Le Château de Bellegarde

From Sully-sur-Loire, it's about a 30 minute drive north to the town of Bellegarde and its château, which was built starting in the 14th century and re-built in the 15th. Bellegarde is a place I liked to drive through and it was a good rest stop when we used to drive to Paris, as I wrote back then, at the drop of a hat. Bellegarde is about two hours northeast of Saint-Aignan and Paris is about two hours north of Bellegarde.

The moat around the château at Bellegard is a small lake.

Like Sully, Bellegarde offers nice moat relections...

Sully encore

I think I've been to Sully-sur-Loire only two times. Once was with CHM in 2006. We had seen two or three other châteaux and a couple of churches earlier that day. The photo below with pink flowers in a pot is one I took in 2006, and the last photo in yesterday's post is one I took that day in 2006 too.

Most of these photos of Sully are ones I took in late May 2015. I was on my way to Paris to get CHM and and go off on an adventure in the southern part of Normandy. I stopped in Sully because I had a good memory of it and I wanted to take a few more photo. If I'm to believe the timestamps on the photos, I took all of them in about 10 minutes' time on that May morning.

I read two things about Sully-sur-Loire this morning that interested me. First, Joan of Arc was held there against her will for a few weeks in the year 1430. The owner of the château at the time didn't like or trust her. I also read that there was a big fire in the château de Sully in early 1918. Several wings that had been added to it in the early 1700s were destroyed, but the parts of it that dated back to the 1300s and 1400s were not damaged.

Sully-sur-Loire et ses charmes

Less than 15 miles downriver on the Loire from Gien, and about 25 miles upriver from the city of Orléans, stands what the Signpost guidebook for the Loire Valley calls "an awesome 14th-century château, solidly rectangular, guarded by mighty towers and turrets, and cleverly 'moated' by the river Sange", which is a tributary of the much wider and longer Loire. The name of the town and château here is Sully-sur-Loire and a member of the Sully family (Maurice) was the bishop of Paris from the year 1160 until 1196 — it was he who came up with the idea of building the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral back then.

The famous writer/philosopher Voltaire spent long periods of time at the Château de Sully-sur-Loire in the late 1600s and early 1700s when another Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, a friend of Voltaire's who had been named the Duke of Sully, was serving as the finance minister of the French king Henri IV of "Paris is well worth a mass" and "a chicken in every pot" fame.

The Château de Sully has a donjon (castle keep) with a 600-year-old roof structure. The castle itself had nearly completely fallen into ruin at the end of the Second World War. The town of Sully, like Gien, had been 80% destroyed when bombed by the Germans and subsequently by Allied forces. The castle has been beautifully restored since those days.

The Michelin Guide Vert for the Châteaux de la Loire says that while this château is undoubtedly a fortress and a good example of military architecture, what gives it its charm is les reflets du soleil sur ses vieilles pierres, l'ombre et le murmure des grands arbres sur ses douves miroitantes, son petit pont, ses toits coiffés d'ardoises, et enfin, son doux ciel de Loire.

Gien

The town named Gien on the Loire river east of Orléans, says the Cadogan guidebook, was "bombed to smithereens in the Second World War, by the Germans in 1940 and by the Allies in 1944. Eighty per cent destroyed, the town was harmoniously restored after the conflict. The splendid hump-backed stone bridge was patched up. Riverside façades were recreated using traditional brick patternings of trellises and chevrons." Cadogan adds: "Meanwhile, by a stroke of good fortune, the Château de Gien up the hill escaped the bombs."

The Signpost guide for the Loire Valley says that "curiously, the town's noble château is built mainly of bricks, which the ordinary houses and cottages all around are built mainly of handsome stone." Gien is about 40 miles east of La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, which I posted about yesterday.

The château at Gien was not built but re-built in the toward the end of the 15th century, replacing fortifications that dated back to the 9th century.

The first stone bridge in Gien was spanning the Loire in 1246, according the Wikipédia. It was replaced by today's bridge in the 18th century.

The town of Gien has long been famous for the blue and yellow faïence (glazed earthenware) made there and for its hunting museum. Of that, the Signpost guide says: "If hunting upsets you, don't go in — the museum looks lovingly at the whole process of chasing and killing animals and birds, how it has inspired, entertained, and fed people..."