Le château de Saint-Aignan dans le Loir-et-Cher

The château in Saint-Aignan is about 1.5 miles from our house. The first fortifications were built on the site nearly a thousand years ago, and the residential château dates back about 500 years. The château is not open to the public. The town itself has a population of about 3,000. It's 35 miles east of the city of Tours and 25 miles south of the big town of Blois.

I'm taking a day off. It's a rainy day. We need the rain. Our yard is parched. Temperatures today are supposed to stay in the low 70s F.

One more look at CHM's Paris apartment

The word that best described CHM's apartment, in my opinion, was dingy. Not dirty, but not cheery or welcoming, for sure. But all that is just cosmetic. It could have been made into a very nice place.

The basement (photos above and below) was another story. It would have required a crew of professionals and a big truck to get it emptied out. And then a major rebuild to make it habitable. Still, I'm convinced that it could have been made into a fine and comfortable bedroom/bathroom suite. But no regrets. I'd love to know, out of sheer curiosity, if it has been sold, and if it has, what it has been made into.

At the time when we were considering buying the apartment as a viager, leaving CHM a lifetime right to live there, we hadn't even imagined that we would be moving to France so soon. Retirement seemed to be years away. But between the late 1990s and they year 2002, many things happened that made it clear to us that it was time to move on. We were burnt out.

Our biggest mistake ever... ha!

 So we spent the years between 1997 and 2003 working in Silicon Valley, living in San Francisco, and driving down to Salton City to see and stay with CHM and Frank several times a year. In 2002 I made the decision to quit my job and explore the possibility that we might be able to leave California and move to France. I needed to tell CHM that we would definitely not be buying his Paris apartment from him. We were planning to leave California as soon as possible and we'd need a place to live right away, not at some undefined time in the future.

In October 2002 we drove down to Salton City one more time. We didn't stay with CHM and Frank. We were camping on that trip, and we'd reserved a campsite a few miles west of Salton, near the town called Borrego Springs. We spent one night camping in Death Valley. In France, CHM had recommended a notaire (a government-licensed contracts lawyer) who he had dealt with earlier. I had temporary custody of CHM's keys to the Paris apartment. I went to see the notaire and arranged for him to send over one of his staff members to see the place. The notaire then recommended what price I should pay CHM. He still wanted a lifetime right to live in the place for at least part of the year.

Camping at Borrego Springs near Salton City, on our way (indirectly) to France

When I made the offer to CHM, he was disappointed. I thought you'd offer me more than that, he said. It's not enough. I pointed out that it was his notaire who had recommended that I pay that price. CHM said his plan was to use the money we paid him fixing the apartment up so that when the time came Walt and I would have a nice place to call home. I told him we had decided to sell our house in San Francisco and use the profit from that sale to buy a house somewhere in France.

We had realized that we wouldn't really able to afford a place in Paris comparable to our SF house. And since we planned to move to France with our dog Collette, it wouldn't be easy to live there and take walks with the dog. One thing the Paris apartment didn't have was a garage or parking space, and I wasn't sure I was ready to live without a car. I told Walt I was going to try to find a real estate agent who might be able to help us. I had quit my Silicon Valley job, so I had plenty of free time. I'd target the Loire Valley. We had recently spent two vacations there and liked the region. It was close enough to Paris and the airport. We still had to see what a property like the one we envisioned would actually cost.

I found an agent who said he'd be glad to help us find a house to buy. When I told CHM we were going to go house-hunting around Amboise, he had no choice but to accept the situation. He also said that we were making the biggest mistake of our lives by not buying his apartment. Time will tell, I told him. We hadn't yet put our SF house on the market. We started getting it ready to sell and we scheduled a trip to the Loire Valley in early December to work with the agent there. We viewed a total of 15 houses in four days, and we found one we liked.

To be continued... 

How my friendship with CHM developed

In 1992, Walt and I decided to take a vacation and spend a couple of weeks in Paris, a trip that included a road trip in Normandy and Brittany. CHM, as it turned out, was planning a trip to Paris at the same time. An elderly couple, old friends of his parents, had been living in his Paris apartment — again, rent-free, he told me — for nearly a decade. They were preparing to move to a retirement home. CHM wanted to inspect the apartment.

