Quiet Friday

It is still such a funny feeling to be here in France on Thanksgiving. You can't help but imagine in your mind that all the stores are closed, and that people are staying in to have a big dinner. But no, that would be only us doing that.

And then the day after Thanksgiving, you find yourself thinking that you might go out somewhere, but there will be traffic and lines and crowds. But of course, it's not true. It's just a normal Friday. Life is just chugging along — no big deal, no disruptions.

All the photos in this post are this past week's sunrises.

Friday here at La Renaudière near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher was a very quiet one. I slept late and then immediately went out for a long walk with the dog when I did get up. I did a blog post. For lunch, we heated up leftover lamb, beans, and carrots from 24 hours earlier.

It's been rainy, but not every day.

There were a couple of American football games on television (we get ESPN Europe), and there was an entertaining movie starring Ben Affleck and Gwynneth Paltrow — the kind of movie you can just sink into and keep up with, even if you aren't paying much attention. Then there was tennis on early in the evening (Djokovic beat Nadal), and later a favorite show called Thalassa that this time was all about Greece.

25 November 2009, 8:30 a.m.

Oh, and the factrice (the woman who delivers our mail) stopped by during the tennis, selling calendars. They do that every year. You choose a calendar from about 30 she was carrying, and you pay what you want to pay for it. I picked one that features pictures of farm animals and gave her 7 euros, which was about all the money we had in the house. As she was leaving, the factrice told me this would be her last calendar visit, because she turns 60 in February and will retire. I congratulated her and told her I recently turned 60 too.

No more leaves on the poplars

What a lazy day it was. One bit of nerdy excitement: we got a new piece of electronic equipment that is a combination DSL modem and router, all in the same little box. I had ordered it earlier in the week, and it came yesterday. It took me all of 15 minutes to hook it up, configure it, and get it running. We are hoping it might make our Internet connection a little more stable. I can't tell much difference so far, but the box itself is nice-looking and that counts because it's out in plain view, for now.

The vineyard early one day in November

So there you have it. This morning I'll go to the pharmacy with those mushrooms, to see what I can find out. At noon, we'll drive over to Montrichard (it's 10 miles) for a lunch of roast goose with new French friends. Rain is supposed to start falling again by noontime, with gusty winds. It's still not cold.

Sunrise yesterday morning, with puddles

We've had more than 100 mm — that's 4+ inches — of rain in November. Earlier in the week, I was talking to a man who works in the wine business here. I said something about all the rain, and he said yes, isn't it great? We are hoping that it will continue. We need a lot more rain this winter to compensate for the long dry spell we had last summer, according to this expert.

Sunrise over rows of grapevines

That's something to look forward to, I guess. Water tables need to be replenished.

P.S. There's an interesting article about two little-known San Francisco neighborhoods, Bernal Heights and Glen Park, in yesterday's New York Times. You might have to register to get the article, but it's free. Walt and I used to live in Glen Park.

A Saint-Aignan morning

One of the last roses of the season

I haven't yet finished posting the pictures I took in Paris, but now that I'm feeling better and am walking the dog again, I'm also taking more pictures I want to post. It's hard to believe that I went for three weeks without taking a walk in the vineyard — one busy week, and two sick weeks.

Looking across the vineyard this morning
toward our house at La Renaudière

It's also hard to believe that the season changed so quickly. It was summer (we didn have a month of good weather, including the first three weeks of September) and now it is definitely fall. The mornings are chilly, especially the sunny ones. Yesterday and today have been sunny again, after a couple of weeks of gray, damp, but warm weather.

Sunrise at La Renaudière, 08 October 2007

The sun comes up after 8:00 right now. Today I slept until about 8:00 and then took the dog out for a walk. I got to watch the sun come up, and take some pictures. There was a heavy dew, so the dog and I were both had wet feet by the time we got back home.

Autumn grapes

There are still some grapes in the vineyard. Some are black, some white, but all of them are now mostly shriveled. Some of the white ones are covered in mold, which might be the "noble rot" that turns Chenin Blanc grapes into the high-sugar fruit used to make moelleux wines — wines we would call "sweet" in English.

Callie and me inspecting some very ripe wine grapes

Wineries around Saint-Aignan make late-harvest vins doux or moelleux in good years, when the fall weather doesn't turn too rainy and the grapes have a chance to mature. The sweet whites are a specialty of the Vouvray appellation, 35 miles west of here.

Fallen apples

The apples have nearly all fallen now, at least the ones produced by our trees. Our summertime neighbors were here yesterday, picking the last good apples on the trees in their little orchard. Walt made an apple cake with ours yesterday.

Pumpkin season

The most successful crops we grew in our vegetable garden this year were the squashes, including pumpkins. We had quite a few green and yellow summer squash too. There are two kinds of pumpkins ready to bring in now, big whitish ones and smaller bright orange ones.

