The Montpoupon stop

I've published pictures of the château de Montpoupon before. It's on the road that runs north from Loches to Montrichard and Blois, as the milestone in my picture indicates. That puts it about a dozen miles (20 km) west of Saint-Aignan and about the same distance south of Chenonceaux.

Le château de Montpoupon

Montpoupon is always a picturesque stop along the road. Once, when we first got here in 2003, we did the guided tour. The most interesting part of the tour was the old kitchen on the ground floor of the château. The guide had us guessing what various pieces of ancient equipment were designed to do. The château was lived in until recently, and the kitchen was functioning as late as 1978. I just read on the web site that you can now tour the château without a guide. That's new. Somebody told me that Montpoupon was recently sold to some Americans, but I haven't confirmed that.

The massive towers are a couple of hundred years
older than the main building at Montpoupon.

The Michelin guide says the old towers at Montpoupon date back to a fortress that was built in the 1200s on the site. The corps de logis — the residential part of the building — was constructed in the 1400s. Like most of the Loire Valley châteaux, it has been modified and modernized and then restored to earlier styles several times over the past 600 years. It survived the French Revolution basically intact.

This little gatehouse dates back to the early 1500s,
the time when Chambord and Chenonceau were built.

Montpoupon was important strategically early on because it was situated half way between Loches, held by the counts of Anjou, and Montrichard, held by the counts of Blois. Later, it suffered through the 100 Years War before being rebuilt in the 1460s by new owners.

An overall view of Montpoupon

Most of the Loire châteaux are surrounded by a village or town. Montpoupon is an exception; it sits out in the middle of the country, kind of isolated except that it's on a main road. The châteaux's main attraction is a museum devoted to hunting.


There's also a restaurant called L'Auberge du Château located on the property at Montpoupon. Information about all this, in French, can be found on this site.

This old farmhouse is part of the Montpoupon property.
Our friend Gisèle told me she lived there for a while as
a young girl. Her father was a chauffeur and her mother
a bookkeeper for the owners of the château.

Finally, here's a picture of Janice and Joanna at Montpoupon. It was taken at sunset, at the end of a very busy day in Valençay and Loches.

18 September 2007

Loches, last Tuesday

In early June, 1429, Joan of Arc came to the town of Loches to urge Charles VII to travel to the cathedral at Reims, in Champagne, to be crowned king. She was just 17 years old; Charles was 26. His legitimacy as heir to the throne of France had been called into question by the warring Burgundians and English.

The 15th-century royal residence at Loches

This was the time of the 100 Years War in France. Joan had visited Charles a few months earlier in nearby Chinon to tell him she had seen the truth in a divinely inspired vision: he was destined to be king. After winning a battle at Patay, near Blois, against the English, he did go to Reims for his coronation, which took place on July 17, 1429.

Charles VII

Joan herself didn't do so well. She was captured by the Burgundian enemy and sold to the English, who in 1431 burned her at the stake as a heretic in the Norman city of Rouen. Charles had Joan rehabilitated in the 1450s. The pope overturned the heresy verdict and Joan was declare a heroine and a martyr.

Agnès Sorel

During this same period, Loches was home to the woman who was to be called the most beautiful woman in France, Agnès Sorel. Agnès was born in the 1420s and was destined by her origins and education to become a demoiselle de compagnie to the queen in the French court. Charles VII, who was not handsome, not intelligent, and not rich, according to historians, took her as his mistress in the 1440s. She was blonde and fair-complexioned.

Loches today from the château grounds

She was not the first mistress Charles and earlier kings had kept at the court, but she was the first one to come out of the shadows and perform the functions of a kind of first lady. She outshone the queen by her beauty, her extravagance, and her art de vivre. Charles gave her a cut diamond, the earliest one known to exist. Agnès invented or popularized the décolleté, baring her shoulders and even her breasts, scandalizing her contemporaries. She wore furs and favored elaborate hairstyles and coifs.

The Eglise Saint-Ours in Loches is where
Agnès Sorel's tomb is kept now.

