Walking on the beach In October

Yesterday Sue and I took a walk on the beach along Beaufort Inlet. This is the entrance to the harbor at Morehead City, a deep-water port in North Carolina. The beach here extends from this inlet to another inlet on the western end of the barrier island called Bogue Banks, and is about 25 miles (40 km) long.

This actually a pretty typical October day. The historical average temperature here in mid-October is about 25ºC (77ºF). Yesterday was T-shirt weather. We walked under blue skies. A lot of people were out fishing and picking up shells, just enjoying the sunshine.

From this beach there are good views of the town of Beaufort — pronounced [BOH-furt] not [BYOO-furt] — which is one of the three oldest towns in N.C., founded in 1710 (Bath and New Bern are older). Sue and I haven't gone to Beaufort yet. That's for Thursday.

Today our plan is to take a 30 minute boat ride out to a place called Sand Dollar Island, on the back side of Shackleford Banks, to gather shells including, of course, sand dollars, which are a kind of sea urchin shaped like a flattened disk. We were told that is illegal to pick up live sand dollars. You can only collect the dead, sun-bleached ones. Sand Dollar Island isn't far from the Cape Lookout lighthouse, which is 10 miles distant in this photo..

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A typical house in Beaufort, N.C. October 2019

As I said yesterday, I'm just too busy. This whole trip in like one big family reunion! Check back tomorrow.

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The port of Morehead City, N.C., seen from an island in Bogue Sound. October 2019.

We are having gorgeous weather, as you can see. I'm really far to busy to be trying to post to the blog.

Sights I saw as I walked along the Seine Wednesday afternoon

Bouquinistes are book-sellers who have stalls along the quays that line the course of the Seine river in Paris. They sell books, but they also sell a lot of prints, drawings, and other printed matter. Their displays are highly colorful.

The Restaurant Lapérouse is the the Left Bank, facing the Îles de la Cité across the river. The restaurant is 250 years old and has recently experienced a "revival" under new ownership, according to this New York Times article. I'm sorry to say that I've never had a meal there.

The old Samaritaine department store has been closed for years now. It's on the Right Bank, across the river from the Square du Vert Galant on the western tip of the Île de la Cité, with it's equestrian statue of the late 16th century king Henri IV.

This is the building where the French académies and instituts sit and deliberate. That includes the language authorities called the Académie Française, who have been writing and publishing successive editions of their "official"dictionary of the French language since the early 17the century.

In front of the Institut stands this impressive statue of the Marquis Nicolas de Condorcet, an 18th century mathematician, philosopher, publisher, and political figure. The Institut is located on the Left Bank.

I'm recovering from my 36-hour trip from the Loire Valley to North Carolina this week. And jet lag. I hope that by the time you see this I will have accomplished a few things.

No food pics, but two café terraces

When I went to the Café de l'Empire (rue de Verneuil, Paris 7e), with my friends C. and B. from California, I didn't take any pictures of the food. Not because it wasn't good or not photogenic, but because the conversation was so lively that I kind of forgot about photography. Before I stepped into the café and saw that C. and B. were there waiting for me.I did take a photo of the menu that is posted on the front of the building.

My dinner was the Salade César, which was sort of unconventional. Instead of a grilled chicken breast, the salad was served with diced up chicken breast from a bird that had been oven roasted. Instead of grated Parmesan cheese, there were thin slicess of Parmesan on top the salad greens. And there were also slices and tomato and wedges of hard-boiled egg around the edges of the plate. It was good, but not really what my memory and imagination wanted or expected a Chicken Caesar Salad to be. 

I took the photo above as I walked along the Seine from east to west, on the opposite side of the river from the Louvre. I thought it was picturesque and I'd like to go have a glass of wine or a meal there one day.

And I took this photo after dinner while I was walking back toward the Place Saint-Michel and Notre-Dame cathedral to catch my train out to the airport. Walt will recognize this place.

Les supplices de Notre-Dame

When I arrived in central Paris yesterday afternoon and emerged from the subway, rain was pelting down. I had taken a lightweight raincoat with me, folded up and stuffed into a pocket of my fleece jacket. That was a good thing I had done that, because I really needed it. Getting it out of my pocket and putting it on took a minute or two, and I got wet. But soon the rain started to slack off.

