Villesavin, un petit château

About three weeks ago, we drove up to Villesavin, near Chambord, to see the "little" château that the superintendent of the Chambord contruction project built for himself there in the 1500s. It turned out to be one of the most interesting châteaux we have seen.

Villesavin, un petit château near Blois and Chambord

We took a guided tour so that we could see the interior of the château as well as the grounds. The guide, a woman in her 50s who had obviously spent a lot of time on and around the property, was informative and funny. You got the impression that she has known the owners of the château for a long time. The tour was in French — I don't know if English-language tours are given.

The guide said that when the current owners inherited Villesavin 25 years ago, it was in a sorry state of repair. It had been abandoned for decades, and the woods had grown up right to the walls of the building on all sides. The place was inaccessible and was falling down. The owners, recently married, moved into two rooms dating from the 16th century, heated them with wood fires in a big fireplace, and cooked in the fireplace too. They cleared the land and opened the place up for tours to bring in a little money for further restoration work. He sold tickets at the gate, and she guided visitors around the property and showed them the two rooms that they lived in.

Inscription over the main entrance at Villesavin

Our guide last month regaled us with stories about how different building materials and decorative elements at Villesavin had probably been siphoned off from the Chambord construction project, which ran from 1525 until 1540 or so.

The fountain in the main courtyard at Villesavin, for example, is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture that was probably intended to stand at Chambord but somehow ended up at the superintendent's home. The fountain is classified by the French government as a historical monument, and under that status the owners are not allowed to modify it in any way, the guide said. They can't even clean off the lichens and fungi that grow on the marble. Government inspectors turn up unannounced from time to time to make sure the fountain hasn't been cleaned.

The main courtyard at Villesavin and the historic marble fountain

The guide said that the owners of the château have done and are still doing major parts of the restoration of the building themselves, one room at a time.

A bust of king François Ier graces a wall in the Villesavin courtyard.
François built Chambord and, whether he knew it or not, Villesavin too.

On the west end of the château building there is a fine interior courtyard which is more barnyard than formal garden. A huge shade tree stands in the middle.

A glimpse of the side courtyard at Villesavin

Inside the side courtyard. You can see the porch that provides access
to the 16th century rooms the owners used to live in

The 16th century rooms were the most interesting part of the building, I thought. There was a gigantic fireplace for heat and cooking. Skins of wild boars — very old, according to the guide — served as throw rugs. The rest of the rooms we saw were done in 18th century style. They reminded me of rooms I've seen in the White House in Washington DC. Only a small part of the château — the owners' private apartments — is heated even to this day, so we shivered through much of the tour.

Another major feature at Villesavin is a very old dovecote (pigeonnier or colombier in French) where doves were housed. There are 1500 pigeonholes in the walls of the building, which is a big round tower. A revolving ladder mounted on a central axis let workers climb up and reach into the pigeonholes to gather eggs and chicks, which were used as food.

The roof structure of the colombier

If you come to the Loire Valley and go to see Chambord, I recommend a side trip to Villesavin, which is nearby.

The apartment we rented in Paris this time

A friend asked me to post pictures of the apartment we rented for our recent week in Paris. After our dog Collette "disappeared" on March 14, we decided pretty quickly that we ought to go spend a week in the big city, just for the change of scenery. We both like to walk the streets of Paris, and that's what we did every day, just to soak up the atmosphere. With all the demonstrations and protests, the atmosphere was particularly exciting.

We didn't have a lot of time to search for a place to stay, but we knew we wanted an apartment, not a hotel room. We enjoy being able to have breakfast in the apartment, and dinner most evenings. That way we can scout out the neighborhood boulangeries for the best bread and we can shop in charcuteries and produce stores and outdoor markets for dinner food that doesn't require any complicated cooking. Paris hotel rooms are notoriously small, and an apartment is always more pleasant.

On Internet forums I frequent, I had heard about a few reservation services that specialize in Paris apartments, so I started searching. Pretty quickly, I found a service called Opodohome with this apartment, called Marais Vertbois. Staying in the Marais sounded like a good idea, and the price was right: 490 euros for seven nights, plus a 25 euro cleaning fee. Almost any hotel room would have cost a lot more. And I knew the location: we wouldn't be far from the rue Montorgueil (where I lived for three years in the early 1980s) and from the rue de Bretagne, a nice rue commerçante in the 3rd arrondissement.