Agnès was not a frivolous woman, however. She schemed to find the money necessary to support her lifestyle, and she imposed her friends at the court. She convinced the king's advisers to trust her judgment and plans. Charles gave her the title to territories all over France, including Loches. She had three children by the king, who declared them legitimate.

Loches from the top of the donjon or keep

In 1450, Agnès went to Rouen to join Charles, who was engaged in military actions against the English in Normandy. No one knows why she made the trip. Maybe she just missed him. Charles put her up in a manor house at Mesnil-sous-Jumièges, on the Seine river near Rouen. She was immediately taken ill and died in just a few hours' time, at the ripe old age of 28.

One of the gates to the town of Loches, witha modern apartment building in the background

An autopsy performed in 2005 on Agnès Sorel's remains showed that her digestive tract was infested with parasites and that she had ingested a good quantity of mercury. Whether she was taking the mercury medicinally to fight the parasites — worms, in other words — or whether she had been intentionally poisoned, nobody knows. Whatever the case, she died from an overdose of mercury salts.

The rooftops of the old town of Loches

Isn't it interesting that both these young women, Joan and Agnès, ended up dying in Normandy, in or near Rouen? I suppose that's where the action was, what with the French fighting the English to push them back across the Channel one more time.

A tower at Loches' royal residence

Joanna, Janice, and I spent the afternoon in Loches last Tuesday. We paid the price of admission and walked through the royal residence in the old medieval city there, including the room where Joan of Arc besought Charles to go to Reims for his coronation and then chase the English out of France.

« Charles VII roy des François »
in his younger days

We walked through the church where Agnès Sorel's tomb has been placed since it was confirmed by DNA testing that the remains are authentically hers. Before, Agnès's tomb was kept in the royal residence.

A modern treatment for an old house at Loches

We also climbed around in the old fortified keep — le donjon — that dominates the town of Loches. It was built in the 11th century by the counts of Anjou as an outpost to protect their territories from the warlike counts of Blois. A little later, Henri Plantagenêt of Anjou, who became king Henry II of England, reinforced the site, but his rebellious son Richard the LionHeart took it from his troops in 1189.

A view from an old window in the royal residence at Loches

Richard ended up in prison, and the French king Philippe Auguste took Loches over for a while. Richard subsequently reconquered it for the English. In 1205, after a year-long siege, Philippe Auguste of France won it back. It remained French from that time on. New, more imposing fortifications were built in the 1200s and 1300s, and Charles VII ended up holding court in Loches all through the 1400s.

____________________
The donjon at Loches


Views from the top of the fortifications are panoramic. But the fact is that Loches was used as a prison for centuries after its glory days as the site of king Charles VII's court. Prisoners were notoriously mistreated. Instruments of torture and little cells where prisoners were held for years in solitary confinement are now on view. The walls bear extensive graffiti left behind by those imprisoned in the dark, dank towers and cellars.

Loches (pronounced sort of like "lush" or "brush" in U.S. English) has about 8,000 inhabitants and is just 30 minutes southwest of Saint-Aignan and about the same distance southeast of the city of Tours.

Joanna and her older brother at Loches

Coincidences

A few days ago Claude published a picture of a bronze figure she saw on a tomb at the Montmartre cemetery in Paris. I looked at it and thought I recognized it, even though I have no memory of ever walking around that cemetery. Claude said the figure represented an unknown Polish soldier.

I thought about it a little more and remembered that the statue I had in mind is located in the courtyard at the château de Montrésor. Montrésor is a village about 12 miles south of Saint-Aignan, and the château there was bought by a Polish family named Branicki about 200 years ago.

The statue in the courtyard at Montrésor
February 2005

When Claude was here about a month ago, she and I drove down to Montrésor (among many other places on a whirlwind of a day). We walked through the 16th-century church there, but we decided not to go into the château grounds. We just didn't have time.

Funerary sculptures in the church at Montrésor
June 2007

I've posted topics about Montrésor several times, with numerous photos. They are here and here. It is one of the 150 French villages that has won the Plus Beaux Villages de France designation. The château is the one where my friend Laurie played the piano that had been played by Chopin.