Very orange

I took the neighbors one of these little orange pumpkins yesterday afternoon. They're the neighbors who live in Blois and have the old house across the street from us as a summer and weekend place. They themselves don't eat pumpkins — they say they can't stomach them after having had only pumpkins to eat during World War II — but I know their oldest daughter likes them. She lives in Blois too, and I asked them to take the pumpkin to her. I bet she makes soup out of it, which is one of the things we're planning to do with ours.

Artichokes in flower

We let our few artichokes go to flower this year. We just put the plants in the ground last spring, and they are supposed to survive the winter. We hope to get a bigger crop next year and to actually enjoy eating artichokes from our own garden next summer.

Vineyard plants

Walking down a row of vines this morning, I looked down and noticed these little plants growing on the ground. I have no idea what they are. I wonder if the little cup-shaped parts are flowers.

The grand tour

Wednesday of last week was the day of the grand tour of the Loire Valley châteaux that are within 25 miles of Saint-Aignan. That includes Chenonceau, Amboise, Chaumont-sur-Loire, and Chambord. I'm leaving out Blois and Cheverny, because we didn't have time to stop at either of those, and Valençay, which we saw a couple of days earlier.

There are many more châteaux nearby that are worth a visit, but it would take several days to see all of them. Le Gué-Péan, Chémery, Montrésor, Le Moulin, La Bourdaisière, Villesavin, Beauregard, Troussay, Selles-sur-Cher, and Fougères-sur-Bièvre are just a few of the others. Not to mention Saint-Aignan.

Chenonceau, 19 September 2007

But when it is your visitors' first tour of the Loire Valley, you have to hit the high spots. It's not too hard to get "chateaued out," if you know what I mean. It's like churches. After the fifth or sixth one, you find yourself yawning and muttering "okay, another church."

To really get to know the Loire Valley area, or any other, you have to spend a few weeks, and vary your pleasures by seeing a château or a church now and then but also taking days off to enjoy long walks along the rivers or through the vineyards. Stopping in a winery for a tasting and having a few nice meals made from ingredients you buy in the street markets is also a good idea. And restaurants.

A main shopping street in Amboise —
it wasn't too crowded at lunchtime.

Anyway, time is usually short and a certain amount of rushing around is necessary. Otherwise, visitors go away with the idea that they didn't really get to see all that they had wanted to see. Driving from château to château over the course of a long day is also a good opportunity to chat, relive old memories, and laugh it up with guests you don't get to see as often as you would like.

Speaking of my driving, I only managed to make Janice scream once while we were in the car. Joanna didn't scream at all, or at least not that I can recall. Remember, I had never met Janice before this visit, even though she has been a friend of my sister's for 20 years. She probably thought I was a madman as we raced around on our area's narrow curvy roads, and sped through villages that were often a tangle of traffic.

Joanna took this picture of the château in Amboise.

Janice's scream didn't come until the very last day of the trip, in Paris. We were driving around the bouldevard périphérique from our hotel near the Porte d'Italie toward the Porte de Bagnolet and the A3 autoroute that takes you out to Charles de Gaulle airport. A big truck was in the right lane and its driver was weaving back and forth over the line dividing his lane from the empty one between him and us. I needed to move over to make my exit.

I watched the truck weave for a few seconds until I thought I detected a pattern in his movement. No, he wasn't actually planning to change lanes. So that empty lane was mine for the taking. I stepped on the gas to try to get ahead of the truck and I started moving to the right. Problem was that he picked that moment to weave left. That's when Janice screamed. "Kenny, watch out for that truck!" she yelled, her life passing in front of her eyes.

But we made it. I've gotten better screams than that out of Walt. Once in Spain... oh well, we survived and so did the car, so there's no point going into the details. I also remember a woman I didn't know, a friend of a friend who came to visit, letting out a tiny scream one day when I decided suddenly to pull off the highway for a good view of the château at Chaumont-sur-Loire from across the river. I hadn't realized that the gravel shoulder of the road was so pitted and rutted. The car went sliding but the anti-lock breaks kicked in and saved us. Since we were wearing seat belts, our heads didn't even hit the roof of the car. And we got a great view of the château, way up on a bluff above the Loire.

The weather was nice, but it was a little too chilly to eat outside in Amboise that day.

Last Wednesday, there wasn't too much excitement of that kind. We walked the river path at Chenonceau in the morning. Then we went over to Amboise and had lunch. The restaurant I wanted to try, one that I've been wondering about for years, was of course closed on Wednesdays. So we went to a pizzeria down the street, directly under the high walls of the château d'Amboise. It's called La Florentine. The food was good. I had a pizza, Joanna had spaghetti with meat sauce, and Janice had onion soup and a big salad with lots of cheese in it.