When we arrived, a young guy was coming out of the building and let us into the entryway. Two minutes later the owner of the apartment appeared; he had gone out to put some money in the horodateur (fancy parking meter) to make sure he didn't get a ticket. He showed us the place and we chatted for 30 minutes or so. His daughter lives in the U.S., and the rental apartment was where she lived when she was a student in Paris.

First impressions: I was a little taken aback at how sparely the place was furnished and how plain it looked. There was a sofa bed, an armchair, and a dining table with four chairs. The floor was vinyl tile except in the kitchen area and bathroom, where it was ceramic tile. Everything was clean, but it wasn't really spic and span, just passable. Still for the price...

We opened the sofa bed and tested it. It was pretty comfortable — not too soft or saggy, and without that awful sofabed rail you often get under your back and that you figure they designed that way so that extra guests wouldn't stay too long. The room was big enough — huge compared to the average Paris hotel room — that we just left the sofa bed folded out the whole time we were there. There was a second folding bed in the closet (behind the curtain) but we didn't use it.

The kitchen had small refrigerator and a two-burner, built-in electric hotplate. There was a good, easy-to-use microwave, and there was a toaster. There was an iron and ironing board that we didn't use (if you know us...).

The heat was a roll-around electric radiator in the main room and a wall-mounted electric radiator in the bathroom. All electricity and other utilities were included in the quoted rate. The owner accepted a check (either French or American) for the $300 or €300 security deposit. We hardly used the heat at all, but then we are used to the winter chill at this point.

There were coffee, tea, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, confiture, and a lot of other grocery staples in the kitchen cabinets, along with toilet paper, a little shampoo, some liquid soap, and a blow dryer in the bathroom. We ended up buying a box of Kleenex and some paper towels. The bathroom plumbing was fine. In the kitchen, there were plenty of cooking utensils and dishes for our purposes.

There were several pieces of furniture where we could put clothes, and there was closet space for hanging up our shirts. There was a decent TV and a boombox for radio. The water was always hot (too hot, really, but let's not quibble). Just off the entryway into the building, there was a room with several dumpsters where we could put not only kitchen garbage but paper and even bottles for recycling.


The apartment was quiet and comfortable. The main negative was its location on the ground floor, right on the street. The street wasn't at all busy, so there was not much car or motorcycle noise, but we could hear people walking by and talking. At night we heard were some sirens out on the rue St-Martin and some car alarms going off. But the biggest drawback was that we couldn't really open the shutters. When we did, people could look right in. We opened the shutters a little bit each day just to air the place out, and we really weren't there much in the daytime anyway.

Haute cuisine it's not

Here in Saint-Aignan we get all the good French food you could ever want to eat. There are a dozen or so restaurants within six or seven miles of the house. But all the food is French. We lived in San Francisco for nearly 20 years, so I think we can be forgiven if we occasionally have a hankering for Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, or ... even ... American food.

A trip to Paris is an opportunity to eat other cuisines. As I said in my last posting, we had dinner at a good Lebanese restaurant one night, and at a good Moroccan the next. Last Sunday, we had lunch in a little Indian restaurant on the rue de Miromesnil, near St-Augustin, called Sanna. I didn't take any pictures. We know people who live in that neighborhood; otherwise, we would never have found the restaurant. It was very good. I remember that there was a 16 euro menu and a 22 euro menu. I had tandoori chicken as my first course, and a curry made with little meatballs of lamb as my main dish. Here's a review in French. As the reviewer points out, the room is very French, the service is very discreet and very efficient, and the food is very good.

I mentioned before that one of the places where we had lunch was an American restaurant that specializes in U.S.-style breakfasts and burgers. It's on the rue des Écoles in the Latin Quarter, near Cardinal-Lemoine métro. Here it is — Breakfast in America.

An American joint in the Latin Quarter

It was warm enough that day for us to sit outside on the sidewalk and have our lunch. We ordered burgers, of course — a bacon cheeseburger for me (very dietetic) and a mushroom-Swiss cheeseburger for Walt. We each got cole slaw on the side, and we ordered a basket of fries to round it (and us) all out.

Bacon cheesburger with a stray mushroom on the edge of the plate

You want fries with that?

Authentic? You got it!

The only American thing we couldn't bring ourselves to order was the wine. On the menu it said "California wine" — no other details. We decided to go for the Côtes du Rhône. The woman who waited on us seemed to speak perfect English but also perfect French.