As a result, CHM needed to stay in a hotel for his time in Paris. He booked a room at the hotel where Walt and I were staying, near the Jardin du Luxembourg on the Left Bank. We spent time with him. He had met Walt in DC back in the 1980s, but they didn't know each other well. That 1992 trip to Paris was when CHM learned that Walt and I had been living together for ten years, first in DC and then in California. I was afraid he might be shocked, but he wasn't. I didn't yet know about his partner Frank, who had been living in Salton City for years.

Walt, our dog Collette, and CHM in the Southern California desert in 2001

At that time, CHM would fly out to California every year, and he and Frank would spend a week or so driving across the country to Washington DC. They would drive a different route every year and sight-see along the way. Frank was happy to escape the summertime desert heat (though the humid heat of Washington was not much better). He would spend the summer driving around to see relatives of his in places including Connecticut, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, while CHM went back to work.

At the end of the summer, CHM and Frank would drive back to Salton City. Then CHM would fly back to DC and go back to work. Often, they would visit us and Frank's daughter in Silicon Valley. In 1995, Walt and I bought a house in San Francisco. Neither one of us wanted to live in Silicon Valley any more, even though we both continued working down there. CHM started flying to San Francisco every summer, staying with us for a few days and then flying down to Palm Springs to meet up with Frank and do their drive across the U.S. 

The Paris apartment stayed empty from some point in the 1990s until the spring of 1999. We had stayed in touch with CHM all through the '90s. We had moved to Silicon Valley in 1992 and we saw CHM and Frank every summer during that time when they came to see Frank's daughter. We went to see CHM in southern California (Salton City) for the first time in 1997. I didn't know what to expect. Two old desert rats, you know. I didn't start taking a lot of photos until I got my first digital camera. It was a 1998 Christmas present from Walt and Charles-Henry.

To be continued... 

CHM's life between 1960 and 1985

I am not at all sure when it was that CHM took possession of the apartment where he had grown up. It must have been in the 1960s. I remember that he told me he had had his parents' apartment divided into two smaller apartments by having an interior wall built. He sold one half of the apartment and kept the other half for himself. The half that he kept had been his father's medical office. He had bathroom fixtures put in and I guess he had the kitchen fitted too. Then he decided to move to the U.S. in 1969. I think he had been there only once before, in 1948.

He settled in Washington DC because he had French friends there. One of them had a house in the village called Carteret in Normandy that I had visited. He stayed with them for a while, I think, and then he met his friend/partner Frank and moved in with him. Some years later Frank moved to southern California (for health reasons). Other members of his family were living out there. CHM bought Frank's house in Arlington VA from him at that point.

During all that time, CHM let people live in his Paris apartment rent-free, if I remember correctly and if he was telling me the truth. Sometimes he didn't tell the truth about such things, I've learned. He didn't like to be asked what he called personal questions. The Paris apartment was getting run down because the people who lived there for free didn't maintain the place, and they certainly didn't improve it.

In fact, the first couple who lived there for a few years did a lot of damage to the place, CHM said. CHM returned to Paris for a visit in 1979 for the first time since he had moved to the U.S. in 1969, he told me, and asked that couple to move out. I met CHM in 1982, when I returned to the U.S. after three years of living in Paris. I applied for a job as a translator at USIA and he was one of the people who evaluated the translation that was part of the test. He called me and offered me a job.

 I went to work with  him in January 1983. We produced the French version of a magazine that was distributed in French-speaking Africa. Because the magazine was consistently weeks and then months behind schedule. CHM was a perfectionist who had a hard time signing off on the final versions of the articles we were editing. He always wanted to make more changes to the text.

Because he kept telling the managers of the government agency who were in charge that the reason he couldn't stay on schedule was because he couldn't find good English-to-French translators in DC, they made the decision to transfer the work to the U.S. embassy in Paris. I quickly found a position as a writer and editor in another department of the organization we worked for. CHM was eventually transferred to that service as well, but he was no longer my supervisor. In 1986, Walt and I  quit our jobs in DC moved to California, for various reasons.

To be continued...