I had walked too far through underground tunnels and when I finally got to ground level I realized I was on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a few hundred meters from the Seine, where Notre-Dame Cathedral stands on an island in the river. I know my way around in that neighborhood, so I walked east to the Rue Saint-Jacques and then north toward the river. The rain was ending and the sun was coming back out. Suddenly there was a big rainbow shining in an arc over the bell towers of the cathedral. It didn't last long, because a cloud covered up the sun again and the light faded. The photo above was the best one I could get before the rainbow disappeared completely.

When you see just the bell towers of Notre-Dame, you might think all is well with the ancient monument. The towers weren't much damaged by the big fire a few months ago. I think supplice is the mot juste to describe what the cathedral is going through. I mean it in the sense of souffrance très vive, difficilement supportable — intense suffering, barely tolerable.

The roof of the church burned hot and fiercely the night of the fire. The metal roof was supported by a elaborate and very old wooden structure that was called la forêt ("the forest"). The wooden roof beams were fairly dry, as you'll understand, after standing up there for centuries protected by the room from the rains of the damp Paris climate.

To keep the church walls from falling down, the old flying buttresses have been reinforced with wooden supports. The church is of course closed to the public, and even the grounds are fenced off. Authorities don't want tourists to get to close to fragilized stone walls that might come crashing down.

And many tourists there certainly were. I pushed my way through crowds and did the best I could to take a few pictures. The rain had ended, but I had only about 20 minutes to spend around Notre-Dame before hiking over to a neighborhood about 20 minutes away. My dinner companions, who had just arrived a few hours earlier from California, were waiting for me in the café where we had agreed to have our evening meal. I wasn't late; they were early. For me, it had been a day of delays and retards, as they say in French. And those delays weren't over yet...

Le jardin en octobre

Here we go, then. It's October 9 already, and I'll be leaving for Paris in a few hours. I need to go finish packing. Here are a few back yard photos I've taken over the past few days.

A peony plant shows some fall colors. I guess it needs to be cut back. Tasha and I were just getting back from a walk in the vineyard.

Now that there's a little more moisture and temperatures aren't so extreme, this colchiques (autumn crocuses) have come up again.

The wisteria got a good pruning this summer. It was growing too far to the right, toward the greenhouse. It's still green at this point, but it won't be green for much longer. (The green can contains potting soil, not trash.)

And finally, the vegetable garden in October. The green and the purple basil plants are in full flower. The kale is coming back nicely, now that it's cooler and there are fewer active insect pests. We're still getting tomatoes but the zucchini plants are finished. We're also getting some bell peppers now. Overall, this has not been one of our better vegetable gardens, because of drought and high temperatures.

Autumn skies, and dinner in Paris

I took these photos later in the day, near sunset, after posting my recent sunrise photos. A front (une pertubation) was moving in from the northwest, bringing rain or at least the threat of it. This slideshow is made up of eight photos and runs for less than a minute. These photos are not in chronological order, and I probably should have put the picture of the beautiful sunset last in the series. It hows how the day ended.

My North Carolina trip begins tomorrow. First I have to take a train from Saint-Aignan via Tours to CDG airport north of Paris. I'll spend the night in an airport hotel and fly out on Thursday morning, destination Raleigh-Durham airport in North Carolina, arriving in the middle of the afternoon the same day. There I'll pick up a rental car and drive 3½ hours out to the coast, to my home town. It's a long trip — from Saint-Aignan to Morehead City— it takes about 36 hours. At my age, it's pretty tiring. Not to mention the jet lag (six hour time difference with France).

However, I've decided to go into Paris for dinner Wednesday night, after checking in at the airport hotel and leaving my luggage in my hotel room. Some friends from California are arriving in Paris a few hours before I do, and I've found an interesting looking café in central Paris where we can have dinner together.