The 16th-century church at Montrésor

Montrésor has a lot to recommend it. There's the church, the château, and a river walk from which you get great views of both. Nearby is the town of Loches, not to mention the Chartreuse du Liget and the old fortified farm called La Corroirie. And the château de Montpoupon.

Dinner at L'Hôtel du Cheval Blanc in Bléré

Last Saturday night, Peter Hertzmann invited us to have dinner with him at a nice restaurant. He wanted to have a meal at the Lion d'Or (two Michelin stars out of three possible) in Romorantin, but when I called I was told the restaurant was closed for the season. Peter has eaten there before — the chef is a friend of a chef Peter has worked with in the past — and Walt and I had dinner there once as well, on a separate occasion.

We looked at the Guide Michelin web site for comparable restaurants in our area that might be possibilities. Walt and I have been to a couple, thanks to friends, including Le Rendez-Vous des Pêcheurs (one star) in Blois, Le Domaine des Hauts-de-Loire (one star) near Onzain, and L'Hôtel du Cheval Blanc (one star) in Bléré. The Michelin site also listed the restaurant run by Bernard Robin (two stars) in Bracieux near Chambord and Le Choiseul (one star) in Amboise.

L'Hôtel du Cheval Blanc in the town of Bléré, near Chenonceaux

Peter told us to choose the restaurant, and we picked the Cheval Blanc in Bléré, where we had had dinner one night the first summer we spent in Saint-Aignan, in 2003. We remembered that it was very good and that the prices there weren't outrageous. The prices listed on the Michelin site for some of the other starred restaurants were much higher, and we didn't want to abuse Peter's hospitality.

So what were the prices like? There were three menus (which are what we call "prix fixe menus" in good American English). For 60 euros, you could have five courses: a starter, fish, meat, cheese, and dessert. For 49 euros, you got four courses by leaving off the starter and "just" having fish, meat, cheese, and dessert. The fish and meat dishes are of course served with vegetables and sauces.

Finally, for 43 euros, you also got four courses: a starter, a choice of meat or fish as a main course, cheese, and dessert. Walt and I went with the 43-euro menu, and I for one am glad I did because it turned out to be more food than I could comfortably eat. Peter ordered à la carte because he didn't want dessert.

Remember that the euro is worth about $1.30 right now, so those three menus would cost $78, $64, and $56 American.

Here's what we ended up eating. While we were waiting for our starters, the server brought us each a plate of what are called amuse-bouches — we'd use the good American English term "hors d'oeuvres" for the same thing. On the plate were:

• a tiny dish containing a spoonful or two of a sort of broccoli custard. I thought it tasted too strongly of overcooked broccoli, if you know what I mean.
  
• a small glass of warm pumpkin purée or soup mixed with a coulis de tomates (a light tomato sauce) and which posed a dilemma — eat it with a spoon or just drink it out of the glass? We ended doing a combination of both. It was tasty and warm.
  
• a tiny, very hot dish containing a few mussels (removed from the shell) in a garlic-parsley butter. It was a little salty and greasy for my taste, but I'm being picky when I say that.
  
• another small dish containing some slices of slow-cooked chicken gizzards (gésiers confits) topped with some sliced, slow-cooked onions (oignons confits). It was delicious.
  

Except for the pumpkin-tomato soup, this amounted to about three tablespoons of food. The pumpkin-tomato soup wasn't much more than half a cup. Remember, though, it is not the appetizer but just a little something to tickle your tastebuds while you are waiting for the meal to begin.

As a starter or appetizer, Peter and I both had what they called un gratin d'huîtres, or oysters au gratin. It was a kind of very creamy soup with about half a dozen raw oysters floating in it. It was more like an oyster bisque than a gratin. There was a well-cooked julienne of leeks floating in the soup, which resembled a crème anglaise (a fairly liquid egg custard) but was savory (or salty) and not sweet. The dish had been set under a very hot broiler (called a salamander) for a couple of minutes so it was slightly golden on top.

Walt had a starter of langoustines, or prawns ("Dublin Bay prawns," to be specific), removed from their shells, cooked, and dressed with a light cream sauce, if I remember correctly. Since I was concentrating on my own appetizer plate, only Walt can give us more details about what he ate.