The Paris apartment where CHM lived

One of the late CHM's Paris apartment's most attractive features is that it has a back yard. It's a small back yard, but still,  a back yard in Paris! That's pretty much unheard of. The apartment also has very large windows from which you can see the yard, and the big grassy courtyard beyond it that is part of the property of the Lycée Buffon. The apartment's windows face south, so there's plenty of light.

The apartment itself features what CHM called  un rez-de-chaussée surélevé. The rez-de-chaussée is the street-level floor of a building. In this case, the "street level" is slightly above ground level. That means that there's what I've heard called an English basement in the U.S., which has windows at ceiling height that let in daylight. When Walt and I thought about buying the apartment from CHM, we thought the basement would be the perfect place to convert into a master bedroom and bathroom. CHM used it just as storage space.

 With the bedroom down in the basement and the main living level of the apartment directly overhead, you wouldn't have to worry about neighbor noise from above.  CHM was fairly deaf toward the end of his life, so he couldn't hear the people walking on the floor above his living/dining area. But I could when I was there. There were children upstairs who must have been riding tricycles around in their apartment. They made a lot of noise.

With the basement that is only partially underground, you walk up just six or seven steps to get to the apartment's front door. There is an elevator to take you up to the five or six floors above. In addition to the basement, CHM said, there are two caves where you can age wine or keep other things you might want to store.

The size of the living/dining area is about 25 feet by 12 feet, I think, or maybe a little bigger. The kitchen is tiny but could be turned into a WC (a half-bath with toilet and sink). The bathroom is small, but it could be converted into a small kitchen. The bedroom on the main level, where CHM slept, is small, but about the size of the bedrooms on the main level in our Saint-Aignan house; say 10 x 12. I never got a chance to measure or estimate the size of the basement, but it must have been about the same size as the main level. I also don't know about ceiling height. 

There are windows on the side of the apartment that faces the courtyard. CHM had them covered in white plastic (I think) sheeting that let in a lot of light but kept the bathroom and bedroom private. I have some pictures of the courtyard and more pictures of the interior of the apartment, but I'm having a hard time finding them in my photo database. More tomorrow... 

A few photos of CHM's Paris apartment

Just a few photos today. I'll try to describe CHM's Paris apartment in words tomorrow. It had some rare features, and some features that needed to be re-done. It also needed refreshing throughout. I'm not sure when CHM's mother died, which would have been when he inherited the apartment. As far as I know, his mother died later than his father (d. 1956). And CHM packed his bags and moved to the U.S. in 1969.

Artwork in CHM's Paris apartment

Twenty-five years ago, in the year 2000, I had temporary custody of the keys to CHM's Paris apartment. He had loaned them to me because we were in negotiations aimed at Walt and I buying the apartment from him. He was in the U.S. and had only recently retired from his job in Washington DC, sold his house there, and bought a house in California. He wanted to keep a place in France. Walt and I were going to spend a week in Paris and we wanted to show the apartment to a French friend who had extensive experience when it came to buying and selling properties in France. We also wanted to show it to a notaire (a contract lawyer) that CHM had recommended we consult about finalizing the negotiations... which, for numerous reasons, were never finalized. One reason for that was CHM's requirement that he would retain a lifetime right to occupy the apartment. By 2002, we were ready to leave California and re-locate to France. We needed to buy a house or apartment in France outright, not a property that might not really become ours free-and-clear many years later.

While I was in the Paris apartment in Oct. 2000, I took some photos of paintings and other artwork hanging on the wall of CHM's place. I don't know who the people in the paintings are, and I don't know who had painted them. I assume some of them might have been painted by CHM's grandfather, but I never asked CHM about them. I've never posted them on this blog before. There were other artists in CHM's family. When CHM passed away a couple of years ago at age 99, he still hadn't sold the apartment. I've heard that he didn't leave behind a valid Last Will and Testament. I would love to know what happened to the apartment, where CHM's father (the doctor) lived from about 1880 (not a typo) until his death in 1956.

Paintings by CHM's grandfather

CHM's grandfather, the 19th century painter Charles-Henri Michel, was born in 1817 and died in 1905. I don't know how many paintings he did, or how many of them still exist. Below are some that hang in museums and churches in and around the town of Peronne. I know there's one of his paintings in the Tour Jeanne d'Arc in Rouen and another in the chapel at the Château de Blois

CHM-the-grandson, the one I called a friend and who spelled his middle name Henry with a Y, was born in 1924 in Paris and died at the age of 99. So the two CHMs, grandfather and grandson, never knew each other. The father of CHM-the-grandson, who was born in 1860, was a well-known doctor in Paris. He died in 1956.