The last time I went to Paris was in October 2017 — Oct. 9, to be exact. I was flying off to N.C. that time too, and I took the train from the airport into the city on the evening before departure. I had a good dinner with CHM in his neighborhood in Paris and then took a long walk through the city before catching my RER train back to the airport. Tomorrow is again Oct. 9, and I'm more or less retracing my steps two years later to the day. Walt says I'm in a rut.

Je sais que l'automne est là...

I know it's now autumn when I see scenes like these on my walks with the dog. It's not cold yet, even though our central heat has come on several times over the past week, with the thermostat set at 18.5ºC — about 65ºF. That's our wintertime temperature inside the house.

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle... Well, not these, actually. They're chestnut leaves that will slowly disintegrate over the course of the winter.Along with almost all of the chestnuts themselves. Nobody seems to want them.

There are patches of mushrooms of various varieties all around the edges of the vineyard, thanks to recent, repeated rains. These have come up just outside our back gate. I wish I knew whether these are edible or not. Dans le doute, abstiens-toi, they say.

Here's where bunches of grapes hung until recently. Nearly all the grapes have been harvested now. That's the surest sign that autumn is here. These were red-wine grapes — Gamay Noir, I assume. They are harvested mechanically, not by hand, so the woody structures the grapes grow on are left behind.

Our "fall colors" are mostly grape leaves, though chestnut and maple leaves are colorful too. Different grape varietals produce autumn leaves of different colors, from bright red to golden yellow. It won't be long before all the grape leaves will be on the ground, and wintertime pruning will start.

And finally, fall food. This is a slice of Greek moussaka, made with potatoes, eggplant (aubergines), lamb cooked with tomatoes and spices including cinnamon, and a firm, cheesy béchamel sauce on top. The weather is cool enough now that we can enjoy cooking foods in the oven, though Walt actually cooked the slices of eggplant (from our 2019 vegetable garden) on the barbecue grill for this moussaka.

October sunrise and clouds

Here's a set of pictures, in chronological order, that I took in the Renaudière vineyard yesterday, October 5, 2019. It was sunrise, meaning between eight and eight-thirty a.m. The slide show is made up of 15 images and runs for about two minutes.



I'm going into high gear to get everything ready for my upcoming trip to North Carolina. I leave in three or four days. I don't worry too much about packing clothes. I take very few articles of clothing over there and just buy whatever I turn out to need along the way. Clothes are so much less expensive in the U.S. than in France. I mean clothes of comparable quality. It's not easy to shop for clothes here because it means driving to Blois, Tours, or Orléans, all between 45 and 90 minutes away — whereas in Morehead City it's easy, with all the big-box stores just a few miles from where I'll be staying.

Cranberry-Walnut Chicken Salad

I don't think I've ever been served chicken salad in France. At least, not a chicken salad the way we make it in America. I wonder if it is a staple in the U.K. or Australia the way it is in the U.S. This one has cranberries and walnuts in it, along with chopped celery, shallot, and parsley. Here's a recipe that just slightly different from this one.

The first thing you need when you want to make this kind of chicken salad is some chopped up chicken. We had cooked a chicken on our kitchen stove's rotisserie (tourne-broche) in the oven. Having the rotisserie is a feature I really like and use regularly. Sorry I didn't take a picture of the cooked chicken before I removed the skin and then took the meat off the bones and diced it up.

Then you need some flavor ingredients: shallot, celery, and parsley, in this case. One nice French shallot (échalote) is plenty for the meat of half a three-pound roasted chicken. Chop the vegetables as finely as you like. You can substitute onion for the shallot, of course. Red onion would be very good.

This particular recipe includes dried cranberries, roughly chopped. It's nice to be able to find these dried cranberries in the supermarkets. Cranberries are not French but North American. They're good in salads and cakes, and Walt has discovered that he can make good cranberry sauce with them for the holiday turkey (dinde) or guinea fowl (pintade). I think you could substitute raisins or diced apple for them in this salad.

And then walnuts, toasted before being chopped. Walt shelled these and then toasted them on a tray in our little countertop oven. Our American friends down the road have a big walnut tree and often have such big crops that they share them widely, including with us. And our English friends over on the other side of the river also have a big walnut tree, and they generously share them too. We don't lack for walnuts. (The salad would be good with pecans done the same way.)