As a main course, I had a fillet of sandre, which is a European freshwater fish sometimes called "zander" or "pikeperch" in English, served in a creamy sauce. On the plate there was also a little ramekin containing a few sliced scallops cooked under the broiler. There must have been some vegetables, but the only one I remember was a little spoonful of cooked spinach.

As his main course, Walt had what the menu called médaillons de bar, which weren't medallions at all but which looked delicious. Bar is sea bass. The fish looked grilled, and there were vegetables on the plate. Peter had veal sweetbreads — ris de veau — but I couldn't see his plate very well from across the big round table so I can't describe it further. Peter did say it was the best meal he had had during his 10-day stay in France. He was in the Dordogne before coming to see us here in the Loire Valley.

To wash all this down, we ordered a bottle of Quincy wine. Quincy is a small grape-growing area about 25 miles east of Saint-Aignan, near the bigger town of Vierzon. Only white wines made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape are produced in Quincy, and ours was a 2005. When the time came to order a second bottle (twist my arm!), we chose a Reuilly. Reuilly is another small wine region and is adjacent to Quincy. The wines are also Sauvignon Blanc, and ours was a 2004. Both the wines, meant to be drunk young (the wines, not the drinkers) were delicious. The Reuilly was fruitier, and the Quincy was slightly more acidic.

There were two choices when it came to the cheese course. You could select samples of three or four cheeses off the restaurant's copious cheese cart, or you could order a salade de chèvre chaud — a mixed lettuce salad in vinaigrette served with two little rounds of bread with slices of goat cheese on them, slightly melted and browned under the broiler. I had the salad but I couldn't eat all of the cheese toasts. Peter had the same salad, and Walt had three pieces of cheese off the cart.

And dessert was still to come! I really wasn't hungry any more, but dessert was part of the menu I had ordered. There must have been a dozen desserts to choose from. I ended up ordering grilled pineapple slices with a scoop of mango sorbet served with two little macaroon cookies. I ate some pineapple and tasted the sorbet, but I didn't touch the macaroons. Walt had an assiette de sorbets, a selection of three fruit-flavored sorbet concoctions, which he said was very good. Peter skipped dessert.

I should mention that the desserts at the Cheval Blanc are served under what the chef calls a "gold dome". It's not gold but a few "threads" of hard, golden caramel shaped into a dome by dribbling the caramel over the outside of a bowl. You'd have to see it to imagine what it looks like, and I didn't take pictures. It's more of a gimmick than anything else.

We had coffee. We drove home. It had been pouring rain when we arrived, and it was still raining when we left. The drive takes about half an hour.

On the way home, Peter said he could see why the restaurant had only one Michelin star and not two, even though the food was very good. The service was a little rough. Our server was a young woman who had to take care of six tables simultaneously — at least 20 people in all. She was stretched to the limit, although she did have some help from the kitchen when it came to bringing dishes out to the tables.

All the customers in our dining room (which was one of two) appeared to be French, with the exception of us and a British couple at a table across the room. The British gentleman spoke French but I could hear his accent.

The restaurant's glassware was fairly crude by Michelin standards, Peter pointed out, and the flatware wasn't perfectly matched. One table knife, in particular, had been damaged; it looked as if somebody had tried to open a can with it. Before the main course came, the server laid out new silver, and by mistake she put the fish knives and fork at Peter's place and the silver that went with his food at mine. We had to point it out to her. She also dropped something on the floor at one point.

All those "defects" and errors would keep the Michelin inspectors from giving a restaurant a second star, even if the food was out of this world. And it was very good.

Le Grand-Pressigny ~ 7 ~

Yesterday our weather was gusty and damp. We saw the sun off and on, but it was so windy you didn't want to be outdoors. The temperature was in the mid-50s F -- about 12ºC.

Don't worry, the pictures don't really go with the text.
I liked this old staircase I saw on the streets of
Le Grand-Pressigny on 11 April 2006.

At about 9:00 in the morning, a sudden squall produced very strong winds and a brief downpour. The trees were bending under the force of the wind gusts, and the downpour included a minute or two during which there were a lot of ice pellets mixed in with the driving rain. Well, this is going to be an exciting day, I thought to myself.