While we were eating, three 20-something Americans came up and took the table next to ours. I got the impression one of them lived in Paris. He seemed to speak French and had a cell phone. The other two, in my estimation, were short-term visitors in Paris on vacation. A different woman, this one clearly American by her accent and look, waited on them. They had studied the menu quite intently for some time, and they had a discussion about whether or not to have wine. The guy with the cell phone kept saying, "So, can we have a bottle of wine with the food?" The other two, a guy and a gal, weren't enthusiastic. They all ended up having Coca-Cola with lunch. When the waitress took their order, the tourist guy asked her, in a familiar-to-me, laid-back, flat-yet-lilting American tone: "The patty melt... What's that about?" She looked at him and said, surprised: "Haven't you ever had a patty melt before?" His answer: "Yeah, but not here." I don't know if "here" meant in Paris or at that particular restaurant.

Another day, we had pizzas at our favorite Paris pizzeria, Pizza Sant'Antonio on the place du Bourg-Tibourg in the Marais, near Hôtel de Ville. We've been stopping in there for years now. French pizza is very different from the American version, and Walt and I both prefer the French version: less overcooked tomato sauce, less heavy melted cheese, a fresher taste.

The Sant'Antonio has been remodeled over the past year or two. It's all stainless steel now, and it feels very clean. Here's the look.

Outdoor tables at the Pizza Sant'Antonio in the Marais

Bottles of water and spicy pizza oil on the tables

The pizzas at the Sant'Antonio

I didn't think about taking a picture of the pizzas until after we had started eating them. Sorry. As you might be able to tell, my pizza had an egg on top. That's common with French pizza. I had broken the yolk and kind of spread the egg around. Walt's pizza had cheese, ham, and mushrooms on it. The pizzas cost about ten dollars per person.

Okay, here's one place where we didn't have a meal while we were in Paris. It's called Ami Louis (aka Chez L'Ami Louis), and it was on the same street as the apartment we were staying in, just a couple of hundred yards further down. It's famous as one of the best old-style Parisian bistrots, serving huge portions of rich food and heavy sauces, all of the best quality. The waiters are reputed to be surly and the décor is shabby chic with walls stained yellow by years of tobacco smoke. American celebrities, it seems, are regular customers.

Le Restaurant Ami Louis, 32, rue du Vertbois, Paris IIIe

Here's the menu. Note the sky-high prices. Asperges for 58 euros! That's $70 or so. (This reminds me that while we were in Paris we were shopping a food market at Les Halles. One man was selling beautiful globe artichokes from Brittany. I asked him for two, and the price came to 30 euros— close to forty bucks. For two artichokes. I said non merci — c'est beaucoup trop cher. I don't know what that man was thinking.)

Ami Louis. Roast chicken for €70, or about $85.

Grilled veal kidneys: $55. A piece of chocolate cake: $25. Fresh raspberries: $27. If I win the lottery, I might have dinner at Ami Louis one night to celebrate. Until then, I have other priorities.

Restaurants and meals we enjoyed in Paris

The first night we were in Paris we had dinner with our friend Cricket from California. She suggested a Lebanese restaurant in the Marais called Aux Fleurs deThym. It's at 19, rue François Miron, just off the rue du Pont Louis-Philippe, and is listed here.

Aux Fleurs de Thym, a Lebanese restaurant in the Marais

We were excited to see Cricket — it had been three or four years since I had seen her — and we didn't think much about taking pictures of the food. What we ordered was called a mezze. It was a selection of 12 hors-d'œuvre plates for the table. Six were cold dishes, and six were hot. There were so many dishes and we were so busy tasting and talking that I can't remember everything we ate. Lentil salad, hummus, samosas, little shish-kebabs, etc. We also had a bottle of Lebanese wine that was very good.

By the time dessert arrived, we thought about photos (for our friends who enjoy such photos, and you know who you are). The restaurant is very small, by the way, so reservations are a good idea. The mezze tasting menu was 58 euros for three people. Wine was extra.

Cricket showing her dessert to the camera

After dinner that first night in Paris, we were already thinking about the next meal. Walt and I had walked past a little Moroccan restaurant earlier in the evening and thought it looked promising. Cricket said Moroccan sounded really good to her. So after the Lebanese sampler dinner, we walked the few blocks up to the Moroccan place and made a reservation for the next evening. It is called La Rose des Sables and here's a review in French. I haven't been able to find any reviews of these two restaurants in English.

