Peintures murales en l'église de Saint-Savin (1)

These photos are nearly 12 years old. They're pictures of wall paintings, but not exactly; they're pictures of ceiling paintings on very high ceilings. Taking photos of details like these means using a long zoom.

The Michelin Guide says of these paintings, which were painted directly on old stone or mortar:

« Les couleurs employées, peu nombreuses, se réduisent à l'ocre jaune, à l'ocre rouge et au vert, mélangés au noir et au blanc. L'ensemble présente généralement une grande douceur de tons, mais reste très lumineux grâce à des jeux de contrastes : une vie intense anime les différents personnages, les pied entrecroisés indiquent le mouvement, les vêtements moulent les formes, les mains souvent d'une longueur disproportionnée sont très expressives. »

Saint-Savin, 2006 et 2009

CHM and I have been to Saint-Savin together twice. The first time was in June 2006. The church was undergoing restoration work inside, so half of the interior was sealed off and not visible. We wanted to go there again in 2007 and in 2008, but before doing the drive, we called the church offices and asked for a status report. Both times, we were told that the interior was only partially open to visitors. Finally, in 2009, the work was finished, and we visited again.

I've been looking through my photos from 2006 and 2009 this morning, and here are a few of them. I discovered that I also have CHM's photos from the 2009 trip. I've processed a few, and there are many others of both his and mine that I want to edit and improve. In this post, the first photo is one that CHM took in June 2009, along with some of mine from 2006. The church steeple is 77 meters (just over 250 feet) tall.

CHM 2009

CHM in a church on that busy June day in 2009

The Michelin Guide I have explains that the original abbey church at Saint-Savin was built in the 9th century and it was protected by a line of fortifications. That didn't stop invading Norsemen from breaking through to pillage and plunder it in the year 878. Work to build a second church on the site, the one we see today, had to wait nearly 200 years. Another couple of centuries later, the invading English and the local French fought over Saint-Savin during the 100 Years' War.

And then at the end of the French Renaissance, in the late 1500s, Saint-Savin was pillaged and plundered by both Protestant and Catholic forces during the Wars of Religion. Monks returned to Saint-Savin in about 1640, but by then many of the monastery buildings had been torn down. The church had suffered but survived, despite significant modifications and botched restoration work. It's amazing that it even exists today.

Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe

The town of Saint-Savin is just north of Antigny, which I posted about yesterday and the day before. The two communes share a border. My friend CHM and I first went to Saint-Savin together in 2006. We had already known each other for more than 20 years at that point, and we went to Saint-Savin for a specific reason. It was because CHM had spent time there during World War II, with his mother. I was sure he would enjoy seeing the place again, and he was too.

Walt and I had first seen Saint-Savin in 1989, when we spent a week driving from Grenoble to Bordeaux and then up to Chartres before going to spend a couple of days in Paris. That was the first time we ever saw Saint-Aignan, too, but that's another story. Anyway, we were going to fly out of Paris back to San Francisco a few days later. Why did we want to go to Saint-Savin?

It was because I had had this poster since my days in Champaign, Illinois, back in the 1970s, when I was a grad student and teaching assistant in the University of Illinois French department. I got the poster from the offices of the American Association of Teachers of French, where I was a part-time staffer, supplementing my paltry TA's salary. At some point, Walt had had this and a couple of other AATF posters mounted on boards and we put them up on the walls of various apartments we lived in when we moved to San Francisco in 1986. We were fleeing Washington DC for a couple of reasons — one being that Washington and the Republicans in power back then (Reagan Republicans) were less than friendly to people like us. I had a government security clearance at the time, and I was soon going to come up for my five-year review. I didn't look forward to being interrogated about my life. Besides, Walt had an opportunity to move to California to continue his education. So off we went.

The first time CHM came to visit us at our house in California was in, I think, 1992. That too is a story for another day. CHM had never been to our apartment or house before. He had only learned that Walt and I were domestic partners a few months earlier. He and his partner Frank were in the Bay Area because Frank's daughter lived there, not much more that two or three miles from us, in Silicon Valley. That was a funny coincidence. He and Frank were to visit us many times in the 1990s, and we visited and stayed with them many times in southern California where they were living, south of Palm Springs.