Still life with storm drain

I guess those ice pellets are what we call hail. Tiny hailstones were bouncing off our north-facing living -room window and making ringing and pinging sounds as they hit the metal balcony railing outside. The wind was rattling our metal window shutters.

Okay, I'm cheating with this photo. I took it in
Le Grand-Pressigny in July 2006, during a heat wave.

We used to have that kind of brief ice-pellet showers all the time during those 17 winters we spent in San Francisco. Obviously, the weather seems fairly chilly when ice is falling from the sky. San Francisco's climate is temperate, which is another way of saying it's always chilly. Here, at least, we get nice hot summers.

Farm buildings on the edge of Le Grand-Pressigny

These squalls and sudden downpours have a name in French: ce sont les giboulées de mars. March showers. So our weather is getting a little ahead of itself.

There's probably no automatic opener for this garage door.

That was yesterday, February 12. This morning, I looked at some more pictures taken in Le Grand-Pressigny — the ones I hadn't posted yet. I realized a lot of them were taken on April 11, 2006. And the weather was beautiful and starting to get seriously warm.

The cemetery is this way, down a dead-end street.
Humour noir ? Or just good city planning?

The sun is shining this morning, and the winds have died down. April 11 is less than two months away. The hours of daylight are increasing. Spring is on the horizon. Vivement le printemps !

Et vivement l'été !
Photo taken in Le Grand-Pressigny in July 2006.

Le Grand-Pressigny ~ 6 ~

Le Grand-Pressigny: the Vironne tower , built in the 1560s.

I got this text from the 37-Online web site, which uses the tagline: "Loire valley tourism - Bed and breakfast accommodation". The site has an English-language version, but the people who put it together obviously used translation software to convert the French into English. The English, in other words, is basically indeciperable. What follows is my translation, and the pictures are mine of course.

The balcony and dome at the top of the tour Vironne.

"At the foot of the keep, the Vironne tower, an old octagonal belfry and watchtower in the purest Italian style, capped by a done, encloses a spiral staircase that once led to the various floors of buildings that no longer exist.

These are the sculpted corbels, or brackets, that support the balcony.

"At the top of the tower, there's an elegant balcony supported by sculpted corbels, from which the visitor comes to understand the strategic position occupied by this oft-disputed rocky outcropping.

A dry moat protected the west side of the château,
which was most vulnerable to attack.

"From this vantage point, the visitor enjoys a beautiful view out over the gardens of the château's grand courtyard, the peaceful tile and slate rooftops of the little town of Le Grand-Pressigny below and, beyond, the valley of the Claise river."

Another part of the château complex, seen from the town below

Here's the French from the 37-Online web site:

Au pied du donjon, la tour "Vironne", ancien beffroi de guet du plus pur style italien de forme octogonale et couverte d'un dôme, renferme l'escalier à vis qui desservait les étages des bâtiments disparus.

A view of the old fortifications, as seen from the narrow streets below.

A son sommet, un élégant balcon, soutenu par des corbeaux sculptés, permet aux visiteurs de bien comprendre la position stratégique de cet éperon rocheux chèrement disputé.

A corner guard tower at the château de Pressigny-le-Grand

Le visiteur, placé à cet endroit aura, en contrebas des jardins de la grande cour du château, une belle vue sur les rassurants toits de tuiles et d’ardoises du bourg du Grand Pressigny qui se déploient joliment et, au-delà, sur la vallée de la Claise.

Why is the web site called 37-Online? It's because 37 is the number assigned to the French administrative département called l'Indre-et-Loire. Départements are the equivalent of our American counties. The one I live in is number 41, le Loir-et-Cher. Most, like these two, are named for the rivers that pass through them.

Le Grand-Pressigny ~ 5 ~

The 16th-century wing of the château de Pressigny-le-Grand was built
in the middle of the ruins of the medieval castle. Both the arcaded
gallery and the tall octagonal belltower are Italian in style.