La Rose des Sables, 103 rue Vieille-du-Temple, Paris IVe

The dishes we enjoyed at La Rose des Sables were the salads we had as starters: Cricket had marinated eggplant, I had tomatoes and cooked green peppers, and Walt had grated carrots with a dressing that included orange juice. All three salads were refreshing and tasty. And we enjoyed the main courses as much if not more. I had a tagine of lamb with onions, prunes, and almonds that was excellent. Walt had a lamb tagine with green peas and artichoke hearts. Cricket had a chicken tagine with seven or eight vegetables. Again, all were amazing. The lamb and chicken were totally succulent.

La Rose des Sables is a place I can recommended highly. It's very small, with room for maybe 25 people, so you have to reserve. For three, with a bottle of nice Moroccan wine, we paid just over 100 euros for dinner.

Before we ever got to dinner that day, we had already had an afternoon snack of oysters (on the half shell, as we say) and a nice bottle of Muscadet white wine at the Au Pied de Cochon restaurant near Les Halles. The oysters were expensive, I thought, but it was fun, and we were in that neighborhood shopping for kitchen items at DeHillerin anyway. It was a rainy day.

DeHillerin, a store full of great kitchen stuff

Au Pied de Cochon, an institution at Les Halles

One other restaurant Walt and I really enjoyed was a little old-fashioned Parisian bistrot in the XIe arrondissement recommended by Dave (Happy in Paris) of the Slow Travel forum on the Internet. We met Dave for lunch there last Monday.

La Ravigotte, 41, rue de Montreuil, Paris XIe

The "full" menu at La Ravigote was 13 euros per person, plus wine. That includes entrée, plat principal, and dessert. For 10 euros, you could have entrée + plat or plat + dessert. Here's what it looked like.

The menu at La Ravigote

The salade de chèvre chaud was very good, as I can attest. As a main course, Walt had joues de porc au gingembre — "hog jowls with ginger" doesn't sound nearly as good, does it? I guess a better translation is "pork cheeks". He said the lean pork was very tender and flavorful. Dave had the poulet fermier aux pruneaux — farm-raised chicken in a sauce with prunes. (If you don't like prunes cooked in sauces with things like rabbit, duck, chicken, pork, veal, or lamb, all I can say is: Get with the program! California prunes and French prunes are both excellent.) Oh, and I had onglet grillé — a grilled beefsteak with pan-fried potatoes. It was tender and cooked just right. We all had dessert too, but I can't remember what. We also had a nice bottle of Bordeaux. The tab came to about 23 euros per person, with apéritifs and coffee.

Paree by night

This past Tuesday evening we went out for one more walk down by the Seine before heading back to Saint-Aignan on the train the next morning. The weather was clear and chilly. I took my camera (the Canon s70) of course and shot a bunch of night pictures — there was plenty of room left on the flash card.


We walked past cafés with empty terrasses. It was a little too chilly to sit out after dark, but I'm sure the outdoor seating areas had been full of people in the afternoon, when it was sunny.

[Caution! Anecdote...] While we were in Paris, we had one lunch outdoors, by the way. It was hamburgers with cole slaw, French fries, and some red Rhône wine at a place called Breakfast in America in the rue des Écoles on the Left Bank. I can recommend it for the hamburgers, but if you don't live in France you probably don't want to sacrifice one of your French meals just to eat a burger. Oh, and we had coffee or a glass of wine at outdoor cafés several times during the week. The weather was not bad for early April. [End of anecdotal content.]

The Café Rive Droite is at Les Halles, in the big pedestrian area surrounding the Forum des Halles shopping gallery.

We walked across the north branch of the Seine and crossed the Île de la Cité, passing in front of Notre Dame cathedral.

Looking down the river from the Right bank, the Île de la Cité is on the left, and just past the Pont au Change are the buildings of the Conciergerie.

As we walked along the river, we went past the Conciergerie.

From the Pont Neuf, we overlooked the tour boats that dock at the west end of the island. The building in the background is the Hôtel de la Monnaie, on the Left Bank.

This is a view of the Place Saint-Michel on the Left Bank and the Pont Saint-Michel as seen from across the south branch of the river, on the Île de la Cité near Notre Dame.

Looking east from the Pont Neuf, you see the Hôtel de Ville and a tower of the Église Saint-Gervais on the Right Bank (on the left in this picture), the Pont au Change, and the administrative and historic buildings on the Île de la Cité (on the right).

This is the view downriver from the Pont Neuf. The dome on the left is the Institut (where the French academy and other academies meet) on the Left Bank. In the distance is the Tour Eiffel, and on the Right Bank you can see the buildings of the Louvre. You can just barely make out the Pont des Arts in the dark.


