any tourists) have the same basic build of a small American town. The average Praisian would no doubt blame this on globalisation, or better yet, globalisation! (pronounced with a snooty French accent), Americanisation, imperialism, capitalism … N’importe quoi. The big difference between France and the US is the distance between the towns.
When you go through enough of these in the space of a few hours, you realise that whoever invented the pattern of economic activity in an American small town (now replicated here and there) was a genius: who wants massive trucks winding through city centres looking for gas or food? And where else are you going to put car dealerships? As for the hyper-markets: well, let me tell ya, “charm” costs, even in France, especially in France. You can get a kilo of nectarines in a hypermarché for the kingly sum of One Euro, or you can wait for the Wednesday market and buy the same kilo from a smelly farmer with one black tooth for three times the price and a lot more attitude. I know, because I live near a market and I used to do my shopping there. I stopped going there when a farmer told me not to touch his produce and proposed to select for me: two rotten avocados and two unripe ones for €10. Non merci. I trundled off to the hypermarché, manhandled a dozen avocados until I found the ones I wanted and came home. Because of the all choice, I also spent about €100 on stuff I did not need, but that should not detain us. And the avocados? Two unripe and the other two rotten. But that too is beside the point. I forgot what the point was.
So we got on the road and sped toward … well, the first night we were staying in a XIVth château in Burgundy. We were not there for wine-tasting – this was only our first stop on the way to the Loire Valley. And as it happened, we got there around 10 pm – too late, the host informed us, for any restaurants in the region. No problem: we got sandwiches from the local gas station – 7 km away – scaled the three floors to our room and passed out on the beds. The next morning …
Ah, but it is always the next morning when you realise what magic, what beauty, this country has to offer. Our room was under the roof, in the left wing of the château. We looked out onto towers on top of a moat and a quaint granary. We had breakfast in a lovely formal dining room with a painting (original) of Erasmus looking over us. Simply wonderful.
From there we headed to our first destination, the city of Bourges, near the geographical centre of France. This is the capital of the province of Berry – the ducs de Berry were quite rich and enormously famous at some point (see Chambord, below) – and, more important, it is here that one of the two earliest examples of Gothic architecture was built.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />
The Cathedral is unusual in many respects. It was begun about the same time as the Cathedral at Chartres, and so each of them presented a model of Gothic architecture to follow. As it happens, it was Chartres that was copied and not Bourges. Some suggest that it was because Chartres was closer to Paris, and so it ended up being more copied. For my own money – and I have not been to Chartres, though I have seen many of its progeny, including the Cathedrals in Köln, Barcelona and Prague – it is probably because Bourges is far more human, more immediate and – therefore, fatally if you want to impress people with the glory of God – less imposing than the Chartres models.
It is also less ideological as a building: it is not in the shape of a cross. The absence of a transept does wonders for the lighting in the place: inside, the nave is like a basilica, only wider, higher and much brighter. There are five aisles but the two on the side rise to a height of 69 feet. The church, at 130 feet, is the widest in France. And yet: from each point in the church I could see all five aisles. There is no mystery here, no hidden corners, no shadows. You can see why church leaders would have gone with Chartres. It was well worth the trip.
Two hours later and we were in Chenanceaux. The chateau there is preposterous. It straddles the Loire – turrets and all – nestled in acres and acres of woodland and parks and riverside terraces. The living and partying areas of the chateau are not that grand – but still, the idea that you can just build a chateau over a river, thus blocking the height of the boats or the width of the barges that could pass … It really is something out of a fairy tale.
From there we drove further west to the outskirts of Nantes, to the Chateau du Breil, where we were staying. We were in the middle of Muscadet vineyards and pasturelands here and there where sheep grazed peaceably. The night sky was overflowing with stars. And the chateau boasts a lovely heated pool, and a crazy Frenchwoman who was never without her glass of Chablis (“in Paris we don’t consider Muscadet wine”) and her Gauloises. Her eldest, my age, is a French diplomat in London and so she immediately adopted me. We were well taken care of.
On the Sunday we went to Fontevraud to visit the Abbey where Eleanor of Acquitaine, Henry II and Richard Lionheart are buried. (See the movie The Lion in Winter, and you will want to drive 600 km to see this Abbey and to pay homage to the great Queen.) There we saw the Dungeon of the Chinon Castle, where Henry II had his court. (Although king of England, Henry had lots of territory in France and preferred to stay in the region, to fight his endless wars with the French king, Philippe Augustus. Philippe was, incidentally, Richard’s (Henry’s son) lover, before Richard became king.) I went down to the bowels of the dungeon, fell in the dark and the damp, and bloodied my elbow. The romantic in me wanted to think that perhaps Richard or Eleanor had also fallen there when they were imprisoned in the castle. (Complicated family.) But, of course, it was an illusion: the dungeon had been built by Philippe in 1205, a year after Eleanor’s death and six years after Richard expired.
From Chinon to Saumur and the Disney castle on the heights overlooking the Loire. This, by the way, is the region of the Troglodytes – the cave-dwelling peoples who carved their abodes into the limestone hills along the river. If you are interested in that sort of thing, go to Capadoccia, in Turkey.
Our last stop was the Château de Chambord. It is stunningly beautiful and strikingly impudent. It is a hunting lodge of sorts, designed to near absolute mathematical precision. Its royal quarters have housed kings and queens and mistresses, in quick succession. There is a double-helixed staircase in the middle of the château, reportedly designed by Da Vinci – proving, once again, that he was an alien. No doubt, three hundred years from now we will decode the DNA message encoded in the staircase. The château anticipates Gaudi in its strangeness, Dali in its surrealism, and Fiddler on the Roof in the many staircases, inside and out, going nowhere, just for show …. If I were a rich man, indeed. I could hear the last owner of the château singing that as he gave up the crumbling building to the French government for the princely sum of one franc. He sold the land for another five million.
That owner, a certain Comte de Chambord, was a descendant of an earlier count by that name who, in 1873 declared his readiness to accede to the throne of France as Henri V. He was not as batty as all that: he was the son of the last duc de Berry (see above). During the Empire – the second Empire, led by the third Napoleon – the good people of France collected money for the impoverished count to buy back his estate (the château). And so he did. After the collapse of the Empire, the fall of the Commune and the declaration of the Third Republic, the good count put his name forward as the next king: the Bourbons and the Orléans having expired, the Berrys were the last royal line to remain. Though impudently declaring himself the successor in spirit to the great Henri IV, the count was not well-received and he died ten years later.
And so it goes.