Saumur : le château

The big colorful image below shows the Château de Saumur as it was depicted in a medieval "illuminated" (illustrated) manuscript called Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (link to Wikipedia article). It was a "book of hours" or prayer book — 206 pages of fine parchment painted by three artists in the Netherlands between 1412 and 1416. Today the book is kept in the library of the Château de Chantilly, just north of Paris.

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My photos above and below the medieval illustration show what the Château de Saumur really looks like these days. A château was originally built on this site in the 10th century by order of the Comte de Blois, who had expanded his county to take in the town of Saumur. It was re-captured in the 11th century by the Comte d'Anjou named Foulques Nerra, whose descendents were the Plantagenêts, and then recaptured by the French king Philippe-Auguste from them in the year 1203. As a royal palace, the chateau was the home of the court of the French king Louis IX, who is best known as saint Louis and reigned for nearly 44 years, from 1226 until 1270. Saumur's château, like most of them, was modified, re-built, and expanded many times over the centuries. It was briefly used as a prison by Napoleon in the early 19th century, and later as a munitions depot by king Louis XVIII.

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I remember the first time I saw the Château de Saumur. It was in January 1992. Walt and I had spent a week in Paris, staying in a hotel we liked just outside the jardins du Luxembourg. Then we rented a car for a week of driving through Normandy, Brittany, and the Loire Valley, before returning to Paris. I caught a bad cold in Brittany. On our way back to Paris from Nantes, we decided to have a picnic lunch in the car, instead of going to a restaurant, before driving on to Orléans for a night in a hotel there. The weather was cold, damp, and gray. We arrived in Saumur at noontime and drove the car all the way up to the château terrace and parked right in front of the main entrance — you can't do that today. I think we were the only people up there that day and at that hour. We sat and ate luhch in the car with the motor running because we needed to keep the heater going. I was feeling miserable.

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Years later, in October 2000, we were staying in a gîte in Vouvray (outside Tours) for a week. There was a little grocery store nearby where we could buy local products like rillettes, rillons, and fromage de chèvre. It was run by a very friendly and helpful young woman. I asked her one day if she was a native of Vouvray. No, she said, I moved here from Saumur. I return there every year for a few week pour me ressourcer — that means something like "to recharge my batteries" or to decompress. She said she loved and missed Saumur very much. That triggered my memory of the lunch stop in January 1992 and I decided it would be nice to drive over there and see the château in better weather, and when I wasn't miserable with a cold. That's when I took photos 1 and 5 above.