Tours itself didn’t seem to have too much that grabbed our attention, but it sat in the Loire Valley, a region of rolling green countryside and, judging by some of the leaflets we picked up in the train station, medieval chateaux every twenty yards. The next day we wandered back to the train station and decided to catch a train to one of them. Seeing as we had our Interrail tickets, it didn’t seem too bad an idea to take a day trip on the trains, what with them being effectively free from now on.
Chenonceau was one of the more famous, apparently. The guidebooks were full of off-the-cuff comments like this, and I’d never heard of it.
It was beautiful. The Chateau had its own small train station surrounded by fields, with a single road approaching from up the valley. We were two of only a few people that got off at the station, which was a raised concrete platform with a single bench, with steps leading down to a path under enormous leafy trees leading to the Chateau. The sun was out, and slid between the branches high above our heads as coaches rolled ponderously out of the car park and disappeared over the brow of the hill.
There were grounds with wooden sculptures dotted in glades outside of the paid-for areas, and we wandered around these for a bit before going inside. Inside, everything was so perfect it was as though it had been given a going over by the historic equivalent of a manicurist. The paths were even and swept, the grass was uniformly cut and pleasing to the eye, everything was clean and the arrangement of grass and flower, tree and shrub was hugely calming and pleasing to the eye. That was just outside the gift shop. The gardens themselves were even better.
The chateau sat on the banks of the river Cher, and one long halled room spanned the river itself, making the building a bridge as well. The main path led up to the gates of the chateau between an avenue of trees, and there was a garden either side of it. Both were ornamental, but they took on new meaning with a bit of background history. The one on the left was planned and planted by an owner of Chenonceau, Diane de Poitiers. (Don’t panic, there’s more to this than just names and dates) She was the mistress of the King, Henri II (told you), and on his death, she was more or less kicked out of the place by Henri’s actual wife, Catherine de Medici, who then planted the other garden. Standing on the path between the two, when one was planted to be a beautiful garden, and the other was planted to better it, it was difficult to make up my mind which I preferred.
The chateau looked strange from the outside. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Big gate, check.
Stone walls, check.
Towers with arrow slits in, check.
Moat, check.
Drawbridge, check.
Crenellations, check.
Hmm.
It wasn’t until we got inside that I realised what it was. Somebody told me. I won’t try and claim figuring it out all by myself, because if I was going to start doing that then this entire exercise would get very tiresome very fast, and what would be the point? I might as well have sat at home and written to you personally telling you I was very clever. You wouldn’t have believed me then either.
It was all fake...well, not fake as in ‘not real’, but fake as in ‘there for effect only’. It was all scrunched up, as if trying to give the effect of a castle that’s routinely used to fend off local mobs etc. and not quite succeeding in giving that impression. It was as if a mad-for-it castle enthusiast had been left a sizeable country house in the will of an old uncle, and then crammed everything in the ‘Castles R Us’ catalogue onto the outside.
Apparently this sort of desperate medieval affectation is called a ‘stylised’ chateau.
Inside was really impressive, and there were markings on every available flat surface. As far as I can gather, Chenonceau was a famous chateau as far back as the days of Diane and Catherine and their gardening wars, which was part of the reason why Catherine, understandably a bit miffed that Diane and Henri had been having it off behind her back all these years, didn’t just rip Diane’s garden out and sow the ground with salt. Chenonceau was a national jewel, but from those days to this, there appeared to have been a very laid-back approach to dealing with graffiti.
Why is it, when something beautiful or famous presents a flat surface at eye level that people throughout the ages have felt the need to carve their way into a kind of vandalistic immortality? Fair enough, that’s a question that answers itself, but something else has always nagged at me.
Next to ‘Cheryl and Baz woz ere 1998’ scratched into the wood/stonework in writing that looks as if Cheryl and Baz woz bleeding to death at the time, there will be a graffito from hundreds of years ago (and considering dungeons and torture and whimsical monarchs, it was more likely that the person who carved it was actually bleeding to death) and the script has all the measured grace and elegance you’d expect of a master stonemason. Did they train people to do this, or did the upper classes always carry a mason in their entourage just in case they felt like defacing something?
One of the rooms silenced even the loudest and most crass of the visitors, (possibly me) apart from a breathed ‘Oh,’ on entering. The walls were black, the wooden floor was black with age, the bed was black, the curtains were black, all of the furniture was black, and there were hundreds of tiny drawings on the wall in fine silver and grey paint. After the death of her husband, another woman of Chenonceau - Louise de Lorraine - spent ten years in the bedroom with a large supply of grey and silver paints quietly and slowly going out of her mind. The drawings were of hearts, and shovels, and skulls, and...yes. Well, it quietened us all down, anyway.
Outside in the muted sunshine, Gemma and I started on the gardens, and I risked life, limb and camera to try and get a photo of the chateau from a slippery upstream bank, of the river, escaping with only a soaked trainer. Gemma and I were standing admiring the gardens when out of the blue and with no warning, a tall Germanic-accented man in his twenties came up to me.
“You are very pretty,” he said.
“Erm, thanks.”
And we ran...
22nd May 1999 1930hrs Sunny, Saturday. MUM’S BIRTHDAY
Going to have to sort out these title things.
We missed the 5:15 by miles – caught the 7:20 instead. Arrived in Tours at 9:30, found the campsite was 5km away without any bus there, all the hostels were closed. So we came to Hotel Vendôme, and a phenomenally friendly welcome. Room’s cheaper than the hostel, so that’s alright!
We went to Chateau Chenonceau today – by train (free! Interrail tickets are great!). Very picturesque and steeped in history – (it was weird seeing graffiti from the 15th century) but a bit stuffy and one of the rooms was stiflingly depressing. A nice day out – the weather (oh, and different country) means that we saw lizards and a snake on our strolls. Gemma and I are undecided as to where to go tomorrow – La Rochelle on the coast or somewhere in Le Massif Centrale? We’re both really looking forward to reaching the Mediterranean, but France hasn’t really had a chance to grow on me yet. WENT TO IRISH PUB (CAFFREY’S!) HAD CHINESE. LOST AT OTHELLO.
Getting back to Tours, we wandered around in the evening and I decided that maybe we’d done the place an injustice by spending the day somewhere else. Streets alternated between cobbles and tarmac and at night the restaurants and cafes were alive and we bought a tray of Chinese food each from a stall and ate it on benches in the middle of a brightly lit cobbled square, where bands could be heard in the bars and people were dining at tables on the cobbles. The atmosphere was full of energy, and the noise of people talking, laughing and singing filled the air under a black sky. We cajoled each other into an Irish pub, and sat under rickety black wooden roof beams with a half-litre of Caffrey’s as Gemma taught me how to pay Othello.
We decided to go to La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France, the next day.
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