Yes, I was being driven. I mean Walt was behind the wheel. We went on a short road trip on Tuesday. The destination was a restaurant in Le Grand-Pressigny, via our friends' house down there for a little apéritif — a glass of bubbly. We walked to the restaurant and then back to their house. The is about the drive down.
Walt driving our little Peugeot, "knocking 90"
When you leave Saint-Aignan to go south toward Nouans-les-Fontaines on the main road, the first few miles are very curvy. They aren't hairpin curves, but they are sharp enough to slow you down and make the driver pay close attention. You wonder why they ever built a road like that one. These are photos that I snapped through the windshield of the car as we drove along.
La Forêt de Brouard south of Saint-Aignan, where the king liked to go hunting 600 years ago
And then all of sudden, halfway to Nouans, the road changes character and runs as straight as board through the Forêt de Brouard and then through fields all the way to the village. Local people say that King François Ier, of Chambord fame, liked to hunt here in the first half of the 16th century. The total distance is about 10 miles.
Nouans is down in a valley and dominated by its big church.
In the church at Nouans, there's a painting (a pietà) dating back to the mid-1400s that was the work of a French artist named Jean Fouquet. Not much is known about its history. It was "discovered" hanging in the church in 1911 by a curator visiting the area from the Louvre in Paris.
After Nouans, the road continues straight down to the next village, Villedômain, another five or six miles. There's no more extensive forest — just wide fields of wheat, corn, sunflowers, or oil-seed rape (colza, canola) and little wooded patches. It's all very pretty, and there is very little traffic, except as you drive by the zoo just south of Saint-Aignan. It seems like most of the people coming to the zoo drive down from the north, because we saw very few cars headed in from the south along our route.
That painting in the church at Nouans by Jean Fouquet, better known for his portrait of Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, is well worth a visit, as we did a few years ago. Time sure flies!
ReplyDeleteLovely photos of the countryside.
I came across your photos of the Jean Fouquet painting a few days ago when I was rummaging through the archives on my computer. Maybe I'll post some of them. They're good.
DeleteSo true CHM, it is an interesting painting.Fouquet was a good illuminator [just a bit later than the Limburg brothers] as well and you can see his work in the Museum at Chantilly. We blogged about him back in March 2011.
DeleteThe bendyness of the road might be because it has continued to go around the fields according to how the land was divided up between families over generations.
ReplyDeleteThis is how I imagine it to be, I don't know for certain! But I would imagine that it was relatively easy to create or abandon a cart track, much less so once the road is made of tarmac and belonging to the local authority.
In any case, the lack of traffic and the beautiful countryside make them a joy to drive along.
Having hiked through several royal domaines, the wheel and spokes of straight roads are common. There's usually at least one central hub from which several ruler straight paths lead to main points in the forest: the chateau; the first town on the other side; a statue; a high point from which there is a great view... I live very near the Bois de Vincennes and if you look closely at a map of the bois you can see where the orginal roads are, still. In the larger forests, there may be several hubs, of course, connected by straight paths. I seem to remember the Forêt de Chantilly being like that.
ReplyDeleteAnother remark is that you have wonderfully clean windshield!
the last photo looks like a painting from anywhere in america.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen the plain of Beauce ? a bread basket for western europe with openfields and the cathedral of Chartres far off in the distance ?
DeleteI have driven across the Beauce many times in 11 years, from Blois up to Chartres and on to Paris. Also, the train from Paris to Blois crosses the flat grain fields of the Beauce.
DeleteThat little Pug has been good to you guys. Sue and I have just added a Citroen C4 to keep company with our Pug 307.
ReplyDeleteHello Leon and Sue,
DeleteA C4 is the next car for us, as the P206 is really getting on in years.
It looks almost like countryside at my place.
ReplyDeleteThe countryside photo's colors are different from Alabama- the yellow and the blue are different somehow. I love European countryside photos.
ReplyDeleteI have more such photos that I will post, E.
DeleteLovely scenery (and great painting). I'm used to a yellow line in between lanes for traffic going in different directions-- I'm wondering if that's the norm in the U.S., or if rural roads would just use white lines, like these do?
ReplyDeleteThe lines down the middle of the road here are white and either solid or broken to indicate whether or not you can pass another vehicle. Ilike the arrows you often see indicating that it is time to move back into your own lane if you are passing another car.
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