When CHM looked around in our house in Sunnyvale (the heart of Silicon Valley) in 1992, he quickly spotted the poster of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe on a wall and wondered how we had come to have it. I told him about getting it from the AATF in Champaign in the 1970s, and how we had driven through there in 1989. He knew my history as a grad student and teacher in Illinois, because he and I had worked together in Washington DC between 1983 and 1986. He had even met Walt but didn't know we lived together. He also told me about his time spent in Saint-Savin in the 1940s. That's why we both wanted to see Saint-Savin again in 2006. It's only 100 kilometers south of Saint-Aignan. Here are some pictures from then. More will follow.

I remember our stop in front of this hotel/restaurant in Saint-Savin, when I took this picture. We decided to have lunch there. When we walked in, CHM told the young man who greeted us (he might have been the owner or manager) that he had good memories of meals with his mother at the Hôtel de France more than 60 years earlier. The man smiled and said he had only been there for a year!

Antigny bis

This web page published in 2017 under the sponsorship of the région Nouvelle-Aquitaine says that many of the wall paintings in the Antigny church date from the 12th century, with others from the 14th, 15th, and 16th. It includes numerous photos of different paintings. See my blog post yesterday for photos from 2006.

Another exceptional feature of the village of Antigny is a funerary column called a fanal or a lanterne des morts. The "graveyard lantern" in Antigny is a rectangular stone column eight or nine meters (nearly 30 feet) tall topped by a cross. It was designed to house an oil lamp that was hoisted up to the top at nightfall using a system of pulleys. Its purpose might have been to light up the cemetery it originally stood in. Some say that according to superstition it protected the dead and their graves, but also that it protected the living from revenants (ghosts).

The lanterne des morts in Antigny was probably built in the 12th or 13th century. By the 1800s it was in poor repair, so it was taken down stone-block-by-stone-block in 1880 and then rebuilt in a new location, closer to the église Notre-Dame, on the village square. At least that's what I think I've understood from reading about it. I didn't take the picture above; I found it on this web site about the 100 or so lanternes des morts of central and western France.

Peintures murales en l'église Notre-Dame d'Antigny

Just a few minutes north of the Château de Boismorand, which I posted about yesterday, is the église Notre-Dame d'Antigny. The village of Antigny has a population of about 550 living on 44 km² (17 mi²) of rolling, wooded territory. Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe is adjacent to the north. The romanesque church in Antigny dates back to the 11th century, with some modifications in the 15th. CHM and I were on the way from Saint-Savin to Poitiers.

Inside the church are a set of 14th- to 16th-century wall paintings that the Michelin Guide describes as being « d'une facture naïve ». They mostly depict scenes of the Passion of Christ. Some of the paintings were re-discovered only in the early 1990s when restoration work was being done.

It was very dark inside the church. I hope these blurry photos do more than just make you cross-eyed. Stand or sit back a a good distance from your screen for a better view.

Encore un... et encore d'autres

Preliminaries: so now use of the AstraZeneca vaccine has been put on hold. I called yesterday and got my name put on two waiting lists to get the AstraZeneca shot — my GP's office and the pharmacy in Saint-Aignan that fills my prescriptions. The owner of the pharmacy told me that they think they might get doses of other vaccines soon, but that I'm number 276 on the waiting list. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, I really intended to get back to some food and cooking posts on the blog, but all these châteaux have gotten in the way. Isn't it mind-boggling how many of them there are? Here's another one in front of which CHM and I stopped for a Kodak moment on July 26, 2006.

This château was built between 1470 and 1490, I've read. That was on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the French Renaissance. It's in a village called Antigny. CHM and I were on our way from Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, where he spent some time during the war in the 1940s, to Poitiers via Antigny and Chauvigny.

The building was greatly modified in the 19th century, so is now basically "neo-gothic" in style, but 16th century wall paintings and stained-glass windows, among other features, were preserved. I read this on the Châteaux de France web site.

On another site, in French, I read that the château was put on the market by its Russian owner in 2011, with an asking price of nearly six million euros. The château has always been privately owned and has never been open to the public. Apparently, it's in excellent repair.

On still another web site, I read that the château was acquired by un homme d'affaires californien de 74 ans in 2016. He apparently fell in love with the "Sleeping Beauty" look of the place. He and the real estate company that handled the deal were very coy about the price he ended up paying, saying only that it was plusieurs millions d'euros. The château has 900 m² (close to 10,000 ft² ) of living space on three floors, if I understand correctly, and sits on 32 hectares (about 80 acres) of land, complete with jardins à la française and une orangerie.