Chaumont-sur-Loire

After lunch and a walk through some of the busier streets of Amboise, we drove on over to Chaumont. I parked around back, in the "secret" parking area I discovered a couple of years ago. When you park there rather than down in the village, you don't have to suffer through a long, steep hike up the hill to get to the château. You're already on top of the bluff, so you just stroll over to the château on flat ground through a wooded park.

Joanna also took this picture of me at the wheel
of the Peugeot. That's the cathedral and the bridge
at Blois that you see through the windshield.

From Chaumont, Blois is a short ride. We stopped on the south bank of the Loire and admired the panoramic view of the city, with its château, an old convent, three big churches, and the old stone arches of the bridge across the river. We didn't cross the bridge so we didn't go into the main part of town. No time.

Chambord

We pressed on toward Chambord, with me pointing out the château de Ménars on its bluff across the river. Mme de Pompadour lived there in the 18th century and had the place refurbished by the finest architects of the day. It isn't open to the public.

At Chambord, there were plenty of people but it wasn't what you'd call mobbed. It never is, in my experience, not the way Chenonceau can be. I guess the grounds are just a lot more spacious and the château de Chambord just about dwarfs all the other châteaux around here. We took pictures and looked around in the château's gift shop as well as some of the other souvenir stores on the grounds before we headed back to Saint-Aignan.

The many ornate chimneys at Chambord

When we got home at about 6:30, Joanna, Janice, Walt, and Callie went for a walk out in the vineyard while I copied my pictures onto my hard disk and started organizing and processing them. They seemed to have a nice walk, and Joanna took some pictures of — what else? — grapes. It was a good but long, busy day for us all.

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

A Napoleon theme

The first part of my sister's trip ended up having a Napoleon theme. We didn't plan it that way, but on Sunday, after her friend Janice finally arrived, we found ourselves at Invalides. We admired Napoleon's tomb there in the Eglise du Dôme.

The château at Valençay. The scaffolding
means that restoration work is under way.

Janice really wanted to go to Fontainebleau, because she has a friend who used to live there. Napoleon spent a lot of time there too. My favorite route from Paris to Saint-Aignan passes within just a few miles of Fontainebleau, so it was an easy stop. Here's my Fontainebleau blog topic from that day, and one from a couple of weeks earlier.

Joanna took this picture of market stalls in Valençay.
You can see that the market wasn't crowded at all.

Last Tuesday, I planned a visit to a local market without thinking of Napoleon at all. We drove over to Valençay, which has an outdoor market on Tuesday mornings. And the château de Valençay, one of the big attractions within 30 minutes of Saint-Aignan, was bought by Napoleon in the early 19th century and given to his powerful foreign minister, Talleyrand.

A pork butcher's shop on the main street in Valençay

Our main focus was the street market, but it was a little bit of a disappointment. In September, a lot of the market vendors take their own vacations after working through the big tourist months of July and August. A good number of stores and restaurants around Saint-Aignan also close up shop in September, including one of our best bakeries (Robert) and one of our best restaurants (Le Crêpiot). So September is not the ideal time to visit the Saint-Aignan area.

Pork kidneys on sale at the Valençay market

At Valençay, there were a lot of empty slots along the main market street. Only about a third of the regular vendors were there, I'd estimate. We looked at clothing, tea towels, aprons, and other possible gifts for people back in North Carolina. Then we, or at least I, went into the food hall to see what products were on sale. I needed some tomatoes and I ended up buying some cheese.

Beef tripe (stomach) in its raw form

Two well-known goat's-milk cheeses are made in the Valençay area. One is called a Valençay and is made in the form of a truncated pyramid. The other comes from the nearby town called Selles-sur-Cher. The cheese has the same name as the town of Selles-sur-Cher. It's also a goat cheese but it is made in the form of a disk. Both these goat cheeses are coated in a mixture of wood ash and salt that is edible. They are sold at different stages of maturation: fresh (frais), half-dry (demi-sec), and fully dry (sec). The flavor gets more pronounced as the cheese ages and the texture changes from creamy to crumbly.

Tripe cooked and ready to be reheated at home. Also veal for
scaloppini, andouillette (chitling) sausages, and pig's feet.

A lot of people think they don't like goat cheese but they should try the fresh ones. They'll be surprised how mild they taste. Most people graduate up to the dry forms before too long and learn to appreciate the pungency of good aged goat cheese. It's good with beer, white wine, or red wine.

Valençay-style goat cheeses

I like to take market pictures and I've posted some here. I'm looking for local color, and I guess some of these pictures also have shock value. But this is France and food in France, where "variety meats" — offal or organs including kidneys, livers, brains, tripe, and chitterlings — are a delicacy.

Goat cheeses — fromages de chèvre — in a shop window

As for us American visitors, we left the market at about noon and drove back home for lunch. We had hamburgers and French fries! After lunch, we drove over to Loches to spend the afternoon in the medieval town there.