In the evening, the Eiffel Tower is turned into a big colorful sparkler for ten minutes every hour on the hour. After our walk, we went and had a good-bye cognac (a calvados and a vieille prune, actually) at a café at Châtelet. Our next scheduled trip to Paris will be in late May, for the Roland Garros tennis matches.

Can you decipher these?

Last week in Paris I noticed an advertising campaign with posters touting the travel planning services of the SNCF, the French national railway. The SNCF's travel agency doesn't just offer train travel, the posters said, but also trips to overseas destinations.

On each poster below there is a phonetic transcription of the name of a major city that is not in Europe. It's a French spelling of the name as it is pronounced in French. You have to have a good grasp of the language to decipher the names, though they are obvious to French speakers.

Can you figure out what the advertised destinations are?

Recent "events" in Paris

We went to Paris on Wednesday, March 29, for a week's stay. The day before we left Saint-Aignan to take the train to Paris, there was a grève générale, a general strike, called by the labor and students' unions, to protest the government's plan to institute a new First Job Contract for people under 26 years old. Under the proposed contract, young employees could be let go without cause during their first two years of employment.

The government saw such a contract as a way to encourage employers to hire more young people. Many young people saw it as discriminatory. Demonstrations followed. Reports said there were as many as three million demonstrators in the streets in cities around the country on March 28 and again on April 4, when a second general strike was called. Those were days that we spent in Paris.

Here are some of my pictures from that week. Click on the pictures to see full-size views.

The current generation of students complains of précarité, which translates as job insecurity. The banner in the picture above was strung up at a métro station near the Place de la République in Paris on Tuesday April 4. The Place de la République is a big square in northeastern Paris where demonstrations are frequently held. The little apartment we rented for our Paris trip was just about 500 yards to the west of République.

That same afternoon at République there was quite a crowdat about five o'clock. These people are marching under the banner of the PCF, the Parti communiste français. The green banners on the van carry the name of the PCF's leader, Marie-George Buffet.

On the Grands Boulevards, near the Porte Saint-Martin, we saw a big group marching toward République. This woman is holding up the PCF's red flag.

This was the aftermath of the April 4 demonstration at République. The crowd had thinned out as the demonstrators marched to the Place d'Italie, in the southeastern quadrant of Paris.

At République, at typical scene on April 4. The CGT is the Confédération générale du travail, a labor union more or less allied with the PCF, the French communist party.

We were out for a walk around the city and just wanted to cross from one side of République to the other. At first we thought that might be impossible. But we found a break in the crowd and made it through. The atmosphere was relaxed and easy, despite what you might think.

The demonstrations on April 4 were big enough to convince the Chirac government that it had a big problem on its hands, but they weren't especially violent or even all that disruptive. Métro trains ran at just slightly reduced service levels, as did buses. Most people were able to go about their daily lives quite normally.

I took the picture above on Friday, March 31, at the Place de la Bastille. We were just walking through when we saw this sit-in. Students were blocking traffic and had backed up a few buses and trucks as well as a lot of cars at this busy intersection. The sit-in had not been announced ahead of time. The demonstrators looked like high school students. They stood and got out of the way when an ambulance came through with its siren blaring, but they wouldn't let cars and buses pass.

On April 4 we saw this march coming up the Boulevard de Strasbourg from the Place du Châtelet in central Paris, near the Pompidou Center.

If you click on the picture above to enlarge it, you'll see that the people who noticed me taking their picture were smiling and friendly. We all said bonjour to each other as they passed. The banner says "the law must be withdrawn, period!"

Meanwhile, it was common to see large fleets of police cars and vans around the city all week. Here's a convoy of police vans on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the Latin Quarter. Isn't it funny how white the police vehicles are compared to the red flags and banners of the protesters?

The political situation is this: the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, pushed the law creating the First Job Contract through parliament. Students and labor union members protested. The president, Jacques Chirac, then announced that he was signing the new law, but he asked employers not to hire anybody under the new contract until after it has been revised. He wanted to reduced the probationary period from two years to one, and he wanted employers to be required to explain their reasons to any employee who was let go during that year.

Some constitutional experts said it was unprecedented, even treasonous, for the president to ask people not to obey a law that he had signed. What if he asked people not to obey laws outlawing murder, for example? Other experts pointed out that the law, once revised according to the president's wishes, will be meaningless. It seems to be a muddled mess. Many are still calling for the law to be abolished.