Of course, you also need a dressing for all these ingredients. I use a combination of mayonnaise — I like the Maille mayonnaise fine from the supermarket if I don't make my own — and some plain yogurt, or a combination of yogurt and crème fraîche, to thin the mayo a little — two parts mayo and one part yogurt. Then it's easy to toss the salad in it. Salt and pepper of course. Serve as a sandwich filling or as a salad over a bed of lettuce, with fresh tomatoes.

The Château de Blois [3]

I was surprised yesterday to read in another guidebook I have in my collection — Loire Valley: Your Guide to Great Drives (in the Signpost Guides series) — this note: François Mansart, the 17th century architect who was responsible for the Gaston d'Orléans wing (or Mansart wing) of the château de Blois, in Classical style, was already knocking down the François 1er Renaissance wing of the complex to make room for the new building when construction was abruptly halted in 1638. Gaston's older brother was Louis XIII, and Gaston was next in line for the throne of France because Louis XIII had produced no living male heirs. Suddenly and unexpectedly, as Louis's health declined, a male heir had been born (he would become king under the name Louis XIV).

Since Gaston would not become king, there was no need for the opulent new palace. He ran out of funds, and it was never completed. But the Renaissance wing was spared. From the Cadogan Loire guidebook: “The Mansart wing... stands in stark, ordered contrast to the delightfully excentric, slightly chaotic other wings. Symmetry and the classical orders triumph in the bright light-grey stone. Gone are the joyously individualistic element of Gothic decoration. Gone are the elevating, exuberant Loire lucarnes which stretch the gaze skywards... Henry James wrote of the Mansart wing that ‘taken in contrast to its flowering, laughing, living neighbour, it marks the difference between calculation and inspiration.’ ”

François 1er's chosen emblem was the amphibian called la salamandre. Why? In France, the common salamander, also called la salamandre du feu, was thought to be able to survive in fires or, indeed born in fires. One theory for this belief is that salamanders would seek shelter in woodpiles in winter. When the wood was brought in to be burned, sometimes a salamander would come crawling out of the fireplace. Legend had it that the creature was born of the fire. Having power over fire meant having power over the Earth, and that's why François chose the salamander as his emblem.

Here are a pair of putti that I photographed at Blois. I'm not sure where they actually were. On the walls of the staircase? That's what seems to be the case given the order of the photos I took that day. The putto is a symbol of love, and we might called them cupids in English. Putti are usually depicted as chubby male children, usually naked, and sometimes with wings.

Finally, the outer façade, facing north and the town, is completely different from the inner façade of the François 1er wing of the château de Blois. Philipped Barbour, author of the Cadogan Loire guide, writes: “...it consists of a series of arcaded storeys much more Italian Renaissance in style. Curiously, the architect didn't make the balconies interconnect, giving the feel of some snooty Renaissance hotel, each window given its separate, exclusive terrace.”

Nobody knows exactly who the architect was, but it is said that the queen, Claude, was personally involved in drawing up the plans. When she died in 1524, only nine years after François became king, he seems to have lost interest in the project. François's next project: le château de Chambord.

Quelques animaux que j'ai vus à Blois

Here are some photos of "wildlife" that I've taken in Blois over the years.

The slideshow runs for nearly two minutes and is made up of 15 photos.

The porcupine was the chosen emblem of the early 16th century king Louis XII. That's Louis (Le Père du Peuple) on horseback. The salamander was the emblem that Louis's successor, François 1er, chose for himself, and that him with the roof-beam halo in a photo I took at nearby Chambord a few years ago. François had the château de Chambord built. He died in mid-century. The rest of the photos of animals are pretty random. The last photo shows a (mechanical) dragon sticking its head out the window of the Maison de la Magie, near the château.