CHM photos from Neufchâtel-en-Bray

These are some photos CHM (Charles-Henry) took in the town called Neufchâtel-en-Bray in July 2010. We were driving from the Somme, site of World War I battles, to Rouen, just 25 miles south of Neufchâtel. CHM had an appointment in Rouen, a place I'm always ready to go to, because I have many good memories of it dating back
to 1972. The night before, we had feasted on a big platter of Neufchâtel cheeses in a restaurant.

The church in Neufchâtel-en-Bray is dedicated to Notre-Dame (the virgin Mary) and was built in the 12th century.
It was destroyed and rebuilt at least twice over the centuries.

CHM loved taking pictures in French churches. He also loved to go on road trips.
Tu me connais, he would tell me. J'ai toujours un pied dans la voiture...

Le Tour de France est actuellement en Normandie

A current event that's been making me think a lot about my friend CHM (Charles-Henry pour les intimes) is the Tour de France bicycle race. The race is in Normandy this week, riding through cities and towns like Rouen, Caen, Bayeux, and Vire. Charles-Henry and I visited many of those towns several times over the past 25 years.

We stayed in Rouen a few times with friends of mine. I lived in Rouen for a year back in the early 1970s. We went to Caen (rhymes with temps) on a road trip from Carteret in Normandy to Rouen in 1998 and CHM took pictures. I didn't yet have a digital camera. We went to Bayeux to see the famous tapestry there. Here's a photo of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Bayeux.

Walt and I have been to Normandy numerous times as well, including a good road trip in 1992 and another in 2005. We've also been to Rouen by train together several times, years ago, when we were staying a week or two on vacation in Paris. Rouen and Bayeux both have impressive cathedrals.

Seafood in a Paris market

I haven't been back to Paris since 2019. Or to the U.S. The pictures here are some that I took in 2016, coincidentally on July 9 that year. It was one of the last times that I saw my friend Charles-Henry (CHM).

I was looking at old photos this morning and came across these. We were walking through an outdoor market near his apartment, not far from the Eiffel Tower.

I don't know about you, but I can almost smell the ocean when I look at the photos below of fish that were for sale that day in Paris, nearly a decade ago. And I grew up just a few blocks from the fish markets in my home town on the North Carolina coast. I did a lot of fishing, crabbing, and clamming back then, and enjoyed eating fresh seafood. I also like the color of the shrimp on the right, which were sold cooked.

I'm homesick for both N.C. and Paris. Maybe I'll get to go back to both one day.

Seen in Touraine

Why did the caterpillar cross the (dirt) road?                    Was the bat in our belfry? No, in our wood stove.

Works of art at the Logis Royal in Loches

Photos taken in 2009 and 2010 with two different Lumix cameras (ZS1 and TZ3).
And no, we don't have a belfry.

Fleurs d'eté en Val de Loire, années diverses

This is not the kind of weather we're having or flowers we're seeing right now. It's rainy and chilly.
What a difference a week makes....

Salmon and shrimp for lunch

Walt has been cooking a lot of our lunchtime foods on the barbecue grill while we were experiencing extremely high temperatures. We've had sausages, beans, shrimp, salmon, and vegetables including grilled courgettes (zucchini) and aubergines (eggplants).

Other vegetables, including broccoli, green beans, and potatoes, have required some slow cooking in pots and pans that have tight-fitting lids to hold in the heat. And cooking in the morning before temperatures climbed as high as 98 or 99 degrees F. We've also been enjoying ice cream for dessert. This morning it's raining and the high temperature is predicted to be in the low 70s. Brrr.

Two photos of the Château de Saint-Aignan

Above, a view of the church and the château at Saint-Aignan in the Loir-et-Cher. I took the photo in July 2004, about a year after we came to live here. Our house is less that two miles from the château.

Below, a slightly closer view of just the château. It stands on the left bank of the Cher river about 35 miles west of the city of Tours. It was built between the 10th and 16th centuries (another July 2004 photo).