Rainy weather here still. It's been a week of doctor's appointments (routine stuff) and pharmacy visits. We are now covered by the French Social Security system and for the first time since we left California we don't have to pay full price at the doctor's, dentist's, pharmacy, or lab.

View down an old street in Le Grand-Pressigny

Of course a visit to the doctor costs only 21 euros ($28 at today's exchange rate), and prescription medications are much less expensive here than in the U.S. Under the French Assurances Médicales plan we have now, our co-payment at the doctor's is now about seven euros ($10 or so).

Ruins of the fortified castle at Le Grand-Pressigny.
This rectangular tower is more than 100 feet (35 m) tall.

This is what is called a "keep" in British English and
a "donjon" in French. It was built between 1190 and 1200.
I like the old staircase, now exposed to the elements.

Prescription medications, in my case, now require a monthly co-payment of thirteen euros. I was paying about forty euros, full-price, until the new coverage started. The co-payment for the same monthly supply of drugs in California, under a very good insurance plan provided by my employer, was $45.00.

Views out over the rooftops of the old village from up near the château

Hey, you thought this was going to be a topic about Le Grand-Pressigny. Well I've about run out of things to say about that village, but I still have some pictures I want to post. I'm posting them with this topic.

Le Grand-Pressigny ~ 4 ~

There aren't very many retail businesses in le Grand-Pressigny. Here are a few of the ones I noticed. Looking at the name of each one, and doing some dictionary and Google searching, I learned a few things

This place, the Bar du Carroir, doesn't look very open. Maybe it's just open on weekends.

What does carroir mean? I at first thought it might be related to the word quarry, which is carrière in French. But it turns out carroir is an old or dialectal word meaning the intersection of two roads, a carrefour.

Some friends of ours over in the village called St-Georges-sur-Cher live on the rue du Carroir. Now I know what it means.

Carroir derives from the Latin quadrivirium, the place where four roads meet (or, seen another way, where two roads cross each other). Another form of the word is carroi, without the final R.

The French word carrefour comes from another Latin term, quadrifurcum, meaning four forks, I guess. You'd think they could have put a restaurant here at this crossroads — a "four-forks" — and not just a bar, a place to have a drink instead of a full meal. Ha ha ha.

This old storefront is, or used to be, occupied by somebodywho made and/or sold saddles and bedding.

I knew the term literie, bedding, but not bourrellerie. A bourrelier (with one L) is a saddler or saddle-maker, I learned. Probably not much call for saddlery, locally, these days.

So the bourrelier makes and sells leather straps, saddles, and harnesses. I suppose those might be used in the construction of beds. The bourrellerie (with two L's) is the name of both the shop and the profession. This new knowledge of mine is bound to come in handy one day.

A literie is a shop where you can buy a bed (un lit) or its constituent parts. Literie is a technical term that means everything that goes into the fabrication or manufacture of a bed, including the frame.

And nowadays literie more commonly means what we call bedding — mattresses, pillows, sheets, etc. I don't know if there is a word for bedmaker in French. In fact, I had to look up bedmaker to see if the word really existed in English. It does.

Why would the restaurant be named Savoie, which is in the Alps?

Here's the story. Louise de Savoie was the mother of king François Ier. He's the king who was behind the construction of so many châteaux in the Loire Valley, including Chambord, at the beginning of the French Renaissance. Louise's half-brother René de Savoie became owner of the château in Le Grand-Pressigny in 1523. His son was Honoré de Savoie-Villars — this important local figure's name is "immortalized" as the name of the town's hotel/restaurant.

La Savoie or Savoy is an old dukedom in the Alps spanning parts of modern France, Italy, and Switzerland. Here's what Wikipedia says about it.

Somebody has a bon sens de l'humour...

This is an obvious reference to the Musée de (la) Préhistoire in Le Grand-Pressigny, up in the château.

Finally, another hotel. The French word espérance describes a religious virtue, whereas the similar and more frequently encountered word espoir (hope) is much more prosaic. So there are two words for "hope" in French.

The English expression "faith, hope, and charity" translates into French as la foi, l'espérance, et la charité.

So I wonder why this hotel is called L'Hôtel de l'Espérance and not L'Hôtel de l'Espoir. And who is Arnault?