The newspaper article from which I'm taking this information about the 2016 sale of the property says the California businessman planned to use the château as a résidence secondaire (a summer cottage). There's a confusing mention in the article about the place changing hands in 2008 as well, acquired by a Belgian company. It's all pretty mysterious. Here's a link to the newspaper article in French.

Another mystery château: Touffou

This one is not a mystery in the same sense as Chauvigny. I'm giving you its name. But it isn't well known, as far as I can tell, being off the Loire Valley beaten track.

Still, it's in the Michelin Guide, which says: « Malgré la juxtaposition de quatre styles différents,
le château de Touffou forme avec ses terrasses un ensemble harmonieux... »

The Michelin Guide also mentions « la belle teinte ocre de sa pierre ».

Michelin also likes « les petites tourelles » at the four corners of the main building, saying they are « très élégantes ».

And one tourism site I looked at called Touffou « une demeure à la fois étrange et noble, d'une grande séduction. »

Nowhere have I seen any mention of the big stone lions guarding the front entrance,
but several web sites and books mention Touffou's "remarkable" gardens.

The Château de Touffou is in the town of Bonnes, just three miles north of Chauvigny. It was bought by a British publicity executive in 1966. He died a year and two ago, and his widow put Touffou on the market with an asking price of seven million euros. Here's a link to an ad published in the Figaro newspaper in Paris. Be sure to look at the 25 photos... By the way, the Figaro lists 21 châteaux for sale in the Vienne department, around Poitiers, and some are going for less than a million euros.

Chauvigny

The town that I posted about yesterday, with such spectacular ruins of medieval buildings perched on a big rock outcropping overlooking a river, is Chauvigny. It's just 60 miles south of Saint-Aignan or Tours. It's in the old Poitou province, 15 miles east of Poitiers, and 180 miles southwest of Paris. I assumed CHM would recognize it, because he and I visited Chauvigny (pop. 7,000) on a nice July day in 2006.

Chauvigny has, according to French Wikipédia, pas moins de cinq châteaux [qui] forment un ensemble fortifié de premier plan, peu commun en Europe. One of the town's attractions is a summertime birds-of-prey show called Les Géants du Ciel, and the châtau des Évêques (bishops), one of Chauvigny's five, is also known as Le Château des Aigles. Here's one more image showing the town's "skyline" — it is a panorama that you can enlarge to see more detail. Then scroll horizontally.

Un mystère

This morning I've just been looking at old pictures and re-processing them. Enjoying them. I'm not going to tell you
what town this is. I do know, however, thanks especially to one picture of a sign with the town's name on it.
I'm not posting that one.

Winter 2021 foods

As I wrote yesterday, for some reason I nearly completely stopped posting about food and cooking over the past year — at least as compared to all the food posts I used to do. Easing my way back into that habit, today I'm posting some photos of foods and dishes we've cooked since the beginning of January.

For example, here's a Thai curry made with red curry paste, onions, garlic, bell pepper, chicken, and broccoli. It was spicy hot and temperature hot, which is the kind of food you need and want when it's cold and damp outside. We ate it over Asian wheat noodles.

Another good wintertime dish to make and eat is called a tartiflette. It originated in the Savoy area of the French Alps, and is made with potatoes and a local cheese called Reblochon. Pre-cook the potatoes in a steamer, cut them into cubes or slices, and lightly brown them in a little bit of butter. Arrange them in a baking dish with some smoked bacon lardons, spoon on some cream (crème fraîche in France), and pour on some white wine. Cut the Reblochon cheese into two disks and lay those cut-side down (crust side up) on top of the potatoes. Bake it in a hot oven until browned. Don't let it dry out.

A French/North African dish for winter is called couscous. (It's also good in summer because it's so spicy.) I know a lot of Americans who eat couscous "grain" as a breakfast cereal — it's not actually a grain but a form of micro-pasta. The best way to serve and eat couscous is with a spicy broth in which you cook vegetables — green beans, carrots, eggplant, zucchini, turnips, onions, tomatoes, etc. — and meats including chicken, lamb, and spicy merguez beef and lamb sausages.