The Château de Blois (2)

Again, from the Cadogan Loire (© 2001) guidebook: The François 1er wing of the château has “an extraordinarily decorated stair tower. The [...] inner façade [facing the courtyard] makes a lavish display of Gothic style fusing with that of the Renaissance. It was begun in 1515, almost immediately after François had inherited the throne. Symmetry is still not especially sought. The salamanders, Francois 1er's favorite emblem, plastered over the walls, may present a Gothic-looking flourish, but many other details are very much Italianate. A grid of horizontal lines, an Italian influence, breaks the traditional vertical movement of French Gothic architecture. The shape of the steep roof may remain traditonally French, with the proud lucarnes not to be found in Italy but the niches added in these dormer windows, a putti* placed in each, are a typical device of classical fashons.”

The stair tower “is a celebrated Loire monument in its own right, although the staircase at Chambord runs away with first prize in the category. The protuding spiral stair tower was a well-established feature of French Gothic architecture, not of the Italian Renaissance, the latter preferring straight ramps more discreetly incorporated into the main building. The openwork sides, thought, impart an Italianate touch, allowing for fine courtly display...”

“The openings and balustrades, rather than concealing the angle of the stair ramps, reflect it with their open shapes and friezes. The procession of sculpted salamanders add the the great sense of movement.

“No one is sure who conceived the plans for this inner [courtyard] façade...”

* I think this term should be the singular form putto, which is an Italian term meaning "a figure in a work of art depicted as a chubby male child, usually naked and sometimes winged", quoting Wikipedia.

The Château de Blois (1)

The Cadogan guidebook for the Loire Valley, a mine of information and entertainment, says thats the château at Blois is a group of "mismatched wings" and describes them as "clashing styles shoved next to each other." The author says, however, that the overall effect "is by no means unattractive; it's even rather amusing and certainly extravagant." Each wing is a grand example of its period's style, and the people who built them were some of the finest craftsmen of their time.

The Louis XII wing was the first to be built. Construction began in 1499, and the brick building is "essentially late Gothic in style" with just a few Italianate features. Louis XII was the king who brought the Italian Renaissance to France. He was born at Blois in 1462 and reigned from 1498 until his death in 1515. His predecessor and cousin, Charles VIII, had started a series of wars with the goal of conquering the Duchy of Milan, and Louis XII continued the campaigns. Thus did the French discover the treasures and charms of Italy.

What is now called the French Renaissance was the result. The French adopted Italian styles and imported Italian architects, landscape architects, artists and other experts (including Leonardo da Vinci). The country emerged from the Middle Ages and a new era dawned. Depicted here on horseback in a 19th century statue on the outer façade of his château, Louis XII came to be known as Le Père du Peuple. For a few years, Louis controlled not only Milan but most of the Italian peninsula. It didn't last long. Louis was in his 50s, and age and failing health caught up with him. He died in 1515, leaving no male heirs.

Louis had presided over the marriage of his daughter Claude to François d'Angoulême, who was the presumptive heir to the throne because Louis had no surviving male children. François would reign has François 1er from 1515 until 1547 — the glory days of the French Renaissance. He has a wing in the Blois château complex too, but that's another story.

Later, the wing you see on the left was built at Blois. Doesn't it look very different? Almost austere. Certainly not inviting.

The Michelin Guide says politely that this part of the complex contraste avec le reste de l'édifice... and implies that it is difficult to judge équitablement. Above is a photo of its façade on the opposite side of the courtyard from the Louis XII wing. To the left is a view of the building from the street below, not far from the Église Saint-Nicolas. This wing was built in the classical style in the 17th century when Gaston d'Orléans, a duke but never a king, lived at Blois. His father was the famous king Henri IV (assassinated in 1610), who gave up Protestantism so that he could become king, and promised all French families a chicken in every pot for their Sunday dinner. Gaston, known also as Le Grand Monsieur, was the younger brother of king Louis XIII, who in turn fathered the Sun King Louis XIV. The seat of the French monarchy had moved away from Blois and the Loire Valley, back to Paris, Fontainebleau, and Versailles.

Des gâteaux, des quiches, des tartes, et des pizzas

Here are some pastries and other baked goods for your Monday. Hope they brighten your day.
I took the photos in 2006 in Blois, so these particular cakes and pies might be a little stale by now.
However, there are plenty of fresh ones available all over France.

I'm off to Loches on an errand this morning. That will take my whole morning. Walt is making pizzas for our lunch.
Bonne Journée !